Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
rootless2:
The "left" or what remains of it, seems to me to be crippled by a weird nostalgia for what never was.

LOL, you're a master of the trolly red-rag-to-a-bull.

Why do you care so much about the wheelchair-bound delusionary rump of the scare-quote left?

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Sun Feb 19th, 2012 at 11:45:29 AM EST
[ Parent ]
I note you don't respond to my argument but focus on labeling. But the answer should be obvious: in the 1960s, the social justice movement loosely speaking, could pretty much be identified with the "left". And at that time "the left" actually meant something and really could be seen as a line of thought stretching back to the first and second internationals. Now though we have a "left" line of thought that heralds back to the height of the cold war as a golden age, from which we have fallen through the Powers of Neoliberalism. I find that to be a peculiar, incoherent, and historically confabulated argument. And it seems to me that the "left" has lost touch with a larger social justice movement.
by rootless2 on Sun Feb 19th, 2012 at 11:58:29 AM EST
[ Parent ]
rootless2:
focus on labeling

I did so in that comment because you use labelling provocatively. If you only want reponses to your argument, only post your argument.

To which I reply below, and am to some extent in agreement with you.

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Sun Feb 19th, 2012 at 12:02:36 PM EST
[ Parent ]
The "left" has - same way as the "right" - always been defined from the need to rally a mayority of the political power in order to rule. In Denmark and Norway we have today parties that are called Left - Venstre - as a result of being founded at a time when the defining charactheristica of the left/right divide was related to a) universal and equal voting rights and parliaments power over the executive and b) the abolishment of inherited economic privileges. The scene changed and they ended up on the right, but the party names stayed the same.

So I would disagree, there never was a coherent line of thought, only worse or better narratives.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

by A swedish kind of death on Sun Feb 19th, 2012 at 02:59:59 PM EST
[ Parent ]
that's true enough, I guess i'm using "left" to refer to  "social democrat to communists" but even that's an uneven track.
by rootless2 on Sun Feb 19th, 2012 at 09:07:43 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Display:

Occasional Series