quetzalcoatl wrote:This is from SOCIAL DEMOCRACY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: A POST KEYNESIAN PERSPECTIVE, so their liberal perspective must be kept in mind. Nevertheless, they are making some cogent reform proposals (if you are at all interested in an operationally effective left in the West).
(1) end the absurd attachment that many people on the extreme left still have to Marxism and Communism. These were, and are, totalitarian ideologies, and any attachment to them is just a disgrace and embarrassment.
Marxism isn't just totalitarian. It's a nonsensical quasi-religious dogma with no basis in genuine science (see 3). Its pretense of scientific analysis is grotesque: it posits supernatural forces, and makes no testable hypotheses.
(2)the mainstream left needs to abandon neoliberalism. Return to strong Keynesian and social democratic economic policies. Post Keynesian economics is the foundation of left-wing economic thought – not Marxism, not neoliberalism, and not watered-down neoclassical Keynesianism.
No, Keynesianism is just another flavor of stupid, unscientific and dishonest. No honest, valid or useful economic science is possible as long as the basic definitions are designed to obscure and confuse rather than clarify and enlighten, and the axioms are designed to rationalize privilege and justify injustice.
(3) the academic left needs to abandon Poststructuralism and Postmodernism, and all the ridiculous related ideas such as truth relativism, moral relativism and even cultural relativism.
Right. The astonishing idiocy of such schools of "thought" -- especially deconstructionism -- is a sure sign of the socialist left's intellectual bankruptcy.
(4) end the climate of political correctness and even hostility to free speech that some left-wing people have. Free speech is sacred in a free society, and you will achieve nothing by demanding that governments silence people whose opinions you don’t like – except to dismantle more of our freedoms and set yourself up for having your own free speech taken away, especially if right-wing governments start imposing their own restrictions on free speech. Hate speech laws, while they are well intentioned, simply go down a dangerous route. There is a real part of the left that is better called the regressive left. It is often intolerant of free speech, is strongly connected with Postmodernism, and obsesses over divisive identity politics.
(5) following on from (4), end the obsessing over extreme identity politics, as it tends to divide people and draw attention from the far more serious issues of economic management and economic justice.
A big part of this is the pervasive idea among the modern left that the best solution to the injustice of privilege is not to abolish privilege, but to enact
countervailing privileges for all those groups who feel aggrieved.
(6) the mainstream left needs to radically rethink foreign policy and even bring Western war criminals to justice. We have just been through the most bizarre periods where even some mainstream left-wing parties (e.g., Britain’s New Labour) have supported the most outrageously immoral and disastrous wars. Even more disgusting, they never been held to account for it. Just look recently at Tony Blair’s “apology” for the Iraq war. Apology, my eye. Any decent mainstream left in Britain would be demanding that Blair – and his New Labour charlatans who planned the war – face charges for war criminality.
And even more, of course, the Bush-Cheney cabal in the USA. Unfortunately, as others have pointed out, that's not going to happen.
(7) the left should strongly defend modern science and secularism, and end the truly bizarre hostility to rationality and science that has emerged from Postmodernism. Related to this, the left should seriously rethink the role of religion in society. Secularism does not necessarily mean hostility to religion, but removing the harmful role of religion from politics, law and society. E.g., there should only be one system of law in a Western secular society, not parallel legal systems for different communities.
The role of religion in modern society is profoundly problematic. On the one hand, it's obviously all just odious bullshit, but on the other, lots of people are still deeply attached to it, especially in the USA. Probably the best approach is just to resolutely keep religion out of the political discourse, and if anyone brings it up, just tell them they are off topic, and move on.
(8) the mainstream European left needs to vigorously oppose the Eurozone and European Union, and stand up for national democracy and economic sovereignty. The EU is one of the most outrageously regressive forces in the world today, and it probably should be dismantled.
The problem is that the welcome internationalism of the EU has been co-opted by soulless, amoral, capitalist greed robots to further entrench and enrich wealthy, privileged takers.
(9) finally, the most painful and controversial issue for most left-wing people: the left needs to rethink whether mass immigration is a good thing, especially in Europe, on economic and social grounds. The public hostility to mass immigration in Europe is rising. If it really gets to the point where a solid majority wants an end to mass immigration and open-doors borders throughout the EU in each nation, shouldn’t a democratically-elected government – even a left-wing one – respect what most people want?
The problem is not mass immigration, as explained below, but policies that enable, encourage, and even subsidize mass immigration specifically by people who do not intend to contribute to and assimilate into the society they are entering, but to parasitize, encyst in, and destroy it.
I strongly disagree with the first point in this list, for two reasons: 1) a Marxist analysis of history needs to be separated from its prescriptive conclusions, and 2) most leftists (even of the radical variety) do not consider the Soviet Union as a viable template.
Marxism is just stupid garbage with no basis in fact, history, science or logic. No one ever understood anything any better for having looked at it in the fun-house mirror of Marxism.
Ambroise wrote: I think the first leftist that I saw on PoFo making the point that socialists have to think very carefully about immigration was Vera Politica, and that it's not as straightforward as some people think it is.
Right. Because socialists have decided not to know the difference between capital and land, they are permanently unable to know the fact that immigration -- higher population -- increases per capita production, but only makes
landowners wealthier, while actually impoverishing the working people whose productivity is increased by immigration. This was explained very clearly and patiently by Henry George in "Progress and Poverty," but socialists, realizing that George's analysis proved their beliefs were false and evil, decided never to know the facts that George identified.
I can't really envision mass immigration as being helpful to the socialist cause.
Of course not: mass immigration has the potential to do enormous good for both the immigrants and the existing population (as it did historically in North America and a few other places) and socialism is evil.