The Left remains continually divided. This is not just a notion of party politics. How often in the end it still is a lot of talk. I have been to sessions ranging from Women's power in Capitalism, Development in Africa, Jobless in America, Labor Rights, the Theatre of the Oppressed, and Socialist Groups to Anarchists. Though the theme of solidarity is expressed, I don't get to see much bridging between movements, team building, interacting with the use of music and other social artistic activities that create a sense of togetherness that creates enough fuel. Protests in the US end after a few hours and dwindle with micro-focal points. It just may be that my expectations are too high.
Following meetings of organizations that catch my eye from time to time, the meetings appear to be usually a small core member presence and myself. Not many followers. Some have been the Socialist Women's Network, and the Marxist-Humanist Group. I had noticed the same evolution that divides the Left as I saw in Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington DC. Each group tends to hyper focus on one lead revolutionary or writer, and it becomes their creed: Che, Castro, Trotsky, Marx, Mao, Chomsky, Dunayevskaya or other. When they get so micro-focused, it makes it harder for them to unite with other Left movements outside of ideology. This micro-focus leaves Labor and Postcolonial voices isolated. It is reminiscent of the larger issues of postmodern society.
For most Postcolonial writers like Edward Said, Postmodernism fails to activate motion, this is true for the Left as well. According to Ziauddin Sardar, Postmodernism is nihilism. It is an excuse to in-action and accomplices barbarism; “Postmodernism emerges as a worldview conjured from the pathological necessity of the West to define reality and truth as its reality and truth,” as the only acceptable truth (Sardar).
Postmodernism insists on a plurality of the world in cultural discourse, as much as Modernism had, but the political economic theory, exclusively from the bourgeois liberal corporate democracies insist on a one-world trading and production system. This forbidden acceptance leaves former colonies and poor communities in developing nations as well as the poor in wealthy nations dominated and manipulated by a false belief system. Many Left groups try to change this nihilism and false belief. They want to awaken the passive postmodernists who are cynical, but they get distracted in micro-disputes of whose theory is singularly best.
Those in power are claiming the power to shape a particular future that is best for themselves, which is exclusive and Columbus-like, denying others the right to state-formation, identifying formation, and determining social movement. Divide and conquer is their preferred plan. This can be the limits of a two-party political system that avoids the true Left. Making the false belief that the Democrats are actually far left is a lack of scope. They tend to be merely in the center, and also keep getting dragged slowly to the Right, because there is actual movement in conservative groups that unifies this conservancy.
Edourard Glissant focuses on the Poetics of Relation, in which the power of experience is imposed upon through the shock of elsewhere. The location of where individuals and populations experience external hegemonic or resistant forces tremor with terror acts. Remember, Imperial colonizers terrorized weaker cultures into submission with their ruthless tactics more so than radical individuals who committed single acts against larger institutions and structures historically. But media is selective, as with the notice that in the last ten years, major terrorist attacks have come from fundamentally Right focused reactions on either side of the globe, regardless of religion, and regardless of state-terror or individual-terror.
Terror and territory may have similar roots, in the relation they have to location, but by displacing our stance, or deterritiorializing our mental control mechanism, we can start to reclaim our own semblance. In an interesting parallel to Irigaray’s expression of changing language, Edourd Glissant’s poetics involves elusive rambling.
“Practice does not proceed without rambling, because rambling is an absolute challenge to narrative” discourse (Glissant). One who is Errant challenges the universal uprooted exile, creating a poetics of relation varying from the dominant narrative transforms meaning and this risk, is the opportunity to realize new potentials. Activating thought destabilizes the standard passivity of someone else’s imposed/chosen universal (Glissant).
“Solitude must fight isolation. Many failed in their adventure because they did not know that. Solitude, like solidarity, is a relative of freedom; but isolation is snake food” (Patrick Chamoiseau). With Patrick Chamoiseau statement we can denote that with each micro-group on the Left in solitude can focus on multiple variables. This is a turn of perspective from nihilism and division, to utilizing the division for distracting the dominant voices.
Perhaps this source of power, allows each group to feel comfortable and strong in their core. Perhaps there is more here than I first thought. One just might utilize this opportunity to avoid isolation.
Anyway, I am sure you noticed that I am a tough critic. But Barbara Ehrenreich in her notorious book, Nickel and Dimed, states: “there is no quick fix here – no one measure or piece of legislation that will set things right and retire the working poor,” no matter how hard they work. “Someday of course – and I will make no predictions as to exactly when – they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they’re worth. There’ll be a lot of anger when that day comes, and strikes and disruption. But the sky will not fall, and we will all be better off for it in the end” (Ehrenreich). The Left will be supportive or in the way when this does happen. But perhaps, their leadership will finally untie and unite.
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