My Earlier 5-Part Series titled "The Lame US Left: 17 Afflictions"

...as a Single Document (Link)

…can be read here on my ancient (13 year old) Website, which I am trying to update today.

https://www.paulstreet.org/the-lame-left-seventeen-afflictions/

The word count of this combined document is too big for Substack so I put it up there ^ (and when I did that I was shocked to see how far behind I was with my publications and interviews on that site.)

For what it’s worth, I’ve spent considerable periods of my life in and around many of these afflictions, including especially #2 (economistic trade unionism), #4 (foundation whoring), #5 (proletarian standpoint), #9 (anarchism/libertarian socialism), and especially #14 (academicism).

Of course a lot of these 17 categories of affliction overlap with each other to a great degree. Thus, in my case, for example, trade unionism (#2), proletarian standpoint (#5, which could also be called, following Bob Avakian, the myth of “class truth”), and academicism (#14) combined with a mid-life crisis of Chomsky-inspired pretend anarchism (#9) and even a bit of localism (#11)) across years of studying and teaching US working class and urban history. I’ve worked and/or corresponded and/or socialized with and around usually decent folks in all the other affliction categories listed in the piece, including even the ones I most loathe: Trumpenleftism (#7), the campist Putin Left (#6), and super-identitarian left Wokesterism (#3).

I might have included Trotskyism, which I identified with in my late teens and early 20s, as an affliction, but hardly see the point of doing so anymore. At the risk of pissing off some good friends, I now think I should have included religion as an affliction of the left —- an affliction hardly unique to the political portside to say the least. (I am in the middle of reading Bob Avakian’s book Away With All Gods — a chilling and first-rate take-down of religious thought based on extensive readings in Christian and Islamic scriptures amd history. I highly recommend that volume as well as Bertrand Russell’s entertaining Why I am Not a Christian. )

For my money, to to speak, there’s only one socialist organization worth joining and contributing to in the USA in 2023: https://revcom.us/en - the Revolutionary Communist Party. The rest are caught up in different lethal combinations of the 17 afflictions. The RCP is, well, not.

If I have any strong criticism of my “Lame Left” series looking back on it three months later, it is that is probably too biting and even at times mean-spirited and shaming in tone. That’s a mistake. We are all works in progress, complex people capable of processing new information and findings. weighing new evidence and science and art and processing new experiences. Everybody can change (not recognizing that is one of the big problems with cancel culture). How you approach people matters: always try to assume goodwill and be ready to listen as well as speak. I, for one, have never been one of those atheists who wears their lack of belief in God on their sleeve and ridicules others’ belief in supernatural Gods. (My own atheism is biographically and socially produced of course: it is a reflection of having intellectually inclined parents whose life experiences had thoroughly discredited religious thought in their minds - and most especially of having a father who struggled with both an inherited/genetic blood disease and a militantly Methodist father who absurdly but quite Biblically believed that disease was a reflection of sin). A history professor of mine claimed to know that one of Karl Marx’s brilliant daughters met stern disapproval from her father when she reported that she had “told off a proletarian for being religious.” The old Moor informed his daughter that religious belief is rooted in alienating and oppressive social conditions for which the working-class Londoner she had shamed had no responsibility. It is almost a necessity for many people trying to make sense of the vicious and anarchic madness of life and death under capitalism. If we want to do away with Gods and other supernatural beliefs, Marx (who praised the Paris Communards for “storming heaven”) counseled, we’ll have to do away with class rule. As I said above, I have spent no small time mulling around in some of these 17 different parts of the left. I’m quite sure I have plenty more to learn and I suspect that many who look closely can find contradictions and limits in my series. That’s how it goes. I welcome respectful disagreement.