For a Revcom-informed critique of “the Left” as I have both experienced it from within and examined it from without:
+1. Paul Street, “The Lame Left: Seventeen Afflictions,” collecting a number of PSR’s from January through March of 2023, https://www.paulstreet.org/the-lame-left-seventeen-afflictions/.
+2. “Revolution v. Revenge: Reflections on Left Pathology,” PSR, October 19, 2023: https://paulstreet.substack.com/p/rev-o-lution-v-re-venge
The second essay dealt with four further afflictions, making for 21 in all. They are
1. Sheep-Dogging Left Electoralism, Parliamentary Cretinism, and Mass Demoralization
2. Economistic and Trade Unionist Revisionism
3. Hyper-Identitarian Wokester Call-Out and Cancel Culture
4. Foundation Dependence
5. Proletarian Standpoint/Class Truth
6. Geopolitical Campism (the Putinleft, the PRC Left, etc.) and Multipolarista left…and bTW the Zelensky left (intimately related to “the enemy of my enemy is if my friend-ism in many cases though sometimes much worse than that)
7. The Pink-Brown Trumpenleft (intimately related to “the enemy of my enemy is my friend-ism in many cases though sometimes much worse than that)
8. The Conspiratorial Left (in retrospect probably doesn’t deserve separate break out)
9. The “Libertarian Left”/anarchist left
10. The Direct Service-ist left
11. The Localist left
12. The single issue left
13. The pathologically pacifist left
14. The academic and academicist left
15. The pessimist and fatalist left
16. The self-ist left
17. Reflexive disdain for and dismissal of the communist socialist revolutionary states of the 20th Century
I added four more afflictions in this essay:
18. Beliefs in God, Supernatural Force, Destiny, and Teleological Laws of History (including Marxism as proletarianist and inevitablist religion)
19. Trotskyism (which I should have identified as generally Western/Euro and white-biased neo-Menshevik-ism)
20. Tailing the Oppressed.
21. Inversion-oriented revenge-ism, intimately related to the religious childishness of “the first shall be last and the last shall be first.”
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List of Avakian’s collected works: https://revcom.us/en/bob_avakian/collected-works
Revcom site: https://revcom.us/en
Revcoms’ weekly Revolution Nothing Less (RNL) Show: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheRevcoms
Avakian’s Substack posts, 86 short and readable posts so far:
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Just four examples of my political writing reflecting some of these above critiques:
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