Leftists Shouldn't Even Try to Stop Hating Each Other
Leftist in-fighting and why it's actually maybe a good thing, sort of.
It’s often noticed that Leftists hate each other, and usually this revelation is accompanied by some amount of “come on, don’t we have more important things to be doing than hating each other?” Apparently some Leftists would appreciate “unity” and “cohesion” in order to “accomplish things”. That sounds great and all, but I don’t think they’ve thought this through.
It’s no secret that there are serious ideological disputes among the various categories of Leftists. It’s likewise no secret that these disputes can cause the Left to seem like a herd of cats, impossible to corral, impossible to lead in any direction for any length of time, and at least unlikely to ever show up in the same place at the same time to, you know, do something.
Well, that all may be true in general, but those qualities are also what keeps the Left from being easily corralled, led, and duped into any number of Fascist traps as a unit. It also happens that this fractiousness allows the Left, when it’s actually needed, to precipitate out of the general public, do something, and then dissolve back into the woodwork before the Fascists can do something back.
Actually, the fact that we Leftists despise each other is, honestly, one of the things that I love about the Left. It shows that an entire population of individuals who (mostly) are capable of self-reflection and self-correction (unlike Fascist automatons) can band together on an as-needed basis and form a collective without losing that ability to self-reflect.
The difference between a Marxist and an Anarchist may be enough to get somebody shot someday, but the fact that each of them admits the other is still a Leftist is at least circumstantial evidence that the Left as a whole has a sort of awareness of its own constituent elements and has the ability to maintain a collective identity despite the differences between them. This, to me, is a sign that there’s something about even the wrong Leftists that’s light years beyond anything the Right can offer.
As for doing something, I’m just not convinced that some united front is all that necessary or even desirable. I mean, what does “The Left” even do? I’m an Anarchist so I’m probably wrong and everything, but it seems to me that the social and political function of The Left is to always be ready to knock over some asshole’s house of cards when it gets too top-heavy. That has always been what the Left has actually accomplished, and I think it’s a little silly to think it’s capable of much more than that.
The Left is — or at least I think of it as — the sociopolitical equivalent of Natural Selection. We have a ton of ideas about the ways things should be, and by all means we should do anything we can to shove events in that direction. But ultimately, we exist to take bad ideas out of the political gene pool, and we should do that repeatedly until something comes along we can live with.
And to do that, we don’t have to like each other. We just have to be around, somewhere, and ready at a moment’s notice.
