The Political Left or the Cultural Left?

Both challenge established rules, but the
political and cultural left differ in purpose.

Keith the eclectic sage looked receptive as he listened to my suggestion, sitting back with his classic mellow pose. I had said he should start attending a radical socialist forum I frequented, which I touted as a good way to “counteract the line of the bourgeoisie.”

He pulled his marijuana cigarette from between his lips, but instead of doing so to give the affirmative response I eagerly sought, he half-consciously pronounced just three syllables:

“Burr-go-weeeze.”

His attention immediately returned to the scattered conversation percolating in the living room at this Saturday afternoon party of bohemians.

So much for my invitation. Marxian economic theory meant little more to the free-thinking crowd of that era, the mid-1980s, than an opportunity for a goofy play on words.

And Keith was every bit the free thinker. He was a beat poet whose understanding of Marx was as fully developed as his fine grasp of any philosopher, poet or outspoken artist. But any feelings about Marxism were just a tiny sliver squeezed in between Keith’s passions for Robert Heinlein, Bob Dylan and Bertrand Russell on the giant spectrum of knowledge and understanding he possessed.

Keith was the cultural left. My proposition that he come to socialist forums was the plea of someone on the political left.

Keith and the other eclectic and outspoken people at this social gathering had myriad grievances against society -- over militarism, the war on drugs, bigotry, anti-intellectualism and the light regard for literacy and critical thinking skills.

The political left had these same grievances. But we tied the solution to all injustices to one thing -- a different system of distribution and production. And to greatly varying extents, the end of private property beyond personal property.

My version of the political left’s diagnosis was that the massive and unending flow of commercialism’s incentives to buy had made otherwise good and loving people irrational, and that the desire to attain higher economic status had created a false and destructive need to make people of other skin colors, genders and sexual orientations seem lesser.

These evils would be repaired, enabling us to treasure one another, only by changing to a system of producing and distributing for sincere, true-to-ourselves purposes.

To the cultural left, a precise, all-encompassing prescription like changing our methods of production, seemed mechanistic. The class consciousness idea seemed prone to regimentation.

  
Besides, many of them liked having small businesses or being self-employed. They saw their own little shares of society’s means of production as being progressive and conscientious. Folks at that party included owners of businesses selling home baked bread, carving peaceful children’s toys and installing renewable energy heating systems in homes.

With pro-green and pro-peace purposes like those, it may seem clear why these people didn’t see themselves as members of the “Burr-go-weeeze” and saw no benefit in entering the doorway of doctrinaire zealots at the socialist forums.

The political and cultural lefts diverge over an impasse caused by the political organizers' "mobilize the masses" vision, contrasted with the cultural side's personal freedom emphasis. One side talks Trotsky or Michael Harrington; the other eyes Janis Joplin and Jimmy Hendrix.

There have been figures who blended the political and cultural left, ranging from Emma Goldman to George Carlin and Lenny Bruce. But as is illustrated by the Beatles’ repertoire including John Lennon’s pro-socialist “Imagine” and George Harrison’s “The Taxman,” pop culture’s role in the economic agenda of the left is ambiguous.

In the ‘80s, my friend Keith was not the business owning type and he worked as a manual laborer in a wood shop (yeah, quite proletariat). That job gave him economic stability, but many of his coworkers’ all-day expressions of bigotry and non-literacy grated on his nerves.

By the 1990s, Keith was considering voting for the Libertarian Party, whose pledges to end drug prohibition connected with him. Moreover, when the choice is Bill Clinton or Bob Dole and corporate money controls the parties of both, the Libertarians looked revolutionary.

Since then, that secret corporate money -- namely the Koch Brothers’ bucks -- totally took over libertarianism as a movement. The Democratic Party got its left wing back via Move On, then Bernie, then Elizabeth Warren, then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the election of other similar establishment defying democratic socialists.

Rage Against The Machine transformed pop music from saleable cool to political substance once again.

The economic egalitarian agenda was reconnected to the public mind, made hugely popular in America by sub-prime lending scams, Money is Speech rulings, unlivable wages, “I can’t breathe” killings, student debt schemes and climate catastrophes.

And I don’t have to persuade Keith to go to forums to connect with the political left. It has come to him.

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Brian Arbenz of Louisville, Ky. USA is decidedly on the political left, as evidenced by his hoisting the "Stop US Terrorism in Central America" sign in the lower photo in this blog entry. That was during an April 1987 demonstration.