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What Happened to the Political Left?

By JR, May 2025

It’s more probable that a camel could pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man entering heaven –Holy Babble, Mathew 19:24

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness - John Kenneth Galbraith

Preface

The political Left, right and center are spatial concepts and relational notions that have varied throughout space and time. In philosophically political frameworks, these terms also have a more substantive meaning.

From the time of the French Revolution when the more radical delegates to the National Assembly seated themselves to the left of the presiding executive officer, they were defined a challenges to hierarchy and arbitrary power on the right such as monarchy, organized religion and various other forms of authority such as conservatism. John Stuart Mill’s classic On Liberty was one of the first attempts at conceptualizing liberalism. These polar opposites constitute a spectrum along which people, policies and political ideologies have been categorized. Political conservatism is often at odds with a personal conservatism that often implies caution, self-control and rational deliberation. Political conservatism is often aligned with law, order, hierarchy, tradition and authoritarianism. Very generally, the left is dedicated to continuing the French Revolutionary commitment to liberty, equality, and fraternity that implies community and the common good of all, not unlike various shades of socialism. 

Anarchists challenge the idea of authority which is 99% of the time arbitrary and illegitimate; this includes the state which has been in every instance a mechanism for wealthy elites with laws, police, military, wars and prisons. The first person to call himself an anarchist was Pierre Joseph Proudhon who declared the “all property is theft”. How could it be otherwise? Some political philosophers have described what Tariq Ali referred to as the “extreme centre”, a tyranny of the middle where the status quo of capitalism is maintained by faking compromise, reforms and attempts at social justice and egalitarianism, but keeping everything the same. This happens to social democrats anytime they have any political power. For example when one of the two or more capitalist parties are elected, precious little, other than cosmetics, changes, Yes, when it comes to the four-five centuries of capitalist tyranny, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Capitalist states are invariably and systemically authoritarian and will co-opt, take over or abolish any threats to its existence. In the period between the two World Wars of the 20th century it turned to fascism as it is doing today. The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) is a fascinating study of what capitalists and other forms of tyranny do when there is a threat to their existence. People need to wake the fuck up and realize capitalism is NOT a democracy even if only based on the grotesque injustices such as economic inequalities it has produced throughout its squalid sordid that have been created by mafia banks, corrupt corporations, obscene billionaires and their lickspittle boot licking politicians.

One might rightly ask, does the political left wing even exist in any meaningful way in the world today?  Consider Bernie Sanders who still belongs to the nauseating Democratic Party in the US, the sell-out war mongering imperialist Tony Blair who demolished the Labour Party in Britain or the closet capitalist limousine liberals who have hijacked the NDP in Canada. As a lifelong member of the left since I was a teen and more dedicated after the horrors of the Vietnam War, its hysterical ant-communist and Cold War fiasco and butchery of the US in its imperialistic ventures in Latin America, the Middle East and other parts of South East Asia. I believe that the left exists now in an extremely fragmented manner with its endless babble on the Internet from uninformed dolts from both right and left on social media.

Since the late 1960s, perhaps the 1968 Paris demonstrations being their last radical gasp, the political left has been locked in a steep decline. The great social democratic countries in Scandinavia (think President Olaf Palme of Sweden who was assassinated with suspected police complicity – a crime still not solved) and Western Europe have long disintegrated into neo-liberal insignificance. And in Canada the CCF/NDP that in the 1960s abandoned its founding document The Regina Manifesto is currently a spent force, having been mired into a state of long decline since the hopeful days of anti-capitalist visionaries such as Tommy Douglas (the founder of our public Medicare), Ed Broadbent and Dave Barrett.

Calcified elitist conservatism dominated by a combination of Christian and Capitalist fundamentalism, creeping demagogic fascism from the former two “Cs”, anti-science, contempt for the natural environment, hatred of the poor and working classes, gangster finance, widespread corruption, multi-trillion dollar bailouts of mafia banks and corporations as the proliferation of fanatical right wing zealots are back for now at least, as anything goes profit at all cost capitalism is in total control. [1] One consequence of this immoral demented naturalization of the thought of any alternative to our current sociopathic condition was offered at least two decades ago by philosopher Frederic Jameson in a thought experiment: that it is more probable that the earth will be demolished by a black swan natural disaster such as a massive comet obliterating our pathetic planet of trash than there would be the most miniscule  probable egalitarian change to the predominant dictatorship of kamikaze capitalism. Today it seems that the only comet that might come is not from outer but from inner space, originating in the uncontrollable greed of morally degenerate billionaires, hedge fund cockroaches and investment bankers whose degeneracy is motivated by the very system of capitalist avarice and greed they are working for and supported by. Even global capitalism (aka neo-liberalism) with a human face is totally out of the question. Putting a human face on capitalism has been tried as it was following the Great Depression and World War II, primarily out of fear from the political left which had a brief window of power and prominence. Even if these mitigating policies meant the rescue of our planet from environmental collapse, the possibility has been ruled out by most climate scientists as being too little and too late, the primary problems being  voracious out of control capitalism and an unsustainable 8 billion homo saps  without intelligence, wisdom or self-discipline .

But even typically radical young people have capitulated into various nauseating forms of obsessive OCD/ADHD cell phone addictions and authoritarianism such as the aforementioned conservatism, neo-liberalism (is John Stuart Mill rolling over in his grave?) and full blown fascism with deranged silver spoon anti-intellectual bumbling billionaires such as US President Donald Trump and his cohort in crime, the dyslexic richest man on earth – creepy neo-Nazi goon Leon Skum. Moreover, one can also claim that we currently experience a perverse version of this Godzilla capitalism with a human face in the guise of what Martin Luther King and several others have called “socialism for the rich”. For his socialism, pacifism and support for working people he was murdered by the FBI. This is what happens in our fake democracies if one crosses a certain line ideological line in the polluted sand.

On the other hand if you are wealthy enough capitalist billionaire or multi-millionaire, a bank or corrupt corporation you will be rescued by the nanny state and taxpayers no matter what you do, even if it entails demolishing the global economy as it did in 2007-09. But for those of the working classes who lost their homes by sub-prime mortgages and other arcane financial instruments of mass destruction or were victimized in a multitude of other demented financial con games such as hedge funds operating from tax havens, you will NOT be bailed out. The only freedom ceded to the worker as opposed to the predator vampire classes (Adam Smith’s “masters of mankind”) is to sell his labour for an unliveable wage(where the real competition exists) - or alternatively live on the squalid streets or under a viaduct as homelessness is now a global epidemic and dissolute disgrace.

In Canada the once proud CCF-NDP social democratic party and the Greens lost big in the Federal election on Monday April 28th of this year. Canadians on the political left need to begin the process of re-organizing for a new genuine socialist party, one that will either reorient the NDP (New Democratic Party) to re-establish it as Canada’s principle progressive social democratic party as it once was under the Regina Manifesto and old name CCF (Canadian Commonwealth Federation), or create a completely new party from its founding 1933 aforementioned manifesto to restore its credibility. The sad demise of the NDP, although in British Columbia having barely surviving the last election to an anti-science jerk, they had lost two key provincial elections, one against far right silver spoon conservative Doug Ford in Ontario and another against Donald Trump fan Danielle Smith in red neck Alberta, two of the worst provincial premiers in Canadian history. And in Alberta’s ugly past there have been some very toxic far right wing demagogues including the string of Bible Thumping Christian fundamentalist Social Credit - even more right wing than the Conservatives. The premiers in British Columbia under the corrupt Grade 9 graduate WA C (Wacky) Bennett and his even dumber insider stock market crook and Grade 11 graduate son Bill “Bullshit” Bennett.

Rampant corruption of Social Credit premiers in Alberta can be traced back to the 1930s with Baptist preacher Bible Bill Aberhart followed by Ernest Manning from 1943 to 1968. But in Alberta equally corrupt calcified conservative authoritarians have succeeded these Social Credit mutants. The current NDP should have defeated both Doug “Fat Bastard” Ford and neo-fascist Danielle Smith but the NDP campaigns in Ontario and Alberta were so lame and ineffective that far right reactionary populist arch-conservative governments had no problem winning majority governments. And where were the previously mentioned brain dead out to lunch cell phone addicted ADHD/ OCD young people in these elections? Mired in zombie cell phone solipsism?

Communist Parties that were popular in the 1920s [2] through to the mid 1950s have been subsequently subjected to propaganda, lies, pogroms, relentless attacks by the schools, churches, corporate media, racist corrupt RCMP, Red Scares, bans and even beatings by rabid cops, imprisonment and murder of their leaders. This bullshit and propaganda persists and is despite the mostly unknown fact that it was primarily communists who fought the Nazis throughout their occupation of Western Europe during World War II. That was the primary reason for their popularity in post WW II Europe, a status that had to be squashed by the West with the Marshall Plan and hysterical anti-communist war mongering monarchists such as Winston Churchill and their likeness in the USA. Of course political freedom and historical truth in our apparent farcical “democracies” has always been a cruel joke. In countries such as Greece the left was very popular and a civil war was fought for three years primed by UK and US interference in Greek politics post World War II. Churchill and other far right wing war mongering zealots wanted to re-install the Greek monarchy as was the case in Italy, Yugoslavia (later invaded, bombed and dismembered by NATO and the US which now totally controls it) and elsewhere throughout much of Western Europe.

Communists were also prominent in fighting injustice and racism at home, especially before the Red Scare purges and violent police harassment, trashing of their offices and beatings while promoting their political causes.  Examples are the great Paul Robeson, Angela Davis in the USA and in Canada Harry Rankin, Dr. Norman Bethune, A. A. Macleod, Fred Rose, Arthur “Slim” Evans and Homer Stevens, renowned head of the British Columbia Fisherman’s Union, all of whom were attacked in some manner by racist corrupt and incompetent neo-fascist RCMP goons. Dr. Bethune ran a medical team in the Spanish Civil War and was the official physician on Mao’s long march for freedom in 1949 but suffered a bad infection from one of his surgeries and died in China. He’s remains a hero for most progressive Chinese people.

Any pretence to social justice, solidarity, the common good, community and protection for the worst off dealing with homelessness is an epidemic which has been lost for decades and died with the far right conservative and liberal regimes that took over and rolled back longstanding rights for workers in the 1980s with Maggie “There is no society” Thatcher, the senile buffoon, Ron Ray Gun and Lyin’ Brian “On the Take” Mulroney. And it got worse as Americans twice elected a village idiot (George W Bush) and a moronic racist psychopathic degenerate, the con man and corporate crook Donald Trump. As Martin Luther King said before he was assassinated, “we have socialism for the rich and dog eat dog capitalism for the working classes.” That was in the 1960s before his murder by an obvious inside job of the FBI’s J Edgar Hoover who despised him; but the economic injustices are far worse today as one-tenth of one percent of the richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 90%.

Yes, in every sense it IS far worse today with rampant corruption and exploitation, pathetic trillion dollar bailouts of bank mafia and financial criminals have become regular norms, global warming, overpopulation, pollution and contamination of ecosystems which are in a state of collapse and species extinction for every living thing except humans who keep reproducing like an out of control plague. But we homo saps will soon be on the list. The present cess pool of capitalism with its multiple crises now compares with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union which following the death of Lenin and the devastating civil war of 1918-21. With the control freak tyrant Joseph Stalin the USSR never aspired to real socialism and who in 1924 banished Leon Trotsky from the country, a brilliant intellectual and charismatic leader who had led the Red Army to victory in the devastating civil war incited by several capitalist countries such as the USA, UK and even Canada that sent 4000 troops to Vladivostok. Trotsky’s idea of “permanent revolution” and Lenin’s revolutionary counterpart to creating a stateless people’s democratic communism were destroyed by Stalin who Trotsky described as “the gravedigger of the revolution”. Trotsky’s three volume History of the Russian Revolution is a must read.

The vile ideology of selfishness and greed called Capitalism which has hung around in various forms and adaptations for at least four centuries has suffered the same demise. However, it ought to have been abolished after multiple depressions in the 19th century and especially the massive global market failures of 1929 and the Great Depression which lasted thirty years – and again in 2008 with global financial criminals bringing down the entire capitalist edifice which was bailed out by their owned and controlled nanny police state governments and placed on the already broken backs of ordinary working stiffs. Then they bailed out the same financial parasites when covid-19 appeared in 2020 – as trillions of dollars appeared as in 2008 out of an apparent vacuum. When the right people need money, there’s never a problem. The putrid system of untrammelled capitalist thievery continues and will ultimately repeat the BBBB (Boom, Bubble, Bust and Bailout) iterations until there is nothing left to steal. But who believes in the farcical rigged stock markets and elections any longer, other than the indoctrinated, delusional and stupid? Responsible free markets might be a good thing but that’s surely not what we have under vampire capitalism. As the great Anarchist Emma Goldman once declared, “If elections changed anything, they would be declared illegal”. Moreover, even if a genuine leftist socialist party (the reformist NDP in Canada and the Labour Party in the UK long abandoned socialism) were elected it would not be able to change anything with the rigid plutocratic authoritarianism of capitalism firmly in place with its laws, police state, military, prisons  and other mechanisms of the state enabling wealth and power that would prohibit even the most minor tweak or reform to an entrenched oligarchic system that controls the entire sordid financial dystopian oligarchy.

Former NDP strongholds in Saskatchewan (anyone old enough to remember the great T C Douglas who was the progenitor of our public health care system?) and Manitoba, the birthplace of progressive prairie populism in Canada are mere shells of their former incarnations. The British Columbia NDP governments of the late John Horgan and David Eby haven’t been nearly as progressive as needed, particularly on environmental issues. The word “socialism” hasn’t been uttered by any NDP member since the 1960s; certainly not since the death of the founder of Canada’s greatest Canadian Tommy Douglas who died in 1986. The same can be said of Rachel Notley’s brief anomalous version of the NDP in Alberta, which was still advocating for an oil and gas sector in the midst of both global climate catastrophes as much as the industry’s terminal decline - and this despite its gluttonous consumption of public subsidies and wildfires rampaging across the province and throughout much of the rest of the world. Across a nation reeling from increasing environmental and ecological devastation such as the environmental abomination called the Alberta Tar Sands, provincial NDP parties have been slow to pick up the cause of fighting climate change.

The most serious problem is that the capitalist system is the very antithesis of what democracy demands, which is equality, fairness, community and egalitarianism. The capitalist system conflicts with basic ethical principles such as the foundational Golden Rule, encouraging people to be corrupt and treat others as means to their nefarious ends. Conservatives and especially Christians inform us that they are a free egalitarian community that eschews greed and promotes the notion of “love your neighbor”, exactly what any upstanding communist promotes. But the Christian Churches are lucrative businesses that pay no property taxes and their leaders - preachers and other paid bureaucrats and officials of their massive bureaucracy pay no income taxes; where do I sign up? Most Christians are capitalists and support the system of greed and corruption of Wall Street mafia banks and the high rollers running hedge funds that hide their loot in offshore tax havens. One might ask, what would a resurrected Jesus think after throwing up?

The idea of sharing with those worst off in society is anathema to these pagans and parasites who worship the false idols of money and property (including the ludicrous scam ridden intellectual variety that continues to enrich arrogant assholes like Trump and Bill Gates).  And when they fail, the obscenely rich are provided with golden parachutes and get out of jail free cards. Oh, but Starbucks donates 1% of their profit on every cup of cappuccino to the starving poor in the Third World. Praise Jesus! But remember that the symbol of Wall Street is a huge metal statue of a bull which is appropriate in the sense that people have been receiving a steady stream of bullshit for at least since the market crash of 1929 - followed by the Great Depression. Then there are the dozens of bullshit jobs such as economists and conflict of interest stock market analysts who never advise anyone to sell anything. For a list of useless jobs, read the late David Graeber’s great book Bullshit Jobs. And how can a slimy multi-billion dollar global hedge fund with headquarters in a tax haven with its gangster employees scattered throughout the world be expected to be honest and devoted to an alleged “democratic” country of origin?  It’s a farce and a scam, like most businesses.

Let’s face the ugly facts about capitalism which has nothing to do with so-called “free markets” that are endlessly manipulated: we are being screwed and the overpopulated planet’s ecosystems are circling the drain. To cite just a few sordid examples that justify our contempt for capitalism as surely there is no lack of anti-capitalism in today’s fucked up world of gangster capitalism. We have been for centuries witnessing a vast expansion of critiques of the repulsions and degradations of capitalism: thousands of books, in-depth debates, TV and newspaper investigations abound on corporations and money laundering banks directly and indirectly ruthlessly polluting our environment, on corrupt bankers who continue to get fat bonuses while their banks have to be rescued with public money, on sweat shops where children work overtime, and so on and on and on ad infinitum.

Notes:

[1] To cite merely two examples of “anything goes” capitalism which is equivalent to a total lack of moral oversight or ethical principle, one could consider (i) the barbarism of UFC in which two people (men or women) are put  in a cage and proceed with no visible rules to beat the crap out of one another as blood is splattered in every direction and (ii) the immorality and gross stupidity of lotteries and online gambling on pro sports, the latter of which was once deemed the quintessence of moral depravity. Remember the great pro baseball player Pete Rose (aka Charlie Hustle) who lost any possibility of the Hall of Fame after he was caught visiting a bookie and betting on baseball games (when such dim witted incredibly stupid money losing activities were illegal ostensibly to protect money grubbing morons from their own ignorance). Now that’s not considered a problem, the capitalist state has no sense of responsibility for protecting people from their own stupidity in a world that is getting dumber by the day, even though these gambling platforms hypocritically advise people of the risks. It’s fucking pathetic when these thieving gambling platforms advise incredibly stupid people to “bet responsibly” when there IS NO SUCH THING. The ultimate hypocrisy is the endless proliferation of internet betting platforms such as “Bet 365, Bet MGM, Fan Duel, Bet 99, Sports Interaction, etc, etc, etc that even provide ads preaching excess and the risk of addiction. These are just a few that have set up shop in Canada. Where’s my vomit bag? The corruption and larceny in the capitalist world made easy with the degeneracy and immoral behaviour of the entire global population that includes, banks, the money grubbing corporate world, their lap poodle politicians and servile docile and idiotic sheeple.

[2] Communist parties in Canada and elsewhere have always been pariahs, subject to persecution, police intimidation and harassment and whenever the opportunity arose, banned. Tim Buck (1891-1973), the former leader of the Communist Party of Canada was subjected to the infamous “War Measures Act”, banned during the Great Depression and World War II, imprisoned (hard labour) with death attempts by hired thugs in the prison, ordered by the pompous ass and millionaire Conservative Party Prime Minister R B Bennett. In Canada we call this “political freedom”. Tim Buck’s survival of the murder attempts in prison made him a hero among Communists Party members and others such as my Swedish immigrant grandfather who was a communist sympathizer who, according to my mother, was harassed regularly by the bumbling corrupt RCMP. Incidentally in the 1935 federal election, Buck ran in Winnipeg North and won 25% of the vote, placing third. He lost to Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF/NDP) candidate Abe A Heaps. Many Canadian living in Canada’s Prairie Provinces literally starved during the drought stricken Great Depression, thanks to wealthy multi-millionaire Conservative Prime Minister R B Bennett’s moral depravity, contempt and neglect of poor people. He was defeated in 1935 by the pious superstitious bachelor mommy’s boy Mackenzie King, a limousine liberal that went on to serve three terms.

                             

By the way, Buck’s treatment as an atheist “commie” or “red” was not unlike other communists parry members and intellectuals in the USA, UK and most countries of Western Europe. Anarchists who don’t believe in god, the state, power mongers, bosses or any other authoritarian self-important asshole received similar treatment.

                       

                                        Canadian Communists Marching in Canada (c 1970)

Not unlike the rest of the so-called democratic “free world”, during the recent election farce in Canada there were a few rare Communist Party of Canada candidates. One of these rare communist candidates was Cam Scott who was running in Winnipeg South Centre and subjected to McCarthyism style red scare/red baiting slurs and “commie” innuendos by the Liberal candidate. These conservative and liberal fascistic reactionary attacks are reminiscent of what Tim Buck suffered on a daily basis from Canada’s authoritarian conservative-liberal capitalist duopoly and simply demonstrate that political freedom in Canada is a sham and always has been so.

                        

The Communist Party of Canada has never restricted anyone’s freedom of expression however outrageous to the religious, conservative reactionary mind. Rather, it has had its offices trashed by the RCMP, censored, banned as illegal, hounded and even imprisoned. They continue to be vilified by pious Christians (recall Karl Marx’s depiction of religion as the “opium of the masses”) and have had their anti-capitalist stances distorted and lied about even as they have continued to support unconditionally for the democratic rights of all Canadians despite the fact that Canada is not a democracy – but neither is any other country on the planet. For the CPUSA persecution is even worse as history has shown is a condition that persists to this day. In Canada some trade union leaders, until they capitulated to the big corporations and capitalism is general, helped create and unify the trade union movement have been at the forefront of the environmental and peace movement for decades. In each of these capacities they have witnessed firsthand how little value is afforded freedom of assembly and political expression in an authoritarian capitalist police state.

Not only did the Communist Party of Canada warn of the looming threat of political repression by the strong arm of the Canadian state last fall, as the Liberal Party joined the Conservatives in deciding to criminalize support for Palestinian solidarity. When the Liberals invoked the all-too-typical state of exception (now the norm) called the Emergencies Act in February 2022, the Communist Party, despite their objections to the Freedom Convoys, strongly opposed this move as an attempt to suspend the civil and democratic rights of all Canadians while taking a stand against the anti-fascist opposition to the those same red neck Freedom Trucker Convoys against whom the act was directed.

Moreover, the Communist Party of Canada in their election platform recommends that Canada "publicly oppose and denounce Israel's war crimes, recognize the ongoing genocide and enact boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) measures against Israel, including a moratorium on all diplomatic and commercial relationships." How refreshing is this compared to the lame mainstream conservative and liberal sycophants that we have a party with strong moral principles combined with conscience, compassion, civility and empathy. If the Communist platform was turned into a song it would be a blend of The Internationale with the Hollies He Ain’t Heavy, He’s my Brother, Bill Withers Lean on Me and John Lennon's Imagine.

                                                      

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