Once upon a time, in the age of critical thought, ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ were terms that situated a group or individual with respect to capitalism. One’s politics were defined by a basic decision with respect to the economic system in which we lived and its political and cultural logic. But as capitalism penetrated every geographical and psychological crevice, so - in Hegelian fashion - its name disappeared from public space.
It goes without saying that there is now no room within the licensed spectrum of debate for any alternative to capitalism.
There is a sad comedy, too deep for laughter, in the groups and individuals who today refer to themselves or are referred to as ‘left’. Examples can be found even in the ‘blogworld’. Johann Hari, consumer of voyeuristic junk and an ideological gadfly who has settled on the corpus delecti of Noam Chomsky’s writings, positions himself on the Left. The ‘redoubtable’ Kamm and his bedfellow Stephen Pollard likewise. Inexorably, the political spectrum shrinks, whilst the name ‘left’ is retained perhaps through some lingering nostalgia for the idea of dissent, a love of certain lexical antiquities still in circulation even though the world to which they belonged has passed away.
In the U.S. of course, the task has been easier, so that today, the terms mapping out the political spectrum are ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, which of course denote two pragmatic perspectives within capitalism, pushing capitalism itself outside the horizon of debate. The term ‘liberal’ rent from its original meaning, now refers to little more than a certain attitude to ‘permissiveness’ and ‘tolerance of the Other’. And indeed, even this lame term has long since taken on a pejorative ring. (Moreover, commentators who are resolutely and obviously on the Left - eg Chomsky- get referred to as ‘liberals’, since the available language, like some autistic Adam, is incapable of naming them). Similarly, ‘conservative’ has become a misnomer. It has nothing to do with the authority of tradition and distrust of abstraction, since all it wishes to ‘conserve’ is the abstract logic of capital and the capitalist-fundamentalist pursuit of profit.
The ideology of capitalism is, among other things, precisely this anamorphosis whereby language is bent and malformed in such a way that the system in which we live and breath disappears as an object of critical thought.