Although Daphne Lawless is in New Zealand, every word of this is familiar as the British left makes its moves to grind together again…
My bottom line on Left recomposition is that I’ve found out, by experience, that there are a hell of a lot of people who call themselves Socialist who are reprehensible human beings and/or have reprehensible, bordering fascistic, politics.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I won’t join the Greens or any other electoral party, but if I’m going to sit in a political meeting with people whose views piss me off, I’d rather go to a Green meeting to hear hippie nonsense and praise of working through the institutions, than go to a Socialist meeting to hear that trans people are menaces and Bashar al-Assad did nothing wrong.
It also doesn’t help that the socialist Left in Aotearoa over the last 15 years has treated me, personally, like absolute shit. I get it, I’m neurospicy, I’m not a people person by any stretch and I piss people off by breathing wrong around them, but I can’t see any benefit of engaging with people who’ve repeatedly told me over a decade that my political contribution (and my personal presence) is worthless or even a liability.
Especially when I think precisely the same of those people – the actual bullies/sex pests, or the “academics” who insist on whitewashing non-Western imperialists and genocidaires, making Red-Brown arguments for chasing the fascist base, or arguing that disinformation isn’t real and journalism based on objective standards is a bourgeois plot. If you say that *those* people are valid members of the socialist movement, you’re saying that *I’m* not, because the two can’t co-exist, and those people frankly have more friends and clout than I do. And we see in practice who *even the people who like my analysis* are more happy to work with.
Left recomposition only means a damn thing if it’s based on a program, and it can’t be based on a program if it’s based on simply gathering together everyone who considers themselves a socialist, because there is a river of goddamn blood between the Assadists/TERFS/anti-liberals and people like me, and there are a lot of people who aren’t anticapitalist but have a better program for change than the Assadists/TERFs do.
