,
6 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
There‘s now a crucial division on the left between those who see the socialist project as international (indeed, “globalist”), and driven by the desire to radically expand freedom and equality, and those who see it as a project of harnessing national economies to the state.
Those of us with the former conception should be “anti-statist” - not in the sense of rejecting state intervention or nationalisation, but because we have a historical understanding that states are not neutral instruments that can be captured for whatever political end.
You can see this division expressing itself over Brexit, free movement, “identity politics” (i.e., are struggles around race, gender, sexuality, disability, etc., divisive “identitarian” distractions from the proper economic focus of socialism, or are they integral concerns?)...
...and internationally in a way that is a direct inheritance from the two-camps worldview of Cold War-era Stalinism: should the left oppose all oppressive regimes, or support those that are, or claim to be, oppositional to the main imperial hegemon (America, for now)?
In a moment of insurgent authoritarianism across the world, a “left” that has as its programme autarkic economic nationalism, protected by closed borders, is going to end up bolstering, and probably collapsing into, some incredibly reactionary forces.
The “third camp” left - and the left which doesn’t use that term or identify with that specific tradition, but which is internationalist, democratic, broadly “libertarian” and anti-statist, and for independent working-class politics - needs to regroup and reassert itself.
