Tuesday 31 May 2011

The (New) Left is dead


I mind a while back looking at what the left had to say about shit given the inevitable collapse of capitalism due to its innate contradictions and what not was integral to left thinking. I mind when I did it was totally depressing because I had to spend an age finding anything and I mean ANYTHING that actually mattered a fuck.

Scanning the last 9 months of articles published by the New Left Review was even more depressing than that because it has absolutely fuck all to say about well anything really. The best you can say is that at least they watch the telly and presumably fulminate about the latest headlines then workshop an appropriate theoretical response with the aid of feminist, eco-lesbians who have a passable grasp of critical theory (Adorno mind not that Walter Benjamin malarky). Apart from that, they lag the times, only ever commenting after the event and in the process come across as a bunch of high-bourgeoisie, privileged elderly shifters at a complete remove from reality thanks to the trust funds and tenures attached to the silver spoons rammed up their rectums at birth.

To give some practical examples – the New Left Review thinks discussing Mao right now actually matters and that shit like the following “The work of Thomas Hirschhorn as artistic primer for a precarious world. Appeals for explanation and engagement in makeshift monuments or plaintive placards, while overflowing installations lay bare the excesses of late capitalism” doesn't just mean whoever writes shite like that is a tool.

Nah, fuck that. If that’s all they can say at this critical juncture i.e. NOW given all the shite that's gone done and is going down, then that’s it, it’s official, the Left is dead, largely, it seems, via auto-anal-asphyxiation.


P.S. this is a positive thing when you think about it. The fact the old lefty figureheads have chosen to render themselves utterly irrelevant makes clear new people and new thinking is needed, give or take ignoring shitfers like this twat like the plague. So thank you Perry Anderson, thank you for rendering yourself an utter joke and reemphasising the fact your brother got all the brains in your family.

No comments:

Post a Comment