“Influential left-wing ideas”

Bob has linked me to another meme, this time on good and bad influential left wing ideas, and I’m only too happy to comply. The rules are self-explanatory so away I go:

Good ideas:

Considerate partisanship – You can’t please all the people all of the time, nor can you agree with all the people all of the time, but you can and must work with as many people as you can, disagree and have the punch up later.

Anti-Clericalism – Not to be conflated with anti-religiousness or militant secularism; to be anti-clerical is to do two things: make sure a single denomination church cannot rule indefinitely; curb another way for people with ideas above their stations to control the levers of political power.

Democratic Socialism – The belief in the parliamentary road to socialism without the belief in the capitalist mode of production. Simple. It also anti-Stalinism without being libertarian socialism; socialism from below as opposed to dictatorship of the proletarian.

Marxian Darwinism – The concept, presented in its best form by Dutch Council Marxist Anton Pannekoek in his 1909 essay Marxism And Darwinism, that we are at once social as well as economic animals and therefore the striving for egalitarianism is a duty. For those who say Darwinism is incompatible with left wing politics, it might be remembered that social Darwinists (Capitalist or fascist) are using natural selection as a terse analogy; what Darwin’s theory points out is that we rely on our society and should therefore want the best out of it (to be in for a good chance of benefiting from it).

Anti-Fascism – The left must be opposed to all forms of fascism, be that from the white working class, the black middle class, the Asian upper class, or the unintelligible Aristocracy of all countries.

Bad ideas:

Cultural Relativism – the notion at best smacks of hegemonic patronisation of those who supposedly know no better, at worst it is the attempt to excuse intolerable behaviours on the grounds that cultural difference reaches further than universal concepts of good and bad.

Postmodernism – At best, and like the above, postmodernism attempts to explain away notions without regard for universal concepts of good and bad, at worst denies the existence of an objective reality independent of cultural or subjective appropriation.

Utopianism – “You sir, yes you, the chap with his hands over his eyes, and his head in the clouds, yes you, shut up will you!”

Anarchism – Left wing unity is a problematic term because established knowledge will have you believe that anarchists and socialists share common cause and this should be at least tolerated. But unity on these lines are arbitrary, rather than seemingly common sensical as some would have you believe. It seems obvious to me that common cause can be achieved quicker with a conservative who believes in asset-based egalitarianism than an anarchist who believes it necessarily follows that a state leads to dictatorship and private property protection.

The Chavista Movement – A Bolivarian alternative to NAFTA or other free trade movements that ideologically reduce poor South American workers to the wretched of the earth? Yes. A catch all anti-American policy that incorporates people holocaust denying scum like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, not just as an economic ally, but as a friend? No!

Not influential enough:

Eco-socialism – Evo Morales once said: “The Earth does not have enough for the North to live better and better, but it does have enough for all of us to live well.” Can you imagine these words from a Tory Environmentalist? No. Therefore it is incumbent upon the left wing green movement to distinguish itself from mere environmentalism.

I’m going to leave it there.

Chaps to invite, again (!), are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here