Why The Left Will Never Be In Power

Confronting Our Nature

Not long after recording our episode, I called Paddy Loughman, who I interviewed last week, for another chat about the state of the world. These conversations are illuminating, rapidly creating new connections in my mental map of the world. Following the thrust of trauma versus healing we had developed during the episode, Paddy and I went on to discuss the unhelpful binaries of Left vs Right, and how the emergence of a new world will demand both “sides” collapsing into themselves and accepting that which they exist to reject: the heaven and hell within us all. 

The Right “wing” rejects the notion that humans are capable of spontaneously looking after themselves and one another. It rejects that we are programmed for anything beyond our basic self-interest, and exploits the dopamine pathways that necessitate a biological interest in staying alive as long as possible. The right “wing” believes in the essential nature of hierarchies, the ultimate nature of strength, and the inescapable nature of competition. It then uses these natures to consolidate power, forever increasing its grasp of and impact upon the world. 

In contrast, the Left “wing” promotes equality, that humankind is fundamentally kind and altruistic, that we surpass our biology, that we have a right to self-governance within the context of community. It promotes the right to diversity of self-expression whilst rejecting abject individualism. It upholds the human right to a dignified life, including basic services such as housing and education. It dismantles centres of power—apart from its own, which it holds in order to combat the right wing’s grasp on the world, ultimately ending in a dissolution of the values with which it began.

This is why we do not live in a Left vs Right wing world on the level of nation-states. The values of the Left demand the dismantling of the modern state if followed through to their logical end. The modern state is a wealth pump, an alien entity which erodes the networks of communities which previously governed social life. Whether by force or gentle invitation, it violently severs a people’s relationship to one another and their land, replacing the lived experience of humankind with the citizen’s experience of mindless consumption.

We have not, then, lived in a seemingly eternal tussle between the Left and Right wing. Since the notion of private property first entered our language as we stopped roaming and began to settle, the Right has cast its shadow over our homes. The brief interludes of social progress were won on ground that was materially supported by the extraction and exploitation of other lands and other peoples: civil rights in the West were funded by labour and goods from the Global South. Had not the long arm of the Right another land and people to rob, its desire for growth would have predicated its continued exploitation from the people closer at hand.

There have been flashes of Leftist statehood battling the capitalist regime all over the world, all crushed by the power of the Right, bloated on millennia of resource-grabbing, land-grabbing and, quite frankly, practice. The Right is a force for power, for the transformation of natural abundance belonging to us all into sovereign material wealth. Fundamentally, the state which supports the same structures—even if for nobler causes such as the national good over the individual—still falls on the right-wing of the spectrum. The true Left wing, then, is anti-power. It is anti-state. It is against the sovereignty of one species above all others, above the Earth, itself a living holobiont, the most wonderfully diverse collective being in the known universe. The Left will never, by its definition, be in power. It will dismantle power.

A sanitised Left-wing, one that dreams of communist nation-states and corruption-free institutions is as afraid of the human capacity for evil as the Right-wing is afraid of the human capacity for goodness (which would undermine all its endeavours). A sanitised Left-wing denies shadow within us all, the ancient violence which hums in our bodies, the rage which swells in our hearts. It imagines a world without human ego and lust and anger and suffering. It promises utopia where, given the opportunity, when humankind is unleashed for all its goodness, all that is unleashed is that very goodness. Both Left and Right deny the immutability of the other, and force us into an eternal war.

In rejecting anarchy, the sanitised Left reveals its ideological similarity with the Right, believing such a world would descend into chaos and violence; that, in fact, institutions to curtail the very violence it denies must exist. And thus, the options available to us only ever paint us as children of the Right wing. Yet, for anarchy to flourish, we must accept the nature the Right warns against, and allow communities to defend against that nature interpersonally. What form does this self-defence take? And how does defence differ from violence?

We live in a violent world. The order of the Law itself is predicated upon a commitment to violence, “to putting bodies on the line” as law professor Robert Cover wrote in his essay, Violence and the Word. Evidently, this willingness to violence does little to deter the spontaneous, ugly violence of hurt people hurting people. What, then, does?

Many indigenous communities bound by their own laws use interpersonal violence to keep the individual in check so the family may be well. Elders in Papua New Guinea will chuckle when what we deem as psychopaths are sent off to live in the forest in isolation (invited in only during times of war, at which point they are crowned interim Chief). There are many stories of the unkind or cruel community member falling off a cliff during a hunt, or drowning in a river, or falling over the forest floor and bashing their skull against a rock. This interpersonal violence is a form of self-defence, meted out so that the sick member not infect the rest of the tribe and sacrifice its health to his values. Arguably, this type of violence allows these communities to live in peace, and be regaled in the Western Left as wise masters of altruism.

Our state-level Left and Right must meet, but not at the middle—rather, on the outside, grasping the bigger, complicated, nuanced, diverse big picture of human nature, a nature capable of everything imaginable, a nature which is fluid rather than static, a nature which responds to its environment, as all beings do. Perhaps our capacity for violence is not a sickness but, on a small scale, a tool of interpersonal governance made monstrous when governance encompasses millions of people. Perhaps our capacity for compassion is not a miracle but, on a small scale, a way of life. Perhaps, together, like Yin and Yang, the fluctuations of all that is essential to our being make peace possible—not by force, and not by sanitisation, but by following that which lights the way through the dark.

This is not a call for violence, but rather an attempt to sketch out the relationships we need to live sustainably, which include smaller-scale societies for size dictates appetite. Often, I find when people think about the possibility of sovereign communities, they get stuck on the notion of the one rather than imagining the networked, the possibility of an ecosystem of communities sharing resources and knowledge and collaborating on the scales of projects that nation states do today. However, that we live in community in order to be held accountable is critical. The beauraucratic nightmare of statehood undermines creativity, shadows possibility and denies responsibility. Law and order insulate power against critique. Bloated and fighting, humanity is sick and fragile. Networked and collaborating, we are resilient and capable. We will not reach such a future unless we accept the reality of our own nature.

© Rachel Donald