A Free Left Blog

At its most basic level, the left’s core problem when it gets into trouble (as now) is falling into expecting those who don’t take responsibility for themselves to be the responsibility of those who do take responsibility for themselves. This is rather than expecting people who don’t take responsibility for themselves to start taking responsibility for themselves. You can broaden this out to cover countries and societies: that on the left we expect that those who don’t govern themselves decently and effectively should be the responsibility of those who do take responsibility for themselves. (Our version of colonialism there, and with the irony that we then blame those who do take responsibility for themselves for being indecent and immoral when they don’t take it on for others).   The victim mentality is an offshoot of this more basic stance, with victim status putting you under the responsibility (again, ironically) of those who are apparently making you the victim. T...

This is the second set of notes and fragments I have collated in the hope that there may be some value in my random scribblings on scraps of paper, Post-It notes and paper pads. The first set of these notes, principally on the environment and politics , has been notable only for the lack of page views it has attracted – a measly 27 at the time of writing. I think there’s some value both in them and in these, but I guess you can’t argue with the readers... The left’s rationalism The left’s rationalism excludes or delegitimizes feeling by re-categorising it along the same lines as knowing, thereby judging feelings on the same terms as knowledge – as right and wrong . By doing this, it enables you, as a person, to be wrong in your whole being – in the way you feel and experience the world. There is no escape. [ N.B. Of course this isn't a lefty preserve. It is shared across the liberal spectrum by what we might call 'neo-liberals', who treat human beings rather...

Does it make sense to think about poverty as weakness? For a lefty like me, for whom reading about the staggering poverty and exploitation of the Victorian era did a lot to form and shape my politics, the suggestion can seem like an insult or a slap in the face. But, then again, we live in a different world now: with a welfare state, universal health, education and other services (though of course some of these like legal aid are being slashed back by the present government). Talking about poverty as weakness injects a personal element into the issue that sensitive souls and the poverty industry might recoil against, but I think it can also help us to conceive of   poverty in a better way and address it more effectively. The idea of poverty as weakness is derived from a controversial source. Over the past week or so I have been reading a fair amount of the iconoclastic German philosopher-poet Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings, initially for the weekly philosophy g...

International Women’s Day on Friday 8 th March was quite an interesting 24 hours to be a man on the Left. I found it mostly depressing and demoralising though. I used to support the broad feminist agenda, but have become increasingly concerned by the particularly strident, strict and aggressive brand of feminist politics that has taken over: almost exclusively confined to the Left of course. Sexism is a serious, continuing and pressing concern in our society, but the kind of treatment it is getting from feminists threatens to distract from and undermine any effective attempts to address it. This treatment is now overwhelmingly ideological, focusing on sexism as something systemic ; indeed sometimes known as ‘patriarchy’. The divisive brand of politics that comes with this should be familiar to us from the Culture Wars between Left and Right in North America: it is highly emotive in its language, quick to cast blame and careless about where the blame lands. The ...