What's left of the Left?

 

Back in 2003--which seems, today, like several millennia ago--Hakim Bey wrote: "What's left of the Left now seems to inhabit a ghost-world where a few thousand 'hits' pass for political action and 'virtual community' takes the place of human presence. The Web has become a perfect mirror of Global Capital: borderless, triumphalist, evanescent, aesthetically bankrupt, monocultural, violent--a force for atomization and isolation, for the disappearance of knowledge, of sexuality, and of all the subtle senses...Utopian dreams have value as critical tools and heuristic devices, but there's no substitute for lived life, real presence, adventure, risk, love. If you make the media the center of life then you will live a mediated life..." (from the new preface to T.A.Z., published by Autonomedia).

In the intervening eighteen years, it seems to me that our trip down this Rabbit Hole has become routine--the "mediated life" is the only life that most of us really know. Not that our lives have ever been completely unmediated, but we appear to have resigned ourselves to this extra layer of cyber-mediation with very little resistance.

In a hopeful mood, Bey added: "The present oneness of the totality feels spurious as hell; more than spectacular, more than simulated; downright spurious. Surely some day soon some real opposition will begin to cohere. A new movement will appear based on both solidarity and difference, as opposed to the sameness and separation of commodity culture and the Global Image."

Has this happened? Bey declined to predict the shape this movement would take, but he ventured that it would be "passionately Green and somewhat anti-Civilization, with a touch of Luddite technophobia. It will be 'poor' and deeply spiritual (not religious but perhaps shamanistic). It will be 'social' and resolutely anti-Capitalist." As a convinced Tolstoyan I say "Amen to all of that."

But a new movement? I think this is where I get stuck. Bey predicted that T.A.Z.'s (Temporary Autonomous Zones) would be part of this "movement," but I question whether such spaces can ever be part of any movement--for unless they are spontaneous and ephemeral, they aren't T.A.Z.'s, and unless they are T.A.Z.'s, they are not moments of liberatory resistance. A movement may emerge from a T.A.Z. like a chick from its shell--but the shell is then dead matter, detritus, and discarded.

Bey ended his remarks with this question: "Can we evade or even oppose the Final Enclosure--and learn to create our own Outside?"

To that question, I pose the following: If we could, who would know and what difference would it make?