The American left is seppocentric. It looks out onto the wasteland that the world has become and thinks that all roads lead back to Washington. It is constantly tripping over its own clumsy apologies for its privilege, its government, its sponsored genocides. It is afraid of theory, preferring instead to ‘let’ the ‘oppressed’ speak, replaying the masochism of the old Christian rite of confession. It has an insular, esoteric language that if you can’t or don’t speak, it won’t teach you. Yet it will cancel you for crimes against race, class, and gender for not speaking that very language! It sees everything ‘bad’ in the world as the fault of the United States, emanating from this country like the foul stench of rotting death.
Yes, the American left is far too seppocentric. It is absorbed in its own problems of culture and the redistribution of the ill-gotten gains of late capitalism to the neglect of the imminent chaos spreading like wildfire all over the world. At the same time that it denounces its government for every military adventure old and new, it fails to prescribe an adequate alternative. It wouldn’t dare pronounce judgment on anything happening anywhere in the rest of the world. It apparently has no opinion on the Taliban or the Communist Party of China. This code of silence cannot be ignorance, for these young generations have more knowledge at their fingertips than previous ones did in their national libraries. It cannot be cowardice, for they throw their bodies to the cops at every whiff of corruption or police brutality. No, it must instead be a conspiracy: in place of a ruthless critique of everything existing, they have instead idolized a ruthless resignation to everything existing. It is now far too negative even for a dialectics of negativity.
The American left’s seppocentrism reconstitutes American imperialism all the more. Its anti-racism in turn offers a new foundation for a new iteration of racism. Its (god help us) anti-capitalism just proves to be one more churn in the butter-pail, melting what was once solid into the rarefied air of capitalism all over again. So much for its prospects.
And yet, the American left is not Americentric enough!
For the sake of proletarian internationalism, the American left must become Americentric. It must finally realize that Lenin’s revolution was never about Russia: it was about England. So too were Mao’s and Fidel’s and Ho Chi Minh’s. It doesn’t matter where the impetus for revolution comes from. Capitalism’s very globality ensures that its crisis will be reproduced all around the world. What matters instead is that revolution culminate in the bloody heart beating at the center of it all. So long as revolution is foreign to the global core of capitalist relations, there is no hope for anyone anywhere in the world. China may have eliminated absolute poverty; but that is hardly socialism. Indeed, the only meaning of China’s great proletarian revolution must be the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, first in the U.S. and then on a world scale.
So we can equally assert that the American left is not Americentric at all. This is to everyone’s disadvantage. For the sake of the poor oppressed folks out there it claims to care so much about, the American left must become Americentric. It must stop apologizing. It must stop refusing to take up space. It must deeply internalize the truth that all roads really do lead to Washington. To do so would be far more serious and internationalist than its current wallowing in self-guilt.
But perhaps we cannot hope for that much. Perhaps we must hope instead that the imperialist center changes locales. If the American left cannot take advantage of its country’s pole position then maybe it should in fact work to topple the U.S. from the world’s peak. Then we ought to hope that China’s or the E.U.’s left can make good on the potential that imperialism offers for proletarian revolution. If this were the American left’s real conspiracy after all, then we have reason to hope for much more. But its current orientation does not admit even that much.
And so the world, its eyes on the American left, must brace itself for another long night out in the cold. And the American left, its ears to the world, will hear only what it wants to. Is there no way off this Möbius strip?