05.27.07
Today’s Leftist
Communism. I want you to roll that word around in your head just a little bit. Think for a moment the images that come to mind. Let them drift through your head and form impressions. Most of us, myself included, will see soldiers in formation, parades through the Kremlin, a man alone on Tiananmen Square facing down a line of tanks, red flags, and other deeply engraved symbols of dictatorial oppression. Others of us find our thoughts drawn to the idealism that gave Communism its early appeal – an appeal that still exists. We try to remember what it really meant to raise the red flag and what that act meant to established powers.
Because of this, there is a natural impulse on the left to defend the actions and aims of regimes who can trace their origins to revolutionary fervor. Once upon a time, they claimed to be building a new world and trying to make things better for all of us. We think to ourselves, “if not for the constant meddling of western powers, who knows if they wouldn’t have succeeded.â€Â In this way, we absolve ourselves the weaknesses of our own analytical models, inadvertently forgive tyranny, and provide comfort to powers that have no business being comforted.
This problem is especially pointed in South Korea where a whole new generation of young leftists is growing up in the shadow the world’s last “communist†regime. Having only just emerged from the shadow of dictatorship itself, this country is new to free speech and relatively open political debate. Moreover, until very recently, the writings of Marx and Engles were illegal (as I understand it), despite the fact that a close reading of even the more basic works suggests a strong opposition to iron fisted dictatorship, since the real commitment in their thought was to genuine equality – made possible by a dictatorship of the proletariat (something like this emerged during the Paris Commune or the original system of Soviets immediately prior to the formation of the USSR). Leftist students across the South are engaged in active study of their northern countrymen, hoping to find the answers to political troubles at home, and in a country so obviously dominated by powerful business interests and a strong militaristic streak that exists hand-in-hand with vehement anti-communism, the problems are many.
Two important thoughts come to mind in light of all this. The first is that being a Leftist does not necessitate being a Communist in the first place. The leftist criticism does indeed find its best expression through a deep mistrust of capitalism and the complex interplay of power that accompanies it. While the most influential thinker on the subject is Karl Marx – the founder of modern communism (though everything he actually wrote about the governmental system known as communism couldn’t fill a small brochure), simply being interested in alternative models of development and economic activity does not necessitate the full own adoption of Marxist thought. Secondly, there is nothing explicitly “Communist†about the regimes in China and the DPRK.  Communism is supposedly a system that embodies fairness, justice, progress, and individual liberty. Forced labor camps, deep repression, dictatorship, a complete absence of civil liberties is not Communism and more than it can be heralded as socially progressive and democratic.
Of course, it is only natural for a leftist thinker to want these regimes to succeed in their stated aims. It is also easy to cite the numerous crimes committed by hegemonic regimes against so-called communist powers. It is also easy to speculate as to how things might have been different had there been less interference on the part of these powers. I often wonder how the world might have been changed in the US embraced the USSR as a partner before the rise of Stalin. Maybe they would have succeeded, and maybe it was wrong for us to have forced such a defensive posture on the basis of an ideological conflict. Eventually though, you need embrace the reality of the now, and understand that places like North Korea will never be worker’s paradises and that Kim Il Sung was never a great revolutionary and was, in fact, a dangerous ideologue who cloaked himself in revolutionary rhetoric in order to obfuscate his own megalomania despite being a puppet of greater powers in China and Russia.
To be a leftist in today’s world means to be relentlessly critical of the systems of domination that exist all around us. To be progressively so means to look for ways to improve the distribution of wealth and upset the status quo without hurting the very souls that you seek to help. In the end, a leftist thinker must be highly self-interested and willing to live at the bottom of whatever hierarchy he creates. Justice is truly done when the top has no systematic advantages over the bottom, and the individual is supreme once more.