The Left and the Right

If you lived anywhere else in the world outside of fortress North America, you would realize that the concept of left and right as manifestations of class warfare is alive and kicking. Although we in the west have lost sight of the daily battles between wealth and the people, the struggle to keep the capitalist/corporatist monster in check is being fought from Argentina to Afghanistan and from Zimbabwe to Zambia. Sometimes the lines are clearly drawn and sometimes it’s hard to tell a power hungry warlord from a freedom fighter, but all conflicts can be reframed into a clash between those interested in maintaining/expanding the public good and those interested in exploiting/plundering the public good for personal and corporate gain.



Since left and right are defined by their treatment of the public good, it behooves us to know what the term means. Economists tend to differentiate public and private goods by stating that the former is not reduced in amount or number by consumption or usage while the latter is. This has more to do with public “goods” and is often confused with things owned by the government. Private goods are actual goods, as in things that have value because their availability is reduced by consumption, triggering a supply and demand economic dynamic. Although the economic interpretation is misleading in that it couches the idea in mercantilist terms, it is instructive in a very salient example of erosion of the public good:



Setting: Iraq (or Afghanistan, etc.) Armed forces are a public good. They are collectively supported, not for consumption, but to ensure the security of the people. When they are used to oppress the people or to further the interests of one group over another, they cease to be a public good in terms of their effect although they continue to be a public good for economists. Fighter jets are bought by the resources of the people (taxes) fueled with jet fuel bought from the private sector with public money, armed with weapons and ammunition produced by the private sector and bought with public money, and manned by pilots paid for with public resources. When they visit destruction on economic targets such as Iraq, they expend vast amounts of public resources. When the target country has been subjugated and opportunities for compensation to the public good present themselves in the form of reconstruction and business opportunities (cell phone users went from a handful before Desert Storm to over 500 000 today) it is the private sector that rakes in the profits. In the “old days” armies performed the same destructive function, but returned “the cost of doing business” to their host public good in the form of looted treasuries and the securing of material tributes. These days, public armies do the destroying while private armies (aka security firms) and the private sector do the plundering.



Money is the ultimate private good because it can be exchanged for any private good imaginable. However, when money is in the shared possession of the people – to be used to purchase goods and services for the betterment of the society as a whole – it becomes a public good which economists call a ‘collective good’. The love of money, as the Bible says, is the root of all evil and no one loves money more than the private enterprise. It is their sine qua non and the basis of their bottom line. In the form of ‘value’ it is what the private sector seeks to extract from the public good, ergo, the Iraq example. Rightists believe that anything of value should be in private hands to be exploited and traded and consumed in order to increase the wealth of private individuals and corporations. They further believe that anything that generates wealth, from utilities to the issuing of licenses, to the sale of government controlled substances such as alcohol, should produce private wealth rather than public wealth (which would be used to benefit the collective good).



And this is the basis of the difference between the left and the right and the reason that the two will be forever irreconcilable – you either care more about others or you care more about yourself. Those whose primary concern is the health and prosperity of the collective tend toward the left or socialist camp; those whose primary concern is personal well-being and the narcissistic pursuit of personal wealth tend toward the right or capitalist/corporatist camp. Unfortunately, that camp also includes a large mass of individuals for whom the policies of the right hold nothing but future poverty and marginalization.



And this latter group is the linchpin of the entire system because their numbers keep the system destabilized far more than the committed denizens of the left. I first encountered this seeming paradox as a teenager when I was canvassing for the NDP in the mid-60’s. I lived in a working class neighbourhood in North Edmonton populated by cookie cutter bungalows and non-descript row housing. Where I had expected receptive households, I was more often than not greeted with disdain and outright hostility – some homeowners would drive me from their property with abusive language and even threats to “kick the shit out of you - you little commie bastard.”



It didn’t make sense. The party I was representing had a platform that seemed custom made to the people in this neighborhood, championing their right to better working conditions, minimum wage, better health care, and on and on. The party in power was the rightist Social Credit who were clinging to power as a relic of the Depression, maximizing the profits of the carpetbaggers, and pandering to the farmer/rural vote which was their base. Although they would tumble to the charisma of Peter Lougheed in the early seventies, Social Credit and its anti blue collar agenda had held sway since 1935. Yet here were these same blue collar workers – lower middle class nine to fivers – stuffing the ballot boxes for a party that promised them nothing but “Christian values” and delivered even less.



It almost seems that many constituents who vote for the right do so out of a fear of the left. The left, to them, is a vehicle for opposition, revolution, oppression, and enslavement by the state. They have incorporated snatches of newsreels from the Bolshevik Revolution, street battles in Winnipeg, and the dictatorship of Stalin and Khrushchev into a steamroller of state control and terror. They are afraid to lose the ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ that the current power structure espouses to insure and see any prospect of change to the status quo in the same way that young children see monsters under their beds. Over the years the rightist machine has successfully equated communism with socialism so that the fear of one is equivalent to the fear of the other. Throw in the red herring that the Nazis were National ‘Socialist’ and socialism is tainted with both the heritage of fascism and communist dictatorship neither of which bear any resemblance to leftist politics.



Maybe it’s time to put the ‘social’ back in ‘socialism’. Those of us who espouse the politics of the left are interested in a world where the vast majority of human beings and, ultimately, all of humanity are treated as such. We want a pooling of resources to allow for the maximum benefit of everyone, not just a few. We want freedom from oppression, and free parks, and universal health care, and pensions, and workplace safety, and a vibrant sustainable environment, and trees. In short, we want everyone to get their fair share, not according to some accident of birth, greed, inheritance, or megalomania. We want, at least, to be closer to an equitable distribution of wealth than we are at present.



As the disproportionate sharing of the world’s wealth becomes ever more a fact of current economic reality, the left is the only check on the plundering of the public good – our collective good – by an increasingly wealthy, increasingly smaller elite. Everywhere we look, corporations and the super rich are taking control of whatever produces wealth and channeling it into their own private domain. What was once a pyramid of assets, with an ever larger proportion owning an ever smaller share of the overall wealth, has become a grotesque, misshapen entity with an obscenely large head, no trunk or waist to speak of, standing on short spindly legs which are straining to keep the abomination upright. Next to this caricature of the distribution of wealth is its twin, the distribution of numbers, with a head the size of a pin sitting on a massive pair of feet.



The left foot keeps trying to kick over the distribution of wealth but the right foot keeps getting in the way.