But the truth
remains: today, Marxism is bankrupt. On the Left, faith is gone, morale is low,
and activism is paralyzed. The Left
needs a new ideology to supplant its failed and discredited Marxism.
Agorism—the purest, most consistent, and revolutionary form of
libertarianism—is that supplanting ideology. Agorism can motivate and direct
the underclass’s struggle against the overclass—and return the Left to its radical anti-state, anti-war, pro-property,
pro-market historical roots. (Agorist
Class Theory, 10/38, emphasis mine)
“Left,” from earliest
political times, has meant “anti-establishment.”
Consistent libertarians wish to abolish the State and its parasitic class of
bureaucrats, politicians, subsidized businessmen, privileged labor leaders, and
military mass murderers. This puts us, in most political lexicons, on the Left; since it is anarchist, it places us on the
Far Left. (Introducing the Movement
of the Libertarian Left, emphasis mine)
To speak of the “Left” and its inescapable cousin the “Right”
is to invite the knee-jerk reaction of, “well, haven’t you heard of the
left-right paradigm?” Don’t you know that the two major political parties, the
Republicans on the “Right” and the Democrats on the “Left” in the United
States, are effectively two-sides of the same coin? There is no choice; it is
all an illusion of choice. The Left/Right concept is just theater for the
masses who are supposed to root for their favorite politician/gladiator in the
televised or YouTube broadcasted “arena” in our metaphorical Colosseum.
Now it is true that agorist literature does speak of two major divisions within the ruling class—the Left
and Right “wings”—and it does lament
the fact that a change in political party does not normally lead to any
substantive earthshattering change to the overall trends of an era.
With regard to the former, Roderick T. Long in his Can We Escape the Ruling Class speaks of
this phony Left/Right dichotomy by noting that most ruling classes split into a
political/bureaucratic or “Left” wing
and a corporate/plutocratic or
“Right” wing:
Most ruling classes are divided
into two broad factions, which we may call the political class and the corporate
class….In the United States today, each of the two major political parties
works…to advanced the interests of both
wings of the ruling class—but the Democrats tend to lean more toward the
Bureaucrats, while the Republicans lean more to the Plutocrats.
With regard to the
latter, one favorite Left revisionist historian often cited by agorist writers,
Gabriel Kolko, (see for instance Agorist
Class Theory, 18/38), begins his important contribution to American
Progressive Era history, called The
Triumph of Conservatism, by lamenting the fact that changing political
parties does not lead to a change in overall governmental policy direction. He
writes, concerning this period of supposedly “progressive” American history,
that “the movements for legislative enactments ran through nearly all the
administrations, and can only be really understood in that context” (9). A
few pages earlier he mentions that “the major political leaders of the
Progressive Era—Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson—were sufficiently conservative to
respond to their [i.e., corporate] initiatives” (5). Now the Taft and Roosevelt
administrations were Republican while the Wilson administration was Democratic.
So the same general theme of legislating to protect corporate interests from
instability ran across both
Republican and Democratic administrations. Even in his day, Democratic Wilson
got called out for sounding just like a Republican: “to the obvious criticism
that this [Wilson’s speech] sounded very much like Rooseveltian doctrine,
Wilson frankly responded…I can’t see
what the difference is” (207).
But this leads me to
a question that I asked myself a short time ago. If the Left/Right paradigm is
just a fraudulent scam—and agorists know
that it is a scam—then why does their literature make such a big deal about
them being “radically Left”? Why not
disassociate oneself from this compromised terminology?
To answer this question, notice how the agorists phrase
their “radical Left” literature. They do not
say that they want to be “Left” in any modern sense of the term; rather,
they say that they want to return to the
historical roots of the “Left.” Consequently, I went on a historical
investigation of the political term “Left” to see if I could dig up anything
germane. In this article I plan to briefly state what I think the agorists are
alluding to when they use the term “Left.” I then plan to write subsequent
articles to fill-in the details.
I stumbled across a book entitled Illuminati: Manifesto of World Revolution (1792) in the course of
my research. The author is Nicholas
Bonneville. Marco Di Luchetti is the translator, editor, and introduction
writer. This book is of supreme interest because it “allows a correct identification of the ideology of the group known in
history as the Brissotins.” The Brissotins are relevant to my discussion
because they were the first group in history to be called “Left”:
It was during Brissot’s mastery
over the Jacobins from 1791 to August 1792 that Jacobin deputies in
the Assembly began the practice of seating themselves to the left of the
President’s Chair. Gradually, this behavior caused others to spot a “left” and
“right” wing. This behavior is the genesis of our modern distinction of “left”
and “right.”
The Brissotins were the first to be
called left-wing politicians. (Kindle Locations 226-229, 235)
My thesis is: when the agorist authors refer to their
“historical roots” in the “radical Left,” they mean, in part, roots in the
ideology of the Brissotins.
I plan to expand upon this statement in Part 2. I want to
assure you that I am not doing crazy “conspiracy theory” research. This is
serious historical research on the French Revolution.
To lure you into reading Part 2, let me very briefly hint at
the similarities between radical “Left” agorism and the Brissotin ideology.
Brissotin
Political Philosophy:
Bonneville wanted to create a world “without any state to
rule over the people. It was utterly libertarian” (Kindle Locations 133).
Brissotin
Economics:
In 1793, the Cercle Social [the
Brissotins were all members of Bonneville’s Cercle Social] specifically
endorsed giving freedom to farmers to sell their goods at market prices... It
was only during the Enlightenment that experiments were made to let
individuals, unrestrained by state intervention, freely supply markets. When
monarchical state controls were removed, supply flourished. When reimposed,
supply contracted. (See Kindle Locations 276-281)
