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Where the Left and the Right Come Together

Where the Left and the Right Come Together

Last updated on: April 14, 2023 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Where the Left and the Right Come Together 2023-04-10T18:46:16-04:00 Gene Veith

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Yesterday, I posted about a British article I came across that defends the working class from charges of racism, making the case that, on the contrary, it “shows what real anti-racism looks like.”

It was published in an online magazine called Sp!ked, pronounced and sometimes printed as “Spiked.” It seemed like a contrarian publication, like Unherd or Quillette, being willing to challenge the conventional wisdom with different and often politically-incorrect perspectives. Sp!ked seemed to be on the conservative side, a British publication that had positive articles about Donald Trump and negative articles about transgenderism and environmentalism.

Curious, I checked the Wikipedia article for the publication. Here I learned that it was originally titled Living Marxism and was the official journal of the UK’s Revolutionary Communist Party! Living Marxism was officially dissolved when it lost a libel suit, but it reconstituted itself with the same editor and many of the same writers as Sp!ked.

The Wikipedia article says that it is now “libertarian,” with some observers calling it “libertarian left” and others calling it “libertarian right.” An environmentalist critic called it part of “the fanatical right.”

But let me explain. . . .Sp!ked exemplifies orthodox Marxism. As such, it opposes the “post-Marxist” heresies of identity politics, sexual politics, gender politics, racial politics, environmental politics, and the whole woke agenda.

As Marx did, it champions the working class. It opposes the “ruling class,” the bourgeois corporate overlords, who today, ironically, have adopted “progressive” values. Which, no surprise, pose no threat to their economic interests.

I would call Sp!ke “populist.” That is, supportive of the “common people.” That label used to imply a leftist perspective, but today, especially with the populism of Donald Trump, it is associated with the right. But the population of the left and of the right have much in common, and, indeed, come together in Sp!ked.

Here are some headlines from Sp!ked along with links to the articles:

Why the Resistance is (still) so much worse than Trump

Trump’s great crime is to have stood up to the elites

Globetrotting green elites are a threat to democracy

We need to kick wokeness off the therapist’s couch

The depopulation bomb

Dylan Mulvaney’s parody of womanhood

And yet, do not think the site is conservative, as such. Another piece is In defence of the sexual revolution. But it’s not the usual progressive defense. It makes its case by opposing “post-liberal feminism,” the “#MeToo” movement, and gender ideology, all of which distort and devalue sex.

I picked up on the Marxism in the article I blogged about, but that didn’t mean its main point was wrong. The author, Julie Burchill, didn’t hide her political theory: “One of the most poisonous projects of the past decade has been the ID-pol brigade’s attempt to drive a wedge between the races, rather than stick to a sensible Marxist class analysis of power.”

True leftists want the workers of the world to unite, not be constantly divided and set against each other because of race, gender identity, sexual practices, or the like. That our progressives are doing so demonstrates the phoniness of their radicalism. That is to say, they do want to overthrow the existing order, but in an authoritarian way. They do not seek to start a mass movement or give “power to the people,” as classic radicals do. They want to seize power themselves. They want the masses to do their bidding.

Don’t get me wrong, though. Exalting a socio-economic class above everything else can be as reductive and unjust as exalting race, sex, and gender. And you can’t truly be libertarian without free market economics. And dialectical materialism is a worldview that just leaves out too much.

But I’m going to bookmark Sp!ked and might occasionally blog about something I found there. But don’t worry. I’m not becoming a Communist.

Image: Logo for Spiked (magazine) via Wikipedia. Public Domain.

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