"Why Do We Not Know This Yet?" Definitive Break - A Contrast Between A Real Left And The Official Left Which Will Never Work

As I was reading this article at In These Times, Michel Foucault, Neoliberalism and the Failures of the Left, I suddenly realized that I didn't believe any of it, not Foucault's vision of the left nor the various strands of left which it presents him as having come to oppose, pretty much the entire European intellectual left - the same kind of stuff that the American intellectual left was and, in its ruins, still is made of and which the official American left is still guided by.  

The entire thing, not only the Marxist content of it was something I used to read respectfully, though I never found it very convincing or compelling but which I had some vague feeling that I should consider because so many wise voices of the left took it seriously, now looks to me to be the very reason that the left has been such a notable failure and why any left which starts out with the attitudes of that "left" will never go anywhere.  I would invite anyone to read that article and then read the essay by Marilynne Robinson,  The Fate of Ideas: Moses, that I linked to Sunday, which talks about the real radicalism of the Mosaic Law and tell me which vision of reality is more likely to speak to real people, their real experience and the facts, exigencies and vicissitudes of their own lives.  

Read the discussion of Foucault, Marx, Maoists, neo-liberals, governing Socialists, etc. consideration of that very condescending, dehumaized view of human beings, the "lumpenproletariat" and how various lefties moved them around as if they were talking about a raw material resource to channel instead of real people and contrast that to the Mosaic consideration of people as beloved by God, conscious beings who are set beyond consideration as part of a system of material commerce.  Consider this point made by Robinson, noting Thomas More's observation:

In his Utopia, Thomas More, the 16th century statesman and scholar, notes one great difference between the regime of Christian England and the laws laid down by Moses. English thieves were hanged in great numbers, sometimes twenty on a scaffold, whereas “to be short, Moses’ law, though it were ungentle and sharp, as a law that was given to bondmen, yea, and them very obstinate, stubborn and stiff-necked, yet it punished theft by the purse, and not with death (italics mine). And let us not think that God in the new law of clemency and mercy, under the which He ruleth us with fatherly gentleness, as his dear children, hath given us greater scope and license to the execution of cruelty upon one another.” More wrote his book in Latin, and the learned could not be hanged (if they were male) — this is the actual meaning of the phrase “benefit of clergy” — so those to whom his thoughts would have been of pressing interest would not have been among his readers. But a very valuable point is made here, which is seldom made, and which, if we were honest, would force us to consider many things.

Moses (by whom I mean the ethos and spirit of Mosaic law, however it came to be articulated) in fact does not authorize any physical punishment for crimes against property. The entire economic and social history of Christendom would have been transformed if Moses had been harkened to only in this one particular. Feudalism, not to mention early capitalism, are hardly to be imagined where such restraint was observed in defense of the rights of ownership. Anyone familiar with European history is aware of the zeal for brutal punishment, the terrible ingenuity with which the human body was tormented and insulted through the 18th century at least, very often to deter theft on the part of the wretched. Moses authorizes nothing of the kind, nor indeed does he countenance any oppression of the poor. Thomas More is entirely conventional, as he would be still, in describing the law of Moses as “sharp” beside the merciful governance of Christ. But how could Europe have been more effectively Christianized — understand the sense in which I use the word — than by adherence to these laws of Moses? Granting the severity of the holiness codes in the Torah, they do not compare unfavorably with laws touching religious matters in More’s England. More himself called for the burning of William Tyndale, the great early translator of the Bible into English, who was in fact burned. It is often said that Europeans learned religious intolerance from the Old Testament. Then how did we happen to skip over the parts where the laws protect and provide for the poor, and where oppression of them is most fiercely forbidden? It is surely dishonest to suggest we learned anything at all from the Torah, if we have not learned anything good from it. Better to say our vices are our own than to try to exculpate ourselves by implying that our attention strayed during the humane and visionary passages. The law of Moses puts liberation theology to shame in its passionate loyalty to the poor. Why do we not know this yet?

Read the meandering, academic discourse on Foucault and "the left" with its beloved, academic, pseudo-scientific language, read the remarkable intersection between that atheist-secular left and the neo-liberalism of Milton Friedman and consider how insufficient an alternative that left is as compared to the radicalism of the Mosaic Law and any attempt to, seriously, follow it.  Then consider the political and social discourse of abolition and civil rights which spoke the language of Exodus and Deuteronomy, the Hebrew prophets, the Gospels and the Epistles and their actual achievements in politics as opposed to the decades, turning into centuries of impotent ineptitude of the academic leftists of this sort.   Marxism is, if anything, deader than any part of the religious left.  Not even the ruling Communists take Marx seriously anymore except as a cultural icon emptier than Uncle Sam.  I can just about guarantee you that even if everyone masters the ridiculous academic mazes necessary to understand what is said in the article, it and its ideas will produce nothing good in laws and policies.

The secular left is a dead end.  The academic left is as dead an end.  It is a guaranteed political failure.  It isn't radical, at all, it is a variation on the same system that hanged thieves in late medieval England instead of considering them children of God.  Look up George Bernard Shaw speaking on the topic of gassing unproductive members of society like unwanted domestic animals if you want another view of the same thing.  That left is no left and it never was.