Don't call me "left"

Way back in the distant mists of time a bunch of people who were defending the monarch and the ancien regime they represented sat on the right, and  the people who didn’t agree sat on the left of a meeting place. This is where the naming comes from. It means that you’re joining in with the consensus and debate, you’re part of the system, you’re perhaps even unconsciously spending energy defending a system you disagree with.

Think about it.

Green plenty will be built after the system we’re all being forced to live under is overturned. Like I said in the first Green Plenty article on this site, the world needs to be turned upside down, so that it is instead the right way up. We need a world built around needs, rather than the stupidity of capitalist profit and the pretence that the ecology is a mere externality that will take care of itself no matter how much it is abused.

We need a world where vast wealth doesn’t act like a black hole distorting the world into dangerous patterns based on immoral assumptions. We need people-centred decisions instead of capitalist logic mayhem ripping our hearts out for fun and profit.

Left means that you participate in the game, it means there is a right. It means that there is discussion to be had with the defenders of the death machine, compromise might be reached etc. etc. None of these things are true, it has to go or the consequences will be terrible, maybe even kill us all. You can’t have a conversation with an actual knife stuck in your belly, it needs surgery, treatment and healing. It might not feel like it, but that is the situation we find ourselves in.

You find the same thinking when you start questioning what the war machine is up to. People start using the word we when they refer to their imperialist, colonial governments and their plundering. Governments that are historically covered in the blood of brown people and do not flinch when you disagree with them to beat you up and throw you in prison. We need to be very clear about where we stand and what we want, and it isn’t carrying on as we are, because it doesn’t work and never worked that well for people like us.

So don’t call me left - I’m not joining in, it needs to be gone, it needs to be turned the right way up. There is no consensus to find. Everything, our very existence, is in play.