During the entire twentieth century, the capitalist
class appears politically as Right or Left. This
division began at a time when the bourgeoisie was no longer capable
of ruling without whole sections of the people, especially the
workers, voting for one bourgeois party or another. Within these
circumstances they always banned the communists, banned the
Marxist-Leninists. They assassinated them, imprisoned them,
deported them and committed all kinds of crimes against them, all
the while cultivating their own Left-wing party and
their-Right-wing party. Leftists even became prime ministers,
depending on the circumstances.
This division between Right and Left is very self-serving
indeed. Just the other day, Joseph P. Kennedy, not the grandfather
but the grandson who doesn't have the stain of gangsterism, issued
a statement that now he has come to know that the American army was
training the military from South America to torture, kill, and do
various other terrible things. His own uncle, JFK, had actually
trained the forces in Guatemala to send to Cuba for the Bay of Pigs
invasion. Under John F. Kennedy there were far more terrible crimes
committed in a short period of time than during any previous
presidency. Are people to believe that the grandson Joseph P.
Kennedy did not know what his uncle had done? But most Americans
are under the illusion that J. F. Kennedy was left-wing, as well as
his brother the former Attorney-General, Robert Kennedy.
The point is that this right-left division is clearly created
to fool the people. At the same time the issue of sectarianism goes
a lot deeper because those who are not serious politically have a
tendency to just pick up some "new" ideas and then differentiate
themselves from everybody else on the basis of their excitement
over them. They split over ideology. This is sectarianism.
The capitalist class, because of its property interests,
splits the society on an ideological basis. In America, everybody is
convinced that here is a society where there are three ideologies:
conservatism, liberalism, and social-democracy. Even if one accepts
that there are certain ideological differences amongst the three,
in political terms there are none -all three dutifully support
capitalism. They all follow the same anti-social policy and they are all
ardent defenders of the capitalist system. The left-right division in
is merely a diversion to fool the people and split the polity.
All over the world there are leftist governments these days.
No capitalist, big or small, has complained of the leftist
government in Italy. The workers' situation is no better than it
was before the leftists took power there. The government in India,
they say, is leftist; there are even communists in the cabinet. A
communist by the name of Gupta is the Home Minister. Just recently
in Bihar, 22 women and children were brutally tortured and
massacred by henchmen of the landlords. The central government has
declared that they are experiencing difficulty in finding the
murderers. The point is that this creation called the Left, just
because they put this appellation on their lapel, means nothing. It
does not make them better or automatically different from anybody
else.
This left-right illusion is a curse of modern times, and
people should try to overcome this affliction. Politically, where
a person stands on the practical politics, the side a person takes
on important issues, that is what makes the difference, not
ideology. Ideas are relative; real knowledge is relative. Ideas
have to be fought over, fought anew all the time. One cannot say
that this is the final word, that this is the end of ideas, because
as new discoveries occur, for example, the discoveries of the last
few years in cosmology and astrophysics, it revolutionizes the
particular body of knowledge. This occurs in all the sciences from
time to time.
If people do not unite politically, if politically they do not
determine their own affairs, it is not possible for them to make
any headway.
Shawgi Tell
University at Buffalo
Graduate School of Education
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
