Abridged Historic Left

 I am merely aiming to be approximately right so as to avoid being precisely wrong in these descriptions. Historically, to be on the left was to be pro-reform in some way, but I don't want to pigeonhole the left-wing into being only concerned with reform and absolve it of responsibility for revolutions, revolutions are excessively left.

Furthermore historically, the whole left vs. right wing comes from French Parliament in the lead up to the French Revolution - at the birth of these semantics, the left were supporters of revolution.

So, there are a number of historic and respectable, even admirable behaviours that could be described as left. 

I like a definition of left as "someone who is critical of the institution to which they belong." 

More fundamentally, what I notice is that the universe is dynamic. To be left is to recognize that something needs to change. That something being a something that is in the purview of our control, in response to the readily observable fact that things are changing. A response is necessary, what works today won't work forever, and if anything we will probably lag behind the threshold where change is advantageous but hopefully not behind the threshold at which change was necessary.

If that is all a bit abstract, consider the Edo period of Japanese history. The Tokugawa Shogunate did it's best in so far as possible, to hermetically seal Japan off from the rest of the world. It limited foreign access to the port of Nagasaki, and it was mostly Portuguese. Certainly, you can go to museums today and see Ieyasu Tokugawa's reading glasses on display such that it was not the case that Japan was so sealed off that it was completely unaware of foreign innovation. That much as they tried to create a kind of homeostasis within the territories they commanded, beyond their boundaries the world continued to change. 

The Tokugawa Shogunate ruled Japan with an unbroken line for about 200 years, the Japanese renaissance. It produced an enormous cultural dividend for the world because this is where distinct Japanese arts including music and theatre, and philosophy including martial and tea ceremony, all flourished. Then the gunships came and the US' Commodore Perry forced Japan to reopen, bringing about the Meiji restoration and eventually the Pacific War and Tom Cruise's "The Last Samurai."

But even cultural homeostasis requires some kind of leftist presence - which is why historically I view left-right distinctions as useful in a way that they aren't now, because there's a symbiosis between two vital components. Somewhere I have photos from my last visit to Japan where we visited the foundries which foresaw Japan's vulnerability to western gunships, by a samurai (Egawa Hidetatsu) who suggested for Japan to maintain it's closed-off status it would have to change by building sea forts with sufficient fire power to keep foreign navies out. 

Everything about keeping Japan closed to the world might strike anybody as inherently conservative, but keep in mind "left" and "right" are relative terms, for the Bakafu government merely adopting western military technology like cannons was progressive. 

In the same way, without getting to subject of the next post "the regressive left" someone can be the left-wing at a dinner party of left-wingers. You might think "of course, the far left." and maybe, but maybe not, the left-wing person relative to a left-wing dinner table is whoever is making the case that the left itself needs to change. In the 70s-80s for example, this would be the person that recognizes that Capital will go on strike if Labour Unions and full employment remains too strong. (Which is basically what happened in the 70s and ushered in neoliberalism in the 80s.)

Such to say, someone fulfilling the historical role (as per my opinion, remember that and merely weigh its quality) would sit at a dinner party as their friends sip champagne and replace the cigarettes in their cigarette holders uttering things like "workers control the means of production" and "we must throw off the shackles of worker exploitation for united we are strong!" the left-wing person at that left wing party might offer the criticism "you do not go far enough! we must embark on a journey to program ourselves as one might program the loom to weave an altogether different kind of man the New Soviet Man!" this would be technically left wing, it would just be stupid, kind of like suggesting the antidote to excesses is merely the matter of ingesting more of the poison. Alternately the left-wing person at the party might remark "but there is an extent that the exploitation of labour can become quite ordinary. We trade labour against risk - we gain our wages, capital must gain their profits. We trade our time and energy for risk, which the employer assumes. Should their business fail, they still pay our wages on the road to bankruptcy. There needs to be a mutual accounting."

This illustration sets up serendipitously, an illustration of how a healthy functional left could appear to manifest. Because both these dissenting voices could be present at the same party, nested within the left-wing of society as a whole, as two left-wing left-wingers relative to the right-wing left-wingers - those who just want to keep running the same left-wing program of reform as ever.

There are more ways to conceive reform than there are to defend the status quo. We should expect the left to take the form of diverse coalitions in vigorous disagreement about the best course of action.

In a well functioning society, the left would always be present, always have influence but only be given responsibility infrequently - in times of catastrophic breakdowns, or long-coming stagnation. 

The left ideally achieves a kind of symbiosis with the right. This is underpinned by the important concept that is under threat presently from a pincer attack by the regressive right and left - The Consent of the Loser.

In an ideal, rather than look like an existential threat to the right, the left should appear more like a menu. Take an issue like climate change.

Ideally, the left would be a coalition of people who broadly agree that anthropic climate change is an issue, and the left's first task is to convince the public at large, by largely convincing the right that climate change is an issue.

Taking our first diversion from the ideal, an ideal left has to coexist with an ideal right, no ideal right can assert without evidence or argumentation that it is never the case that anything need change. We may be living in a world where whatever we call the right, is disrespectfully simply adamant that climate change can't necessitate any reaction, which is something a losing left, cannot be expected to consent to, which will I suppose have the natural effect of denigrating the constructive parts of the left and elevating extremists like "Just Stop Oil" in the UK who are committed to making nuisances of themselves publicly.

But we may have in this coalition of the left, people who recommend an effectively priced cap and tax emissions scheme targeting the heaviest emitting industries of greenhouse gases coaligned with a group who wish to outlaw all animal-based diets, even pet ownership.

From this coalition, an ideal right would work to elevate those in the left coalition who have the least intrusive solutions to offer while diminishing the more extreme on the left with the most costly proposals.

That just about completes my take on a historic left. In summation, a historically utilitarian role of the left, is to challenge the status quo in a spirit of open collaboration. Including it's own status quo. Because fundamentally the universe is dynamic. Tomorrow will resemble today, but it most importantly is not just today again, there will subsequently, be things that need doing. Which is why I am for a left, that functions without polarizing.

In my own history, my sympathies lean leftwards, but the left is somewhat culpable for it's own contributions via it's own behaviour for the dysfunctional world we now live in.