Being leftist today

After my rant about Fox News yesterday, I thought I might present part of a speech that seeks to define what it means to be a leftist. The following is part of a speech delivered by Cornel West, professor of religion and African American studies at Princeton University. The speech was delivered at the last day of Left Forum in New York City.

What does it really mean to be a leftist in the early part of the 21st century? What are we really talking about? And I can just be very candid with you. It means to have a certain kind of temperament, to make certain kinds of political and ethical choices, and to exercise certain analytical focuses in targeting on the catastrophic and the monstrous, the scandalous, the traumatic, that are often hidden and concealed in the deodorized and manicured discourses of the mainstream. That's what it means to be a leftist. So let's just be clear about it.

So that if you are concerned about structural violence, if you’re concerned about exploitation at the workplace, if you're concerned about institutionalized contempt against gay brothers and lesbian sisters, if you're concerned about organized hatred against peoples of color, if you're concerned about a subordination of women, that's not cheap PC chitchat; that is a calling that you're willing to fight against and try to understand the sources of that social misery at the structural and institutional level and at the existential and the personal level. That's what it means, in part, to be a leftist.

The speech was included in the Democracy Now! podcast of March 13 (near the end). You can read the complete transcript or download the podcast here.

Personally, I don’t make a very good leftist, since I’m an avowed capitalist. In American terms, I’m a liberal, centre-left in New Zealand terms. I don’t agree with real leftists on everything, but certainly more than I agree with neocons. But that’s a subject for another day.

In the meantime, this is part of my ongoing attempt to understand what it means to be centre-left today.