Where’s the Left? You Ask (and an Activist Asks for Funding to Study the Marginalised Groups Asking These Questions)

The right wing has returned to the EU, a roundabout realisation of Josep Borrell’s fears that the “idyllic garden” of Europe would be “invaded by the jungle” (which, in his words, meant the rest of the world). In Russia, President Putin believes that things like living wages, social security, and general living standards were distractions for the Soviet Union from its glorious fight against the imperial west, which has collapsed the left’s armed front, and that the Soviet Union cannot retrieve its former glory except through a counter-right-wing, imperialist, Tsarist East. In Communist China, children under the age of six are demanding that Shein’s minimum wages be raised before they’re gone to right-wing factories to work at Apple and Tesla in Shanghai. 

In Asia, countries are under the rule of populist right-wing leaders, theorize comrades like Michael, who has a Tamil Tigers tattoo on his right shoulder and a copy of Soccer in Sun and Shadow perpetually in his right hand. In Argentina, there is a president who desperately wants to become Netanyahu, presaged by a Brazilian president who wanted to become Trump. In our Arab region, the options left could hardly be called left at all. We have standard right-wing governments, occasionally buttressed by leftists who have allied themselves with them, writing about their personal experiences on websites funded by imperialist powers during the day, and affirming their determination to resolve their disputes with the Arab right on LGBTQ+ and women's issues at night.

Therefore, dear reader, you ask: Where’s the left? How’s it doing? As a non-resident researcher with an expired visa in the country I live in, focusing on right-wing concerns, I must answer. However, since a journalist's role is merely to convey information, I directed this question to the leftist activist Badr Abu Muhja, who promised to provide an answer upon his return from an annual retreat in Bali, which he attended at the beginning of spring with his organization, which is concerned with integration and empowerment in view of Elon Musk's restriction of anti-populist discourse on X (formerly Twitter).

The Impact of Marginalization is Invisible...The Impact of Marginalization is Permanent

A month and a half later, Abu Muhja returned from the retreat with a new perspective. He affirmed that the question about the left's current status has a specific social context and historical, environmental, colonial, and class-based roots. The answer therefore depended on the questioner's identity and personal experience, because "the personal is political," as he put it. Consequently, he immediately decided to prepare a proposal for funding a comprehensive study to delineate the systematic effects of marginalisation by successive political and religious authorities on suburban residents—a plan he’ll be presenting to donors at the annual NGO conference in Copenhagen next month.

Beware of Self-Hatred

Abu Muhja warns against examining these questions too deeply without "taking a critical look inward." Recent psychological research suggests searching for the left may stem from a deep, unconscious self-hatred due to the left's disappearance. Thus, Abu Muhja advises questioners to take the 16 Personalities test, delve into Freud's theories on the libido, and seek a therapist to begin a self-healing journey "to silence the right-wing voices whispering about the left's disappearance, so they might find the true left within themselves at the end of the journey."

Different Priorities and More Urgent Issues

Despite marginalization, trauma, self-hatred, and colonial pressures bringing about this whole enterprise in the first place, Abu Muhja sees some validity to it, given the public's inability to understand the priorities of intersectional leftism. Issues of class consciousness, basic rights, property questions, and wealth distribution are inescapable and can be addressed later, after winning the battle against the white man, confronting the European Union for directing its funding to Ukrainian organizations and reducing the region’s share of the budget, training citizen journalists to cover these changes through podcasts, and neutralizing the existential threat of the left-wing Democratic Party, led by comrade Bernie Sanders, by losing to its right-wing faction, which—dear, oh dear oh dear, imagine losing to the Republicans again.