This was a very interesting and highly critical diagnosis of the left by the left. It was quite a refreshing read and really had me thinking about its content. I thought about providing commentary on some these, but I'll let it stand on its own. It's possible I could later add it in, but I doubt that I will.
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Failure permeates this cycle of struggles, and as a result, many of the tactics on the contemporary left have taken on a ritualistic nature, laden with a heavy dose of fatalism. The dominant tactics – protesting, marching, occupying, and various other forms of direct action – have become part of a well-established narrative, with the people and the police each playing their assigned roles.

all give the appearance of being highly significant, as if something were genuinely at stake. Yet nothing changed, and long-term victories were traded for a simple registration of discontent.

a broad range of student occupations across the Western world has taken up the mantra of ‘no demands’ under the misguided belief that demanding nothing is a radical act.

contemporary folk politics typically remains reactive...ignores long-term strategic goals in favour of tactics...prefers practices that are often inherently fleeting (such as occupations and temporary autonomous zones)...chooses the familiarities of the past over the unknowns of the future...and expresses itself as a predilection for the voluntarist and spontaneous over the institutional (as in the romanticisation of rioting and insurrection)..privileges the local as the site of authenticity...habitually chooses the small over the large...favours projects that are un-scalable beyond a small community...and often rejects the project of hegemony, valuing withdrawal or exit rather than building a broad counter-hegemony.

led towards the identification of political power as inherently tainted by oppressive, patriarchal and domineering tendencies

direct democracy inexorably imposes significant constraints...the level of effort and involvement...leads to problems of sustainability.

the problem of democracy today is not that people want a say over every single aspect of their lives. The real issue of democratic deficit is that the most significant decisions of society are out of the hands of the average person.

Ethical-consumerist campaigns like this offer a semblance of effective action – they provide a meaningful narrative about the problems of the system and indicate the simple and pain-free action necessary to resolve it

folk politics therefore expresses a ‘deep pessimism: it assumes we can’t make large-scale, collective social change’. This defeatist attitude runs amok on the left – and perhaps with good reason, considering the continued failures of the past thirty years.

For centre-left political parties, nostalgia for a lost past is the best that can be hoped for.

resistance has come to be glorified, obscuring the conservative nature of such a stance behind a veil of radical rhetoric. Resistance is seen to be all that is possible, while constructive projects are nothing but a dream.

At the extreme, some argue for what amounts to a left-wing survivalism: civilisation is in catastrophe, and we should therefore become invisible, retreat to small communes, and learn how to grow food, hunt, heal and defend ourselves.

our era is dominated by one hegemonic ideology...neoliberalism.

it was a political project from the beginning, and a massively successful one in the end. It succeeded by skilfully constructing an ideology and the infrastructure to support it, and by operating in a non–folk-political manner.

discussions of the left in terms of the future now seem aberrant, even absurd...From the radical left’s discomfort with technological modernity to the social democratic left’s inability to envision an alternative world, everywhere today the future has largely been ceded to the right. A skill that the left once excelled at – building enticing visions for a better world – has deteriorated after years of neglect.

The complex and often disastrous record of the twentieth century demonstrated conclusively that history could not be relied upon to follow any predetermined course. Regression was as likely as progress, genocide as possible as democratisation...even those limited but not insignificant political gains that have been achieved – such as welfare provision, women’s rights and worker protections – can be rolled back.

The anti-intellectualism that permeates the political right, and increasingly infects the critical left, is therefore a retrogression of the worst kind.

Cyborg augmentations, artificial life, synthetic biology and technologically mediated reproduction

Emancipation, under this vision, would therefore mean increasing the capacity of humanity to act according to whatever its desires might become..it is in this sense that universal emancipation lies at the heart of a modern left.

By ‘work’, we mean our jobs – or wage labour: the time and effort we sell to someone else in return for an income.

estimates suggesting that anything from 47 to 80 per cent of current jobs are likely to be automatable in the next two decades

today’s jobs typically involve more casual working hours, low and stagnant wages, decreasing job protections and widespread insecurity

In the United States, for example, a full 34 per cent of fulltime workers live paycheque-to-paycheque, while in the UK, 35 per cent of people could not live off their savings for more than a month.

the emergence of ‘jobless recoveries’, in which economic growth returns after a crisis but job growth remains anaemic. Such recoveries have become standard for the US economy...forecasts suggesting that US unemployment will remain above pre-crisis levels until 2024.

As one UN report puts it, ‘the cities have become a dumping ground for a surplus population working in unskilled, unprotected and low-wage informal service industries and trade.'

efforts to reduce higher education to glorified job training.

Thatcher’s chief economic advisor eventually admitted that the war against inflation was in fact a proxy war against the working class.

new industries currently only employ 0.5 per cent of the American workforce...the average new business creates 40 per cent fewer jobs than it did twenty years ago.

the welfare state is becoming little more than an institution designed to deploy the surplus against the working class.

the state can always resort to simply locking up, excluding and brutalising large sections of the surplus population...Mass incarceration is a system of social control aimed primarily at surplus populations rather than at crime.

mass incarceration over the past few decades was not a response to rising crime rates, but rather to the proliferation of jobless ghettos and the advances made by the civil rights movement. The racialised nature of this system is well known, but the patterns of incarceration cannot be fully understood without reference to class and surplus populations. For instance, middle-class and upper-class black populations are largely left alone

With a post-work society, we would have even more potential to launch forward to greater goals. But this is a project that must be carried out over the long term: decades rather than years...Given the reality of the weakened left today, there is only one way forward: to patiently rebuild its power

Our first demand is for a fully automated economy

The two-day weekend, for example, emerged spontaneously from workers’ predilection for drinking and spending an extra day recovering

unpaid work is proliferating – an entire sphere of ‘shadow work’ is emerging with automation at the point of sale, with work being delegated to users

an essential demand in a post-work society is for a universal basic income (UBI), giving every citizen a liveable amount of money without any means-testing.

[UBI] is just as open to being mobilised for a libertarian dystopia

the nature of work would become a measure of its value, not merely its profitability

higher divorce rates are easily explained as women gaining the financial means to leave dysfunctional relationships.

One of the most difficult problems in implementing a UBI and building a post-work society will be overcoming the pervasive pressure to submit to the work ethic.

The working poor ended up rejecting the plan out of a fear of being stigmatised as a welfare recipient. Racial biases reinforced this resistance, since welfare was seen as a black issue, and whites were loath to be associated with it.

Our lives have become increasingly structured around competitive self-realisation, and work has become the primary avenue for achieving this. Work, no matter how degrading or low-paid or inconvenient, is deemed an ultimate good.

Work has become central to our very self-conception – so much so that when presented with the idea of doing less work, many people ask, ‘But what would I do?’ The fact that so many people find it impossible to imagine a meaningful life outside of work demonstrates the extent to which the work ethic has infected our minds.

suffering is thought to be not only meaningful, but in fact the very condition of meaning. A life without suffering is seen as frivolous and meaningless...Work, and the suffering that accompanies it, should not be glorified.

Proponents of the Bolshevik Revolution model appear more useful as historical re-enactors than as guides for contemporary politics. Likewise, the recent history of revolutions – from the Iranian Revolution to the Arab Spring – has simply led to some combination of theocratic authoritarianism, military dictatorship and civil war. The electoral reformist approach is equally a failure.

hegemony enables a group to lead and rule over a society primarily through consent...rather than coercion

it matters little whether right-wing governments hold power – a reality that the US Republican Party has consistently exploited over the last two decades, often to the surprise of those on the liberal left.

The future has been cancelled. We are more prone to believing that ecological collapse is imminent, increased militarisation inevitable, and rising inequality unstoppable. Contemporary science fiction is dominated by a dystopian mindset, more intent on charting the decline of the world than the possibilities for a better one.

utopian ideas have been central to every major moment of liberation – from early liberalism, to socialisms of all stripes, to feminism and anti-colonial nationalism. Cosmism, afro-futurism, dreams of immortality, and space exploration – all of these signal a universal impulse towards utopian thinking.

Recent US science fiction, for instance, has often been written in response to contemporary issues of race, gender and class, while early Russian utopias imagined worlds that overcame the problems posed by rapid urbanisation and conflicting ethnicities. These worlds not only model solutions, but illuminate problems.

non-state cryptocurrencies

the left has typically focused on creating media spaces outside the mainstream, rather than trying to co-opt existing institutions and leaking more radical ideas into the mainstream. Too often, these news organisations end up simply preaching to the choir, pushing narratives that never escape their own insular echo-chamber.

Labour organisations have traditionally been significant forces of social transformation...inflexible – if not outright corrupt – union leaderships have made the revitalisation of these organisations an uphill battle. Yet they remain indispensable