(By Joshua Babcock)
In this roundtable, four scholars—Taras Fedirko, Jessica Greenberg, Sarah Muir, and Yukun Zeng—explored the divergent meanings and historical transformations in the categories of “left” and “right” across global contexts. Panelists did not approach “left” and “right” as a unitary, universal opposition that can be used to categorize all political phenomena, past and present. Instead, they explored how these categories act as a shortcut for accomplishing political ends—even in situations where the binary isn’t regularly or consistently invoked.
Overall, the panelists considered how binary logics work to simplify a range of voices, interests, and projects. They connected these considerations to questions of pedagogy, organizing, and the imperative of developing both nonbinary analytics and political metalanguage. The panelists didn’t try to conclusively answer what “left/right” does or should mean, nor did they try to explain why self-styled “leftist” politics sometimes fall into pro-violence positions, as in the recurrent case of the “tankie” (or, if not pro-violence, then at least positions that accept it uncritically). Rather, they considered the grounds against which individuals and groups use “left/right” to self-position their voices, interests, and projects to make themselves (il)legible to others.
Yukun Zeng began with the recent shutdown of the museum for one of the most famous labor NGOs in China, Workers’ Home (工友之家, Gongyou Zhijia). The museum had long served as an icon for the “New Workers” social movement. After hundreds of millions of rural people migrated to work in cities in the wake of the 1980’s opening policy, these new workers labored in private sector jobs under precarious labor conditions (without contracts or insurance for work injuries, recurrent wage arrears, etc.). This coincided with neoliberalization, which, since the 1990s, had caused large-scale layoffs of “old workers” and forced them to also find jobs as precarious as those of new workers. New workers’ civil rights have been a tricky arena for individuals across China’s New Left–Liberal political spectrum.
Zeng’s presentation featured two videos. The first was a performance at the Workers’ Home of a song that critiqued labor exploitation. The second was an animated version of the webcomic, Year Hare Affair (那年那兔那些事), that used cartoon animals to satirically comment on global, nation-state geopolitics. In both, Zeng drew attention to the effervescent mood and affect that was palpable not only in the live performance but also in the commentary that praised the “tankie” sentiments behind Year Hare Affair.
Taras Fedirko began not with critiques of NATO and U.S. global hegemony, but with a photo of members of the Russian Volunteer Corps, a pro-Ukrainian militia composed of Russian citizens and led by a far-right militant. Armed with U.S. and other allies’ light weapons and vehicles, the group staged a raid into the Belgorod region of Russia in May 2023. Rather than focusing on formal, institutional politics, Fedirko emphasized the ways that “left/right” binaries connect to and diverge from “enemy/ally” binaries in everyday conversations and media reports on the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Jessica Greenberg presented a video of the Bosnian band Dubioza Kolektiv, who performed their song, “U.S.A.,” at the World Democracy Forum in 2021. While the group and song were deeply critical of nationalism, they were taken up during the Forum as examples of a desire for Balkan nationhood—a concept of nationhood imagined along neoliberal, ethno-nationalist state lines. Among other things, Greenberg reflected on the role of music as a vehicle for protest but also considered how the medium afforded the message’s slippage into a nationalist framework.
Finally, Sarah Muir offered Argentinian politics as a limit case. In Argentina, “left/right” aren’t routinely used. Instead, binaries of “Peronist/anti-Peronist” are far more common, a set of terms that point to a political ideology developed in the early 20th century as a “third way” that sought to reject both communism and capitalism (named after Argentinian politician Juan Perón). However, this doesn’t mean that “left/right” never show up. Instead, “left/right” are often talked about in terms of their absence, used to justify the exceptionalism of Argentinian politics. Or, when the terms are used, they are often used to signal a contrast between “ideological” and “non-ideological.” In this way, a person can claim that someone else is “left/right” while self-positioning not as the opposite term, but as “non-ideological” altogether.
During the full-group conversation and Q&A, audience members asked about the ways that “left/right” do or don’t map onto binaries of “East/West,” and also inquired after the status of “center” or similar categories that attempt (often unsuccessfully) at escaping from binary logics and/or ideology.
As the panelists concluded their discussion, Greenberg paraphrased a quote by the urban planning and policy scholar, Robert W. Lake. In response to an audience question at the end of a talk—“Is there light at the end of the tunnel?”—Lake answered: “There is no light at the end of the tunnel. The tunnel is politics.” Far from a pessimistic or nihilistic position, the panelists argued that this highlights the importance of engaging with the things that concretely matter to people without relying on terminological shortcuts, either “left/right” or any of the various “issues” that get used to label and collapse diverse phenomena into apparently singular forms.
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May 26, 11 am CST
Roundtable: Afterlives of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, Beyond Tankie
About the roundtable: What do “left” and “right” mean today? As words, how are “left” and “right” used, and toward what political ends? How can we think about politics beyond the left–right binary? And just what (or who) is a “tankie”? In this roundtable, our experts share examples of how the left–right paradigm has appeared during their research, and how it organizes politics in different contexts around the world.
Flash Presentations + Presenter Bios:
Taras Fedirko
If U.S. imperialism is the answer, what is the problem? Many left-wing groups in NATO have focused on NATO expansion as the cause of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. By formulating the basis for their political response in this way, they have presented their domestic political enemy as the universal adversary for the left. I will discuss what the “cultural imperialism” of the left reveals about the political legacy of U.S. global hegemony precisely at the moment when this hegemony is declining.
Taras Fedirko is a political and economic anthropologist researching war, oligarchy, and media in Ukraine. He is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the University of Glasgow.
Jessica Greenberg
How does the meaning of left and right change when political expression circulates outside the social context it is intended to critique? I analyze the Bosnian band Dubioza Kolektiv’s performance at the World Forum for Democracy at the Council of Europe (France). The band’s leftist critique relies on irony and parodic critiques of nationalism. Yet in the Council context they are also read as an example of Balkan cultural difference. Analyzing how left or right politics circulates in this case reveals what institutions and actors have the power to define what ‘real’ democracy looks like.
Jessica Greenberg is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois. She writes about student activism in the Balkans, human rights advocacy in Europe and the relationship between democracy and law.
Sarah Muir
In Argentina, “left” and “right” do not play a significant role in organizing politics. However, they are not simply absent. Where they do appear is in reflexive analyses of politics, in which people ponder their absence in political practice. This presentation explores the paradoxically absent presence of “left” and “right” in Argentine political life.
Sarah Muir is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Gender Studies, and International Studies at The City College of New York and Assistant Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research draws on the traditions of linguistic, political-economic, and historical anthropology to investigate practices of economic investment and ethical evaluation in contemporary Argentina. Her first book, Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion (University of Chicago Press, 2021), traces the lived consequences of Argentina's history of repeated financial crisis. Her current project, Accounting for Kith and Kin: Financial Ethics and the Space-Time of Obligation, investigates the semiotics of numbers in the politics of obligation, belonging, and accountability.
Yukun Zeng
Originally used to describe Communist Party of Great Britain members who defended Stalin’s use of tanks to repress uprisings in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), “tankie” continues to recur whenever “global” leftists defend “leftist” states’ repressions of their own people, from ethnic minorities, Hong Kong, and social movements in China to the Russia-Ukraine War and debates over leftist legacies and policy in Venezuela. This presentation will consider the urgency of developing a new political (meta)language to change not just how we talk or do politics, but also how we talk about how we talk and do politics today.
Yukun Zeng recently completed a PhD at the University of Chicago. His dissertation project, Canonical Reading, Alternative Education, and the Social Movement of Eternal Wisdom in Contemporary Chinese Societies, interrogates the contemporary grassroots Confucianism in contemporary Chinese societies by probing the intersection of language, knowledge, gender, and social movement. He also co-runs the public anthropology platform Tying Knots 结绳志.
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