Against concentrated oligarchy, left splintering functionally amounts to surrender

Evidence

This kind of universalism is hard. There are so many perfectly good reasons for people on the broadly defined left to be fed up, angry, and disappointed with one another, and to latch onto those disappointments to rationalize splintering into smaller and smaller groups. But when power and wealth and weaponry and information technology are concentrated in so few hands, and those hands are willing to deploy them for the most venal and reckless of ends, splintering is tantamount to surrender. Up against oligarchy, all we have is the power latent in our capacity to unite. Race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and nationality shape our distinct needs, experiences, and historical debts. We must hold on to those realities and build on a shared interest in challenging concentrated power and wealth, while constructing new structures that are infinitely more fair, and more fun. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1084

Categorization

• APHORISMS: ‘Up against oligarchy, all we have is the power latent in our capacity to unite’ reads as a genuinely repeatable piece of political wisdom.
• DEEPTHINKING: The tension between honoring distinct identity realities and unifying against concentrated power — ‘splintering is tantamount to surrender’ — is a dense, unresolved argument worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: The left’s defeat may have been a slow disintegration rather than a battle — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 276