The Left revives the very institutions the system is liquidating.

Evidence

A strike has exactly the opposite effect. It regenerates the ideal of a possible university: the fiction of an ascension on everyone’s part to a culture that is unlocatable, and that no longer has meaning. This ideal is substituted for the operation of the university as its critical alternative, as its therapy. This fiction still dreams of a permanency and democracy of knowledge. Besides, everywhere today the Left plays this role: it is the justice of the Left that reinjects an idea of justice, the necessity of logic and social morals into a rotten apparatus that is coming undone, which is losing all conscience of its legitimacy and renounces functioning almost of its own volition. It is the Left that secrets and desperately reproduces power, because it wants power, and therefore the Left believes in it and revives it precisely where the system puts an end to it. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 492

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Jameson’s reading of the postmodern — but here Baudrillard inverts Marxist hopes: the Left now works to conserve the very capital it once sought to overthrow. — connects to: Reform-minded dissent within a system strengthens rather than threatens it
• SEED: Angle: ‘the conservation left’ — a piece on how today’s institutional defenders believe in and revive systems the system itself is abandoning.
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradigm-shifting inversion: political opposition becomes the therapy/revival of the very apparatus it opposes, because the system is liquidating everything on its own.

Broader Connections

• Reform-minded dissent within a system strengthens rather than threatens it #corroborates (0.72)