The 21st century "left"

 A little thought experiment-y thing occured to me as I walked to Le Progres, my little neighborhood cafe. If Churches were abolished, I thought, if there were no churches, neither Catholic nor Protestant, would there be Christians?

I think there would be. In my counterfactual, the wiping out of churches would occur after they had existed, and after Christianity had spread.

But the Christian who still existed would have apol dilemma, in that their identity would be only quasi-institutional. It would be an identity of belief without a corresponding instutional object in which to perform that belief.

This, I think, is how I think of the "Left". The fall of communism, everywhere, has left the Left with a belief system but no institutional object in which to perform its identity.

As a lefty myself, I often run up against the fact that my political performance is within an almost comically distorted image of the left, which is the moderate left parties. And those parties, everywhere in the world, are not only divorced from any organized global labor movement - the international - they are one and all opposed to such a thing. The thing that, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, defined the "Left".