Have I found my leftists?

Recently, Evan suggested to me that I try to actively engage leftist or radical positions in the same way that I engage libertarian and Austrian positions. With the Austrians, I find that I buy a lot of what they have to say - they have interesting insights that have a sense of being "untapped" because they are so out of the mainstream. But they have more than enough analytical, methodological, and philosophical problems that the debate I can have with them is always lively. They're also very active on the internet, which makes the interaction easy.

Evan suggested that I engage radicals in the same way. I'm not entirely opposed to the radical/socialist/leftist outlook. I've found the Trotskyite/New Left position enriching in the same way I've found the Austrians enriching - lot's of good insights but enough differences that I'd never personally align with them. Also, like the Austrians, they are very good at history of thought, which is always intriguing for me. Usually, I turn to Dewey, Hitchens, Orwell, etc. for this stuff. These are guys that don't leave any doubts about their positions on human liberty - which of course makes me more comfortable. Aside from that explicitly anti-totalitarian nexus on the left, though, it's slim pickings. Mattheus von Guttenberg gives an excellent example recently of a Marxist blogger that was so nonsensical he couldn't make heads or tails of the encounter (I would provide a link, but Mattheus and Jonathan's website is temporarily down). In the past I've shared similar concerns about Slavoj Zizek ravings about the end of capitalism. It's just hard. Even the good, sensible Marxists are speaking a whole different language from most of us - but a lot of them aren't even sensible.

Anyway, recently I've posted on the Modern Monetary Theory/post-Keynesian perspective. Whether they're really deficit owls or just deficit super-doves is up for debate. I can't help but get the sense that they're just repeating "solvency isn't a problem! solvency isn't a problem!", while the rest of us Keynesians are calmly saying "we know solvency isn't a problem - we never said it was - we're worried about real growth". If that's all going further down the rabbit hole of post-Keynesianism is going to get me, I'm not sure how fruitful it will be. But maybe they have more to say than that. I may just have to follow their blogs for a while and see. I don't want to just write a bunch of posts on solvency. We shall see. They're not radicals, but I may have found my leftists, Evan.

What do readers think? Would more post-Keynesian material, links, and well honed sniping to draw commenters in be interesting?

I still haven't quite given up on the idea of engaging more of the full-blown Marxists. Does anyone know of intelligible, engageable, interesting radical blogs/communities out there? I think New Left/Frankfurt School type stuff would be best. It would be a real learning experience for me, but I think if a reasonable person wants to engage the left, this is the left to engage.

A young Marx once wrote that philosophers have thus far only interpreted the world, but that the task is to change it. It's hard to argue with that. My problem with many leftists is that they have taken up the banner of change and left the banner of intepretation lying on the ground. That's dangerous - you have to continually re-evaluate your position and your ideas. To me, that's the major liability of the left. We shall see - let me know what you all think.