Probably "alt left" is taken, by someone quick, given how "alt right" flew off the shelves, making new space, opening possibilities for self branding. I'll avert mine eyes and not go searching for spoilers, and carve the alt left niche as I choose, knowing I'll be ignored by some of my imitators.
Alt Left will include Occupy and Dr. David Graeber, the Yale anthropologist, who died early of Covid. I've got a take on Occupy starting from the Elk Statue (now hidden away) in Portland, Oregon. Occupy Portland (OPDX) disbanded peacefully, although not everyone got the memo (we did, and relayed it).
For the record, OPDX (2011) did not fight with police all that much. We were all part of the 99% per the shoptalk of the day. I tracked the Joker Riots (2020) too, through social media and in these blogs, but didn't wade into them personally (no, not even here in Portlandia), as a caretaker for a 90+ year old in the middle of a pandemic. I got vaxxed and stayed semi-isolated (doable in my line of work), but I wasn't vexed by the unvaxxed, who included scientists.
Like Dr. Bucky Fuller, Graeber is good at scrambling what people take for granted, as when writing his history of debt. Bucky helps us revector "socialism" as what we've been implementing through our prime contractor irrigation system and cost plus defense contracts, base housing, base schooling, hospitals for veterans, cradle to grave. One way to frustrate capitalism in its more cowardly forms is to not buy its ridiculous presuppositions.
Rorty's Achieving Our Country, figuratively circled in the above YouTube, traces leftism to anti-imperialism, non-interventionism. When Jefferson suggested the USA support Napoleon in spreading the French Revolution, Washington and Hamilton pushed back. I'd throw in the reluctance, on the part of many Friends (Quakers) to engage in proselytizing, i.e. arm twisting others to imitate one's ways.
The "alts" have to be interesting to libertarians to survive (do we need to survive?), which I link to "libretarians" i.e. those who believe in (fight for, exercise) the freedom to read anything and everything (libre for books, and for freedom). I reveled in Princeton's open stack libraries (Firestone, Jadwin...).
Going with the freedom to browse comes the freedom to explore, the planet for starters. My declaration of human rights admits that bars or other establishments might ban access to specific customers over time, that relationships should be voluntary (where "serving strangers" is also relationship e.g. "I'll voluntarily treat new people, given my doctor codes" is a kind of business professionalism).
Which brings us to the libre software movement and the leverage that transparency and code sharing brings to the picture. At some point, "reading" became "running" i.e. "to read" meant "to execute", to carry out orders, to tackle tasks. Writing came to include programming, i.e. filing such executable scripts.
The alt left is bold about not championing closed box architectures, even if it has to use some. By "it" I might just mean "me" as I'm using black boxes routinely, but to run open source pretty often.
I'll extend the "energy slave" and "no race, no class" concepts, as revolutionary in the lefty sense, of creating more civil rights for people. The "nature is technology" school recognizes a universe "slaving away" in the sense of orbiting planets, exploding stars, transforming energy, and reckons in those terms.
In contrast, the moral abomination we call "slavery" wherein people are coerced to perform labor against their wills with no powers of negotiation or opting out, may be offset by automation, such that our machines (our energy slaves) do the dreary stuff. That was a big part of the vision: freeing the scholar to return to his [sic] studies.
Keeping those machines running can actually be interesting work, for someone in the mood to pay attention to such things. For example, I get mental benefits from coding, including debugging, even when I'm not being paid.
Left to their own devices, many humans enjoy playing with model trains. Those who get to drive the trains for real should have opportunities for job enjoyment. Job satisfaction among railroad workers is a critical diagnostic. Likewise healthcare workers need ample access to their own "dogfood" including mental health care. Too many ER doctors get the stress without the benefits (just money doesn't cut it).
Religions should be recognized for contributing to professionalism and selflessness in performing necessary jobs with a sense of volunteerism, in celebration of a cosmic order. Religious orders may have widely differing beliefs and practices and yet work in symbiosis. Diversity is desirable.
The ability to collaborate and cooperate are marks of Darwinian superiority (ironically). The individuating individualist need not be a simpleton, singularity or soliton. "Self made" does not imply "hermit" or it might, for a spell. I'm not suggesting leftists have to be extroverts and gregarious. Many a leftist intellectual is more of a hub and server, in the W3 sense, multitasking.
