Has the left become socially conservative regarding sex and relationships? I think in fact, as in so many areas, it has come to believe in everything and nothing at all. Let me explain by reference to Nikolai Bukharin 1/ https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/age-gap-grooming-pedophilia-debate

Part of the condition of the post-traditional left is wild, utterly incoherent leaps from extreme to extreme. So in the space of some weeks, sex is dirty, threatening and oppressive... 2/

Then a culture event takes place: perhaps a pop song using ideas of 'sexual liberation' to generate sales (such as #WAP ) and all of a sudden 'sex positivity' is all the rage. One cannot be 'sex positive' enough, until... 3/

Just as suddenly, after some celebrity outrage, sex is once again venal, horrid, terrifying etc. This partly works with the rhythms of popular culture and the news cycle, to which many millions are now addicted. But it is made possible by a deeper philosophical poverty 4/

Since it is post-traditional, there is no anchorage. Yesterday's radical feminists are today's post-modernists and back again, one time materialists abandon their philosophical basis before readopting it months, weeks, days, hours or minutes later 5/

This is why the left is so faddy. Positions become extreme obsessions, violently guarded, and around which hysteria is sometimes mobilised. Then it is quickly forgotten and replaced by a new fad. Almost all of these obsessional themes are extreme minority pursuits 6/

People often associate the profound tribalism with which new positions are adopted with social media, and there's a truth in that. But most of the modern left has no solid point of reference. There is no centre. 7/

The consequence is not listless moderation, it is an endless sequence of 'ultra' positions. Without central gravity, we swing into the outer-expression of phenomena, into permanent, fog-horn blasts of primary colour. Which leads me to Bukharin 8/

Bukharin is more often remembered today for 'market socialism' - for his defence of economic liberalisation in the 1920s USSR, as a 'Right Bolshevik'. He shouldn't be - he was an ultra in every direction, at every fresh twist in the development of the revolution 9/

Before he was Mr New Economic Policy (a path he took to extremes beyond sense) he was Mr 'War Communism'. During the Russian civil war, he became deranged by the spectacle of emergency property requisitioning. 10/

The desperate seizures of goods and produce, necessitated by conditions of civil war, economic collapse and famine were re-imagined by Bukharin and co-thinkers as the dawn of a beautiful new stateless, classless age, rather than what they were: a tragic symptom of class war 11/

He continued to leap from ultra-stance to ultra-stance until his final showtrial and execution. Here's one decent resource on his course: 12/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tragedy-Bukharin-Donny-Gluckstein/dp/0745307736

Lenin concluded that Bukharin's undoubtedly brilliant mind performed in this way because he didn't understand Hegel (klaxon) or dialectics (klaxon). He didn't see the contradictions within, and driving, War Communism or the NEP 13/

So he was chronically unbalanced, swinging euphorically from impeccable virtue to glorious outcome, missing all nuance. I'd say he was the thinker for the post-traditional left today, but that might be unfair to him 14/

He was after all waging a revolution. Moods of euphoria and hallucinations of paradise are par for the course. The tides today are darker and less meaningful, pulling us from paranoia to hopeless reveling with even less anchorage 15/15