What Happened to the Left?

Nick Cohen has an excellent piece in the New Statesman this week. It's worth reading in full, but here's how it ends:

Historians may see the similarities between the slave empires of Nazi Germany, communist Russia and Maoist China as more important than the differences, but the differences meant an enormous amount to millions of people at the time. However selective their condemnations and hypocritical their double standards, they knew they were against the far right in its political or clerical guise. (Or, in the case of the Catholic fascisms of France and Spain, its political and its clerical guise.) The solidity of the conviction imposed constraints - however critical the old left was of capitalist democracies, there were alternatives to democracy that it would never tolerate. The constraints also brought honour because they instilled the ideal of fraternity. The victims of far-right regimes were guaranteed support through the international backing from the democratic and the totalitarian left.

Ask an Iraqi communist or Kurdish socialist today what support they have had from the liberal left and they won't detain you for long. Apart from the odd call from the Socialist International, there has been none worthy of the name. One expects the totalitarian left to be stuffed with creeps, but the collapse of the democratic left strikes me as catastrophic. Why couldn't it oppose the second Gulf war while promising to do everything possible to advance the cause of Iraqi democrats and socialists once the war was over? Why the sneering, almost racist pretence that Saddam had no honourable opponents?

The ineluctable answer is, I'm afraid, that there no longer is a left with a coherent message of hope for the human race. The audiences at Michael Moore films don't look at his propaganda images of kite-flying kiddies and pull themselves up short by thinking of what happened to their comrades in Iraq. They have no comrades. They don't support Saddam. They don't support his foes. They have no policy to offer. The noise of their self-righteous anger is merely a cover for an indifference bred by failure.

Marxist-Leninism is as dead as any idea can be - it made the fatal blunder of putting its ideas into practice and died of shame. Fifty years ago, there were revolutionary socialist movements in dozens of countries ready to take power. Today there isn't one, and the world is a better place for that. The nobler traditions of the social-democratic left are also under enormous strain. It seems that Tony Blair or Gordon Brown is about as good as it can get in Britain. Europe has leaders who appear more left-wing on paper, but to date they have failed to pull the Continent away from stagnation.

Unless you believe that the failure of the world's peoples to look leftwards is all the result of brainwashing by the corporate media, you have to conclude that the left is dead. The anger that propelled it is still there, and although it won many battles, some of the oppressions it fought against remain as grievous as ever.

The pity of the aftermath is that while the honourable traditions of the left are forgotten, the worst flourish and mutate into aberrations that would have made our predecessors choke.

Update: Hmm...the article seems now to be only for subscribers...or do they allow you one free access and then insert the subscriber-only page?

Comments

[George Lee]

"Europe has leaders who appear more left-wing on paper, but to date they have failed to pull the Continent away from stagnation."

That is a Hell of a sentence.

Still, the piece is a good one.

[James Hamilton]

Thanks for posting this - it more or less encapsulates what I've been thinking myself about the modern left. However, it's ironic that he cites Crooked Timber, as if it's on his side with this issue. I can only imagine that he didn't discover the site until after the war, and hasn't read it much since, as it's a far better example of what he's saying than John Laughland ever will be.

[Mick H]

James - yes you're absolutely right about Crooked Timber.

[nick]

Ask an Iraqi communist or Kurdish socialist today what support they have had from the liberal left and they won't detain you for long

Ask Ahmad Chalabi what support he had from Nick Cohen (a sad, sad case, who I used to respect) and he'll keep talking for weeks.