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Title: The Left That Was Author: Murray Bookchin Date: 22 May 1991 Language: en Topics: the left, social ecology Source: http://social-ecology.org/wp/1991/04/the-left-that-was-a-personal-reflection/
I would like to recall a Left That Was–an idealistic, often
theoretically coherent Left that militantly emphasized its
internationalism, its rationality in its treatment of reality, its
democratic spirit, and its vigorous revolutionary aspirations. From a
retrospective viewpoint of a hundred years or so, it is easy to find
many failings in the Left That Was: I have spent much of my own life
criticizing the Left’s failings (as I saw them) and many of its
premises, such as its emphasis on the historical primacy of economic
factors (although this fault can be overstated by ignoring its social
idealism), its fixation on the proletariat as a “hegemonic” class, and
its failure to understand the problems raised by status hierarchy and
domination.
But the Left That Was–the Left of the nineteenth and early twentieth
century–did not have our devastating experiences with Bolshevism and
particularly Stalinism to correct its weaknesses. It developed in a time
of a rising mass movement of working people–a proletariat, in
particular–that had not gained anything from the democratic revolutions
of the past (as had the peasantry). The Left That Was, nonetheless, had
features that should be regarded as imperishable for any movement that
seeks to create a better world–a rich generosity of spirit, a commitment
to a humane world, a rare degree of political independence, a vibrant
revolutionary spirit, and an unwavering opposition to capitalism. These
attributes were characteristics of the Left That Was, by which I mean
not the Leninist “Old Left” or the Maoist “New Left” that followed, but
traditional ideas underlying the Left as such. They defined the Left and
distinguished it from liberalism, progressivism, reformism, and the
like.
My concern, here, is that these attributes are fading rapidly from the
present-day Left. The Left today has withdrawn into a strident form of
nationalism and statism, presumably in the interests of “national
liberation”; an inchoate nihilism, presumably under the aegis of
postmodernism; and an ethnic parochialism, presumably in the name of
fighting racial discrimination. New versions of nationalism, a lack of
concern for democracy, and a fragmenting sectorialism and parochialism
abound. Dogmatism and moral intimidation have turned this sectorialism
and parochialism into a whiplash, one that silences all analyses that go
beyond mere bumper-sticker slogans.
Too many careers and reputations are being made by many “leaders” in the
present-day Left through shrill voices rather than clear insights. Their
sloganeering has no content, and their verbiage offers little
understanding of the fact that we are all ultimately one community of
human beings, and that we can transcend the mere conditioned reflexes
that undermine our commitment to mutual recognition and care for each
other as well as the planet. I am not speaking of a New Age “oneness”
that ignores basic class, status, and ethnic divisions in present-day
society, divisions that must be resolved by radical social change. I am
discussing the failure of today’s Left to establish any affinity with a
humane Left That Was, one that celebrated our potential for creating a
shared humanity and civilization.
I realize only too well that these remarks will be viewed by many
contemporary leftists as unsatisfactory. But in the Left That Was, the
working class was at least seen (however erroneously) as the “non-class
class”–that is, as a particular class that was obliged by inherent
tendencies in capitalism to express the universal interests of humanity
as well as its potentiality to create a rational society. This notion at
least assumed that there were universal human interests that could be
substantiated and realized under socialism, communism, or anarchism.
Today’s Left is “deconstructing” this appeal to universality to a point
where it denies its validity and opposes reason itself on the basis that
it is purely analytical and “unfeeling.” What has been carried over to
our time from the sixties is a basically uncritical assortment of narrow
interests–and, one is obliged to add, alluring university careers–that
have reduced universalistic to particularistic concerns. The great ideal
of an emancipated humanity–hopefully one in harmony with nonhuman
nature–has been steadily eroded by particularistic claims to hegemonic
roles for gender-biased, ethnic-biased, and other like tendencies.
These tendencies threaten to turn the Left back to a more parochial,
exclusionary, and ironically, more hierarchical past insofar as one
group, whether alone or in concert with others, affirms its superior
qualifications to lead society and guide movements for social change.
What many Leftists today are destroying is a great tradition of human
solidarity and a belief in the potentiality for humanness, one that
transcends nationality, ethnicity, gender differences, and a politics of
hegemonic superiority.
I cannot hope to deal here with all the details of the social idealism,
humanism, and drive for theoretical coherence that made the Left That
Was so different from the pap leftism that exists today. Instead, I
should like to focus on the internationalist and confederalist
tendencies, the democratic spirit, the antimilitarism, and the rational
secularism that distinguished it from other political and social
movements of our period.
The nationalism that permeates much of the Left of the eighties and
nineties (often in the name of “national liberation”) was largely alien
to the far-seeing Leftists of the last century and the early part of the
present one. In using the word Left, I am drawing from the language of
the French Revolution of 1789–94 so that I can include various types of
anarchist as well as socialist thought. The Left That Was not only
established its pedigree in the French Revolution but defined itself in
opposition to that revolution’s shortcomings, such as the Jacobin
message of “patriotism” (although even this “nationalistic” notion had
its roots in the belief that France belonged to its people rather than
to the King of France–who was obliged to change his title to the King of
the French after 1789 as a result).
Repelled by the references of the French revolutionaries to la patrie,
the Left That Was generally came to regard nationalism as a regressive,
indeed, as a divisive force that separated human from human by creating
national boundaries. The Left That Was saw all national boundaries as
the barbed wire that compartmentalized human beings by dividing them
according to particularistic loyalties and commitments that obscured the
domination of all oppressed people by ruling strata.
To Marx and Engels, the subjugated of the world had no country. They had
only their international solidarity to sustain them, their unity as a
class that was historically destined to remove class society as such.
Hence the ringing conclusion of The Communist Manifesto: “Working Men of
All Countries, Unite!” And in the body of that work (which the anarchist
Mikhail Bakunin translated into Russian), we are told: “In the national
struggles of the proletarians of different countries, [Communists] point
out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire
proletariat, independently of all nationality.”
Further, the Manifesto declares, “The working men have no country. We
cannot take away from them what they have not got.” To the extent that
Marx and Engels did give their support to some national liberation
struggles, it was largely from their concerns about matters of
geopolitics and economics or even for sentimental reasons, as in the
case of Ireland, rather than principle. They supported the Polish
national movement, for example, primarily because they wanted to weaken
the Russian Empire, which in their day was the supreme
counterrevolutionary power on the European continent. And they wished to
see a united Germany, arguing (very wrongly, in my view) that the
nation-state was desirable in providing the best arena for the
development of capitalism, which they regarded as historically
progressive (again wrongly, in my view). But never did they impute any
virtues to nationalism as an end in itself.
Specifically, it was Frederick Engels, a popularizer and also a
vulgarizer of Marx’s thought, who regarded the nation-state as “the
normal political constitution of the European bourgeoisie” in a letter
to Karl Kautsky, barely a month before the physically debilitated Marx
died. Dealing as it did with Poland’s struggle for independence from
Russia, Engels’s letter advanced what Paul Nettl has called a “narrow
preoccupation” with the “resurrection” of the country. This letter later
created a great deal of mischief in the Marxist movement: it provided
self-proclaimed Marxist parties like the German Social-Democratic Party
with an excuse to support their own country in August 1914, which
subsequently destroyed proletarian internationalism during World War I.
But even within the Marxist movement, Engels’s “narrow preoccupation”
with nationalism did not go unchallenged in the pre-1914 era. Rosa
Luxemburg’s refusal to bow to nationalist tendencies in the Polish
Socialist Party was of outstanding importance in perpetuating the
internationalist legacy of socialism–she was no less a leading voice in
that party than she was in the German Social-Democratic Party and the
Second International generally. Her general views were consistently
revolutionary: the socialist ideal of achieving a common humanity, she
held, was incompatible with nationalist parochialism. As early as 1908,
Luxemburg wrote:
Speaking of the right of nations to self-determination we dispense with
the idea of a nation as a whole. It becomes merely a social and
political unity [for the purposes of measurement]. But it was just this
concept of nations as one of the categories of bourgeois ideology that
Marxist theory attacked most fiercely, pointing out under slogans like
“national self-determination” or “freedom of the citizen,” “equality
before the law”–there lurks all the time a twisted and limited meaning.
In a society based on classes, the nation as a uniform social-political
whole simply does not exist. Instead, there exists within each nation
classes with antagonistic interests and “rights.” There is literally no
social arena–from the strongest material relationship to the most subtle
moral one–in which the possessing classes and a self-conscious
proletariat could take one and the same position and figure as one
undifferentiated national whole. [emphasis added]
She expressed these views most sharply with reference to the Russian,
Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and other empires of the day, and she gained
a sizable number of supporters in the socialist movement as a whole. As
it turned out, I may note, Luxemburg was bitterly opposed on this point
by two of the most insipid vulgarizers of Marx’s theories–Karl Kautsky
of the German Social-Democratic Party and George Plekhanov of the
Russian Social-Democratic Party, not to speak of activists like Josef
Pilsudski, of the Polish Socialist Party, who was to become the
notorious “strongman” of Poland during the interwar period. It was
Lenin, in particular, who supported “national struggles” largely for
opportunistic reasons and for notions that stem from Engels’s view of
the nation-state as historically “progressive.”
Anarchists were even more hostile than many Marxist socialists in their
opposition to nationalism. Anarchist theorists and activists opposed the
formation of nation-states everywhere in the world, a view that placed
them politically far in advance of the Marxists. Any approval of the
nation-state, much less a centralized entity of any kind, ran contrary
to anarchist anti-statism and its commitment to a universalized
conception of humanity.
Bakunin’s views on the subject of nationalism were very forthright.
Without denying the right of every cultural group, indeed the “smallest
folk-unit,” to enjoy the freedom to exercise its own rights as a
community, he warned:
We should place human, universal justice above all national interests.
And we should abandon the false principle of nationality, invented of
late by the despots of France, Russia, and Prussia for the purpose of
crushing the sovereign principle of liberty.... Everyone who sincerely
wishes peace and international justice, should once and for all renounce
the glory, the might, and the greatness of the Fatherland, should
renounce all egoistic and vain interests of patriotism.
In sharp opposition to the state’s pre-emption of societal functions of
coordination, anarchist theorists advanced the fundamental notion of
confederation, in which communes or municipalities in various regions
could freely unite by means of recallable delegates. The functions of
these confederal delegates were strictly administrative. Policy-making
was to be left to the communes or municipalities themselves (although
there was no clear agreement among anarchists on how the decision-making
process was to function).
Nor was confederalism–as an alternative to nationalism and statism–a
purely theoretical construct. Historically, confederalism and statism
had been in conflict with each other for centuries. This conflict
reached back to the distant past, but it erupted very sharply throughout
the era of the democratic and proletarian revolutions, notably in the
new United States during the 1780s, in France in 1793 and 1871, in
Russia in 1921, and in the Mediterranean countries, notably Italy and
Spain, in the nineteenth century–and again in Spain during the
revolution of 1936.
In fact, Spanish anarchism, the largest of the anarchist movements in
Europe, flatly opposed Catalan nationalism despite the fact that its
largest following by the 1930s was recruited from the Catalan
proletariat. So uncompromising were anarchist attempts to foster
internationalism that clubs were formed everywhere among the Spanish
anarchists to promote the use of Esperanto as a worldwide means of
communication. Far more ethical than even Luxemburg, anarchists
generally raised so-called “abstract rights” that were anchored in
humanity’s universality and solidarity, a vision that stood opposed to
the institutional and ideological particularism that divided human from
human.
The Left That Was viewed any abridgment of free expression as abhorrent
and reactionary. With few exceptions (Lenin’s views are a case in
point), the entire Left of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
was nourished by the ideals of “popular rule” and the radicalization of
democracy, often in sharp reaction to the authoritarian rule that had
marked the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution. (The word democracy,
I should note, varied greatly in its meaning, ranging from free
expression and assembly under republican institutions—the common
socialist view–to face-to-face democracy–the common anarchist view.)
Even Marx and Engels, who were by no means democrats in the sense of
being committed to face-to-face democracy, wrote in The Communist
Manifesto that “to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class
[is] to win the battle for democracy”–a clear avowal that “bourgeois
democracy” was flawed in its scope and ideals. Indeed, the elimination
of classes and class rule by the proletariat was expected to yield “an
association, in which the free development of each is the free
development of all”–an avowal that literally became a slogan comparable
to “Working Men of All Countries, Unite!” and that persisted well into
the Left of the 1930s.
As a Marxist, Luxemburg never strayed from this 1848 vision. In fact,
her vision of revolution was integrally bound up with a proletariat that
in her eyes was not only prepared to take power but was acutely
knowledgeable of its humanistic task through experience and the
give-and-take of free discussion. Hence her firm belief that revolution
would be the work not of a party but of the proletariat itself. The role
of the party, in effect, was to educate, not to command. In her critique
of the Bolshevik Revolution, written only six months before she was
murdered in the aftermath of the failed Spartacist uprising of January
1919, Luxemburg declared:
Freedom only for the supporters of the [Bolshevik] government, only for
the members of one party–however numerous they may be–is no freedom at
all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks
differently. Not because of any fanatical conception of “justice” but
because all that is instructive, wholesome, and purifying in political
freedom depends on this essential characteristic and its effectiveness
vanishes when “freedom” becomes a special privilege.
Despite her support of the Russian Revolution, Luxemburg lashed out at
Lenin over this issue as early as 1918 in the harshest terms:
Lenin is completely mistaken in the means he employs. Decree,
dictatorial force of the factory overseer, draconian penalties, rule by
terror, all these things are but palliatives. The only way to rebirth is
the school of public life itself, the most unlimited, the broadest
democracy and public opinion. It is rule by terror which demoralizes.
And with very rare prescience for that time in the revolutionary
movement, she warned that the proletarian dictatorship reduced to a mere
elite would result in a “brutalization of public life,” such as
ultimately did occur under Stalinist rule.
With the repression of political life in the land as a whole, life in
the Soviets must also become crippled.... life dies out in every public
institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the
bureaucracy remains as the active element.
For the anarchists, democracy had a less formal and more substantive
meaning. Bakunin, who was presumably contrasting his views with
Rousseau’s abstract conception of the citizen, declared:
No, I have in mind only liberty worthy of that name, liberty consisting
in the full development of all the material, intellectual, and moral
powers latent in every man; a liberty which does not recognize any other
restrictions but those which are traced by the laws of our own nature,
which, properly speaking, is tantamount to saying that there are no
restrictions at all, since these laws are not imposed upon us by some
outside legislator standing above us or alongside us. Those laws are
immanent, inherent in us; they constitute the very basis of our being,
material as well as intellectual and moral; and instead of finding in
them a limit to our liberty we should regard them as its real conditions
and as its effective reason.
Bakunin’s “liberty,” in effect, is the fulfillment of humanity’s
potentiality and immanent tendency to achieve realization in an
anarchist society. Accordingly, this “liberty ... far from finding
itself checked by the freedom of others, is, on the contrary confirmed
by it.” Still further: “We understand by freedom from the positive point
of view, the development, as complete as possible, of all faculties
which man has within himself, and, from the negative point of view, the
independence of the will of everyone from the will of others.”
The Left That Was contained many pacifists, but its most radical
tendencies eschewed nonviolence and committed themselves to
antimilitarism rather than pacifism as a social as well as a combative
issue. In their view, militarism implied a regimented society, a
subordination of democratic rights in crisis situations such as war or,
for that matter, revolution. Militarism inculcated obedience in the
masses and conditioned them to the imperatives of a command society.
But what the Left That Was demanded was not the symbolic image of the
“broken rifle”–so very much in vogue these days in pacifist
boutiques–but the training and arming of the people for revolutionary
ends, solely in the form of democratic militias. A resolution
co-authored by Luxemburg and Lenin (a rare event) and adopted by the
Second International in 1906 declared that it “sees in the democratic
organization of the army, in the popular militia instead of the standing
army, an essential guarantee for the prevention of aggressive wars, and
for facilitating the removal of differences between nations.”
This was not simply an antiwar resolution, although opposition to the
war that was fast approaching was the principal focus of the statement.
The arming of the people was a basic tenet of the Left That Was, and
pious demands for gun control among today’s leftists would have been
totally alien to the thinking of the Left That Was. As recently as the
1930s, the concept of “the people in arms” remained a basic tenet of
independent socialist, not to speak of anarchist, movements throughout
the world, including those of the United States, as I myself so well
remember. The notion of schooling the masses in reliance on the police
and army for public safety, much less of turning the other cheek in the
face of violence, would have been regarded as heinous.
Not surprisingly, revolutionary anarchists were even less ambiguous than
socialists. In contrast to the state-controlled militia that the Second
International was prepared to accept in the 1906 resolution cited above,
the anarchists sought the direct arming of the masses. In Spain, weapons
were supplied to anarchist militants from the very inception of the
movement. The workers and peasants relied on themselves, not on the
largesse of statist institutions, to obtain the means for insurrection.
Just as their notion of democracy meant direct democracy, so their
notion of antimilitarism meant that they had to countervail the state’s
monopoly of violence with an armed popular movement–not merely a
state-subsidized militia.
It remains to add that anarchists and to a great extent the
revolutionary socialists of the Left That Was not only tried to speak in
the general interests of humanity but abjured any body of ideas and
prejudices that denied humanity its naturalistic place in the scheme of
things. They regarded the worship of deities as a form of subjugation to
creations of human making, as the masking of reality by illusion, and as
the manipulation of human fears, alienation, and anomie by calculated
elites in behalf of an oppressive social order. Generally, the Left That
Was boldly laid claim to the rationalist heritage of the Enlightenment
and the French Revolution, however much this saddled the Marxists with
mechanistic ideas. But also, organic forms of reason, borrowed from
Hegel, competed with mechanism and conventional empiricism. Where
intuitional notions competed with materialist ones among anarchists,
they attracted a sizable body of artists to the anarchist movements of
the past, or to anarchist ideas. Additionally, rationalism did not crowd
out emotive approaches that fostered a highly moral socialism that was
often indistinguishable from libertarian outlooks. But almost every
attempt apart from certain individual exceptions was made to place
mechanistic, organic, and emotive approaches to reality in a rational
framework–notably, to achieve a coherent approach to social analysis and
change.
That this endeavor led to disparate tendencies in the Left That Was
should not surprise us. But the notion of a rational society achieved by
rational as well as moral means and idealistic sentiments formed a
unifying outlook for the Left That Was. Few leftists would have accepted
William Blake’s notion of reason as “meddlesome” or current postmodern
views of coherence as “totalitarian.”
The Left That Was was divided over the question of whether there could
be a peaceful, indeed reformistic, evolution of capitalism into
socialism or whether an insurrectionary break with the capitalist system
was unavoidable. The wariness of the Left That Was toward reforms can
perhaps best be seen in the fact that years ago, serious debates
occurred among Western leftists of all kinds on whether they should
fight for the eight-hour day, which many thought would make capitalism
more palatable to the working class. In Tsarist Russia, the Left
seriously debated whether their organizations should try to alleviate
famine conditions among the peasantry lest their charitable efforts
deflect the anger of the peasantry away from Tsarism.
But however serious those differences were, attempts at reform for its
own sake were never part of leftist ideology. The revolutionary
Left–which truly defined socialist and anarchist movements as a
Left–certainly did not want to improve the capitalist system, much less
give it a “human face.” “Capitalism with a human face” was an expression
they would have regarded as a contradiction in terms. The Left That Was
hoped to overthrow capitalism and initiate a radically new social
system, not to rationalize the existing order and make it acceptable to
the masses.
To participate in struggles for reforms was seen as a means to educate
the masses, not a way to dole out charity or improve their material lot.
Demands for reforms were always permeated by the broader message that
fundamental social reconstruction was needed. The fight for the
eight-hour day, years ago, and strikes for better living conditions, not
to speak of legislative improvements for working people, were seen as
means for mobilizing the oppressed, for engaging them in struggles, and
for disclosing the limits–and basic irrationalism–of capitalism, not
simply or even significantly as a means for bettering life under
capitalism. It was not until a later day that reforms were advocated by
so-called leftist parties, candidates, deputies, and humane devotees of
the working class, the poor, and the elderly as techniques for
“humanizing” capitalism or rendering leftist candidates more popular–and
electable for public office.
To ask for improved working and living conditions was seen as a way of
directly challenging the “wage system” and the sovereignty of capital.
Even so-called “evolutionary” or “reformist” socialists who hoped to
ease from capitalism into socialism were revolutionary in the sense that
they believed capitalism had to be replaced by a radically new social
order. Their conflicts with the revolutionary socialists and anarchists
in the Left That Was centered on whether capitalism could be replaced by
piecemeal changes, not on whether it could be given a “human face.” The
First World War and particularly the revolutions that followed it left
reformist socialism in debris—but it also produced a Left that radically
departed in many of its basic tenets from the Left That Was.
The outbreak of the First World War, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917,
and the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in the Spartacus
League uprising of January 1919 (a drawing of socialist blood that
occurred with the indirect assent of the official German Social
Democrats) opened a major breach in the history of the Left generally.
At the outbreak of the war, nearly all the socialist parties of warring
Europe succumbed to nationalism, and their parliamentary fractions voted
to give war credits to their respective capitalist states. Nor did the
attitudes of certain leading anarchists, including Kropotkin, prove to
be more honorable than those of the “social patriots,” to use Lenin’s
epithet for the German and French socialist leaders who supported one or
another camp in the war.
To analyze the reasons why this breach was opened in the Left That Was
would require a study in itself. But the Bolshevik seizure of power in
November 1917 did not close the breach. Quite to the contrary–it widened
it, not only because of the unavoidable polarization of Bolshevism
against Social Democracy but because of the authoritarian elements that
had always formed a part of the highly conspiratorial Russian
revolutionary movement. The Bolshevik party had little commitment to
popular democracy. Lenin had never viewed “bourgeois democracy” as
anything more than an instrument that could be used or discarded as
expediency required. Many demands were placed on the largely Bolshevik
regime that was formed in November (it initially included Left Social
Revolutionaries as well): the advancing German army on the eastern
front, the incredibly savage civil war that followed the Revolution, the
isolation of the Bolsheviks from the workers and peasants in the early
1920s, and the attempt by the Kronstadt sailors to recover a soviet
democracy that had been effaced by the bureaucratic Bolshevik party.
These demands combined to bring out the worst features of Lenin’s
centralist views and his opportunistic views of democracy. Beginning in
the early twenties, all affiliates of the Communist International were
“Bolshevized” by Zinoviev and his Stalinist successors, until the
commitment of socialism to democracy was marginalized and largely faded
in the Communist parties of the world.
No less important in undermining the Left That Was were the various
myths, popularized by Lenin, that capitalism had entered a unique,
indeed “final” stage of its development, a stage marked by “imperialism”
and worldwide “struggles for national liberation.” Here, again, Lenin’s
position is too complex to be dealt with cursorily; but what is
important is that the traditional internationalism that had marked the
Left That Was increasingly gave way to an emphasis on “national
liberation” struggles, partly for the purpose of weakening Western
imperialism, and partly to foster economic development in colonized
countries, thereby bringing the domestic class conflict within these
countries to the top of their national agendas.
The Bolsheviks did not abandon the rhetoric of internationalism, to be
sure, any more than the Social Democrats did. But “national liberation”
struggles (which the Bolsheviks largely honored in the breach at home,
after they took power in the newly formed Soviet Union) uncritically
fostered a commitment by the Left to the formation of new nation-states.
Nationalism increasingly came to the foreground of socialist theory and
practice. It is not surprising that the first “People’s Commissar of
Nationalities” in the new Soviet Union was Joseph Stalin, who later
fostered this nationalistic trend in Marxism-Leninism and who during and
after the Second World War gave it a distinctly “patriotic” quality in
the USSR. Expressions claiming that the Soviet Union was the “fatherland
of the working class” were ubiquitous among Communists of the interwar
period, and their parties were modeled on the centralized Bolshevik
Party to allow for Stalin’s blatant interference in their affairs.
By 1936, the politics of the Communist International (or what remained
of it) had veered sharply away from the ideals that had once guided the
Left That Was. Luxemburg, honored more as a martyr than as a theorist,
was discredited by the Stalinist cabal or totally ignored. The Second
International was essentially moribund. Idealism began to give way to a
crudely amoral opportunism and to an antimilitarism that was variously
emphasized, rejected, or modified to suit the foreign policy of the
Stalinist regime.
Yet opposition there was–as late as 1939–to this degeneration of the
ideas that had defined the Left That Was–opposition from left-wing
tendencies in certain socialist parties, from anarchists, and from
dissident Communist groups. The Left That Was did not disappear without
furious debates over these ideals or without attempts to retain its
historic premises. Its ideals remained at the top of the revolutionary
agenda during the entire interwar period, not only as a source of
polemics but as part of an armed confrontation in the Spanish Revolution
of 1936. Leftist parties and groups still agonized over issues like
internationalism, democracy, antimilitarism, revolution, and their
relationship to the state–agonies that led to furious intramural and
interparty conflicts. These issues were branded on the entire era before
they began to fade–and their fading altered the very definition of
leftism itself.
The “Cold War” invaded the humanistic agenda of the Left That Was by
turning most leftist organizations into partisans of the West or the
East and by introducing a dubious “anti-imperialism” into what became
Cold War politics. “National liberation” became the virtual centerpiece
of the “New Left” and of the aging “Old Left,” at least their various
Stalinist, Maoist, and Castroist versions.
It should be understood–as this Left did not–that imperialism is not
unique to capitalism. As a means of exploitation and cultural
homogenization, and as a source of tribute, it existed throughout the
ancient, medieval, and early modern eras. In ancient times the imperial
hegemony of Babylon was followed by that of Rome and the medieval Holy
Roman Empire. Indeed, throughout history there have been African,
Indian, Asian, and in modern times, expansionist and exploitative
“sub-imperialist” states that were more precapitalist than capitalist in
character. If “war is the health of the state,” war has usually meant
expansionism (read: imperialism) among the more commanding states of the
world and even among their client states.
In the early part of the twentieth century, the various writings on
imperialism by J. A. Hobson, Rudolf Hilferding, and Lenin, among others,
did not discover the concept of imperialism. They simply added new,
uniquely capitalist features to earlier characterizations of
imperialism, such as the “export of capital” and the impact of
capitalism on the economic development of colonized countries. But what
capitalism has also exported with a vengeance, in addition to capital
itself, has been nationalism (not only demands for cultural autonomy)
and nationalism in the form of centralized nation-states. Indeed, the
centralized nation-state has been exported to peoples who might more
reasonably have turned to confederal forms of struggle and social
reconstruction in asserting their cultural uniqueness and right to
self-management. Let me emphasize that my criticisms of nationalism and
statism are not meant to reject the genuine aspirations of cultural
groups for full expression and self-governance. This is particularly the
case where attempts are made to subvert their cultural uniqueness and
their rights to autonomy. The issue with which I am concerned is how
their cultural autonomy is expressed and the institutional structures
they establish to manage themselves as unique cultural entities. The
cultural integrity of a people does not have to be embodied in the form
of a nation-state. It should, in my view, be expressed in forms that
retain valuable cultural traditions and practices in confederal
institutions of self-management. It was goals such as these in
particular that were raised and prized by the great majority of
anarchists and libertarian socialists, even certain Marxists, in the
Left That Was.
What has happened instead is that the export of the nation-state has
poisoned not only the modern Left but the human condition itself. In
recent years, “Balkanization” and parochialism have become vicious
phenomena of disastrous proportions. The recent and much-described
breakup of the Russian empire has resulted in bloody national struggles
and aspirations for state-formation that are pitting culturally
disparate communities against each other in ways that threaten to
regress to barbarism. The internationalist ideals that the Left That Was
advanced, particularly in the former “socialist bloc,” have been
replaced by an ugly parochialism–directed against Jews generally and in
much of Europe against “foreign workers” from all parts of the world. In
the Near East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, colonized or formerly
colonized peoples have developed imperial appetites of their own, so
that many of what now pass for former colonies that have been liberated
from Euro-American imperialist powers are now pursuing brutally
imperialist aspirations of their own.
For the emergence of an authentic Left what is disastrous here is that
leftists in the United States and Europe often condone appalling
behavior on the part of former colonies, in the name of “socialism,”
“anti-imperialism,” and of course “national liberation.” The present-day
Left is no less a victim of the “Cold War” than colonized peoples who
were pawns in it. Leftists have all but jettisoned the ideals of the
Left That Was, and in so doing, they have come to accept a kind of
client status of their own–first, in the 1930s, as supporters of the
“workers’ fatherland” in the East, and more recently as supporters of
former colonies bent on their own imperialist adventures.
What matters is not whether such leftists in Europe or the United States
do or do not support “liberated” nation-states that are either newly
emerging, subimperialist, or imperialist. Whether Western leftists
“support” these nation-states and their endeavors means as much to those
states as seagull-droppings on an ocean shore. Rather, what really
matters–and what is the more serious tragedy–is that these leftists
rarely ask whether peoples they support accept statist regimes or
confederal associations, whether they oppress other cultures, or whether
they oppress their own or other populations–let alone whether they
themselves should be supporting a nation-state at all.
Indeed, many leftists fell into the habit of opposing the imperialism of
the superpowers in a mere reaction to the sides that were lined up in
the “Cold War.” This “Cold War” mentality persists even after the “Cold
War” has come to an end. More than ever, leftists today are obliged to
ask if their “anti-imperialist” and “national liberation” concerns help
to foster the emergence of more nation-states and more ethnic and
“sub-imperialist” rivalries. They must ask, what character is
anti-imperialism taking today? Is it validating ethnic rivalries, the
emergence of domestic tyrannies, sub-imperialist ambitions, and a
rapacious collection of militaristic regimes?
Clearly, parochialism is one product of the new “anti-imperialist”
nationalism and statism that have been nourished by the “Cold War” and
the reduction of specious leftists to minions of old Stalinist and
Maoist-type conflicts dressed in the garb of “national liberation.”
Parochialism can also function internally, partly as an extension of the
“Cold War” into domestic spheres of life. Self-styled spokespeople for
ethnic groups who literally pit one racial group against another,
dehumanizing (for whatever reason) one to enhance the other;
spokespeople for gender groups that parallel such exclusionary ethnic
groups in opposition to their sexual counterparts; spokespeople for
religious groups that do the same with respect to other religious
groups–all reflect atavistic developments that would have had no place
in the Left That Was. That the rights of ethnic, gender, and like strata
of a given population must be cherished and that cultural distinctions
must be prized is not in question here. But apart from the justified
claims of all these groups, their aims should be sought within a
human-oriented framework, not within an exclusionary or parochial
folk-oriented one. If an authentic Left is once again to emerge, the
myth of a “hegemonic” group of oppressed people, which seeks to
rearrange human relations in a new hierarchical pyramid, must be
replaced by the goal of achieving an ethics of complementarity in which
differences enrich the whole. In ancient times, the slaves of Sicily who
revolted and forced all free men to fight as gladiators in the island’s
amphitheaters behaved no differently from their masters. They reproduced
what was still a slave culture, replacing one kind of slave by another.
Moreover, if there is to be a Left that in any sense resembles the Left
That Was, it cannot be merely “left of center.” Liberalism–with its menu
of small reforms that obscure the irrationality of the prevailing
society and make it more socially acceptable–is an arena in its own
right. Liberalism has no “left” that can be regarded as its kin or its
critical neighbor. The Left must stake out its own arena, one that
stands in revolutionary opposition to the prevailing society, not one
that participates as a “leftist” partner in its workings.
Certainly the Left That Was fought against innumerable irrationalities
in the existing social order, such as long debilitating working hours,
desperate hunger, and abject poverty. It did so because the perpetuation
of these irrationalities would have completely demoralized the forces
fighting for basic social change. It often raised seemingly “reformist”
demands, but it did so to reveal the failure of the existing social
order to meet the most elementary needs of denied people. In fighting
for these “reforms,” however, the concern of the Left That Was was
explicitly and unwaveringly focused on the need to change the whole
social order, not on making it less irrational and more palatable.
Today, the Left That Was would have also fought with desperation against
the forces that are depleting the ozone layer, destroying the forests,
and proliferating the nuclear power plants in order to preserve life
itself on this planet.
By the same token, however, the Left That Was recognized that there are
many problems that cannot be solved within the framework of capitalism.
It held, however “unrealistically” it may seem, to its revolutionary
position rather than curry public favor or surrender its identity to
opportunistic programs. At any given moment, history does not always
present the Left with clear-cut alternatives or immediately “effective”
courses of action. In August 1914, for example, no forces existed that
could have prevented the outbreak of World War I, not even the Social
Democracy that had committed itself to opposition to the war. The Left
had to live an ineffectual, often hidden, frustrating life amidst the
effluvium of popular jingoism that engulfed so much of Europe, including
most of the workers in the socialist movement itself. Similarly, in
1938, there was no longer any possibility that the Spanish Revolution
could be rescued from fascist military attacks and insidious Stalinist
counterrevolution, despite the valiant struggles that continued for the
greater part of a year thereafter.
Regrettably, there are some impossible situations in which an authentic
Left can only take a moral stance, with no hope of intervening
successfully. In such cases, the Left can only patiently try to educate
those who are willing to listen, to advance its ideas to rational
individuals, however small their numbers may be, and to act as an
ethical force in opposition to the “art of the possible,” to use a
famous liberal definition of politics. A recent case in point was an
admirable slogan that was raised at the inception of the Gulf war,
namely “Neither Side Is Right”–a slogan that obviously did not resonate
with the nationalistic attitude of the great majority of American
people, nor one that was likely to be politically effective. Indeed, to
choose sides in the Gulf war would have been to confuse American
national chauvinism with democracy, on the one hand, or to confuse an
indifference to Saddam Hussein’s totalitarianism with
“anti-imperialism,” on the other. This eminently moral position tries to
advance a humanistic viewpoint in the face of the repellent political
and economic reality that marked both camps in the conflict.
To pretend that an authentic Left can always offer a practical solution
to every problem in society is chimerical. Offering “lesser evils” as a
solution to every evil that this society generates will lead to the
worst of all possible evils–the dissolution of the Left into a liberal
morass of endless compromises and humiliations. Amid all its fights in
support of concrete issues, an authentic Left advances the message that
the present society must be demolished and replaced by one that is
rational. Such was the case with socialists like Eugene V. Debs and
anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman in the Left That Was.
Put bluntly: What this society usually does should not deter Leftists
from probing the logic of events from a rational standpoint or from
calling for what society should do. Any attempt to adapt the rational
“should” to the irrational “is” vacates that space on the political
spectrum that should be occupied by a Left premised on reason, freedom,
and ecological humanism. The need to steadfastly maintain the principal
commitments that minimally define a Left may not always be popular, but
the alternative to the monstrous irrationalities that permeate
present-day society must always be kept open, fostered, and developed if
we are ever to achieve a free society.
It may well be that in the foreseeable future an authentic Left has
little, if any, prospects of gaining a large following. But if it
surrenders the most basic principles that define it–internationalism,
democracy, antimilitarism, revolution, secularism, and rationalism–as
well as others, like confederalism, the word Left will no longer have
any meaning in our political vocabulary. One may call oneself a liberal,
a social democrat, a “realo” Green, or a reformist. That is a choice
that each individual is free to make, according to his or her social and
political convictions. But for those who call themselves leftists, there
should be a clear understanding that the use of the term Left involves
the acceptance of the fundamental principles that literally define and
justify the use of the word. This means that certain ideas like
nationalism, parochialism, authoritarianism–and certainly, for
anarchists of all kinds, any commitment to a nation-state–and symbols
like the broken rifle of pacifism are totally alien to the principles
that define the Left. Such ideas, introduced into politics, have no
place in any politics that can authentically be characterized as
leftist. If no such politics exists, the term Left should be permitted
to perish with honor.
But if the Left were to finally disappear because of the melding of
reformist, liberal, nationalist, and parochial views, not only would
modern society lose the “principle of hope,” to use Ernst Bloch’s
expression, an abiding principle that has guided all revolutionary
movements of the past; the Left would cease to be the conscience of
society. Nor could it advance the belief that the present society is
totally irrational and must be replaced by one that is guided by reason,
an ecological ethics, and a genuine concern for human welfare. For my
part, that is not a world in which I would want to live.