Scenarios For Possible Lefts
Walter, Michael
Let's begin an argument (here in the pages of Dissent) about the future of the left—an open, many-sided, tentative, experimental argument, without manifestos or ideologically correct positions....
...This has been much talked about but not yet realized in any significant way: a left that draws on the energies of feminism, environmentalism, and so on...
...nor do they think it a virtue to have a position, and then a set of interconnected positions, on every political issue...
...It seems useful to bracket them and ask another: what might be the shape of a left within which answers could be worked out...
...It is not enough to label them as "single-issue" movements...
...They can no longer be conceived, however, as a class apart, waiting for their historical moment...
...4. A communitarian left...
...I cannot offer much more than a list with commentary...
...It doesn't have to be a meta-narrative—here we are all postmodern— but it does require coherence and direction...
...I am not evoking a traditional politics but more specifically a politics without much effervescence, youthful high spirits, new ideas, or physical energy...
...In this sense, we can best think of ourselves as democratic communitarians—though we are likely to emphasize, as most communitarians do not, that the economy is a central focus of communal life, much in need of democratization...
...1. A sectarian left...
...Still, there is hope here of finding and engaging new people, and the process of inclusion, if it works at all, should make life on the left more interesting...
...These latter demands represent second-stage communitarianism...
...What we mean when we call them "new" is that they are committed to their limited, partial, singular cause, without global or world-historical ambitions, unwilling to compromise for the sake of winning power, naturally contained within civil society (and subject to its fissiparous tendencies), suspicious of politics and the state...
...The old left seems less a unified coalition than a temporal series of people in trouble—or, better, less a movement than a fortress or a set of fortresses under siege...
...What kind of left politics is possible now, appealing to what constituencies, organized how...
...What moral and strategic choices should we make...
...We are in a period of uncertainty and confusion...
...I am inclined to think that a little-of-this-and-a-little-of-that is the most likely leftist politics, at least in the short run...
...I am not going to try to answer questions like these...
...Will the current academic wars have any other politically significant consequences...
...But none of the new social movements appear to be part of anything else...
...Perhaps this academic left can play the classic role of the sect, providing mechanisms for protective encapsulation, survival, recruitment, and conversion...
...The larger left (if there is a larger left) is often fed by people who pass through the sects, receiving a political education there and then breaking away or fading away but retaining a strong leftist identification...
...Opening up the curriculum, enlarging the canon, teaching a more critical (deconstructive) style...
...Perhaps a left party, movement, or political tendency could take over the programs of these two without taking in their organizations—a coalition of causes, as it were, rather than of groups...
...What seems called for, in any case, is strategic retreat and regroupment, which require other qualities...
...3. A "new social movements" left...
...2. An old left...
...And the politics of the academic left is anyway too difficult, too far removed from everyday concerns, for easy transmission...
...But we must find more to say about what this means and how it might be realized...
...The academic left has, of course, no such power as is attributed to it by neoconservative critics of "political correctness...
...The language is mostly that of French poststructuralism, with significant Marxist residues...
...The idea is not entirely alien to the old left: think, for example, of Gramsci's call for a "national-popular" politics...
...It isn't apparent, though, that feminists and environmentalists have much interest in the groups-in-trouble that make up the old left's social base...
...Its journals are intensely focused on a very small audience and filled with its internal quarrels—which are often fierce enough to attract attention were it not for the largely impenetrable jargon in which they are conducted...
...5. A postmodern left...
...They mix intensity with specificity, which FALL • 1992 • 467 makes them difficult to recruit to a wider politics...
...Maybe...
...But what will this larger left look like...
...The old left has largely surrendered the vision of social transformation...
...The British Labour party provides a useful model of the resulting politics, and it is a sign of the declining social base of this politics that it can hardly command the support of more than one-third of the electorate...
...They often raise radical children—not an unimportant political function...
...I can't imagine a left without these causes, though they would obviously have to be brought into contact with one another, and with others as well, including the causes-in-decline of the old left, and compromised in the process...
...Given the size of the student population, the percentage of the age cohort that goes to college, academic leftists can claim a very large constituency...
...But I have in mind a particular version of sectarianism, an academic version, which displays some robustness right now and is much in the news...
...The doctrine and method, however, bear the clear marks of sectarian closure...
...Largely contained, as I have said, within civil society, feminism has produced its own sectarian grouplets (often located in the academy), while environmentalists tend to drift off into a kind of green mysticism...
...This is what makes them attractive: they claim to be able to win significant victories without revolutionary transformation or any radical use of the state's coercive power...
...Undergraduates are in fact remarkably resistant to political, as distinct from, say, technical or professional education...
...Many of the new social movements are right-wing mobilizations, like the anti-abortion struggle and other similar campaigns—for school prayer or against pornography—driven by religious fundamentalism...
...It may seem odd to start here, since sectarianism is more often a dead end than a useful beginning...
...the commitment is mostly residual (it is hard to see how it could be justified in poststructuralist terms...
...In what direction do we want to pull...
...The collapse of communism ought to open new opportunities for the democratic left, but its immediate effect has been to raise questions about many leftist (not only communist) orthodoxies: about the "direction" of history, the role of state planning in the economy, the value and effectiveness of the market, the future of nationalism, and so on...
...We must defend them, and help them defend themselves, as citizens of this society, not as the 468 • DISSENT generative force of some ideal future...
...Academic sectarianism seems unlikely to serve the purposes of mass education...
...Old leftism today is a politics of holding on—to the welfare system, the public sector, collective bargaining, the possibility of state intervention...
...Nor is any radical abandonment of old constituencies called for (it's not, in any case, morally possible) but rather a disciplining of all the "special interests" —starting on the left, in order to make communitarianism politically plausible, but proceeding rapidly to the right, where the special interests are much more "special...
...Feminism and environmentalism are no doubt movements of great potential strength, and their natural affinity, one would think, is with the left...
...This would permit (or actively encourage) an incoherent bricolage of all the other options...
...Indeed, civil society has always been the home of the democratic left—since we never managed to "seize" state power—and I am inclined to think that we should dig in there...
...Though they each have their militants, they don't require a "totalizing" commitment...
...Gramsci's national-popular politics requires this qualification: that it must be enacted simultaneously in many local settings and in the singular national setting...
...Nor do they seem to have much interest in each other: each has a constituency that cuts across the lines the other draws...
...Sectional interests come to the fore at a time like this, because the threats posed by aggressive corporate managers and an indifferent or hostile political elite are experienced with varying intensity and on different schedules by different groups...
...That is by no means a small number, but the sense that it is not expanding and is not going to expand has made for a very weak opposition to the larger projects of the political right—an opposition, again, more concerned with protecting individuals and groups than with transforming the environment they inhabit...
...The new social movements are not like the labor movement, on which, indeed, a powerful left politics was founded...
...The Anti-Corn Law League was a single-issue movement, but it was also part of, an instrument of, the bourgeois class struggle...
...But this is also, after a decade or more of self-indulgence in the upper reaches of American society, a politics of sacrifice—and the sacrifices won't begin, as I have already suggested, in the upper reaches...
...The first stage would involve persuading unionized workers to give up the more narrow forms of business unionism (feather-bedding, opposition to technological advance), black leaders to acknowledge and address the problems in their own communities, welfare recipients to take a greater responsibility for their own welfare, environmental activists to reject "not in my backyard" environmentalism, feminists to recognize the value of the family as a social institution and pull back from the radical individualism of "my body and my rights...
...Perhaps we can constitute one kind of left (a speculative and disputatious left) in the very process of arguing about the possible kinds...
...We will remain uneasy with the market, even while recognizing its value, and we will look for ways of ensuring that the engaged citizen counteracts and balances the "economic man...
...Its graduate student recruits might constitute a vanguard, but where is the main force...
...The people first asked to turn away from the defense of private interests—"I'll get mine" —are people who have little to defend and are likely to get less...
...It is not certain that many of their militants will stick around once the compromises begin...
...No doubt, any left should be so connected, but these are social/ political forces in trouble or in decline, and the connection now is necessarily defensive...
...If it is serious, it is certainly a left politics, and there is no reason why such a politics can't be defended in the language of an American (liberal, democratic, egalitarian) political tradition...
...But is there anything more than these two...
...They are not prepared to march to the rescue of the besieged fortresses...
...Still, it is a lively presence and something new in the history of left sectarianism: more like a "school" than a party, with masters and disciples (professors and graduate students) instead of leaders and militants, guided by a doctrine and a method rather than an ideology...
...We can't cut our ties to people in trouble or to social groups in decline, for these are not merely the "base" of the old left but the raison d'etre of any possible left...
...Nor does it have, in my view, the prospects for growth and influence 466 • DISSENT claimed by its participants...
...I am inclined to doubt, however, that they can reach this constituency in any effective way...
...This sounds all too much like the agenda of the right—unless it is specifically designed to facilitate similar demands on the middle and upper classes, the political elites, and the corporate managers: to pay the taxes necessary for social reconstruction, to use the state as an instrument of the common good, to surrender the extraordinary privileges that have made this country one of the most inegalitarian of Western societies...
...I am not sure what this means—presumably a left that has abandoned (or been liberated from) its old sectional base, its class/interest-group constituencies, and appeals instead to the nation as a whole in the name of traditional values and a common good...
...What story do we want to tell about ourselves...
...This is the leftism we know best, connected to the industrial working class, the trade unions, ethnic and religious minorities —the "new deal" coalition or, in Europe, classic social democracy...
...But we can hardly endorse this politics...
...What are our options...
...Other Dissent editors and writers will, I hope, join in with lists of their own (mine is a little short) and with additional comments...
...it will be the unplanned product of many people pulling in different directions...
...And, finally, we will look for ways of strengthening civil society, because no democratic community can survive for long unless its citizens are locally active in associations, unions, movements, co-ops, churches, neighborhoods, and so on...
...The word "old" takes on its standard meaning here...
...Hence, number 6, a democratic and pluralist left, is probably the best of the possible lefts...
...they are self-contained, sufficient unto themselves...
...So communitarianism is not an easy (even if one could make the case that it is a necessary) politics for the left...
...They are expressed in a difficult and esoteric language, and they demand a radical commitment...
...FALL • 1992 • 469...
Vol. 39 • September 1992 • No. 4
