The Future of the American Left

...On the other hand, it's quite true that, in the past, this kind of left, the broad powerful coalition, has taken shape in America only on rare occasion...

...Very little thinking about progressive foreign policies has been done until now...

...But there is one further element that, it seems to me, has become a little clearer today, in the context of communism's collapse and the vast changes going on around the world...

...A new kind was always needed, but under cold war conditions it was impossible to create, except in very limited ways, since large struggles around the world tended to fall into one cold war camp or the other...

...The sum effect is that we on the American left are going to have to find new kinds of reform programs, just as we are going to have to generate either new kinds of unionism or some institutional base other than unions for the new kinds of programs...

...The same revolutions in Eastern Europe that have aroused so much hope that history's last word has yet to be spoken, so much enthusiasm for high ideals and bold reforms, will also, as no one can doubt, go on arousing horror and fear...

...Yet in reality the United States, because of its wealth and power, cannot avoid exerting a significant influence around the world, and the nature of that influence doesn't have to be abandoned to chance or to the political figures in the center or on the right who feel more comfortable discussing it...

...In his pamphlet, he went out of his way to denounce Samuel Gompers, the founder and at that time still the leader of the American labor movement, just as he went out of his way to denounce, with a lot of vitriol, too, all the main labor and socialist leaders of the advanced industrial countries...

...A vast literature has debated this question ever since 1906, when Werner Sombart posed the question in its classic version: why is there no socialism in America...

...Our vision of progress today is not radiant, because radiance suggests inebriation, and inebriation means disaster and crime...

...This little sketch of the American left sheds some light on the likely consequences of the enormous events that are taking place around the world today...

...I realize that many people around the world—and in the United States, too, in the procommunist sector of the left—have watched communism's collapse with genuine dismay and fear...

...During the past seventy years, the United States may have appeared to be, of all countries around the world, perhaps the furthest removed psychologically from the Soviet Union...

...Constitution...

...In the future it should become imaginable to talk about a governmental foreign policy that would reflect the feminists, antiracists, and ecologists of America, not to mention labor, just as United States policy has always done a vigorous job of reflecting commercial interests...

...The potential for policies that the left could support was already shown, I would suggest, by the human-rights policy of the Carter Administration in the late 1970s, which shows, by the way, how progressive policies and policy makers do somehow end up creeping into Democratic administrations...

...It is better than a theory: it is, here and there, and in more places than ever before, a reality before our eyes...

...not just against the distribution of American wealth but against the wealth itself, which was pictured as largely stolen from other countries...

...but on the side of the forces that wish to control capital and render it socially responsible, what comes naturally are international obstacles...

...In the century and a quarter since the American Civil War and the rise of a modern capitalist economy, there have been three great upsurges from the left...

...It is a vision of democracy in all fields, and of democracy's potential for growth...

...This is for several obvious reasons—the partial demilitarization that has already followed the end of the cold war, the feeling of no longer being under siege, the end of the communist stigma that attached to more sectors of the American left than ever deserved to suffer from it, the generational transition in Washington, the several splits within the American right...

...Lenin, reversing Marx's notion of the international working class, argued that the labor movement in countries like the United States depended for its high wages on imperialist exploitation of the Third World...

...Its fallacies were large, and its political costs were larger...

...The global nature of production, the end of the bloc system, and the coming breakdown in the historic estrangement of the left do signify, though, a pretty dramatic change in those conditions...

...Why is that...

...The socialist vocabulary has never taken hold in America, but from Harrington's perspective, in certain deep respects the left in America has never really differed from the mass social democratic movements of Western Europe...

...Will that be enough to regenerate the left in the United States...

...And there is a further problem in the United States, namely, labor's lack of prestige, which will make labor solidarity campaigns far less fashionable than have been the campaigns for the Brazilian rainforest or the solidarity campaigns that were mounted by the supporters of Central American Leninism...

...The "hyper-anti-imperialist" left was thrown by this belief into conflict with its own anti-Leninist comrades elsewhere on the left, into conflict with the mainstream of the labor movement, into conflict even with some main elements of American culture...

...but the American left found itself embracing an opposite tendency...

...What is needed is a new kind of left-wing internationalism...

...Lenin's contribution to political theory was not only his concept of the "party of a new type" (which was, in democratic eyes, bad enough) but also, equally important, the interpretation of global economics that was offered in his pamphlet from 1916, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism...

...A notion of joining together solidarity with rights is, I maintain, the crucial feature of democratic socialism, what distinguishes socialism from liberalism on one hand and populism on the other...

...The trio is performing on stage, and its performance would be marvelous if all 100 • DISSENT three members were pitching in...

...An inability to adapt to the new world economy has destroyed communism altogether...

...Today, according to the figures that everyone seems to accept, they represent a mere 16 percent, and if we were to factor out the unions that represent government employees, which have grown strong relatively recently, the true figure would be 12 percent...

...The notion that forces within America might have any sort of crucial role to play around the world in promoting democracy, human rights, the rights of labor, or other such matters has seemed, to much of the American left, an almost absurd proposition, which one can hardly mention without adding in the same breath a defensive phrase about the central role of the United Nations or other international agencies...

...Imperialism exists...

...Yet in each sector of the broad left, these people, the ones with the idea of a broader movement and with a larger program of social reform, have lacked the strength to play their unifying role with much effectiveness, or at any rate they have lacked the strength to build up sturdy institutions...

...But by viewing imperialism as something more than that, by seeing imperialism as both a necessary consequence and cause of capitalist productivity, Lenin's theory ended up explaining too much, and the over-explanation led to any number of exaggerated and distorted analyses...

...So the other two members of the trio, the labor movement and the social movements, have more often than not had to go on alone...

...There is one other way, which is perhaps vague but important, in which the collapse of communism will help the American left...

...The first of the upsurges took place in the long-ago 1870s and 1880s...

...But in the years since Vietnam, the largest portion of the left, labor apart, has had very few positive alternatives to offer, in the sincere but usually unstated belief that America's best possible foreign policy would be to refrain from doing much of anything at all...

...The success of movements like Amnesty International and Greenpeace in attracting popular support can be seen, I think, as signs of the readiness of many people in the United States, together with people in other parts of the world, to go about building this new international spirit...

...One of the crucial ways in which that can occur is for political analysts on the left to begin to feel more comfortable making distinctions between the good and the bad in American foreign policy—between, on 102 • DISSENT one hand, authentic examples of American imperialism and, on the other hand, the progressive uses of American influence...

...But it is not capitalism's highest WINTER • 1993 • 99 stage...

...From the second upsurge, that of the 1910s Paul Berman presented a version of this article at a conference held in Mexico City in July 1992 on the future of the left...

...Pointing to those parties and their achievements for inspiration and for proof of the practicality of our own proposals has gotten a little harder today...

...The creation of a primitive welfare state in the United States by the New Deal in the 1930s was powered in large part by Harrington's kind of European-style labor-led left...

...I think the entire period from Lenin's seizure of power WINTER • 1993 • 103 to communism's impending final defeat is going to be seen in the future as a giant detour from the main path of history, a pointless aside...

...But the effect of Lenin's pamphlet was to offer a theoretical basis for reversing this attitude...

...In reality, though, a big portion of the American working class movement throughout this century was, in its origins, Eastern European, Slavic, and Jewish, with family or ethnic ties to the Old Country...

...His argument attempted to explain away the errors in Marx's labor theory of value by identifying imperialism not as a byproduct of advanced capitalism but as capitalism's essence —as the very reason that workers in the advanced capitalist societies were growing richer instead of poorer, as should have happened, according to Marx's theory...

...Yet these American leftists, for all their dynamism and their ability to out-compete their more democratic rivals on the left—these people were fated not only to fail at attracting wide American support but to arouse against themselves popular furies so vast as to be fatal...

...I believe this path is represented by the old nineteenth-century idea that in history there is progress, and the progress consists of social and economic progress for the poor and the oppressed, which mut take place in the context of an ever-developing political democracy...

...On the American side, in regard, say, to Mexico, the degree of ignorance about Mexican conditions, ignorance about Mexican thinking, the lack of intellectual contacts—all of this remains very great...

...Our vision is sober, nonutopian, cautious...

...The next step should be proposals for left-wing foreign policies on the part of the government...

...The formal left in a country like, say, France, has always contained a large, perhaps too-large, dose of out-and-out nationalism, from which the French left and France as a whole have drawn strength...

...In its fuller elaboration, the theory required its own adherents to turn against not just some specific appalling uses of American power but against American power itself...

...To arrange alliances of one philosophy with the other—to find ways to promote solidarity in the context of rights, and rights in the context of solidarity—ought not, in principle, to be so difficult...

...and for that reason, the same American working class that seemed so remote from the Soviet experience was, in reality, relatively well informed about the unhappy march of Eastern Bloc events, far better informed than the working class of most other countries outside of Eastern Europe...

...And then the new possibilities will begin to appear more attractive...

...These were not formulas for economic success or democratic progress...

...And it affixed a significant part of the blame on the organized working class in the wealthier countries...

...Lenin's theory was, of course, not entirely wrong...

...Lenin's idea, especially as elaborated by later generations of economists in Latin America and elsewhere, pointed to the kind of imperialism that, in the case of the United States, preyed on much of the region immediately to America's south during the century and more after the 1840s...

...This crisis, I should add, is not just a secondary consequence of communism's collapse—though, to be sure, the fate of communism does render the "hyper-anti-imperialist" project implausible...

...What will be the effects in the United States of this economic transition...

...One reason for this, which is not often mentioned, is the close social tie between the populations of what became the Soviet empire and the American working class...

...Progress, in its modern version, has been wholly stripped of any hint of the millenarian or the messianic...

...The unavoidable corollary of Lenin's idea was the notion of the international class struggle, which led leftists in poor countries to imagine, extrapolating from Imperialism that their own social systems had been structured more by imperialist powers than by internal struggles...

...Still, there's no pretending that a programmatic crisis doesn't exist...

...The nineteenth-century left in the United States and all over the world looked with sympathy on the United States as the first and most advanced of the democracies...

...I have no quarrel with the traditional answers to this question: the lack of a feudal past in the United States, the relative prosperity of nineteenthcentury American workers (the "shoals of roast beef " on which socialism went aground), the Emersonian intellectual tradition, the two-party structure of American politics, and so forth...

...With a greater willingness to draw this distinction, the left should be able to propose active foreign policies of its own—a novel step, and something that isn't about to happen at once, since the news of the collapse of "hyper-anti-imperialism" will take a lot longer to spread than the news about the rest of Lenin's legacy...

...Lenin and his school of thought saw in the military occupations, interventions, annexations, and exploitations of poor regions by rich ones something more than a merely objectionable and criminal use of wealth and strength...

...The goods that multinational corporations produce are now manufactured all over the world...

...In fact, it has become a conventional thing to make this remark...

...From the point of view of historical explanation, Harrington's notion of the left has had an obvious validity...

...This happens because each of these three great upsurges has deposited, as part of its own historic sediment, a different meaning of the term...

...All of the heavy industries have been showing the results for years now, with consequences for American unionism that are well known...

...But we do still have a vision...

...But like Socialist parties all over the world, the American Socialists underwent a split in 1920 over the question of Bolshevism— and the results in America turned out to be exceptionally disastrous...

...And the effect was to convince large sectors of the broad American left to regard their own country, the United States, as far more criminal and rapacious than it actually was, and far less amenable to progressive reform...

...Yet the moment for broaching possibilities like these has arrived...

...It has always been something of an instinct for the socialistinfluenced activists in America to try to bring together one with the other...

...Yet for the broad American left as a whole, the news is anything but bad...

...Instead we find ourselves able to see with far more clarity than ever before the fundamentally international quality of the working class that was first observed by Marx—who turns out to have made some valuable comments after all...

...From those nowforgotten battles emerged a workers' movement that, because of the German immigration of the time, was able to draw on Marxist and anarchist ideas about economic class, though for uses that turned out to be cautious and limited...

...There's no reason to ask...

...Again in the 1960s, the civil rights revolution (which went on to provide the model for feminism and the other social movements) was rendered possible only by something similar, with labor as a main engine...

...Taking the three upsurges in reverse chronological order, the sediments that remain from each can be described this way: From the third and most recent upsurge, that of the 1960s and 1970s, emerged the civil rights or black political movement, the movement for Latin and Asian immigrant rights, the feminist movement, the gay liberation movement, the ecology movement, and a variety of other social movements and radical tendencies (for example, the movement for the rights of deaf people) that continue to exercise a lot of force...

...It was proposed most clearly by Michael Harrington, who until his untimely death was himself the most prominent American political intellectual to bear the mark of the second or formal phase...

...Lenin's theory was a kind of "hyper-antiimperialism...

...For instance, when journalists discuss the left in reference to the Democratic party or the universities, what they usually mean are the social movements of the third phase: the black movement, the feminists, the WINTER • 1993 • 97 gays, the ecologists, and everyone else who carries the mark of the 1960s and 1970s...

...Now, when we ask how the amazing worldwide events of the last few years will affect the American left, we have to specify just what left we have in mind...

...The labor movement from the first phase has drawn its strength principally from a philosophy of solidarity, as expressed in the crucial tactic of a strike, while the social movements from the third phase have drawn strength principally from a philosophy of rights, as expressed in the crucial tactic of a legal appeal to the U.S...

...The legacy of this early period, after the Marxist and anarchist influences had been digested and expelled, was the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and subsequent additions to organized labor...

...And for us in the United States, to see the socialists of Sweden, Germany, or Britain go down to electoral defeat is anything but cheering...

...and if we don't succeed in these things, our own social movements will continue pulling apart, and American society as a whole will continue developing, as has been the case for twenty years now, in directions that are ever less egalitarian...

...These were the people who felt drawn to the Communist party itself from the 1920s through the 1940s, or became fellow travelers of the party, or in later decades became noncommunist supporters of Bolshevikstyle revolutions or, more recently, of "vanguard" revolutionary movements abroad that maybe flew a Marxist flag or maybe a flag of third-world anti-imperialism...

...The anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s is an even better indication of the strength and popularity of a progressive internationalism...

...A feminist foreign policy, for instance, which is not something that would make the United States popular around the world (except among women), has barely been mentioned, so far as I know...

...but today it's obvious that in reality, the labor movement of countries like the United States will be able to protect its high wages only if wages also become high in the poorer countries...

...The conference was sponsored by the Centro de Estudios para un Proyecto Nacional S.C...

...As in many countries, in the generations that came after that decisive split, the communist side seemed to attract, at least in certain periods, many of the most dynamic and energetic people...

...If we think of these East European experiences and then picture what the impending revolution in Cuba will be like—for which, by the way, the democratic, anti-Fidelista left in the United States, apart from a few people in the labor movement, is totally unprepared—we can only shudder...

...It's reasonable to suppose, as he insistently did, that any future social reform on an equivalent scale will require new versions of the same broad left coalition...

...The sediments from these three great upsurges, one piling on top of the other, make up the vast historic American left...

...The missing figure from the American trio—the democratic socialist who ought to be harmonizing between the philosophy of solidarity and the philosophy of rights, the person who ought to be singing the possibilities of a more radical social reform than his companions are likely to propose, the person who ought to be bringing together labor with the social movements in a powerful coalition as broad and effective as the social democratic tendencies of Western Europe—this person has wandered offstage in the sincere belief that morality itself and the oppressed masses everywhere around the world except at home require this absence...

...It is sometimes forgotten that at the start of the second phase of American radicalism, in the 1910s, the Socialist party of America did seem to enjoy a potential that was not unlike that of its fraternal parties in Western Europe, 98 • DISSENT even if an observer like Sombart already had his doubts...

...The only left-wing social model that has had any relevance to the United States in recent years has been the Northern European one, along with some of the welfare-state measures adopted in Canada...

...In 1956 the unions in America represented 36 percent of all workers...

...We are on the brink of returning, in short, to a world belief that such a thing as progress exists, and that progress must be democratic, or it is not progress...

...But countering these problems and building new kinds of solidarity is, in fact, the task of the hour...

...A further factor helps to explain the fiasco that overcame the formal left...

...In the universities, for instance, where the news is often slow in penetrating, there will be great resistance to this development...

...That kind of internationalism is plainly not going to arise automatically...

...These consequences are good, but also bad, and in such contradictory ways as to be ironic, like winning a free ticket on an airplane that has just been declared unsafe...

...104 • DISSENT...

...The theory took the authentic meaning of imperialism and applied it to so many phenomena that even foreign investment in poorer countries came to seem like a kind of colonialism...

...Ever since the Second World War, the right (in its main sectors) and center in America have proposed active foreign policies of their own...

...It is merely the stage of capitalist relations abroad that corresponds to the stage of savage antilabor oppression at home...

...And there are the advantages that arise from the crisis or collapse of world "hyper-anti-imperialism...

...They saw in this kind of imperialism the core of the capitalist system, a main source of America's wealth and especially of the relative prosperity enjoyed by most of the American masses...

...A return to the idea of progress is not something that is going to spread around the world with simplicity or ease...

...In the United States, the same thinking led to misfortunes of a different kind...

...Capital is naturally internationalist...

...CEPNA), with support from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation...

...Beginning in the 1960s, the large number of Cubans in Florida and New Jersey, not all of them wealthy or bourgeois, similarly influenced American attitudes toward communism in its third-world forms, and so did, though on a smaller scale, the immigrants and refugees who fled to America from Communist China, Vietnam, and Cambodia...

...For if the theory was right, even the labor movement in a country like the United States was incriminated by the benefits it drew from imperialist exploitation...

...Then again, the term "left" is sometimes used to denote the organizations and writers who still use explicitly socialist vocabulary or analysis—which is to say, the organizations and writers who can trace their political genealogy back to American radicalism's second phase, the formal left of the 1910s through the 1930s...

...But the trio seems to have only two members...

...A sizable minority of American opinion underwent an experience of something like estrangement during the course of the Vietnam War, and the same thing happened on a smaller scale during the many battles against President Reagan's policy of allying with the extreme right in Central America...

...through the 1930s, emerged the Socialist party, the socialist-influenced progressives, the Communist party, and other left-wing organizations —the formal left, so to speak, bits and pieces of which still survive...

...The ultimate cause of the crisis in left-wing movements around the world is, we can safely say, the economic transition from locally concentrated heavy industry to a mode of production based on computers and freer world trade...

...It is a stage of capitalism...

...The obstacles to any alliance larger than a rump or a fleeting coalition of convenience among the different elements are not just sociological or cultural, which would be daunting enough, but reach to the level of fundamental political philosophy...

...The substantial sector of the formal left in America that looked kindly on communist-style movements abroad has, for that reason, always found itself tragically at odds with the keener knowledge of far larger portions of the general population, including those portions whose poverty and immigrant sufferings might have otherwise generated a respectful interest in left-wing economic ideas...

...But we have to ask ourselves, in that case, what is this main path of history from which communism has been a detour...

...That hasn't happened to social democracy—but no one needs to be reminded that the diminishing usefulness of centralized planning and the progressive shrinking of the industrial proletariat have nonetheless been chipping away at social democracy's power and prospects, not just in Europe...

...The broad left in America, the powerful democratic left that Harrington wanted to see come to life once more, the left that ought to consist of legacies from all three grand phases of left-wing insurgency since the Civil War— this left has more often than not resembled a guitar trio whose third member appears to have disappeared...

...The third meaning of the "left" is something else entirely: less a factual description than a thesis...

...These experiences seemed to produce, for years at a time, an apparent success for the estranged wing of the left...

...Lenin emphasized precisely that fateful conclusion...

...If only we knew how to exploit these advantages...

...The crisis of "hyper-anti-imperialism" stems also from something else: the newly globalized mode of industrial production...

...The traditions and instincts of American reform have always emphasized approaches that are nonstatist and pragmatic, and for that reason, the programmatic crisis of social democratic systems, the crisis in progressive statism, is likely not to be as devastating in the United States as perhaps in some other countries...

...And the same theory led to the idea that successful revolution would require pulling the poorer countries out of the world market in favor of Soviet alliances and dependencies...

...The theory of "hyper-anti-imperialism" achieved a popular acceptance on the formal left in America and even in certain sectors of liberal thought that never pictured themselves as left wing...

...WINTER • 1993 • 101 Still, the irony is this: just as we find ourselves hobbled by the decline in the industrial work force and by setbacks to the social democratic model in Europe, we also find ourselves, because of the success of the anticommunist revolutions, facing unprecedented opportunities...

...And, in this context, it has become much harder to maintain the illusion that the world's exploiters come from one set of countries, the exploited from another...

...The integration of previously isolated and undeveloped countries into the world market came to seem like a one-sided disaster...

...In each instance a sizable part of the population rose up against injustice, won victories, pushed the country in more democratic directions—and left behind a sediment of institutions and beliefs that have turned out to be permanent features of American life...

...But at a deep level, the estrangement with America has produced consequences that are anything but successful...

...The definition of "left," reasonably precise at first glance, turns out after a few minutes of conversation to vary widely for different people...

...It will have to be...

...Still, sooner or later the word will finally get around...

...The crisis of " hyper-anti-imperialism " means that the moment has at last arrived for large parts of the left to end their estrangement from the rest of the country, and in this way to establish some of the conditions for a more unified broad American left (even with a weakened labor wing...

...Discussions of the left in the United States have the frustrating tendency instantly to lose all shape and contour, like ice cream melting on the plate...

...The left in Harrington's sense includes not only the social movements of the third phase, not only the small socialist legacies of the second phase, but also, as the grand engine, the labor movement that descends from the long-ago first phase back in the 1870s and 1880s...

...There is a programmatic side to this downturn as well...

...In an article in New Politics, the labor writer Denis MacShane points out that at the 1992 World's Fair in Seville, Spain, corporations like DuPont and Time-Warner did not want to exhibit within the United States pavilion because these corporations now regard themselves as multinational, not American...

...Workers in the United States already enjoy probably the fewest on-the-job rights of workers in any of the industrial nations at equivalent stages of development, far fewer rights than workers in Canada, for instance, and today they face the possibility of a further decline in power and rights...

...One obvious area in which a reinvigorated spirit of internationalism needs to be extended is labor solidarity—to begin with, a labor solidarity between the workers of the United States and Mexico...

...In the past, the hegemony of "hyper-antiimperialist" ideas in much of the American left has always restricted the left (apart from the labor movement) to the kind of foreign policy views that are conventionally called "isolationist," which can be described as the wish that America would exercise something like a Canadian degree of influence on world events...

...During some eras of the past, in moments of extreme anger and civil tension, the national estrangement of large sectors of the formal left in America has acquired an aura of emotional validity...

...If by the left we mean something like Harrington's vision, we find ourselves, then, at the same kind of downturn in America that we see in the social democracies of Europe, and for structural reasons that are not really susceptible to political action or will...