The development of the European and American left since 1945
Markovits, Andrei S.
SINCE THE FALL Of the Berlin Wall the European—along with the much weaker American—left has been in a crisis that has challenged its very identity. In fact, this profound crisis predated the...
...actual no copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 91...
...These in fact rendered them the unchallenged representatives of a clear political formation that was known to itself and the rest of the world as "the left...
...I call the fourth and last remaining group the "neo-Nationalists...
...Editor: Mitchell Cohen/Michael Walter, Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc., 310 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10025...
...Unions catapulted themselves into a position of quasi-equality with "their" parties...
...This question lies beyond my scope here...
...Associations, colors, insignia, songs, tastes, and leisure activities that had been institutionalized in the decades before the Second World War— in many instances even before the Great War—continued in a completely different world...
...This is also the period when the left's enmity against Israel, begun in the wake of the Six Day War of June 1967, became a salient issue for its politics, its identity, and also its internal divisions...
...The left divided, and divides, over Serbia, over Chechnya, over Darfur, even over the war in Iraq...
...Only in France did the old transition-belt model between the Communist Party (PCF) and the communistdominated trade union federation (CGT) remain largely intact...
...The workingclassdominated milieus of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remained by and large what they had been...
...Few people will admit this, but the tone that makes the music is pretty clear...
...And yet, it was none of these political events that initiated the fundamental transformation that was to be completed in 1989...
...multilateralism as opposed to unilateralism...
...4) other classes mailed through the USPS average no...
...1. The appearance of the new social movements and their political offspring, the Green parties...
...Wherever labor's struggle with capital was mediated by various public or para-public institutions and neocorporatist arrangements, the losses were less drastic...
...or the politics of confrontation embodied by the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO) and the Student Socialist Organization (SDS) in the Federal Republic, there developed a clear challenge to the existing lefts in each of these societies...
...They argued that the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany could—and did—on occasion produce good things, such as a stable and democratic order in Germany and Europe...
...In my article "The Minister and the Terrorist" (Foreign Affairs, November-December, 2001), I described four groupings that emerged at this juncture within the New Left...
...The first was the external line that separated it from the rest of the political world, notably liberals, conservatives, fascists, clericalists, and the representatives of "cleavages" other than the "owner-worker" cleavage that defined the essence of the left as a whole.* And second was the internal line that separated social democrats from communists...
...Publisher: Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, 310 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10025...
...Above all, they did not develop a visceral hatred of all things American...
...Instead, we witness the proliferation of 12 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 groups focused on particular forms of injustice, slighting, and victimization—in other words, on purely negative experiences...
...The Third Worldists would later constitute the bulk of the "Fundamentalist" (or "Fundi") wing of the German Green Party and fight a bitter rearguard action against what they believed to be the sellouts by Fischer and his "Realos...
...Where social democracy was the stronger of the two before the war, it emerged so again afterward— and vice versa...
...d. free distribution by mail (samples, complimentary, and other free) (1) outside-county as stated on Form 3541: average no...
...Still, with the events of 1989 and 1990, a period that began in the late 1860s and early 1870s and entered its political salience in the 1880s came to a close...
...Being a Dissenter was still acceptable in the large tent of the left...
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...whereas the latter still saw their raison d'être in fundamental opposition to the dominant social system...
...b. paid and/or requested circulation (1) paid/requested outside-county mail subscriptions stated on Form 3541 (include advertisers' proof copies/exchange copies): average no...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 11,127...
...The left moved from growth, state, class, economy, and politics to identity, gender, empowerment, and deconstruction...
...Of course, there were immense differences between social democrats and communists in this orthodox period...
...Some would say that the radicalism of this period, its revolutionary potential to transform capitalism, ended with the tragedy of 1914...
...They considered imperialism the most important political issue of the day and rejected everything that the developed world stood for, including Western values and industrial modernization...
...confronting harsher conditions of production...
...h. copies not distributed: average no...
...Italy's Hot Autumn...
...actual no...
...The term had always been associated with some sort of growth, but now the desirability of growth was questioned, if not entirely rejected...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: none...
...e. free distribution outside the mail (carriers or other means): average no...
...This is a very serious problem for organized labor and its progressive allies in advanced capitalist societies because it fosters an especially problematic particularism...
...strategically, both were hopeful about "mega" solutions—"mega" state, "mega" bureaucracies, "mega" technologies, "mega" progress...
...Posters of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Jerry Garcia, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Allen Ginsberg adorned the homes of thousands of European New Leftists alongside such other icons as Che Guevara and, of course, Ho Chi Minh...
...All communists—without exception— rejected the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, opposed the United States, and favored the Soviet Union at least in some fashion, whereas most social democrats were hostile to the Soviet Union, if initially also guarded in their support for the West, NATO, and the United States...
...Date: December 1, 2004...
...But there exists a more fundamental problem...
...Mainly carried by students and not by the traditional subject of the left—that is, the industrial working class—this massive transformation of the discourse of the left was deeply anchored in the cultural climate of the United States, which the rest of the world, particularly Europe's students and its young generally, embraced with enthusiasm...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: none...
...In contrast to all other New Leftists, members of this group considered the industrial working class not only a worthy ally but as an "objectively necessary" part of any major social transformation...
...In the course of the 1970s and increasingly in the 1980s, progress began to mean almost the opposite of what it did before...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 4,478...
...I cannot think of two more potent wedge issues that define inclusion and exclusion on the left today...
...After all, Leninism had designed the transmission-belt pattern of party-union relations precisely in order to eliminate unions as autonomous actors—and thus prevent syndicalist tendencies from developing as viable options for left politics in advanced industrial societies (though they did develop in semiagrarian settings such as Spain, Italy, and southern France...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 9,181...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 1,771...
...Left-wing nationalism has a long history in Germany (National Bolshevism and the Strasser wing of the National Socialists are two cases in point), and it is hardly surprising that such feelings were represented among the '68ers as well...
...Although the political character of governments mattered, more important still were the deeper social structures...
...Communism was a serious contender for governmental power in Italy, France, Greece, and Czechoslovakia before it was defeated by American-sponsored opposition in the first three cases and by Soviet tanks—twice—in the last...
...Even though often defensive in nature (and also demobilizing), these neocorporatist arrangements signaled a new union strength...
...In this view, the Germans were no exception...
...One of the most characteristic manifestations of orthodoxy all over Europe was the domination of the party over the unions...
...Absolutely crucial in these were the massive offensives led by hard-right governments such as Ronald Reagan's administration in the United States and Margaret Thatcher's in Great Britain...
...For the ensuing thirty years, social democracy was unequivocally pro-Western...
...I only want to suggest that on virtually all the indicators dear to economists, the restructuring that occurred at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries created dislocations far more massive than those produced by capitalism today...
...it was in full swing by the time the Wall tumbled in good part because of the ineptitude and moral bankruptcy of at least part of this left...
...Several points are worthy of mention in this context: 1. Everywhere in Europe there occurred at this time a clear politicization of the unions...
...Both of these developed into absolute icons for all lefts in the world...
...that is, all matters pertaining to the state, society, economy, and culture, whereas the unions' domain pertained al'Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, "Cleavage Structures, Party Systems and Voter Alignments: An Introduction" in Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives (New York: The Free Press, 1967), pp...
...8. Complete mailing address of headquarters or general business office of publisher: same as above...
...In short, it led, and the unions followed...
...On the institutional level, there emerged small, but intellectually influential parties to the left of the traditional social democratic and communist parties in terms of their programs as well as their strategic approaches...
...His latest book is called AmerikaDich Hasst Sich's Besser: Antiamerikanismus and Antisemitismus in Europa, published in 2004 by Konkret-Literatur-Verlag in Hamburg...
...Owner: Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc., 310 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10025...
...1-64...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 10,760...
...34 inst...
...2004 STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP AND CIRCULATION (Required by 39 U.S.C...
...Alas, we know from too many tragic events how erroneous this wishful thinking was...
...3685) 1. Publication title: Dissent...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 11,127...
...Fragmentation and Polarization 198911990-Present With the collapse of Soviet communism and the green and purple challenge to Western social democracy, the European left has lost the overall coherence of modernist universalism that defined it for more than a hundred years...
...There is, of course, the exception of the British Labour Party, whose identity and policies were much more directly influenced by the party's constituent unions than was the case for the continent's three social democratic giants— Sweden, Austria, and Germany...
...He believed that because capitalism exploited the working class internationally, the working class would sooner or later realize the international dimensions of its predicament and confront capitalism with its own internationalist solidarity...
...Thus, it is not by chance that in Germany, France, Italy, and the United States, the "'68ers" (achtundsechziger, soixantehuitards) have attained near mythical status, and generated a considerable nostalgia, in the postwar histories of these countries' left-wing politics...
...Through the influx of a large number of academic researchers, many of whom were veteran "68ers," the unions developed a more sophisticated theoretical approach to problems that until then remained largely beyond their purview...
...2. The weakening of union power...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 74...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 4,403...
...Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities: None...
...After all, it was then that the left realized that its internationalism and perceived universal class solidarity had lost its primacy to the much more powerful sentiment of particularistic nationalism...
...ANDREI S. MARKOVITS is the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor...
...To be sure, there are some small pockets among the German Greens— though much less in the SPD's milieu—where Israel, Zionism, and America have not become automatic terms of derision and hatred...
...and that liberal democracy, though capitalist, was indeed preferable to tyranny, even of the people's republic kind...
...0 N THE OTHER HAND, the relationship between parties and unions changed substantially...
...It was at this critical juncture—the decade between 1968 and 1978—that tendencies developed whose influence persists to this day, in Germany especially, but also in Europe generally...
...2. This, of course, led the unions to distance themselves from their respective parties...
...Largely propelled by a restive rank and file that wanted to cash in on its superb position in a tight labor market, the unions bargained for the most impressive "quantitative" 8 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 and "qualitative" gains attained by labor at any time in the fifty-plus years of the postwar period...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 158...
...This changed drastically in the course of the 1980s...
...The Parti Socialiste Unifie in France might perhaps be the best example of this genre: small in number of voters, members, and officeholders, but important in intellectual influence...
...The earlier relationship between these two was by and large resumed during the postwar period...
...Possibly no other change wrought by the New Left had such a tangible impact on virtually all aspects of private and public life as did the rise and establishment of the women's movements...
...Publication name: Dissent...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 297...
...If the subsequent era was to transcend DISSENT / Winter 2005 n 7 POLITICS ABROAD socialism and develop some sort of post-socialist politics, New Leftists in the period I have labeled "heterodox" wanted a "true" socialism, freed from what they viewed as related perversions: social democracy in the West and Leninism/Stalinism in the East (though some New Leftists were mesmerized by Leninism in its Maoist version...
...As a consequence of this difference, communists and social democrats also found themselves on opposite sides of the cold war, then in a hot phase...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date) 10,760...
...In a hierarchy of key items defining what it means to be left in contemporary Europe and the United States—prochoice, abolition of the death penalty, equality in marital arrangements and official recognition of gay and lesbian couples by the state...
...If anything, labor has emerged as the most nationalistic among all major social groups in advanced capitalist countries...
...Concretely, these changes were anchored in two major struggles that informed American politics at the time: the civil rights movement at home and the Vietnam War abroad...
...The losses covered many areas: receding or stagnating membership...
...The third group were the "orthodox Marxists," who located the source of the Federal Republic's ills not in industrial modernization but in capitalism...
...Already then, the main root of Germany's trouble lay in its solid anchoring in the West—controlled by that double-headed evil, the United States and world Jewry...
...Interestingly, the losses were particularly severe in those countries where labor had been the least "compromised" by corporatist arrangements during the previous two decades...
...This Statement of Ownership will be printed in the Winter 2005 issue of this publication...
...Today, this antimodernist, anti-Western sentiment is alive and well throughout Europe among those on the extreme right and left who invoke nationalism in their opposition to globalization...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: none...
...The authority that parties of the established left enjoyed during the orthodox period eroded in this decade of heterodoxy...
...The deep American roots of the New Left in Europe, both in form and substance, are beyond debate...
...Others would date the crisis from the end of World War I, the events of 1918, which already pointed toward the coming of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and National Socialism in Germany...
...2. Publication No.: 158-080...
...In the communist as well as the social democratic version, the party was in charge of "big" politics...
...4. There was also a noticeable "intellectualization" of the labor movement...
...of community that were so essential in the creation of a politically effective working class...
...If being left and progressive meant building dams and steel mills during the previous two eras, it now implied saving little fish and rare birds from the destruction wrought by those very dams and mills...
...Managing Editor: Maxine Phillips, 310 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10025...
...But in Germany it also had a nationalist component provoked by the country's division and limited sovereignty...
...I argue that there have been four periods in the history of the left since World War II that have affected the position of the left today...
...Although it is evident that "the left," as commonly understood, was predominantly a European phenomenon throughout the late nineteenth century and all of the twentieth century, the United States did contribute significantly to this political formation precisely in the postwar period...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 9,356...
...There are virtually no divisions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and over the essence of the United States...
...These experiences may all be real, but the groups that develop around them will remain largely powerless without the positive institutions...
...The former had reached an accommodation with capitalism, even if they had not quite accepted it yet...
...actual no...
...At least in this instance, I will argue for the primacy of economy and society over politics...
...This has changed...
...9. Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor...
...facing serious problems with one's "own" parties, be they communist or social democratic...
...politically, they were believers in collective arrangements countering the inherent fragmentation of the market and liberal individualism...
...These collective expressions of workingclass identity remained largely intact between 1918 and 1968...
...6 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 most exclusively to "small" politics, the realm of industrial relations however defined...
...During his JUSO [youth organization of the SPD] days, the current chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, was closest to this wing of the New Left...
...c. total paid and/or requested circulation (sum of 15b(1), (2), (3), (4): average no...
...One cannot understand the rise of the New Left in Paris, Berlin, Milan, and London without understanding the massive influence of American rock 'n' roll, folk music, protest songs and poetry, and the civil rights movement's tactic of the "sit in...
...They detested its parliamentary institutions, disdained its market-based economy, hated its role as a driving force in modernization's inevitable destruction of the environment, and feared any manifestation of nationalism, which they saw as a harbinger of the ever-looming "fascistization" of German politics and society...
...We will most likely be spared any repetition of the horrors of the GULAG or the genocidal mania of the Khmer Rouge—whose protagonists claimed to be acting in the name of justice, equality, and progress...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 98 percent...
...The character of left-wing politics, the culture of socialists and communists, was barely changed by the war...
...i. total (sum of 15g, 15h(1), and 15h(2): average no...
...actual no...
...This radical change has three salient features...
...actual no...
...Nowhere was this more obvious than in Italy, where the three union confederations (allied with different parties) discovered that as many things united as divided them...
...But to paraphrase a well-known political economist of the nineteenth century: it appears first as tragedy, the next time as farce...
...The Hitler-Stalin pact, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, a replay of that in Czechoslovakia twelve years later, the Sino-Soviet altercations, the war between China and Vietnam, the Cambodia fiasco with all its implications— there were plenty of sobering experiences for the progressive project in Europe...
...and on and on—opposition to Israel and America figure at the very top...
...Still, the immense similarities between communism and social democracy were more characteristic of the orthodox period than the obvious differences...
...Here are some of these shared traits: both were sociologically anchored in the male, industrial, mainly skilled working class...
...Two fault DISSENT / Winter 2005 n 5 POLITICS ABROAD lines—both of which had been "frozen" by 1920—defined the identity of "the left...
...As a consequence, the Westerners committed a major blasphemy in the eyes of the rest of the left...
...Thus, for example, even though Helmut Kohl's government in Germany was by most measures as conservative as Reagan's in the United States and Thatcher's in Britain, it simply could never roll back labor in Germany to the same degree...
...DISSENT / Winter 2005 n 13...
...And they also began to look at the Holocaust as a development sui generis and not merely as an epiphenomenon of what the rest of the German left then still called—and continues to call—"fascism" rather than National Socialism...
...The hegemonic discourse of the left on both sides of the Atlantic features America and Israel as identity-defining issues that are largely nonnegotiable...
...But even in the social democratic variant, where no concept equivalent to the transmission belt existed, the party was hegemonic: it designed strategy, took charge of the theoretical debates, and prevailed in shaping economic policy...
...It was in this milieu that the new meaning of "leftism" in Europe and the United States was forged...
...Marx got it right: capitalism, an inherently depersonalized and rootless form of productive relations, was indeed international in its structure, and this international system of production exploited laDISSENT / Winter 2005 n I I POLITICS ABROAD bor on an international scale...
...For reasons that probably have more to do with the personal psychologies and histories of the relevant individuals than with macro-sociological factors such as class background, education, religion, geographic origin, and gender, the Westerners successfully differentiated between American culture (which they loved, as is evident from Fischer's well-known admission that Bob Dylan had a greater influence on his life than Karl Marx) and American politics in the world (which they disliked...
...the events" in Paris...
...Instead, it had been "about the right of every Volk to assert its national-revolutionary and social-revolutionary liberation...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 101...
...Germany's current foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, is exhibit A. This group, though vehemently against the war in Vietnam, totally supportive of third world liberation movements, and bitterly opposed to Western—as well as West German—capitalism, began to reorder the hierarchy of its negative preferences...
...In brief, protecting the life-world, reclaiming lost intimacy, defending vulnerable groups, extolling smallness—all this replaced the previous faith in the liberating aspects of technology and the obsession with "mega" projects that had dominated the European and American left's discourse for exactly one hundred years...
...But the political landscape of Western Europe, as delineated by Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, still pertained...
...In the United States, Canada, Britain, France, and even in supposedly "open" and export-oriented countries such as Germany, the trade unions have consistently been active supporters of some sort of protectionist measures...
...g. total distribution (sum of 15c and 15f): average no...
...An expanded and amended English-language version is forthcoming from Princeton University Press...
...5. No...
...If one has anything positive—or even non-derogatory— to say about the United States or Israel, one always needs to qualify it with a rePOLITICS ABROAD sounding "but...
...7. Complete mailing address of known office of publication: Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc., 310 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10025...
...Yes, communism seemed ascendant vis-à-vis social democracy on account of the Soviet Union's emergence as a global power...
...Crucial in this reordering was that tyranny rather than capitalism was put at the top of the list...
...During the 1970s, the Third Worldists believed that the Federal Republic was second only to the United States in its objectionable character...
...Whereas 1945 represented a major hiatus in the arrangement of global politics, it did not alter the essential identity and topography of the left...
...In marked contrast to the Third Worldists, adherents to this path develI0 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 oped an anti-Zionism that could barely, if ever, be differentiated from anti-Semitism...
...Percent paid and/or requested circulation (15c/I5g x 100): average no...
...The Orthodox Period: 1945-1968 I have called the first era the orthodox period because it witnessed a continuation, by and large, of the left's ideological and political topography since the Bolshevik Revolution...
...On the intellectual level, the New Left offered a radical critique of the politics of the hegemonic parties...
...of issues published annually: four 6. Annual subscription price: $24 individual...
...actual no...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: none...
...They expanded their horizons from the confined world of industrial relations and shop-floor affairs to include issues of "grand politics" hitherto left to the respective "sister" (or "mother") party...
...actual no...
...economic and social justice...
...Finally, it remains an open question whether what is today called "globalization" is truly unprecedented in its altering of social relations and human life—as so many claim—or whether it is merely another of the constantly changing and highly disruptive stages in the longue durée of capitalism...
...The Heterodox Period: 1968-1979 It would not be an exaggeration to say that virtually all the tenets defining the left during the "orthodox" period were substantially challenged, if not superseded, by events during the legendary sixties...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: none, actual no...
...John Maynard Keynes triumphed over Karl Marx, and the Godesberg platform prevailed all over Western Europe—well beyond the immediate confines of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD...
...Faith previously placed in technology, centralization, and the state was now conferred upon localism, decentralization, and community power...
...The dislocations of those years shattered the left's internationalism, led it to embrace centrifugal particularisms, and then to watch its emancipatory dreams die on the battlefields of Europe...
...Adherents of this tendency reached deep into the SPD and some German trade unions, notably the metal workers', printers', journalists', writers', and bank employees' unions...
...3. Central to this activism was the role of hitherto marginal elements within the labor movement...
...The countries north of the Alps (with Finland and Norway being the useful exceptions proving the rule) exhibited a social democratic identity, whereas their counterparts to the south embarked on a communist path...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 175...
...Increasingly, also, the color purple denoted the arrival and staying power of politically meaningful women's movements in the public arena of all advanced industrial democracies...
...And as a consequence of their powerlessness, they will turn inward, extolling their own particularism, which will only further fragment an already fragmented left...
...actual no...
...dealing with a hostile state preoccupied with creating favorable economic conditions for an increasingly difficult global economy...
...In notable contrast to the subsequent time period, which entailed a paradigm shift, the New Left challenge developed within the Marxist paradigm—though it was profoundly threatening to the existing world of socialist politics...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: none...
...No doubt, the party's primacy over the unions was much more pronounced in the communist model than in the social democratic one...
...In other words, where labor's conflict with capital remained the "purest" in the sense that it preserved the market as the main arena and adjudicating mechanism of this conflict, the unions' setbacks were particularly severe...
...Although labor's core—that is, male, skilled, industrial workers—also participated in the general mobilization, it was often its lesser skilled, female, and foreign colleagues who were the political vanguard at the grass roots and on the shop floor...
...2) paid incounty subscriptions stated on Form 3541 (include advertisers' proof copies/exchange copies): average no...
...The New Left focused mainly on opposing the war in Vietnam, demonstrating solidarity with developing-world liberation movements, and transforming bourgeois society...
...Briefly put, the working class lost its position POLITICS ABROAD not only as a theoretically compelling feature of all socialist orientations but also as an empirical necessity of quotidian politics...
...support for third world claims against the rich first world...
...Lastly, members of this group upheld the value of universalism—already at this time a ready target for various relativizing particularisms that came to define other groups on the left, to which I now turn...
...f. total free distribution (sum of I 5d and 15e): average no...
...seeing the arena and timing of conflict determined by management...
...actual no...
...This issue contributed to an open break within Italian social democracy (between the Socialist Party [PSI] and the Social Democratic Party [PSDI]), and similar fissures— without the ensuing break—opened in POLITICS ABROAD German, British, Danish, and Norwegian social democracy as well...
...Paradigm Shift: 1980-1989 In this era most fundamental assumptions of the socialist project underwent major challenges...
...Roughly speaking, to the Westerners, the plight of the Jews was a serious issue, which meant that they developed a much more favorable view of Israel than did the other three groups...
...actual no...
...Both theoretically and empirically, there was a tight logical connection between the working class and the left: not all workers had to be left, but there could be no left without workers...
...A new European (and American) commonality for all lefts—a new litmus test of progressive politics—seems to have developed: anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism (though not anti-Semitism, or at least not yet...
...Though small in actual numbers, these parties represented the legacy of the "68-ers" in the left's "party space"—a standing challenge to the orthodox left...
...On the one hand, one should rejoice in this development, because Truth and Progress (with capital letters) were too arrogantly defended by much of the left throughout the twentieth century...
...There has not been a common issue since the Spanish Civil War that has united the left so clearly as has anti-Zionism and its twin, anti-Americanism...
...If one is not at least a serious doubter of the legitimacy of the state of Israel (never mind the policies of its government) and if one does not dismiss everything American as a priori vile and reactionary, one runs the risk of being excluded from the entity called "the left...
...The two most prominent German radicals to undergo such a shift are Horst Mahler and Bernd Rabehl...
...By the mid-1990s, in fact, a substantial number of '68ers had completed a journey from extreme left to extreme right, with the constant factor being their hatred of the West...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 4,486...
...This was a time when the left, both social democratic and communist, placed its hopes in the "clean" energy of nuclear power...
...And for a good reason: labor indeed stands to lose an inordinate amount of power and tangible material gains in a "free" global market subject only to the laws of unbridled capitalism...
...To be sure, the big union organizations were major players in these countries' social democracies, but they took a back seat to "their" parties in politics...
...Indeed, I would argue that perhaps the most defining gauge of where somebody stood politically, how she/he saw the world, was that ubiquitous triangle of Israel, the Jews, and the United States...
...On every conceivable front and in every country, organized labor suffered one defeat after another, leading to a substantial weakening of its position in the political arena and the labor market...
...To the Third Worldists and the orthodox Marxists, the plight of the Jews—though real—remained unimportant, massively subordinate to the plight of third world peoples (to the Third Worldists) and of workers (to the orthodox Marxists...
...It was really a conjuncture of social, economic, generational, and cultural shifts that changed the very identity of the left over the last twenty-five years...
...The changes that came in the late 1960s were nothing short of revolutionary, though—in contrast to the two subsequent periods—they still followed the major vectors of what it meant to be "left...
...Even though these two activisms clashed with each other, they emanated from the same optimism, power, and self-confidence that redefined the role of unions inside the European left during this period...
...actual no copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 98 percent...
...Still others see the death of a progressive alternative in the internecine battle between social democrats and communists that contributed to—though it wasn't responsible for— fascism's triumph, particularly in Germany...
...By the mid-to-late 1950s, however, the "Westernizers" had carried the day...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 301...
...3. Filing date: December I, 2004...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 9,186...
...ICALL THE FIRST group the "Westerners...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 9,344...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 4,402...
...It is in this context that the old siren songs of nationalism and neonationalism seem especially appealing to the lefts of all industrial societies...
...2) in-county as stated on Form 3541: average no...
...For the first time in the history of the left, the essential impetus for this development came not primarily from Europe but from the United States...
...I remember calling myself a Labor Zionist in the late 1960s and early 1970s...
...Signature and title of editor, publisher, business manager, or owner: Debra Plastrik, Business Manager...
...4. Issue frequency: quarterly...
...WHATEVER THE actual reasons for the predominance of one leftist camp over the other, there was an obvious North-South divide in Europe during this period of orthodoxy...
...On both sides of the Atlantic, this generation was equally formed by the first seemingly democratic and impromptu rock festival held in the muddy fields near Woodstock, New York, and by one of Europe's foremost intellectual émigrés who, unlike others in his immediate milieu, proudly remained in America while becoming one of this country's most challenging critics...
...All other movements, social groups, and individuals were in principle subordinated to the working class in the endeavor of attaining socialism...
...They also developed cozy relations with East Germany, whose MarxistLeninist system they regarded with tolerant admiration if not outright enthusiasm...
...Tellingly, much of critical social science, formerly engaged on behalf of a progressive agenda, was now superseded by an increasingly philosophized Marxism, which in turn drifted toward literary criticism and various other poststructural and postmodern intellectual endeavors...
...Put positively, at the top now was not the emancipation of the working class or even the liberation of third world peoples from imperialism, but rather democracy, due process, constitutionalism, and human rights...
...A political manifestation and social formation that defined the very idea of progressivism in the advanced industrial societies for exactly one century collapsed...
...IT HAD BECOME clear by the mid-1980s that green was the left's trendsetting color instead of the century-old red...
...But just as Marx the social analyst was more often right than wrong, the opposite is true for Marx the normative thinker, the revolutionary, the activist, the political man...
...In addition to this activism "from above," the unions also engaged in an activism "from below...
...Although one can still identify many worthy causes that qualify as progressive, one would be hard-put to identify a subject of history that—like the working class of yore—could form the social basis of a unified left...
...The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for federal tax purposes has not changed during the preceding twelve months...
...Be it the events at Berkeley, Columbia, and the National Democratic Convention in Chicago for the United States...
...They were vehemently anti-Zionist (although not necessarily anti-Semitic) and found in the Palestinians an emblem of noble suffering and anticolonial resistance...
...legalization of marijuana...
...ideologically, both were ardent advocates of growth at all costs...
...Along with two other prominent ex-leftists, Mahler—now the far right National Democratic Party's official legal counsel—recently declared that the '68er movement had been "neither for communism nor for capitalism, neither for a Third-Worldist nor for an Eastern or a Western community of values...
...If the 1970s was the decade of the unions, the 1980s could be called the decade of union setbacks...
...The left's innocence was most certainly lost by the early fall of 1914...
...Thus, the losses incurred by American and British labor were more profound and long-lasting than those suffered by German, Austrian, and Swedish labor...
...failure to attain even the most meager compromises in collective bargaining...
...actual no copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 1,416...
...There too, however, independent union power figured significantly in the discourse of the left, particularly because the former Catholic union, sporting the new acronym CFDT, shed its former clericalism and became one of the most vocal advocates of the New Left...
...This group's strength explains why serious criticism of "actually existing socialism" in the Soviet DISSENT / Winter 2005 n 9 POLITICS ABROAD bloc was unpopular in parts of the German left well into the 1980s—so much so that the Polish Solidarity movement was often denounced by German unionists and social democrats as retrograde and reactionary...
...3) sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, counter sales, and other non-USPS paid distribution: average no...
...This was still possible in important circles of the German and the American left...
...But something wholly new also happened at this time: the rise of left politics outside of POLITICS ABROAD any established institutions, parties, or unions...
...progressive income tax...
...The second group I call the "Third Worldists...
...The universalism of class as a primary political identity was superseded by the particularism of groups...
...It is here that the nexus between the volkisch left and the vOlkisch right, which manifested itself so vigorously in the streets of many German and European cities in the spring of 2002 and again in 2003, was forged...
...3. Labor's inability to pursue a genuine policy of international solidarity...
...I am talking about Herbert Marcuse, whom many have—quite rightly—called the New Left's most influential thinker...
...Above all, the 1980s witnessed the weakening —perhaps even severing—of an alliance that once had defined the left, with the working class as subject of history and driving force of progressive politics...
...Nationalist sentiment grew over the controversy surrounding the 1983 deployment of American intermediate-range nuclear missiles on German soil and was later intensified by German unification...
...This article is based on a paper presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association...
...Issue date for circulation data below: Fall 2004...
...History, of course, never repeats itself...
...On the one hand, they entered into various macropolitical arrangements with employers and the state that gave labor an active role in economic management...
...American developments will be mentioned only when they were essential contributors to the shaping of the left in all advanced industrial societies...
...3) other classes mailed through the USPS: average no...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 67...
...From circa 1880 until 1980, the most fundamental dogma of social democrats and communists alike was that the working class would be the decisive carrier of social transformation beyond capitalism...
...Extent and nature of circulation: a. total no...
...They saw the West also as an occasional force of liberation and emancipation, not only as one of repression and exploitation...
...Union leaders always had a very ambivalent relationship to left-wing intellectuals, but now a "march through the institutions" on the part of New Left activists changed organized labor's mentality to a noticeable degree...
...In the nationalist camp, by contrast, the plight of the Jews was either never acknowledged or even viewed with outright contempt...
...Similar, though not as effective, distancing maneuvers on the part of unions also occurred in Germany, Britain, Sweden, and Austria...
...actual no...
...copies (net press run): average no...
...Add to this group a substantial presence of tertiary-sector "intellectual" workers, and the new working class had become a politically meaningful reality...
...In fact, this profound crisis predated the events of 1989...
...being unable to strike...
Vol. 52 • January 2005 • No. 1
