Some weeks ago, provoked by
a poll in LFF, I
posted on “influential leftists”, listing five good influences, five bad influences and five who I wished were more influential.
Flesh is Grass rightly
noted that it might be better to think of influential ideas. I’ve been thinking about it ever since, and decided it’s an impossible task.
What are “ideas”? Inventive solutions to society’s problems (anathema to someone who sees the whole of capitalism as fundamentally flawed)? Big ideas, isms like socialism (or is that too abstract and utopian)? Something in between?
Well, having been mulling it over, I’ve come up with my lists, even though looking at them they seem a bit ridiculous. Some of them are meant to be provocative, some are heart-felt, but I’m not going to tell you which are which.
GOOD INFLUENCES
Social justice – This is probably the idea that I hold most dear, and which ultimately influences more or less the whole left, but as I write it down, it seems pathetic, a platitude rather than an idea, and one that has been bent and abused by everyone from Bill Ayers to Iain Duncan Smith. Still, surely worth defending?
Internationalism – Arguably another platitude, and one that most of the left lays claim to. But I wish it was a little more influential, that people who pay it lip service actually worked out how to put it into practice, actually applied it, say, to the Tamils languishing in refugee camps in Sri Lanka’s interior, to the Chinese workers who make all the plastic tat we put in our kids’ party bags, to the women who are stoned for adultery in western Asia.
The one state solution – Many of my friends on the anti-anti-Zionist left think that the one state solution is essentially equivalent to the genocidal destruction of the Jewish nation. They argue that the Arabs (who have demography on their side, and formidable military allies in the form of the Saudis, Iran and so on) have proven themselves unable to share space with Jews. I reject this fatalistic view, and having recently been in Northern Ireland am more confident than ever that we can forge our own futures if we unshackle our imaginations. It feels to me that the idea of the one state solution is steadily gaining ground, not just among the hardcore advocates of a “free Palestine”, but among younger Jews in both Israel and the diaspora. This slow awakening comes with a growing sense that another Zionism is possible, and a recovery of the memory of pre-1948 Zionism, the Zionism of Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Joseph Trumpledor, AD Gordon and Judah Magnes, which called for a “national home” for the Jews and not necessarily a nation-state. By the way, I have at various other times in my life called for a one state solution also for South Africa, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Ireland and Cyprus.
Open source – I remember thinking it was one of the sillier elements of the
Euston Manifesto that it filled a whole clause (no.14 if you're interested) with
open source software: a complete distraction, I thought, from the real issues. But since then I’ve changed my mind as I’ve watched the rise of creative commons licensing, free and open source software, participatory media, citizen journalism and
citizen scholarship. If you use Firefox or Wikipedia, for example, you will have experienced small-c communism in practice: voluntary co-operation and mutual aid on a massive scale, at the most sophisticated level possible, to achieve, well, not a common goal, but an endless multiplicity of projects, completely outside the logic of the market or the state.
Strangers into citizens – I think
this idea is influential, as it has managed to mobilise thousands of church-goers, as well as both
Red Ken and
Mayor Boris. Although
some of my comrades think it doesn’t go far enough, surely its influence is a good thing in itself?
BAD INFLUENCES
National sovereignty – What is a nation? How can a nation have a “self”? How is that “self” supposed to determine itself? Why should that self-determination take the shape of a state? Why should we respect the systems of rule that history has randomly bestowed on other nations? Why should we go to war, for example, out of respect for some Kuwaiti hereditary monarch’s right to use his kingdom as a personal bank account? Equally, why should we “stop” a war out of respect for some national socialist or clerical-fascist’s right to use his country as a personal fiefdom?
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions – It is now common sense in the liberal world to see Israel as a pariah state, the worst possible state in the world, as bad as apartheid South Africa, as bad as the Nazis already. The boycott, divestment, sanctions idea has zero chance of contributing positively to peace or justice in Palestine; its only role is to give liberals an outlet for their moral ejaculations and to engrave in indelible letters the idea that Israel is the last word in evil.
Blood for oil/the Israel lobby/the shock doctrine – These ideas are probably incompatible at some level, although that doesn’t stop them from being held equally true
by the same people. They are examples of
vulgar or arrested materialism. They are attempts to explain the world through its underlying material/economic forces, but fall short. They fall short because they have no way of explaining the link between material interests and political or geopolitical effects, so end up as versions of
conspiracy theory.
Foreigners are stealing our jobs – this sounds like a right-wing idea, but it has been repeated over and over again on the left by Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians, from Ed Balls to Phil Woolas to Ed MiIliband. And the left has so far failed to respond to this, except in the form of moralistic hand-wringing.
Second Campism – Imperialism was one of the great evils of the last few centuries, so it is to its credit that the left has historically opposed it. But nowadays, the power cartography of the world has been so re-calibrated that the whole notion of imperialism makes little or no sense, and the concept of anti-imperialism becomes more and more attenuated. It seems to me that most self-proclaimed
anti-imperialism these days is better described as
Second Campism – that is, supporting the other camp over one’s own. Thus leftists once flocked to Cuba and the Viet Cong as the enemies of Amerikkka; now they flock to “anti-imperialist” dictators who have even less connection to the left’s core values, simply because they are the enemies of Amerikkka.
NOT INFLUENTIAL ENOUGH
Mutualism, co-operatives, self-management – It is
bizarre to see Conservatives talking about mutualism and workers’ co-ops, as these are historically very much a part of the heritage of the left, and especially the British left. The co-operative movement is intimately tied up with the history of the labour movement. Both express, if in different ways, human desire for autonomy and self-management. It is tragic that the left has vacated that territory and left it for the right to claim. In the year that
Ken Coates and
Colin Ward died, it is time for these ideas, the legacy of people like
William Morris,
Murray Bookchin and
Daniel Guerin, to be influential again. (See also
Will Davies on this.)
Small government – The Tory claiming of mutualism is a symptom of a bigger failure of the left: its abandonment of the larger ideal of liberty. For the last century, the century of the Bolsheviks and the Fabians, non-state socialism has been eclipsed, and the right has claimed the mantle of the party of the small state. Time to take it back.
No borders – The abolition of borders is, of course, an impossibilist demand, a utopian dream. There is no way a single country can abandon its borders: the call for no borders is immediately a call for a totally transformed world, a world with no borders. This is not something we can work towards in a practical way, but rather a way of imagining the world, and thus making our world different.
Class analysis – This used to be one of the most influential ideas on the left. Far too influential, arguably, as the
trad left was blind to anything other than class: blind to sex and sexuality, to culture and morality, to psychology, to the sacred, to other axes of identity like gender and race, to patriotism and kinship... But the post-1968, has gone too far the other way. Only the most tedious and dogmatic of leftists talk about class these days. But without that anchor, the value of social justice goes adrift, and the left just surfs every passing wave, from Third Worldism to identity politics, from Gaia to Wahhabism.
Agnosticism – I don't mean agnosticism about God (although that seems the only sensible option to me) but rather agnosticism about religion. The chattering classes seem increasingly encamped in the culture wars over evolution and God, the Eaglefish versus the Hitchkins, each equally narrow-minded and obsessive. It seems to me that religion has a track record of contributing an enormous amount of good to the world, and an enormous amount of evil – and the same can be said of atheism. Enough already; let’s just get on with it.
Despite the signal lack of success of my last memething, I am tagging, if they feel up to it, the following: Flesh, Modernity, Norm, Carl again, Darren (because of this) and Sarah. Any ideas? P.S. please don't feel obliged to stick with the 5-5-5 formula or to write overlong essays at each bullet point like I did.
UPDATE: A
rejoinder from Eamonn on the one state solution, and a
response from Norm on national sovereignty, class analysis and one state.
Update 2: Sarah serialises her responses:
1,
2,
3. Flesh
responds here. And Waterloo Sunset on
what's wrong with the liberal left.
Update 3: Carl's entry.