The Marching Dead!! posted by Richard Seymour

If Nick Cohen is right, then the Left is dead as a serious political project; but since he has rarely been right in the last year or so, I'm inclined to doubt it. I'm not here going to engage in yet another boring refutation of his argument, point by point - and this is at least in part due to the glib diluteness of his case. As Charlotte Street points out:

Resourcefully, the concept of this great world-historical shift has been cobbled together from a handful of current media events – reaction to Michael Moore’s latest film, the visit of an obnoxious Muslim cleric to the UK, and of course the morally insolvent decision of the Left (along with the majority of Europe) to oppose an imperialist (sorry ‘anti-Fascist’) war.

In the strange temporality of the media-world, great sea-changes in human consciousness, abrupt shifts in the Zeitgeist and epochal actions and speeches happen with alarming regularity, or can be telescoped through the lens of a few prepackaged headlines, before being inexplicably dispatched to oblivion by the ‘next big thing’.

I'd like to point a few things out about his article, however:

1) Noone besides Saddam Hussein himself pretended "that Saddam had no honourable opponents". It is just that the kind that Cohen opted to support (the jaw-dropping PUK) had no claim to honour of any kind. On the other hand, Cohen's output has often involved the suggestion that the war had no honourable opponents, which is a shame.

2) Iraqi communists did not, on the whole, support the war. Of the various communist parties only one has chosen to join the occupying forces (presenting it as a victory for themselves in the process, of course). Iraqi trade unionists who opposed the war have of course been working with British trade unionists and socialists, and one of their representatives made his case against the war and occupation at the Unison conference this year. When Cohen refers to "Kurdish socialists", he actually means Dr Barham Saleh of the PUK, so I will allow judgments to form themselves on that.

3) A small point, but the term "Marxism-Leninism" has a very specific meaning in political language, refering to the state-religion of the Stalinist regime. The SWP is both Marxist and Leninist, but it is not "Marxist-Leninist". He can claim if he likes that Marxism-Leninism died by putting its ideas into practise, but it is best to know what is meant by the terms he is using first.

4) The SWP may have "led" the Stop the War Coalition in some senses, but not in any sense that has morally significant consequences. The SWP did not impose its ideological preferences on the coalition (otherwise there would have been no coalition), and its performance in terms of gaining ideological hegemony, organisational strength and media coverage suggests that whatever the SWP did bring wasn't altogether bad. It just happens to be the case that when mass movements erupt, it is usually the far Left that takes a leading role. Organisation and debate is what revolutionary parties are good at (some would say that's the only thing they are good at).

5) Since when was Douglas Hurd revived "in liberal circles"? Does anyone know what he's talking about?


Now, all those points aside, I think I understand where Cohen is coming from when he mourns the demise of the "democratic left". With the end of the Cold War, it was expected that the disappearance of the communist Left would result in a renaissance of the other main tradition of socialism - that of social democracy. Instead, as Gregory Elliot points out, we have watched them sucked into the void with their embarrassing militant cousins. The reformist road to socialism was unavailing, but the reformist road to a more humane capitalism doesn't look much more hopeful.

Pursuing a strategy of accomodation with capitalism, rather than confrontation, parties of the centre-left and allegedly left-of-centre left (like the European Greens) have often done the job of the political right with greater alacrity than the right itself. The kind of anti-fascist Left that Cohen would like to see is that which sent volunteers to Spain in the 1930s; it is sad that the working class no longer appears to have that kind of international muscle*, but appealing to US military power as a surrogate is a profoundly mistaken approach. Given the record of the United States government, given its stated intentions (those embodied in important documents such as the National Security Strategy of 2002, and the literature of the Project for the New American Century), and given the peril involved in such a venture, it was entirely appropriate that people should have regarded the invasion and occupation with suspicion. And it was therefore entirely right that the Left should have taken a lead in this.

Because that tradition of the Left which Cohen supports has not fared well of late, he believes the Left is dead, (or maybe he is saying this to demoralise those who believe the Left has seen a modest but growing revival, who knows?). It would be more accurate to say that reformist socialism is giving way to its inner termites. That creates as many problems as it solves, but it does leave the decks cleared for a new Left oriented toward the new global situation. I believe that such a Left is emerging, conjoining a nascent, heterogenous anti-capitalism with full-blooded anti-imperialism. It is emerging thick and fast in Latin America and South Asia, trailed by growing numbers of supporters in Europe and North America. Trade unions are reviving their capacity for militant, grass-roots activity; street protest has never been so ubiquitous or so vibrant. Excellent grounds for hope if you have the stomach for it.

*This point needs to be qualified with one important consideration. The existence of large numbers of unemployed people, coterminous with the presence of an organised communist Left, made it easier to recruit people to go abroad and fight wars than today. There is perhaps an alarming sense in which subjectivity in late capitalism has become bourgeois, pacified, gentrified and less inclined to life-or-death struggle over such minor matters as principle. If that is so, I record it as a problem to be confronted rather than as a fatal truth to be stoically accepted.