Stephen says, "Spit in your hand and lube up his butthole before you mount his ass.  This can't be that play that shows gay sex but doesn't address the realities of lube."  Joseph complies and starts humping Max, who is lying shirtless on the floor, his face rubbing into the ancient carpet.  I slip out quietly to find the bathroom, and pass a Yiddish choir practice on my way to the ghostly, underused toilets.

We are rehearsing my new play, "You Will Experience Silence," in a building owned by Workmen's Circle, America's oldest and classiest organization for Yiddish culture and Jewish social activism.  The map in the lobby misleadingly states that there is a "Cemetary" on the fourth floor, and I've been joking that we should visit my great grandfather there, since my family has been active in Workmen's Circle ever since they landed in America.  

My family is still active, in the sense that the older generation - the one that grew up in the labor movement of the 1920s - is still active. But my parents were never members, and never brought us to meetings.  They did, however, bring us to a Workmen's Circle Chanukah Party when I was very young and my grandmother was the Chairwoman of the Metro DC chapter.  I remember distracting myself with driedls and chocolate until an old man got up and started talking about the "real" Chanukah.  My ears perked up.  He said that the real Judah Maccabee was a tyrant - that he slaughtered many fellow Jews in his battle against the Syrian Greek empire, and that his war of revolution was followed by a civil war between the Jews themselves - a war that had more to do with power than with religious ideology or devotion to God.  

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Often in the chronicles of human endeavor, what appears a great beginning, or at least a revival, in a political or ideological movement, in reality represents its final, decadent stage.  Some fireworks burn brightest as they die,  Thus it was that the flourishing anarchist movement during the Spanish civil war of 1936-39, while viewed at the time as a powerful breakthrough for a phenomenon that defined itself in terms baffling to most today, as "libertarian communism," stood at the conclusion of radical labor's intervention in history. 

There are many more such examples, both in totalitarianism and in more benevolent chapters of the modern epic.  From the Parisian insurrection of 1968 to the riots in Athens today, the same judgment appears appropriate:  notwithstanding the frenetic acclamation of superficial commentators, these are better seen as concluding rather than inaugural moments.  In my view, the same could be said of the Islamofascist offensive embodied in the atrocities of September 11, 2001. I believe the horror of that day represented Saudi Wahhabism in extremis, rather than the commencement of a victorious worldwide jihad, just as Hitler's temporary victories in Europe in 1939-41 preceded the eventual collapse, rather than the triumph, of Nazi imperialism.

Of no 20^th century event does the coincidence of spectacle with decline seem more obvious, in retrospect, than the Cuban Revolution of 1959.   The pathetic story of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's fall from revolutionary hero in 1960 to scrounging vagabond liquidated in Bolivia in 1967 was, at the time, perceived by only a few observers in the international radical milieu as a sign that the wave of protest culminating in France six months afterward would close, rather than open, a cycle.

Guevara has returned to prominence as a symbol of the left, displayed on tee shirts and other ephemera, including a brand of cigarettes in Holland.  With that result, the appearance of Steven Soderbergh's bloated two-part film Che, totaling four hours of incident and detail incomprehensible to anybody who is not Cuban or a specialist in the annals of Castroism, comes as no surprise.  But as with the revolution itself, and the subsequent squalid defeat of Guevara's Bolivian campaign, what we see on the screen must stand as a stillborn exercise in nostalgia, rather than evidence of a Castroite resurrection.  

In addition, this cinematic monstrosity signifies the end of Soderbergh's credibility as a film director.   While the Georgia-born cinéaste has been hailed absurdly as a protean figure excelling in all aspects of movie-making, his career has slid since he displayed a clever perceptiveness about sexual deceit in sex, lies, and videotape (1989).  His Erin Brockovich and Traffic, released in 2000, were competent but effective more for their messages - the virtue of protest against corporate corruption in the first case, the power of corruption represented by the drug trade, in the second - than for their cinematic verve.  Traffic, for its part, was marred by unconvincing family entanglements attached to the character of a high government official, played by Michael Douglas.

Soderbergh's obsessions, focused on improbable narrative convolutions that hardly rise to the level of "plot twists," obscure gadgets, and shallow characterizations, have made his later pictures unattractive, when not incomprehensible, to critics and viewers alike.  With the Ocean's 11-12-13 franchise, his flaws were aggravated to a point where the last two films became caricatural.  The blank stupidity of employing the actress Julia Roberts to play a woman pretending to be the actress Julia Roberts, in Ocean's 12, was hard to exceed, although the same film was weighed down (physically no less than psychologically) by the enormously (in every sense) untalented Catherine Zeta-Jones, who had brought nothing but bulk to Traffic. 

In Ocean's 13, Soderbergh outdid his previous artistic failures by humiliating Al Pacino, making him a simulacrum of the suave outlaw roles in some of which he had excelled (see the Godfather trilogy and Carlito's Way, not the ludicrous Scarface).   Ocean's 13 similarly degraded Ellen Barkin, who once joined Pacino in lighting up the classic Sea of Love. And those were but two imbecilities in a movie filled with such tidbits.  Formerly, such film fumbles were usually blamed by the prevalence in Hollywood of a then-common variant of "p.c.": Peruvian cocaine.  In the case of Che, however, the drug at fault is obviously the more familiar political correctness.

Andy Garcia, an underrated and underutilized star who, with obvious justification, trudged through the Ocean's franchise as if his only concern might have been to collect his check, is a Cuban-American and pronounced anti-Castro patriot, so that his inveiglement into the Che disaster was doubtless impossible to imagine.  But a Cuban-born star with a thorough knowledge of the events in Cuba and Bolivia in the 1950s and 1960s could not have saved this latest debacle.  Not even Benicio del Toro, a good choice for a Guevara impersonation, could effect such a rescue.  

Soderbergh's Che appears more a pseudo-documentary than a dramatic film, an effect heightened by the film's dialogue being almost entirely in Spanish.  Yet it is a pseudo-doc with a considerable difference, in that notwithstanding its enervating length, Soderbergh's Che ignores, without exception, the entire backstory of the events it portrays.  The origin of Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship is never explained; nor is the July 26, 1953 failed coup attempt by Castro, centered on an assault at the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, for which the July 26 Movement (M-26-J) was named.  Among Cubans and foreign experts, the latter gap may be easily explained; how to account for the fact that Batista, universally portrayed by Castrophiles as a monster, was satisfied to see the defiant captive Castro sentenced to no more than 15 years in prison, of which he served only two before he was released in a Batista amnesty?  How, we may ask, does this compare with the dozens of executions carried out after Castro's takeover?  Similarly, the training of Guevara as a medical doctor is unaddressed, although it is doubtful that many spectators of this film will ask how a physician, who has taken the Hippocratic oath to preserve life, could have ordered so many of the mentioned shootings.

The background of Guevara as an anti-American radical in the Guatemalan events of 1954 is also overlooked.  Add to this a silence about the history of the Directorio Revolucionario, the main alternative armed oppositional group to Castro's M-26-J.  Throughout the film, in addition to its near-exclusive Spanish dialogue, groups and names are mentioned without any effort to flesh them out.  A "Faustino" appears and denounces the PSP or Popular Socialist party, as the Cuban Communist party then styled itself, as Stalinists.  His full name, Faustino Pérez, is unmentioned, along with his cooptation into the Cuban Communist leadership.  Nor, of course, is the rich experience of the Cuban Stalinist apparatus as partners of Batista, whom they supported as the Nicaraguan Stalinists once backed Anastasio Somoza, discussed.   A "Rolando" is given orders, and is identified in the credits, printed in a separate pamphlet, as Rolando Cubela; Cubela's later turn against Castro, imprisonment in a plot to kill the dictator, and eventual exile, are deemed unworthy of mention. 

Similarly, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, a Spanish-born anti-Stalinist revolutionary who distinguished himself as a fighter in Cuba, is casually smeared, without further elucidation (Gutiérrez Menoyo also turned against Castro.)  As in the Ocean's franchise, Soderbergh remains fascinated with gimmicks rather than personalities.  He spends more time in the first half of the film recording the wrecking of apartment walls to gain a tactical position during the climactic battle of Santa Clara than with the crisis of the Batista regime caused by the same battle.       

In its second-half treatment of Guevara's Bolivian misadventure, context is even more important, and further absent.  Whatever one's view of the Bolivian Communist Party as a Soviet and Cuban tool, Guevara's delusions about life in the highland nation were absurd.  Bolivia's marginalized indigenous majority and history of Trotskyist trade-unionism, rather than pro-Soviet leftism or Castro-style socialist caudillismo, had nothing in common with the population in Cuba or its history.  Guevara emerged on the altiplano more as a subimperialist emissary of neighboring Argentina's Peronism than as an authentic social revolutionary, and left no visible influence in Bolivian political life.  Among the many phantom names that passes through this film like water in a sieve is that of Jorge Ricardo Masetti, an Argentine associate of Guevara who began his political career in a Peronist group with fascist tendencies.  This fact was revealed in a 1997 Guevara biography by Jon Lee Anderson, pretentiously credited as the film's Chief Consultant, but apparently ignored. 

Guevara was obviously a heedless risk-taker, as shown by the cigar- and pipe-smoking habits he maintained even though he was asthmatic.  Nobody has ever, it seems, asked what kind of person, especially one trained as a doctor, would so indulge himself. At the time of his death, few might have imagined the glamorous Guevara going to Bolivia to commit "revolutionary suicide" - a planetary equivalent of the "suicide by cop" in which insane individuals wave guns at the police.  But some in the Castroite milieu of the time, which existed in the U.S. no less than elsewhere, and of which I was then still a member, suspected that Guevara had become an uncomfortable presence for Castro.  

I remember vividly the rainy day in San Francisco, in October 1967, when the death of Guevara produced headlines in the local dailies.  We feared Guevara had been encouraged to leave Cuba and immolate himself in a faroff place, surrounded by people who did not understand or sympathize with him, with the complicity of Bolivian Stalinists.  In addition, much has been revealed since Guevara's death about Tamara Bunke, known as "Tania," the German-Argentine who accompanied him to Bolivia and was also killed there.  Bunke was a KGB/Stasi agent assigned to monitor Guevara's Bolivian operations.  All such perspective is missing from Soderbergh's film. 

The only thing more tedious about this film than its artistic and historic nullity was the juvenile reaction to it visible among the recusant leftists, many of them resembling escapees from an asylum, who crowded into its showing in Manhattan, giggling and cheering at predictable war scenes, like children at a Star Wars performance.  The film should be called Castro's 12, because like an Ocean's franchise product, it is all bogus aesthetics and no content - as well as in recollection of the 12 survivors, including Castro and Guevara, of the doomed Cuban revolutionary mission of 1956, in the yacht Granma.  These personages leap into the camera's eye and depart from it much as do the associates of George Clooney in the Ocean's series - but such may be the fate of any film roles created by Soderbergh.

In real history, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, notwithstanding their political faults, along with Gamal Abdel Nasser and Ahmed Ben Bella in North Africa, erupted into global attention as youthful idols.  The leadership of the leading nations then remained in the superannuated hands of men like Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Macmillan, DeGaulle, and Mao.  In this regard, the Cuban revolutionaries, in particular, and as I have written elsewhere, had more in common with Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis Presley than with Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. 

But Guevara himself, as a doctor who embraced terrorism, may better be compared with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian physician who became second-in-command to Osama bin Laden, as well as the notorious Stalinist assassin and medical anthropologist, Mark Zborowski; Radovan Karadžić, the government psychiatrist who became infamous as a terror leader in the Balkan wars of the 1990s and now faces trial at The Hague, and even Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi death-camp doctor (see Scientific Training and Radical Islam, published by the Center for Islamic Pluralism).  This is the aspect of the Guevara legacy that most needs examination, and is most lacking from Soderbergh's overblown homage to a revolution that led to tragedy and disillusion, even before the Bolivian fiasco that ended Guevara's life.

One of the few certainties of the 20th century was that the apostles of Marxist materialism and the adherents of Muslim theocracy were mortal enemies. In Afghanistan, they went to war. But that was the 20th century.

The terms Left and Right were coined in 1789 to describe seating arrangements for the National Assembly during the early stages of the French Revolution. Those seated to the podium's right wanted to preserve parts of the past; those on the left hoped, in the name of progress, to invent a new future. But the maneuverings of politics soon muddied the initial transparency of these terms into an enduring illegibility. The ideas of the bloody minded right-wing reactionary Joseph de Maistre, the intellectual arch-enemy of the Revolution, for instance, became an inspiration for the early socialists-and so it has gone ever since.

The flamboyant French litterateur Bernard-Henri Lévy, widely known in Paris as BHL, acknowledges the problem. In his new book, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, he writes that 'the famous split between Left and Right that has structured French politics . . . has become harder and harder to believe in.' That is because, to his dismay, much of the Left, cuckolded by history, no longer believes in progress or modernity. He describes the contemporary Left, with its signature scowl of anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and anti-liberalism, as 'that great backward falling corpse which the worms have already started to chew.' The corpse is what he confusingly calls 'the right-wing left'

Despite his disdain for much of the current Left, and despite the fact that many of those closest to his point of view in France endorsed the presidential candidacy of the 'right-wing' flag bearer Nicolas Sarkozy, a personal friend, Lévy refused to abandon the Socialist ticket. His dilemma, he told Sarkozy, was that no matter how much he liked, respected, and even agreed with the French president, he couldn't support him because 'the Left is my family.' Lévy's new book is an effort-part memoir, part essay, part polemic-to explain the nature of those family ties.

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There is an old child's joke that goes like this. "Rabbi David, Rabbi David, why does the dog wag his tail?" "Because, my child, the dog is bigger than his tail. If the tail was bigger, perhaps the tail would wag the dog."

The tail-wagging-the-dog inversion is an ancient staple of comedy. It is an equally ancient staple of political theory, starting with Aristotle's warning that wealth-seeking in the service of the household is a positive good, but where the household is devoted to wealth-seeking it has become corrupt. Aristotle was pointing to one of the biggest, most important questions about tail-dog relations in the West: what is the relationship between our politics and our economics? The different answers to this basic question are the real differences between McCain and Obama.

Marx argued that the answer was simple: our political values are merely temporary expressions of economic imperatives, and will give way as economic interests evolve. Marx also saw capitalism as inherently unstable. Capitalist markets, he said, would lead to an endless and amplifying series of boom-and-bust cycles, and at the same time the working class would be ever-more exploited by a dominant class. The combination of instability and resentment would lead to the proletarian revolution, most likely in Germany, later in the United States.

Marx was wrong, of course. The western democracies defied Marx's logic by a decidedly unMarxian choice of priorities: politics over economics. We intervened in our respective economies with government regulation, and social welfare programs, and publicly funded higher education, and the political empowerment of labor -- in ways ranging from American trade unions to the Scandinavian Fordist model - and created something new, a working middle class. We modified political arrangements to ensure representation for economically disempowered groups. And we intervened in the system of corporate capitalism to stabilize markets and tame, if not end, the boom-and-bust cycle of bubbles and depressions that had marked the century leading up to 1929. For a while, in other words, the world was not divided between working poor and capitalist rich.

One of the reasons Marx got his story wrong is the he did not sufficiently recognize that capitalism was evolving. New forms of corporate capitalism led to new forms of government-economy relations. That's the genius of capitalism, what Joseph Schumpeter called its capacity for "creative destruction"; old forms are pushed out as new ones come in.

But capitalism can also lead to a less creative form of destruction, when social relations are sacrificed to pure economic interests. Both state socialism and unfettered capitalism share this weakness: giving economic systems priority over political values creates terrible cognitive dissonance. In their personal lives we tell people - especially young people - to value loyalty and stability, kindness and empathy, respect and cooperation. Then we tell them exactly the opposite about their economic lives: that they should expect to have ten different jobs in their career, to always be negotiating, to be perpetually on the job market, to rely on nothing, commit to nothing, and expect no more than the market demands in return for their efforts. The interventions in western economies in the 20th century did more than tame the excesses of the markets, they opened the space for civil society and communality to flourish. Richard Sennett, among others, has recorded the decline in our understanding of the profoundly important relationship between political values, economic intervention, and social capital.

The current crisis involves confronting another new form of capitalism, finance capitalism. It is remarkable how little McCain and Palin seem to understand this basic point. Palin gave a speech recently in which she spoke about small towns as the "real" America. The speech got some attention for its negative implication - what parts of America are anti-American? - but there was another line in that speech that was actually more interesting. Speaking of small town America, Palin spoke of "those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food..." Factory workers, teachers, and farmers sounds like a description of the American workforce circa 1930.

Finance capitalism is a new, emergent form that supplements and, in places, supplants market and corporate capitalism. As a new form, finance capitalism has not yet matured. Specifically, we have not yet worked out an approach to the Marxian equation of economy and politics in this new context. When McCain bellows that Obama's plans are "socialism," and when Palin (probably unknowingly) quotes Reagan's declaration that the adoption of Medicare will be the end of American freedom, they are not just engaging in the classic pastime of Red-baiting. They are also reflecting a near-total lack of appreciation for the fact that new economic forms require new political approaches, not to create new value commitments but in order to preserve the old ones.

Doing the same thing in the face of changed conditions is one form of radicalism; adjusting measures to suit new conditions is essential to intelligent conservatism. The "freedom" of individual workers to negotiate the terms of their employment may have made sense in the context of cottage industries of the 17th century; it took on an entirely different, more sinister meaning in the context of early 20th century industrial capitalism. The "freedom" of patients and doctors to negotiate their relationship takes on a whole different cast in the face of HMOs and a giant health insurance industry bent on maximizing profits by minimizing costs. And the "freedom" to keep what you earn has to be reconsidered when "earning" means something unrelated to old ideas of productive work and "keeping" your money means being left to the mercy of economic predators. (Government, remember, was invented in the first instance to protect us from one another.)

So the basic question is both profoundly simple and hugely complex. The hugely complex dimension is, "Once we decide what we are after, here, how do we achieve it?" There won't be a single, magic wand-style solution. Like the relation between labor and industrial capital, or the relationships in international trade, or the systems of international finance, new arrangements will emerge piecemeal and take different forms in different places. But the profoundly simple question comes first. Confronted by the recognition of a new, explosively creative form of capitalism, do we declare once again that our economics serves our political ideals, or do we embrace the idea that concepts like "freedom" and "democracy" are only worthwhile because they create profits? Between our economic and our political values, which is the tail and which is the dog?

[Cross-posted from The Huffington Post]

Fair play to Hugo Chávez: he’s not the sort of man to let pesky obstacles like the laws of economics derail his vision for turning Venezuela into a socialist utopia. A couple of typically bombastic pronouncements over the weekend confirm that Hugo is happy on his chosen path and not for turning.

The government maintains strict price controls on foodstuffs such as milk and bread in an effort to ensure that poor citizens have access to daily staples, but the unintended consequence - as even a freshman economics major sitting hungover in a morning lecture daydreaming of pussy could have told you – is that, despite being one of South America’s richest nations, food shortages are now a familiar feature of everyday life, as farmers prefer to scrape a living selling their produce in neighbouring countries, where prices are higher.

Chávez’ response was a masterstroke. (All that coke must be good for the brain after all.) “If there’s a producer that refuses to sell milk to the government and sells it instead at a higher price to a private company, we will expropriate their farm,” said Mr Chávez on his Sunday television programme, Aló Presidente [“Hello, Mr President!”] as he inaugurated a state milk processing plant. “If we must bring in the army, we will do so” he added.

Nationalization of farms? Bravo, Hugo! That’ll put bread on the shelves! Indeed, for an idea so elegant in its simplicity, one wonders why no-one’s ever thought of it before. What? Oh.

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[Nick Cohen, author of the bestselling polemic What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way (the subtitle's slightly different in the UK), has generously agreed to let us reprint his new preface for the paperback edition. In August, I defended Cohen's book, and the Euston Manifesto, against the mendacious attacks of Johann Hari. --MW]

Tony Blair: There is global struggle in which we need a
policy based on democracy, on freedom and on justice . .
John Humphrys (a BBC presenter): Our idea of
democracy. . .
Blair: I didn't know that there was another idea of
democracy. . .
Humphrys: If I may say so, that's naïve . . .
Blair: The one basic fact about democracy, surely, is that you
can get rid of your government if you don't like them.
Humphrys: The Iranians elected their own government, and
we're now telling them. . .
Blair: Hold on John, something like 60 per cent of the
candidates were excluded.
BBC Radio 4, February 2007

WHEN I published What's Left? I did not expect to be universally loved. I have lived among London's liberal intelligentsia long enough to know that while it is hard on others it is always easy on itself, and would not take kindly to a history of how leftish people had ended up apologizing for the ultra-right. The reviewers who praised this book are all over its cover, what surprised me about the critics was their denial. A few said the book was a defence of the second Iraq war, even though every time I mentioned opposition to the war I said the opponents were right in nearly all their arguments but had astonished me and others by their inability to support those Iraqis who wanted something better after thirty-five years of a vile dictatorship.
More common was a transparent shiftiness.

All right, critics conceded, a few leftists had flipped over and gone along Islamism and Baathism. But these people were not worth bothering with. No connection existed between the ideological contortions of the extremes and a liberal mainstream that remained wedded to the highest principles. All I had done was use odious but fringe figures to smear decent and moderate men and women, such as themselves. As an account of my argument, this was partial in the extreme. What's Left? looks at how the Left picked up and then dropped the opponents of Saddam Hussein; why the European Union stood by and allowed Slobodan Milosevic to ethnically cleanse the Balkans; the reasons for the liberal middle class's disillusion with democracy and free speech; the instant willingness of respectable writers to excuse Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks; the inability of the British Liberal Democrats and European Social Democrats to oppose George W. Bush while supporting a free Iraq; the growth of polite antisemitism; and the propensity of liberals everywhere to portray a global clerical fascist movement as a rational response to Western provocation. Say what you will, but these were and are mainstream phenomena. Liberal writers did not examine them and explain why I was mistaken. They just ignored what I had written and hoped that if they insisted on their righteousness with sufficient vehemence, others would believe them - and maybe they would believe themselves.

For denial about what had happened to the liberal-left was not confined to the reaction of a couple of reviewers to one political book. In Europe and North America intellectuals worked ferociously to maintain the illusion that a principled consensus survived the mayhem after 9/11. I can sympathize with them to an extent because although it is essential to realize where the received wisdom is going wrong it is rarely a simple or painless task. Historians have it easy. They can look back at another time and see the faults in what almost everyone took for granted. In theory, we know future historians will do the same to us and find elements of our beliefs as wrong-headed and narrow-minded as we find many of those of our ancestors. In practice, however, self-examination is psychologically impossible for many. When you live in a consensus, it does not feel as if you have an ideology that needs examining. If the overwhelming majority of people you meet agree with you, your assumptions do not appear tenuous or debatable. They are just there - as natural as the air you breathe and as unquestionable as the weather.

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Why we need a left

In my first two posts of this series, I tried to defend opponents of violent jihadism and supporters of the Iraq war from the charge that they had abandoned the values of the left and indeed attempted to make a case that tackling Islamofascism and tyranny are on the contrary, authentic leftist positions to take.

 

I promised that my next post would look at the broader issue of why a left is still necessary. Clearly this is a topic more suited for a lengthy polemical book than a blog post (Yes, I am open to offers….) so what follows is a brief and simplified attempt to make the case that in the modern world, the values of the left remain absolutely essential if the combination of chaos and dynamism that prevails is to meet with a progressive response.

 

The first thing that has to be said in any attempt to state the case for the left in 2007 is – forget the far left. Leninism is dead, Trotskyism is dead, Stalinism is dead, Maoism is dead, the concept of ‘socialist revolution’ is dead and the idea of a planned socialist economy is dead. And to that one should add a long overdue – thankfully.

Millions of people were murdered, perished or were incarcerated as a result of ‘socialist experiments’ in the last century. Millions more had their lives and their family’s lives wrecked by communist dictatorships and in countries now described as ‘formerly communist states’ the impact of over four decades of totalitarianism are still felt.

 

That tiny minority of oddballs who continue to believe in the ‘dictatorship of the proleteriat’ and other euphemisms for state terror should be as unacceptable to democrats as far right-wing opponents of liberal democracy – what is amazing is that they are still regarded as acceptable leaders for ‘peace movements’ and labour movement organisations.

 

But, of course, while Marxist inspired revolutionary socialism was a horrendous catastrophe, social democracy (or democratic socialism if you prefer) came out of the last century with a pretty good balance sheet. Western European welfare states were inspired by and largely created by the social-democratic parties of the labour movement. The health care systems, the universal education systems, the progressive housing solutions, the victories in terms of wages and work conditions for millions of European workers are a credit to the social democratic project. It was never plain-sailing of course and there were times when the tide turned against social democracy (the era of Kohl-Reagan-Thatcher) and there were times when one wondered if anything would remain of the core aims of social-democracy (the era of the third-way).

But on the whole, social-democrats can be justly proud of the achievements of their parties in the past century. In countries where social democracy took root, real acute poverty is a thing of the past even though great inequalities of wealth remain. Likewise the values of social liberalism also can look back on great progress – great steps forward have been made in gender equality, gay rights, racial equality and religious freedom.

Together social-democracy and social-liberalism have improved the lot of millions of people and won real and lasting victories – if one steps away from the disasters of revolutionary socialism, reject it utterly, then the left has actually enjoyed enormous success – successes which of course need to be defended, expanded and improved upon. But while social democracy in Europe has been able to make headway in the main goal of taking the benefits of a capitalist economy and using the state to more broadly distribute the resources available and has, through regulation and intervention, been able to force capitalists to pay better wages and offer better working conditions, on a global scale poverty remains at an intolerable level with millions living in starvation conditions.

And while liberal democracy reigns across the continent of Europe – no longer restricted only to the western half – large parts of the world remain in the grip of tyrannies or face threats from violent totalitarian movements. It is no coincidence that many of those parts of the world where poverty remains acute are also countries where democracy has yet to be able to take root. And there, surely, lays the answer to what the purpose of a modern left should surely be – defending and expanding on the gains of the victories of social democracy in the west, tackling the scar of global poverty and pushing for the expansion of democracy internationally. In an era of rapid globalisation, the moment seems perfect for the western left to make a real effort to globalise its values.

Yet at the same time, when one reads the debates over the past decade, a lack of confidence in the core values of both liberalism and social democracy emerges which hinders the ability of the democratic left to take on the tasks facing it. Cynicism about the value of democracy as opposed to an enthusiasm to spread it globally and cultural relativism rather than international solidarity risk making the left into a club of parochial critics. An unwillingness to tackle economic questions and a Luddite anti-globalisation stance rather than a concerted effort to create a social-democratic world, leave the left looking like a snooty western elite who wash their hands with some charity rather than address the need to shift globalisation in a progressive direction aimed at eliminating poverty.

 

The democratic left has much to be proud of (including its opposition to the anti-democratic left) but it must leave behind the cynicism and nihilism that has infected it in the past decade or so and confidently take on a new role as champions of a progressive globalisation and the internationalisation of democracy. In my final part of this series I will sketch out some rough ideas for how that might start to take shape.

[Note: This is the first in a four-part series on the state of the left. --ed]

I suspect it might be men in particular who have a problem about leaving behind the passions of our youth. We can't let go of our favourite bands from our teens, we still take an odd pleasure in eating the candy we enjoyed as a kid, we have ever-lasting soft spots for those early girlfriends and spend an inordinate amount of time watching and talking about games.

But when it comes to politics, surely a grown up affair, we really should be able to cast off much more easily our youthful attachments, shouldn't we? Yet, when it comes to ideology and allegiance, it is hard to throw out every little pamphlet from the wardrobe. If you were a teenage Trot, a youthful commie, or an adolescent anarchist, you have probably found yourself caught in the trap – the past six years have been hard for anyone who still identifies themselves as a lefty but maintains a commitment to the core principles that were supposed to bind all the 57 varieties of leftism. Yet you can't get let go.

I'm addressing this to the kind of readers who, perhaps with a background in Marxism, or socialism or social-democracy or serious liberalism, have found themselves shuffling away from the ANSWER-led anti-war demonstrations, raising eyebrows at people buying the latest Chomsky Self-Help Guide for Lefties, shaking their head at those who have failed to take clear sides in the conflict against Islamism and sighing when hearing those who have allowed their opposition to the Iraq war to lead them to ignoring the need for solidarity with Iraqi democrats.

I'm talking about the kind of people who found much to appreciate in Paul Berman's thoughtful and informative Terror and Liberalism or in the more strident arguments of Christopher Hitchens about the struggle against Islamism and the bankruptcy of the anti-war movement. I am talking about those of you who get labelled 'neo-con' by old comrades and aren't really sure whether to simply embrace the presumed insult or to fire back with a list of their leftist credentials.

Because the dissenting voices that have emerged on the left in the past five or six years have been fairly confident in asserting that, despite supporting 'Bush's wars', despite finding Paul Wolfowitz closer to their own views on foreign affairs than John Kerry, despite finding more to nod along to in Commentary than the magazines of the left, they are still the torch-bearers of real leftism and it is the rest of the left who have sold out.

Why do we bother? Are we just clinging to an identity from our youth and denying that old line that "If you aren't a socialist at 18 you haven't got a heart but if you are a socialist at 40 you haven't got a brain"? Are we just trying to deny that we are following the classic path of moving rightward, drifting into conservatism as we mature? Or are we actually on to something, are we really witnessing the separation of the left into two new camps – 'the anti-imperialists' who put the blame for all the world's ills at the door of western democracies and we, the 'anti-fascists' who despite our criticisms of capitalism, recognise the need to take sides against tyranny, theocracy and terror?

In the coming weeks I want to make the case for the re-affirmation of liberal left principles against the crude anti-imperialism (in hard and soft version) that has come to dominate the voice of the radical left. To argue why, despite our embarrassment at those who claim to be the authentic voice of radicalism, it is really the Eustonite, the Bermanite, the Hitchensian, left that is the true torch-carrier of our youthful idealism. I want to argue that there is, in fact, nothing 'right-wing' about opposing tyranny, terrorism and fascism and nothing 'left-wing' about making excuses for tyrants. That it is an agenda of social solidarity and liberalism that has the best chance of defeating reaction across the globe and not isolationism, thoughtless militarism or free-market evangelism. I will make the case that here is nothing in opposing injustice abroad that stops us from making the case for a liberal-left agenda at home.

In short, I will argue that not only is it still possible to be a lefty but that, rather, it is more essential than ever.

[Read part two here.]

More wheezes and gasps of the classical left:

The economic crisis exposed a festering ideological one. The second generation of kibbutz offspring — who slept in communal children’s houses with assigned caregivers — began to rebel. With the lifetime security that the kibbutz was supposed to offer in jeopardy, young people began to leave.

“By the end of the 1990s,” said Gavri Bargil, executive director of the Kibbutz Movement, an umbrella organization, “you could find kibbutzim with no young generation at all.”

Worse, after decades of hard work, the kibbutz founders, now in their 80s and 90s, were left with not even an apartment or a pension to call their own.

Part of the recovery involved selling the Israeli dairy giant Tnuva, a cooperative half-owned by the kibbutzim. The sale provided them $500 million to establish pension funds.

In the past, kibbutz members were rewarded equally, whether they milked cows or managed a large industry. On the new kibbutz, members earn salaries or receive end-of-month allowances reflecting the income they bring in.

 

As much an annual Passover fixture as horseradish or bad wine, every Jewish family has an Uncle Ron. He is, in fact, at most every holiday gathering, but with Pesach’s prescribed overindulgence, he’s in rare form. After tipping back the fourth cup of wine, his mix of arrogance and outrage boils over. Uncle Ron’s been ruining American seders for a century, but over the decades—depending on the context—his diatribe has changed.In generations past, Uncle Ron was the seder socialist, crying for world revolution and railing against the piecemeal reforms pushed by FDR and his labor union boss. But with today’s Uncle Rons inhabiting the upper socioeconomic echelons of American society, the seder rant is more likely to critique welfare queens than corporate fatcats. “Look, I didn’t get to Scarsdale by hanging out on street corners,” today’s version might go. “The Asians study, work, and get ahead. But don’t hold your breath for the Puerto ...

There’s a kerfuffle afoot over at the Grauniad, the orthographically-challenged faux-left British broadsheet much adored by every self-righteous prig in Islington.To the Working Class!: Guardianistas toast the proletariat with an exquisite Louis Jadot Montrachet

Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian editor in chief, pines for a more economically just world, a world in which governments aggressively redistribute wealth for the betterment of, you know, the people. The ones without money and stuff. And that’s all very noble, but here’s the problem, as revealed by the website Private Eye:

Last year, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, a leading left liberal UK national newspaper, received a 14.7% increase in his annual salary from £272,000 to £312,000 plus a £175,000 bonus. This bonus was apparently related to the relaunch of the Guardian using the compact, Berliner format.

Of course, Guardian sales figures have been flat since the relaunch, and the Guardian lost 50 million pounds last year. But Alan’s given it a gentleman’s try, and Guardian readers don’t seem inclined to begrudge the justice-loving bloke a mere 500 thousand quid (nearly a million dollars) for his last year’s efforts.

This gives new meaning to “embarrassment of riches," especially since the Guardian recently fretted about the irresponsiblity of runaway corporatism as evidenced by unearned and astronomical executive salaries. It all makes for great titters in the conservative blogosphere.

But this is an old story and an old problem for the left. Here’s a quote from Bundist Vladimir Medem writing about his visit to America in 1921 (from Irving Howe's World of our Fathers):

[Never before] have I seen so many people inclined toward Bolshevism as here in America. And precisely among the affluent, the “alrightniks.” If you see a Jew who drives a car, you can be almost certain that he will be chanting Sabbath hymns for Bolshevism. And the better his car, the warmer his “sympathies”…

Lefty thinking--whether the Bolshevism of the 1920s lower east side or the quasi-left Guardianism so popular in today's online Anglosphere--will always appeal to some rich brats precisely because it absolves them of responsibility to deploy their riches humanely. After all, it’s the system, man. It’s about passing through stages of history. When a more equitable world will come about only through revolutionary change and the inevitable working out of the dialectic, what's the point in dwelling on the fact that your million dollar salary last year could have provided clean water and basic nutrition for a thousand impoverished children in the developing world? Why bother matching your stated belief in redistribution of wealth with, uh, a willingness to redistribute your own?

No, to hell with the bourgeois silliness of "charity". More important to break open the White Burgundy and cultivate your insight into systemic injustice over elevated conversation at the next Guardinista dinner party. So party on, Rusbridger and Guardianistas of the world. You have nothing to lose but your sense of personal responsibility for the social progress you talk so much about. Your wealth, you get to keep.

An article on Kibbutz Afkim headlined the front page of The Boston Globe today. Kibbutz Afkim manufactures their own brand of electric scooters - Afikim Electric Mobilizers, and has found their largest consumers (no pun intended) in fat Americans who are willing to pay big bucks to avoid walking.

Centers for Disease Control claims that more than 60 million adults in the U.S. are obese, but as the article states, "That health crisis is Afikim's business opportunity."

The kibbutz factory, which designed its first scooters 15 years ago for elderly and infirm kibbutz residents who could no longer walk or bike to the store or communal meal hall, has super sized its latest top-line, four-wheel, battery-powered scooter, upgrading the motor and replacing a two-person bench with a single bucket seat. The model, which previously had been marketed in Israel to carry two or three passengers, has been reconfigured to move a single passenger weighing as much as 500 pounds.

While the majority of the Kibbutz' customers are the elderly, $2 Million in sales went to "heavy customers" in the past year.

Yes Minister: Segolene Royal for PresidentI've been waiting patiently for someone to say that never has socialism had such an attractive human face. That would surely not be the worst sweetly condescending remark Segolene Royal has had to put up with over the years, especially during her recent ascent in the French Socialist Party, which culminated yesterday in her nomination for president.

There's every indication Royal is going to give Nicolas Sarkozy a run for his argent, and if she wins, she'll be the first female president the country has ever had. This is actually quite amazing when you think about it: the dual Gaullic stereotypes of effeminacy and radicalism were not enough to keep Margaret Thatcher and Andrea Merkel from becoming the first embodiments of European ovaries of steel. Why has it taken France so long to see the legitimacy of female rule?

Ali G once asked Newt Gingrich about the danger of someone like Hillary Clinton becoming chief executive of the United States. "But in'it a problem if a woo-man become preziden 'cause ven what if she fall in love wif Saddam Hussein?" This is closer to the prevailing wisdom about female authority than one cares to admit. Just consider that French MP and fellow Socialist Laurent Fabius asked what would happen to Ms. Royal's four children if she were elected. Who'd stay home with the les enfants? Never mind that their father is also a hard-working lefty MP Francois Hollande and that Royal, as former Vice-Minister for Family and Childhood, was a sponsor of paternity leave legislation. Sarkozy, too, takes her as seriously as Fashion Week:

"If I ever became a candidate for the presidency one day, I would be very happy to debate with her. From my point of view she's every bit as attractive a Socialist candidate as Henri Emmanuelli."

One look at Monsieur Emmanuelli and the misogyny of this crack vaporizes in laughter. Right?

I have no problem -- nay, I have a civic, Francophilic responsibility -- to point out the hotness of Segolene, who was famously featured, at 53, on the beach in a blue bikini with the bod plenty of 23-year-olds wish they had. No sexism here! Gavin Newsom: His phone number to the girl (or guy) who can describe San Francisco's education policy. Even Rumsfeld, judging by his early press clippings, might have been allowed to fuck up Iraq if only he'd done it in a muscle-tee.

But beauty does not diminish from an ability to govern any more than Royal's decision to wear high heels on a trip to Chile (scandal!) makes her un-statesman-like. Jacques Chirac probably had jarfuls of Brill Cream smothered into those six strands of hair when he inked the deal for Osirak, and both he and his sale were still butt-ugly.

Royal herself sounds very much like the kind of right-of-left Third Way candidate the Continent has been craving. She's a fan of Tony Blair. She's tough on French hooliganism and the insidious creep of Islamism into Parisian affairs. She also thinks fellow party member and ex-prez Lionel Jospin's 35-hour work week is no way to keep France competitive in today's globalized economy. (Marxists never were averse to labor, despite what your wan, bong-hitting roommate in college told you.)

When Hillary's elected, and I move to France -- Royal's got my vote.