I was talking about this with Lil recently, and she thinks that part of the problem with the Left here in Switzerland (and she includes the Greens in this) is that they are not good at getting out the vote - and further, that much of the Left is quite arrogant in their ideology and out of touch with the everyday needs of the European citizen. So between not voting and thinking you are right (without checking it out), the Left is really in danger of losing a lot of seats in the upcoming national election this fall (and already lost a huge number of seats in a recent Kanton Zurich election). And unfortunately, the Greens...while having a great cause...are too "copper, wool and straw" for most people to relate to.

Half the population is under the age of 18. Tanzania's future is NOW...join the 50% campaign!

Perhaps the word 'Left' is the problem, and its association with labour unions and the working class. We all work.

In the end, I am uninterested in parties. I am not at all sure we need them. What we need is communities - local and transnational. We have new tools for getting together in 'interest groups', across borders and maybe across languages barriers.

I believe we will no longer need politicians nor parliaments in the future. They were invented, after all, to solve a logistics problem that might no longer exist in a  few years. Who needs a representative, if you can represent yourself?

What the Internet has started to prove is that 'middleman' are no longer needed. Politicians are 'middlemen'. We need decentralization. Peer-to-peer.

We'll still need a civil service to implement our decisions.

OK, OK all this is in the future, and I may not be around to see it. What you are asking in this debate is what we can do now to affect the dialogue (or rather begin a dialogue!!!). I'd like to see a 'hard left' that is so hard left that it becomes something else never seen before - with a new name!

We could always bring back Flower Power...
Retro is in now  ;-)

You can't be me, I'm taken

The Left has become a middle class interest, not a working class interest. With the demise of the unions it's become much easier to distract the working classes with celebrity, sex and glamour, with a side order of immigrant abuse, and screw them over.

The most active remnants of the working class hard left (at least in the UK) is a tiny subculture of travellers and eco-protesters - the kinds of people who chain themselves to trees to stop a new road. When they're active they have a high media profile, but - apart from a few successes - their political effectiveness isn't high, because they target specific issues in a negative way rather than pushing a positive alternative. Also, that kind of rebellion can easily be dismissed as irritating and adolescent. It's noisy, and it's coming from outside of the mainstream by people who very deliberately don't fit it, and that makes it easy to dismiss it.

So I think a New Left has to co-opt the pseudo-authority of the Right. It has to wear a suit, it has to be respectable, and it has to be able to appear in the FT without creating cognitivive dissonance in the readership. It has to appear on mainstream news channels pushing hard left points -  I'm not suggesting any compromises there - without looking anything like the old left. It has to be smart, confident, unflappable, relentless and utterly plausible and convincing.

The media, rather the shop floor, is the main battleground now. The way to reinvigorate the Left is to subtly storm the media so that Left values move into the mainstream without being sidelined as oppositional politics (with the implied frame that they're in opposition to the Right, which can easily present itself as the natural party of power.)

Because the media has more than one channel, the New Left has to have a presence in all of them. We've already talked about taking Being Green away from the allotment anoraks into the mainstream, and there has to be a lot more of that in every area.

The Right does this already. Big Brother isn't just a stupid show, it's a stupid show with a gladiatorial subtext which promotes ruthless competition and fuck-you values. People love it partly because it undermines Left-ish socialisation, which is seen as oppressive and limiting - goody-goody and PC and rather dull.

A smart move would be an alternative show which somehow promoted sane values without labouring the point or being earnestly PC about it.

You can't reach people by lecturing them. But you can reach them by being obviously more fun and entertaining than the alternative.

Good idea, Bob! But we have to conduct this debate with a maximum of rigour if we want to produce anything worthwhile.

The first requirement should be to define clearly the words we use in such a debate before we start using them, because in this field, words are highly polysemic and can be misleading. For example, what do you mean by a hard left? Another example is "liberalism" or "neo-liberalism", "capitalism" and so on... For some persons, liberalism means global financial capitalism, for others, it means all forms of capitalism. It is not splitting hairs for the fun of it; on the contrary, it is necessary if we want to have a fruitful debate.

Another condition for an interesting debate (it might be harder) is to stop having a unidimensional vision of politics. I'm fed up with people positioning themselves or others in a one-dimension space (more to the left or more to the right) with only a very poor set of criteria (the role of the state...).

In my view, what we need is a more creative, a more innovative left. We need a modern social democracy which takes into account the world as it is in order to transform it without giving up its values and its goals and is able to make an alliance with the trade unions and the NGOs.

We also need a new utopian left which is rid of the old leninist/trostkyite vision of the world and which is able to develop and propose new economic and social models.

"Ne te courbe que pour aimer..." René Char

I think (and this is just my personal opinion) that one of the reasons the Right has been more appealing is because they have presented a more comprehensive vision of the society. True, a lot of it is simplistic, impossible, and downright xenophobic and selfish, but it's a vision, nonetheless. Just like religion answered questions in the society in the past, politicial vision has to respond to people's need to know where their societies are headed. Left-wing parties have struggled with that identity and vision. People (especially in the middle class) all have a selfish streak, and the right-wing vision if the world appeals to that. You you can be wealthier, yes you don't need to pay as much in taxes, yes foreigners are undesireable because they threaten our way of life, etc. These are easy answers and they fit what some people want to see in their life. Selfishness will almost always trump solidarity in my humble opininion. The only way forward for the left-wing parties is to clearly differentiate themselves from the right-wing by presenting their own co-herent vision of the world, by not adopting right-wing policies just to a lesser degree, by appealing to the selfish streak in people AND the need for the society to co-exist at the same time.
Clearly there are also some country-specific logistical issues that need to be worked out as well, but the trick is first to become a viable, vocal, and well-organized opposition.

Mikhail from SF

Before you talk about renewing the Left, shouldn't we discuss what "the Left" actually is?

On some issues (societal values, foreign policy), I'd likely be categorized as being on the left; on others (economy, business) as being on the right.

In the US I was a blue dog democrat under Clinton, until I found myself to the left of Gengis Khan under Bush, but I didn't change, it's the ground under my feet that moved.

Going beyond the political disputes of the day, the left basically focuses on two overarching issues: social justice and climate/energy/environment. However, I think voters notice that there is a reluctance on the left to articulate the synthesis of these two messages. As well they might, as this synthesis boils down to: less, distributed more equitably.

As so often discussed here, we will have less energy at our disposal in future; how much less will depend on the quality technological fixes, but it's going to be significantly less. As a consequence, literally everything in our daily lives will become significantly more expensive. The neolib response will be to junk the existing social systems as "too expensive", saying they want to "put the money back in people's pockets".  (All right, I hear you saying, "Whaddaya mean 'will be'!?" But imagine what kind of noise machine they'll crank up when energy costs jump by (caution: WAG) 30%.) To resist this, a large part of our "mission" will be to convince the public that these systems are vital and must be retained - quite possibly through the sacrifice of even more discretionary income (higher taxes).

As a message, "less, more equitably" is a lot less emotionally appealing than the message of the right, i.e., Life will be groovy if we can just get rid of all the [demon of the week]. And I think a lot of groups to the left of center are still unwilling to take this logical step.

But to me, harmonizing social justice with sustainable environmental and energy use is the challenge of our lifetimes (with all due apologies for the unintended drama of that statement).

I realize that the foregoing is getting away from the strategic focus with which Bob framed the discussion. But consistently articulating a message of "less, more equitably" would make the left a highly relevant (though perhaps not highly popular) force.

"Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease." - Kurt Vonnegut