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.

"Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia

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.

"Dieu se rit des hommes qui se plaignent des conséquences alors qu'ils en chérissent les causes" Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

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.

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman

One peculiar aspect is that the right parties are far less closed than the left parties. They recruit talent like Sarkozy or Ken Mehlman in the US while the left parties/organizations are self perpetuating closed groups.

My 2 cents:

First of all one should note that in some countries in Europe the "hard-left" (as in the German Linke and the Dutch Socialists) are achieving electoral results that were inconceivable a decade ago - as far as the "beyond-the-socialists-left is concerned. The way they have done that is (if I understand correctly) by addressing the working class as a working class, talking prominently about economic issues that affect the majority of wage earners and the various hardships they are suffering as a result of the erosion of the welfare state. It's worth noting however that these exact policies that today are considered "extreme" were a decade or two ago, pretty much part of the Social Democratic mainstream.

The re-emergence of a powerful left IMHO requires the left to be defined principally as a defender of the economic interests of the majority of wage earners and as a democratizing force across the board. It also requires the re-invigoration of the notion of worker solidarity, a concept that has taken a beating lately and - of course - acquiring some media avenue to publicly and articulately present its views. The web seems like a promising avenue, but it can't be the only one.

More than that however, the left needs a new, feasible utopia, or if you prefer some sort of credible "vision". I happen to believe that the mix of decentralization and cooperative enterprises that we frequently discuss here in the ET, must be a crucial element of this new "repositioning". I quote from a recent article by Rick Wolff, on the exact topic we're discussing:

The new direction and strategy for social democracy follows from the flaw in its historic compromise with capitalism.  The egalitarian, solidaristic society envisioned by social democracy cannot be secured so long as it leaves in place a group of people with incentives and means to prevent that.  A transformation of the structure of production inside each enterprise could change the basic situation in so far as it ended the dichotomy between workers and capitalists.  The collective of workers that produces the surplus/profits would become the same collective that appropriates and distributes the surplus/profits.  Full participation in work and its products would then make possible and foster full participation in political democracy and cultural activity.  Achieving this fundamental re-organization of each enterprise must become a core policy of social democracy.

Instead of old social democratic policies inadequate to their goals, this projected transformation of the structure and practice of all work represents a dramatic new vision and program.  It offers the basis on and with which to construct an egalitarian, solidaristic society.  Advocacy of such a program might reanimate, unify, and focus the forces of a new left today.

The great thing about such a strategy is its "non-millenarian" character: it is something that can be tried and tested now, its viability demonstrated in the present rather than in some future utopia.

Finally as to what constitutes the left: right now, again IMHO, if there is a fissure, a borderline somewhere in the political spectrum, it isn't mainly between conservatives and social democrats. The Grand Coalition in Germany is an indicator of the convergence of the "two poles". Instead I think that the political line (on a party level) is to the left of the Social Democratic Parties. The (electoral and social) success of that, explicitly anti-neoliberal political space, is a requirement for shifting the Overton Window this way and dragging the Social Democrats along with it...

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake

Thanks for bringing this up whataboutbob, here's how I view it.

As I understand it, the term Left refers to the three veins that came out of early Socialism envisioned by Marx and Engels:

• Utopic Socialism (also called Reformism and the base of today's Socialist parties)


• Communism (also called Scientific Socialism)


• Anarchism

Taking on each one:

Reformism is presently dead in Europe. The traditional Socialist parties slowly mutated from the WWII, getting farther and farther apart from its origins. Socialist parties in Europe are presently dominated by liberals and limit themselves to pursue liberal agendas. Even the social state has been left behind by many self-entitled socialists.

And this is the major root of the disillusion that the electorate feels towards Socialist parties: they can't differentiate their politics from those of the Liberal or Christain Democrat parties. Tony Blair's Third Way was nothing else than liberalism put forward by "lefty" politicians.

As long as Socialist parties continue to fool electors presenting a social concept and performing another there's no hope to become a decisive political force in Europe - Christian Democrats and Liberals will continue to have majority on their own.

Communism is also going through an identity crisis. Today, European Communist parties resemble somewhat the social democrat parties of the early XX century - promoting Socialism inside the Democratic regime. Contemporaneous Communism is in fact an alternative to the Liberal undermined Socialism, but with a major setback: modern Communist became Nationalist.

It can be traced back to 1970s when the last Fascist regimes fell in Europe; with a revamped Left, western European Communists cemented Nationalism as a way to keep some independence from the Soviet block. The iron curtain felt more than 15 years ago, but Communist parties are more Nationalist than ever, skeptically opposing the European Construction.

Nationalism and Communism don't rime. Naturally the Communists cannot feel at ease with the present Liberal lead European Construction, but instead of euro-skepticism we need a clear European Communist Project.

Anarchism is by far the most successful form of Socialism in the early days of the XXI century. You don't see the word written in the newspapers, or in the acronym of any party, but associated with a revival of Agrarianism, Anarchism is today one of the most influential veins of political thinking.

Claiming for the reduction of the state, a new social pauper paradigm centered on rural living and devoid of progress, the voices of Green, Environmental, and anti-Globalization movements are the visible side of modern Anarchism. And this is the most important aspect of the modern rise of Anarchism: it grew by itself dissociated of political parties. Maybe this is the only way for Anarchism to be.

The influence that Anarchism has today, reaching now deeply conservative sections of society, will not disappear easily. Even when rougher times come, and Anarchists have to feel the paucity of the society they propose, even then Anarchism will prevail because, love it or loath it, it presents a real alternative to today's unsustainable way of living in the wealthy countries.

This is just a quick review of my thinking; Socialism has a long and rich history that couldn't possibly be summarized so quickly, and that, by the way, is far, far from over.


luis_de_sousa@mastodon.social

And I had an interesting (but too short) conversation with Jerome in Paris about the need for a new "hard Left"in Europe too (which I hope Jerome will say more about here).

I have to agree, and the reason is not to get it into power, but to shift the dabate leftwards a little.

Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?

I think Fran comes closest to hitting the nail on the head:

No clear vision as to what they want to achieve

It's hard to communicate when you don't know what it is you want to communicate.

For the last 25 years or so the Left has been stuck in a sort of conservatism where we mostly just defend (or rearrange a little bit) past gains against a right wing that has had all the wind in its sails.

The steam, finally, is beginning to run out of the Right-wing onslaught somewhat, but will the Left be able to take advantage of this?

A couple of (economic) ideas?

Economic Democracy

The Left has surrendered its' position in the public mind as the progressive force on economic issues. The Right is (wrongly) seen as the people you turn to to fix the economy.

So the Left has to regain this position in ways that are consistent with our values -- i.e. combine efficiency and growth with greater equality and public participation in decisions that affect people's lives.

In the post-WWII period to 1970s, the Left built its' position as the progressive economic party primarily through demand-side initiatives -- union power and higher/more equal wages, Keynesian macro policy, the welfare state -- that established a virtuous cycle of greater equality at the micro level that reinforced, and was reinforced by, economic growth and full employment at the macro level.

Now what we need to complement this may be a Left "supply-side policy" that can reestablish this "virtuous micro/macro circle" through increased public control over investment decisions:

These "left-demand side" policies must be augmented by a "left-supply side" that links changes in the workplace with influence -- and perhaps control -- over investment funds on which the economic health of their societies depends. . . .

This would require . . . dramatically extending the principles of worker participation far beyond the narrow confines of the shopfloor and into society more generally. . . . to develop industry-specific union strategies and then linking them to . . . questions of structural change and employer-driven visions of flexibility. . . .

The vehicle to make democracy more meaningful in capitalist societies is a reinvigorated set of public institutions -- such as political parties, trade unions, and community organizations -- that can effectively demand accountability, particularly on the crucial issue of investment.

Also  a new set of global economic insitutions that would promote growth, full employment, and reduction of international economic inequalities.

Qualitative Growth

Part of a renewed Left program also ought to be a re-think what we mean by concepts such as "efficiency" and "growth." Not less, necessarily, but emphasizing a different kind of economic progress:

. . . the expansion of the qualitative dimensions of output, including satisfactions that are not directly embedded in commodities:

• Intrinsically satisfying work
  
• Voluntary leisure time
  
• Economic security
  
• A safe and clean environment
  
• A plenitude of community and voluntary services