After new Labour, the new left – or rather, as the term has been used before, the new, new left. You can see it in the street protests at international conferences in Seattle, Prague, Davos, Nice and now Quebec; in the World Social Forum, the anti-Davos summit of anti-capitalist groups held earlier this year in Porto Alegre, Brazil; in the election campaigning of Britain’s Socialist Alliance; in the expected May Day protests for which Britain’s police are now anxiously preparing; in the popularity of such writers as Naomi Klein and George Monbiot.
This new left resembles new Labour – one of the targets of its deepest scorn – in being linked to older structures and breaking away from them at the same time. Its direct antecedent is most clearly revolutionary Marxism. But it is embarrassed by many of Marxism’s previous institutional forms, and refuses to be bound into the endless quarrels over interpretation that so tortured the Marxist parties and their various splinter groups. It takes from Marxism only its idealism; it disdains equally its clotted, contested analysis and its totalitarian forms of state.
Its great bogey is globalisation, just as imperialism (which globalisation, in the left’s interpretation, more than a little resembles) was the great bogey of the Leninist left. But Lenin’s analysis of imperialism acknowledged its productive dynamism as well as its oppression. The new left concedes nothing to globalisation, or to global capitalism. It concedes nothing, indeed, to anybody. Its freedom from established ideologies and state powers – the lack of any Trotskyist or Soviet line to defend – gives it limitless scope for denunciation.
The old left was organised through disciplined cadres; the new left organises in a quite different way, through networks, conferences of the like-minded, demonstrations, publications of landmark works, journals. It takes particular advantage of the internet, which, by giving formal equality to the websites of the US government and the Mexican revolutionary Subcomandante Marcos, has proved an extraordinary boon to small and poor groups. And though the new left no longer has access to the presses and funds of the organised Marxist parties, it has turned that into an advantage: it uses its freedom to operate through the established media.
The media, by displacing or absorbing politics in the way that they ceaselessly do, want to show themselves as representative. They need a right and a left wing as well as a centre, in order to simulate the 19th/20th-century political world whose forms they reproduce. At the same time, journals and newspapers of the moderate left, such as the New Statesman, the Guardian and the Observer, range between centre-leftism and new-leftism – not to provide an increasingly impossible synthesis of these positions, but because they need to provide a range to cater for the tastes of their readers.
Thus the star players in the new-left alliance are often media stars: as well as Klein and Monbiot, they include Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and the US-born writer Susan George, now based in France. Even if, like Chomsky, they are also scholars, the common denominator of these figures is their journalism, which includes both articles for newspapers and appearances on radio and television. They are therefore open to being “commodified” – that is, to being simply one of the many wares of a capitalist media market place, in a way that the badly paid and overworked writers and journalists for the revolutionary parties could rarely be.
The dominant theme of globalisation has many causes around which it can deploy. These include the arms trade; the global perils to the ecosystem; the impoverishment of vast areas such as Africa; the use of cheap labour by the multinational corporations; the mass production of food; the spread of US culture and tastes throughout the globe; the hegemony and military superiority of the United States; the imposition of the “Washington consensus” model of economic development on developing countries; mass alienation from politics; the corruption of politics and politicians; and the widening gaps in income between and within nation states. In each of these areas, a growing number of specialists, many drawn from the burgeoning ranks of the non-governmental organisations, oppose what they see as an oppressive consensus view on behalf of an inarticulate (or only partly articulate) global citizenry, which itself takes local forms.
New-left wrath has been particularly stirred, in the past decade, by the failure of capitalism in the former communist world: it was a favourite theme of Ken Livingstone’s before he became the mayor of one of the world’s most capitalist cities. Ignoring the relative success of the central European states – or highlighting the many downsides to that success – leftist criticism has centred on the former Soviet states, especially Russia. There, the left sees the IMF/World Bank cocktail of measures as little more than a conspiracy by US corporations, in alliance with bankers, neoliberal economists and a criminalised Russian political class, to open up the mineral and other wealth of the former Soviet world to western exploitation, leaving the former Soviet proletariat to their destitution.
The capacity to be at once global and local is one of the new left’s strengths. A sweatshop in Manila is linked to the worldwide struggle by its manufacture of Nike trainers; a coffee-field in Kenya is similarly involved by providing the raw material for Starbucks.
It is also a strength for the new left that the lack of a Moscow – or any other centre for the new version of world revolution – allows it to embrace diverse national forms. But one culture is more amenable to, and creative of, the new left than any other. It is in France that many of the most important academic-cum-journalistic figures live and work: their analyses, their rejection of the consensus, underpin much of the current new left. If the Anglo-Saxon journalistic tradition provides much of the local detail, French idealistic leftism, in a straight line from Jean-Paul Sartre, gives the theory.
In the late 1990s, several French books – for example, Ah Dieu! que la guerre economique est jolie (“Oh, what a lovely economic war”) by Philippe Labarde and Bernard Maris; Vivre et penser comme des porcs (“Living and thinking like pigs”) by Gilles Chatelet; L’illusion economique by Emmanuel Todd – have achieved sales in the tens and even hundreds of thousands for a denunciation of global capitalism, often in the most extreme terms. The bestselling of all was Viviane Forrester’s L’horreur economique, which shifted 300,000 copies within months of its first publication in 1996. (It later sold hugely in Germany, Argentina and elsewhere, but no English translation appeared until 1999.) Forrester – a novelist with no previous publications on economics or apparent interest in the subject – argues that the new capitalism makes all workers superfluous and as such expendable; it is thus the modern version of Nazism, its aim being “instant genocide”.
In an essay on French anti-capitalism, the social theorist Pierre Rosanvallon – an influential thinker for France’s social democrats – writes that Forrester’s book, with its extraordinarily crude and hyperbolic analysis, is not so much a description of capitalism as a sign of the “emergence of a new political culture, as radical as it is free from any concern with real-life, practical action”.
Rosanvallon says that the new political culture – the new left – is distinguished by three main traits. First, it is based in “passions, not programmes”. In contrast to an old left heavily reliant on data, the new left’s “fuzzy radicalism” works by posing “a stark, satisfying juxtaposition of the forces of good and evil”. Second, it is rooted in a moral resistance: “placing value on resistance somehow compensates for the elimination of a revolutionary horizon” and “brings moral determination to all”, regardless of political abilities. Third, it is “post-reformist”; the very extremity of its analysis and rhetoric puts it beyond, implicitly and explicitly, any kind of programme for action – and thus allows it to criticise such programmes as being necessarily treacherous, simply because they propose action in the real world.
Another French anti-radical, the historian Pierre Nora – who has been involved with most of the French state’s engagements with the intellectual world over the past three decades – has suggested that the era of the “engaged intellectual” is now drawing to a close, and that this is a good thing. In the May-August 2000 issue of Le Debat, the journal he edits with Marcel Gauchet, Nora writes that the intellectual is now a university professor or an expert, rather than a figure of leisure free to range across disciplines. The old model of the engaged intellectual, he argues, was one that encouraged political irresponsibility and intellectual tyranny. After all, “in every intellectual, there is a despot”.
In the journal Correspondence – a production of the Committee for Intellectual Correspondence whose founding editor was the US sociologist Daniel Bell – Mark Lilla, professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, writes that the “migration of serious intellectuals into the more popular media robs them of the distance they need to develop their ideas and see social developments in perspective”.
The apparent strengths of the new left – its moral certainty, the extremes of its denunciation, its global reach – are also its weaknesses. While calling for the fruit of reform (equality, redistribution, respect for the environment), it scorns and is detached from the mechanisms of that change. Conflicts of interest are foreign to it: the boons of globalisation (however that is defined) are ignored or denied, and thus there can be no narrative of why, for example, developing countries such as India and China are so avid to be part of the process. Purity of heart is all.
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