Helena Sheehan
crossfire
Reading ”The global revival of the left” (February 16 to 22) by Glenda Daniels and David Macfarlane, I thought: ”This is where I came in.”
I was part of the 1960s ”new left” who believed that we understood the world anew and would turn it upside down. We would push aside the old left with all its stodgy talk of the mode of production and the role of the state.
We highlighted gender and race and culture and the relationship between the personal and the political in a way that the old left did not seem to do. We initiated a flourishing of new forms of political activity, a vibrant global counter-culture.
But we were also so myopic. We didn’t really grasp the nature of political and economic power. Moreover, we didn’t know as much about the old left as we thought we did.
Those of us who stayed around when others were gone tried to understand why history moved on in a direction so disdainful of our desires. One insight of the early Students for a Democratic Society in the United States (SDS) was the necessity ”to name the system”. When the energy of the new left began to dissipate, I decided to look to the old left, which was, I found, much better at naming the system.
This idea of a plurality of social movements replacing left parties has been around for several decades now. Empirically, of course, it is true that many inclined to the left have put their energies into these movements as opposed to left parties, but this is much of the problem of the left, not its solution. Theoretically, I believe that activism in terms of race, gender, and let us not forget class, needs to be underpinned by naming the system in which an oppressive division of labour and inequitable distribution of resources are rooted.
The older left named the system as capitalism and conceived of a systemic alternative to it as socialism. For Eddie Webster of Wits University to say that the oppressed five-sixths of the world has been excluded by the traditional left is obviously and outrageously false. The left has embraced all the oppressed of the Earth.
It has brought light and literacy, health and hope to sections of the population in parts of the world that had known only unrelenting darkness, degradation and despair without it. It has addressed the exclusions of class and race and gender far more coherently and actively than any other force, because it has done so within the framework of an analysis of the nature of the social order.
The new movement is attempting to link the plurality of oppositional forces together at least at the level of strategic activity. It is also struggling to name the system. However, there is considerable confusion about doing so, with your authors adding to the confusion. Those who characterise the new movement as an anti-globalisation movement are failing to name the system accurately and to name its opposition appropriately.
Why should the left be against globalisation as such? The left is opposed to a particular version of globalisation, a globalisation dominated by the neo-liberal agenda, a globalisation that prioritises market forces above all other social ties.
The left has always stood for an alternative globalisation and much of it is doing so within that tradition. To quote Blade Nzimande and Zwelinzima Vavi, as your authors do, in support of the critique of neo-liberalism and the aims of the new movement, without making the point that they do so in a way that is in conscious continuity with the older traditions of the left, is misleading.
Much of this new left is still the old left trying to find its way in new times. Your paper and your authors have taken this movement seriously and have not reduced it to a crowd of crazies who can travel with the same mobility as international financiers and clash with local police for their kicks.
Behind those on the streets of Seattle and Prague are masses who cannot be there because they are poor or have jobs that keep them where they are, but want to be part of a force addressing and confronting the nature of the global system that defines their world.
To say that communist, social democratic and national liberation movements have run their course, especially here in South Africa, is not right. I have been involved in all three of these movements in past decades in the US and in Europe and there is no doubt that they have changed dramatically and drastically, but they have not left the stage.
Here the African National Congress embodies in an unstable equilibrium all three traditions, as well as those who believe that there is no alternative to the neo-liberal agenda. These traditions are playing themselves out here in new ways and time will tell what will be the outcome.
The growth, economic and redistribution strategy, for example, is perhaps most contested from within. People moved by these traditions did not lead difficult, dangerous lives for all these decades to make South Africa safe for bull markets or a cozy haven for knighted press barons to entertain the world’s rich and famous and to leave masses hungry and homeless.
The left has won state power here in a context in which enormous power resides elsewhere. It is traversing treacherous terrain. The whole world is not only watching but pulling in different directions. Paradoxically, although the world is more and more tightly organised into a global system, there has been a decline in ability to think historically and systemically.
It is necessary to get the story right, to name the system correctly and to build a movement accordingly. The left in this precarious present must find its continuity with its past in forging its future.
Helena Sheehan is a philosopher on leave from Dublin City University at the University of Cape Town