aNALYSIS
Sean Jacobs and Jessica Blatt
How is the American left reacting to the attacks of September 11, and the current bombing and ground assaults by United States military in Afghanistan?
First off: there is not much of a left to speak of in the US these days.
Yes, there’s an environmental movement, and a labour movement that is again picking up speed after years of near-irrelevance. For example, the American Federation of Labour-Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO) the biggest industrial labour federation in the US has been reinvigorated through its work in organising undocumented immigrant workers and protecting them from exploitation in sweatshops and on farms. These two movements have formed an uneasy alliance, along with student activists and the odd anarchist and socialist group, against the uneven effects of globalisation. (The high point of this alliance was the Seattle and Washington protests).
There are also community organisations and those focusing on civil liberties as well as women’s, minority, gay-rights and consumer lobbies.
Figures such as the Reverend Jesse Jackson and former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader have national organisations with a certain amount of political clout. The impact of these groups on electoral politics has been such that in the aftermath of the 2000 election, Nader was blamed for taking votes from the Democrats he got 4% of the popular vote leading to the deadlock that gave the world President George W Bush.
There are also a few small left political parties aside from the Greens, such as the Labour Party (that does not participate in elections, ostensibly until it has built organisational structures) and the Working Families Party (which is affiliated with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party).
The intellectual left is largely confined to universities (with a liking for obscure academic polemics) and a few highbrow political magazines such as the Village Voice, The Nation, the even smaller Progressive and the New York Review of Books.
But these constituencies are varied, diffuse, and often at odds. The result? There is no coherent, visible “left,” in the US today, where even before September 11, “ideology” and “partisanship” were already virtually dirty words.
Still, there have been efforts at anti-war organising, with respectably well-attended rallies and marches in almost every major city (anti-war marches in New York and Washington delivered up to 20 000 people), and “teach-ins” (meetings in the tradition of the informal political classes run by Vietnam War-era university students) on university campuses nationwide.
An illustration of the current state of left politics can be gleaned from an event three weeks ago in New York. A once promising coalition of activists and unionists split, never to reconvene, over the question of a just US response to the attacks.
One half of the room voted for “justice, not war”. The other half found the idea of demanding justice to be another instance of arrogant American, racist imperialism. Much yelling and recrimination later, the coalition dissolved.
This event encapsulates the two basic responses on the left. On the one side, best represented by Noam Chomsky, is a kind of narcissistic post-facto rationalisation. In this view, Americans brought this on themselves. American foreign policy has created a monster of reaction in the Third World, and now the chickens are coming home to roost.
The other response the call for international justice is clearly more nuanced, but suffers from its own deficiencies. Where the Chomskyite response is callous, and sacrifices political viability for ideological purity, the “justice not war” crowd have few concrete ideas on what “justice” means or how it may be achieved.
In addition, they lack any understanding of Middle Eastern and Islamic politics or have no or minimal contact with progressive groups there.
A simple anti-war stance is not viable, for two reasons. The first is that the attacks were serious, and appear to be continuing, with anthrax-laced letters showing up daily in newspaper and magazine offices, and even the Pentagon. Terrorism represents a real threat to public safety, one that cannot simply be ignored.
This is complicated by the political climate. In the post-September 11 atmosphere, dissent is not tolerated. Intellectuals or politicians who have even questioned minor elements of the US government and Bush’s response, have faced isolation or public censure. And through the new Homeland Security Act the state has been given extensive powers to arrest or spy on dissidents.
The second reason is that, when community organisers go out to drum up opposition to the government’s attacks on Afghanistan, the first thing anybody asks them is, “Okay, well what should we do?”
Anti-war protests attract large numbers of people. But their inclusiveness has to do with the fact that the messages and slogans at these marches are vague and make no connections to US foreign policy.
Unless organisers can come up with a position that is both practically viable and connects to the concerns of ordinary citizens, their activities will not impact on the present reality nor result in a lasting movement.
How to get the left out of its rut? First, it has to admit that its old analysis is out of date, that it doesn’t know what to do. There are signs that this is happening. People are buying all the books they can read on the Middle East and Islamic politics. Edward Said’s works are flying off the shelves in New York nowadays.
Secondly, they have to find new ways of articulating their agenda to a mass public, update their organising tactics for the mediated age and learn to make connections with and take lessons from activists elsewhere. They need to recognise our interdependence. They have to start from scratch.
South African Sean Jacobs is a visiting politics fellow at the New School University in New York City. Jessica Blatt is an American politics graduate student living in New York