But why *just out of curiousity* leave it 20 years back?
What did western left-wingers do when US imperialism ordered the government of Afghanistan to hand over a terrorist and imposed crippling sanctions, when it could be seen what they did to Ocalan?
What did "leftists" do when Russia, led by the corrupt Yeltsin and the oligarchs, invaded Chechnya, without even an invitation from the prime minister they installed? All those dim years back!
What did those "leftists" do when the US continued asking the IMF to give billions of aid to keep the Russian regime going as a sort of sub-imperialism asking only that somehow the two accounts should be kept separate because it was embarrassing to be suggested to be paying for the war against Chechnya?
Could it be that those leftists, with a bad conscience and great embarrassment, thought that the social values of US imperialism were preferable to the primitive communism of the Talibans? that a global system where in neighbouring countries children from the age of 8 may have to work 14 hours a day making carpets or designer footballs for export to the rich markets of the west, was somehow preferable? That the system in the USA was much better where more women have been officially executed but at least not in public. That this makes it not qualitatively morally better but at least gives some sort of argument in favour of mumbling over the matter, or discussing it just out of intellectual curiosity over the latest in vegetarian meals?
What then is not being grasped here in a principled way?
In 1979 there were good leftist reasons to support the independence of countries from foreign domination, whether that came from the new Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereignty or from the anti-communist crusade of the US hegemonism.
(The emergence of the unusual Taliban regime has only occurred in the course of 20 years of inter-hegemonistic fighting over their country, and I suggest is a primitive communist reaction, albeit not scientific and of course not to our cultural tastes. It is a powerful argument against non interference, as will be the emergence of a similar regime from the ashes of Chechnya. It is no argument for leftists to be motivated by an unstated prejudice against Islamic fundamentalism. Indeed the reverse, if you do not like Islamic fundamentalism.)
What self-regarding leftists have to grasp now, in a world in which the socialist bloc has collapsed, is that there is a fight on about world governance, which cannot be based on the mechanical application of what Lenin did in 1916, not least because imperialism now sometimes interferes by methods other than direct war. Rather we need to accept that the fight is on. We need to define the terms under which organisations claiming the status of emerging world governmental bodies, have to justify themselves in terms of what is in the interests of the working people of the world.
Thus at Seattle, the WTO must *not only* ban child exploitation in Pakistan and Indonesia if it wants feudal restrictions on the rights of women in Afghanistan abolished. It must *also* demand control of the world capitalist financial system to compensate for the uneven accumulation of capital by pumping them back into democratically approved development funds for areas like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia.
Can we have an end to deciding politics in terms of who can best pose as a "leftist"?
Chris Burford
London