On Sat, 18 Sep 1999 00:12:07 +0100 Jim heartfield
<jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> writes:
>>From: sawicky at epinet.org (Max Sawicky)
>
>Takes issue with my comment
>
>>The way I see it, the contemporary political and administrative
>>establishment is quite decisively a product of the left, but in the
>>sense of being a product of the left's defeat.
>
>
>>mbs: By this reasoning, we could say the modern U.S. right was
>>based on American communism/trotskyism, since half the editorial
>>board of National Review was ex-communist of one type or another . .
>.
>
>Well, after reading Alan Wald's New York Intellectuals I would say
>that
>there was something in that. Those Trotskyists whose criticisms of the
>Soviet Union seemed more important to them than there criticisms of
>the
>US state department did move pretty rapidly to the right and did
>indeed
>make a specific contribution to Cold War Liberalism. (Incidentally
>isn't
>that the meaning of George Orwell's accommodation to MI5.)
Well in the US, Cold War liberalism, neo-conservatism, and even plain old conservatism have owed much to ex-Marxist intellectuals. The philosopher, Sidney Hook did much to speahead the defection of the New York intellectuals from Marxism and Trotskyism to Cold War liberalism following WW II. The father of neo-conservatism, Irving Kristol, started out as an activist in the American SWP. As someone has already noted, William F. Buckley's National Review was in its early days heavily staffed with ex-leftists of various stripes. Among the most prominent of these were James Burnham, author of *The Managerial Revolution*, a former stalwart of the American SWP who along with Max Shachtman, had been a leading defender of the thesis of "bureacratic collectivism" against Trotsky and Max Eastman, the former editor of The Masses, and a onetime friend of Lenin and confident of Trotsky, and an innovative Marxist thinker in his own right.
>
>
>>More reasonable to say that the left attracted some talented
>>people, and when some of them took their leave, for one reason
>>or another, they were likely to play an important role in the
>>guise of new political identities. Especially those that were
>>planted as agents in the first place, as Clinton himself may
>>have been.
>
>Of today, I would say that the semi-organised left of the seventies
>and
>eighties concentrated the experience of defeat in the most systematic
>form - that's why so many of them have found a hearing for their
>political expressions of lowered expectations, accommodations to the
>market and so on.
>
>Maybe this is a more English thing than it is an American. The
>existence
>of the labour party does mean that there is a straight conveyor belt
>from the left to the establishment that has carried former leftists
>like
>Chancellor Gordon Brown (one-time Gramscian), Development Minister
>Clare
>Short (one time Irish solidarity activist) Peter Mandelson (one-time
>Communist Party youth organiser) Tony Banks ('break the poor not the
>law' - municipal socialist) Paul Boateng (ditto) into the British
>Cabinet today. On top of them you could add the Government political
>advisors drawn from the Communist Party: Geoff Mulgan, Charles
>Leadbeater, Charlie Whelan (now retired), and the two sons of the late
>Ralph (socialist register) Miliband, Ed and David who are advisors to
>Gordon Brown and PM Tony Blair respectively.
The US is largely lacking in that sort of a conveyor belt, no doubt because the sort of an organized left such as exists in Britain has been largely absent in the US. On the other hand if we look at recent administrations in the US, one can certainly find some ex-leftists. Thus the budget director during Reagan's first term, David Stockman, was a New Left activist back in the 1960s. The architect of Clinton's failed health care reform plan, David Magaziner, was a leftist activist back in the '60s and '70s. There are no doubt many other people in the Clinton Administration who are ex-leftists, though generally not in high profile positions.
Jim Farmelant
>
>--
>Jim heartfield
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