On 2010-04-26, at 12:02 PM, SA wrote:
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> If I understood Julio's post correctly, he said anyone on the side of workers' struggles is a leftist, regardless of ideology.
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>> […]
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> ...the percentage who consider themselves Marxists or say they want to abolish capitalism must be pretty tiny. Have you ever looked at an issue of PM, the popular-front newspaper from the 1940's? When they covered labor, race and other social issues, they took sides, they wrote intensely and passionately, and with a definite social-change perspective. But I think only a very small number of the staff would have said they're Marxists, or out to abolish capitalism. Most would have called themselves liberals.
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> On a much more mundane level, I read the articles in the American Prospect on labor issues, and they obviously all take, in a general sense, a pro-solidarity, non-individualistic line. Yet the people who write them (and, to the extent that they agree with the articles, the people who read them) are almost all nice liberals who love Obama, etc. None of them are Marxists or anything close. If you have to want to abolish capitalism to be on the left, then in the 1930's John L. Lewis was not on the left. Whatever you think of John L. Lewis, any definition of the Depression-era US left that would exclude him seems pretty odd to me. Certainly it doesn't at all correspond to how most people perceived things at the time…
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> ...it's usually pretty obvious when someone is "more on the liberal end," as opposed to "more on the leftist end." But there seems to be a mania for drawing bright lines for purposes of identity-stability.
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My views are similar to those of Julio and SA.
In general, I don't find the terms "left" or "socialist" very meaningful because of the many conflicting interpretations which people assign to them. Marxists and social democrats each describe themselves as socialists and of the left, but that in itself it tells us next to nothing about their often widely differing political values, objectives, and strategies for change.
More broadly and despite their differences, liberals, social democrats, Marxists, and anarchists have historically been situated on the left and conservatives and fascists on the right. I think that political taxonomy is still valid, though the differences between left and right are less evident in modern societies, where the level of social conflict is such that differences can be channeled into parliamentary systems and resolved through electoral compromise. That's been clear in this discussion and the related thread about the tea party on this list.
There is little confusion about who is on the left and who on the the right in highly polarized societies, especially those convulsed by civil war. There was no difficulty, for example, distinguishing between the two sides in the French, Russian, or Chinese Revolutions or in Nazi Germany or the Spanish Civil War. A simple gesture or comment betrayed the political sympathies of even those who wore no uniforms or engaged in overt activity.
The same historical divide between the constituencies of the left and right have not gone away, though it expresses itself a more muted form. It presents itself daily in relation to government intervention in the economy, abortion rights, gay marriage, undocumented immigrants, affirmative action, trade unions, religion in public life, civil liberties, military spending and foreign wars, and other important contemporary issues. Liberal Democrats and socialists to their left have as coherent and consistent view of these issues as do their conservative Republic opponents and others on their right from a contrary standpoint.
We're in the habit of identifying the left with socialism. But with the historic decline of the militant trade unions and mass socialist parties, the left which exists today, as Julio and SA have noted, is mainly composed of liberal Democrats in the US and their kindred liberal supporters of social democratic parties elsewhere. To exclude these liberal masses from the left effectively leaves the small remaining cohort of socialists in and around university campuses with no one left to talk to but themselves.