[lbo-talk] Todd Gitlin on "Incoherent Left" - full article

[David Green]

Once upon a time, in a century far, far away, there was an idea of a single, 
interconnected left in a single, interconnected world—a unified force, or a 
vanguard, or a virtual chamber of the deputies of the people, some entity whose 
mission was to lead the way toward the realization of a collective and universal 
ideal. In one sense, the origin of this grand metaphor lay in the millenarian 
monotheism shared by the three Abrahamic religions. In an earthier way, it lay 
in the seating arrangements of the post-Revolution French Parliament, which 
positioned the left as the party of the future against the right, which stood 
for the already done, the established, the past. Just as time was bifurcated 
into past and future, teetering on the knife-edge of the present, so were the 
two tendencies.
 
This was not—there never is—an idea without precedent. The past had been full of 
struggles for justice and equality. But only occasionally did seers hazard the 
notion that there was a single, overarching, or undergirding structure to all of 
them. One attempt to formulate a common root was the couplet attributed to John 
Ball, the English priest who helped inspire a peasant revolt in 1381: "When Adam 
delved and Eve span/Who was then the gentleman?" (No small inspiration: The 1888 
novel A Dream of John Ball was written by a founder of England's Socialist 
League, William Morris.) The colonists gathered in Philadelphia in 1776 held it 
"self-evident" that "all men"—not just white men, Englishmen, propertied men, 
men of the late 18th century, or denizens of the Northern Hemisphere—are 
"created equal."
 
Then Marx lent the idea a universal and analytical as well as normative 
sweep—perfect for an age of globalizing production, communication, and 
culture—with the ingenious proposition that history was passing into the grip of 
a single, unitary agent of change and deliverance. He borrowed Hegel's imagery 
of the "universal class" to posit that history—all of it—tended toward a grand, 
apocalyptic conclusion in which distinct conflicts would be subsumed into the 
Final Conflict, to be won when all the oppressed were gathered by inexorable 
processes into one Big Class to End All Classes.
 
For roughly a century and a half after Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto, 
the left—or, if you like, Left—was more or less the name for those who honored 
and heralded that One Big Class. Even a good deal of 19th- and 20th-century 
nationalism was motivated by the idea that in seeking the independence of their 
respective nations, hitherto colonized, imperialized peoples were pursuing a 
universal project—the peoples were willy-nilly a people in the making. The 
lyrics might vary from place to place, but under the tutelage of One Big Party, 
the melody would be the same.
 
Beginning in 1960, the editors of London's New Left Review began composing the 
theoretical music for a revised revolution, and they hit their stride as Fidel 
Castro, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong strived to conscript the global South into a 
sort of universal liberation front, and some Westerners fancied themselves its 
allies. In 1970, the New Left Review spun off a publishing company, Verso, from 
which now emerges The Verso Book of Dissent: From Spartacus to the Shoe-Thrower 
of Baghdad. "Dissent" is the new rubric—a chastened choice in the post-1989 
world—but then where shall the editors, Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim, draw the 
line?
 
The book, an anthology of quotes and excerpts to commemorate Verso's 40th 
anniversary, superficially looks like a heap of loose ends, but it is both more 
and less. Tariq Ali writes in his preface that the figures who appear in the 
book are the "dissenters and rebels who have attempted to move mountains, to 
improve, change, transform the world since the earliest times." But if the 
category of world-changer is to be so all-welcoming, why not Mussolini, who in 
his own way "attempted to move mountains, to improve, change, transform the 
world"? Why honor the black nationalist Robert F. Williams but not the 
organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee? Why toss a credit 
to the Stalinist hack Louis Althusser for having called Spinoza "the first 
materialist thinker" (was Democritus chopped liver?).
 
It's good to represent the ex-colonial world, but why a Palestinian poet who 
heralds "the glory lost since Umayyad conquests"? Why reproduce bumper-sticker 
slogans from groups like the Crips and Bloods, while omitting Albert Camus? Why 
may kibbutzniks not apply? Why honor the Sartre who declined the Nobel but not 
the Sartre who for decades defended the State of Israel's right to exist?
 
There is plenty of agitprop in this collection, but explanations are wanting for 
how saints become sinners and what the two might have to do with each other. 
When does the Mao celebrated in 1927 for declaring, "Down with the local tyrants 
and evil gentry! All power to the peasant associations!" pass over into the Mao 
satirized in 1961 as an oppressor of the masses? The editors strain to represent 
bottom-up rhetoric, however boilerplate, and select cultural snippets (John 
Lennon at his most banal) alongside high-flying theory. A passage from Foucault, 
harnessing forces of control to forces of resistance in "perpetual spirals of 
power and pleasure" (his italics), is followed two pages on by Adam Michnik 
celebrating "the end of the utopian dream," which in turn is followed, five 
pages on, by a hope for "peace with social justice" expressed by a Peruvian 
community organizer assassinated by the Maoist Shining Path. Lenin is 
celebrated; then, poker-faced, a few pages on, so are the rebellious sailors of 
Kronstadt.
 
Perhaps the principle is that boilerplate is admissible as long as it is 
Manichaean, as when Bolivia's president, Evo Morales, speaks of "the 
confrontation of two cultures: the culture of life represented by the indigenous 
people, and the culture of death represented by the West. I believe only in the 
power of the people." Hugo Chávez makes a show of dispelling the sulfuric fumes 
left on the United Nations General Assembly rostrum by George W. Bush, and 
declares "readiness to fight to save the world and build a new and better 
world." Seven pages later, the book quotes from an anthem of Iran's Green 
Movement, which arose to oppose the "allegedly fraudulent presidential election 
results" that renewed the tyrannical power of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ally of ... 
Hugo Chávez. Does one big movement enfold Hugo Chávez and the democrats of 
Tehran?
 
The Verso Book of Dissent is a project that not only does not cohere, but also 
cannot. History is too messy to fit a grand story of Establishment vs. Dissent. 
Does Tristan Tzara, who rants "against action," who "hate[s] common sense," 
really belong to the same One Big Union with Eugene V. Debs who, on the next 
page, heralds "the rise of the toiling masses"? And what do they have to do with 
the Internet guru John Perry Barlow, telling "Governments of the Industrial 
World, you weary giants of flesh and steel" that he comes "from Cyberspace, the 
new home of Mind"? Is it not, to say the least, problematic to tell "the past to 
leave us alone" in a volume that celebrates tradition?
 
For the sake of ecumenism, it is helpful to see the former Sandinista 
vice-president Sergio Ramirez acknowledging that his government "many times 
los[t] a proper perspective of ... what was just and desirable," that fell into 
the hands of "power in perpetuity." But then it is also interesting to see where 
the editors' limits lie. They quote Albert Einstein when he opposes the 
terrorist Menachem Begin in 1948, when he writes compellingly about socialism in 
1949, when he co-signs a humanist, anti-cold-war manifesto with Bertrand Russell 
in 1955, but not during the many occasions when he declared himself a Zionist. 
It would seem that one single nationalism in the world is not admissible to the 
editors' almost-United Nations, though a banal 1997 anti-Oslo Accords statement 
from an official of the theocratic Hamas is found worthy of inclusion, as is a 
simple-minded statement in favor of boycotts, divestments, and sanctions against 
a certain nation whose name must not be spoken.
 
Often enough, The Verso Book of Dissent resembles the 16th-century Foxe's Book 
of Martyrs, in which a sort of unity was composed from the premise that what 
Christians (mainly Protestant) had in common was less what they believed than 
what was done to them. It was popery that unified the potpourri. Later, it was 
European empires. And now? "The left" exists in quotation marks.
 
Lacking coherence, The Verso Book of Dissent heads smack into an intellectual 
dead end. Nothing unique there: The right suffers its own incoherence. But in a 
time of ideological decomposition, it would be good to see people so sure of 
themselves come down from their high horse.
 
Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University. 
His latest book, with Liel Leibovitz, is "The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, 
and the Ordeals of Divine Election" (Simon & Schuster, 2010). His novel, 
"Undying," will be published next month by Counterpoint.