*** http://jacobinmag.com/blog/?p=372
I think Chris Bertram is someone well-worth reading. It’s clear the feeling isn’t mutual. In a Sunday piece<http://crookedtimber.org/2011/05/22/the-fragmenting-coalition-of-the-left-some-musings/> in the always engaging *Crooked Timber*, Bertram wrote of the fragmented European left and examined what remains of it.
He correctly identifies the bankruptcy of the “technocratic quasi-neoliberal left,” that band of Third Way “modernizers” who took over the continent’s venerable social democratic parties during the last few decades. They have little to show for compromises made in pursuit of power and their policies have continued to undercut the very social forces that made the reforms of the past century possible. Their only appeal, Bertram concludes, lies in that they are “slightly less bad than the full-on right-wing.”
Bertram’s second current is left-populist, “blue Labour,” those culturally conservative workers who are worried about neoliberalism’s effect on their communities, as well as the influx of low-wage, migrant labor. They want to win elections to effect change just like the New Labourites, but don’t share the latter’s natural aversion to extra-parliamentary mobilization. Alas, these workers are running counter to History, as market reforms continue to erode their ability to organize and articulate themselves politically.
There’s also the “eco-left,” an egalitarian, somewhat inchoate formation united by a common mistrust of growth and the traditional “more is better” leftist posture. He sees this group, from Zapatistas doing combat drills in the Lacandon Jungle to Nick Clegg’s jaded lovers, as capable of organizing “resistance to government policy and implement[ing] alternative ways of living in the here and now.”
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