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A. Cockburn paints a gloomy but perspicacious picture of the left, one that applies not only to the U.S. I think what we are witnessing is a fairly complete wipeout of the historic left and working class movements as institutionalized since the late 19th century. The Russian revolution was their apogee. An analogous process - and immediate historical predecessor - was the extinction of the radical petit-bourgeois Whig tradition in early-mid 19th century England. It traced a lineage back to the Levelers of the Revolutionary period and others to the "left" of these. Its extinction coincided with the Chartist movement and the repeal of the Corn Laws. That tradition lived on longer in the U.S. as the 19th century "Democracy" as well as in the progressive wing of the Republicans, together with independent manifestations in the form of Populist, Socialist (never a Marxist party under Debs, essentially a radical democratic party with a working class orientation) and Midwest Progressive parties. It lived on just long enough to ideologically encompass the history of the U.S. working class movement in its historical entirety. This subjective history "ironically", but not accidentally coincided with, first the global ascendancy and then global "triumph" of U.S. imperialism, including the ideological projection of an individualized petit-bourgeois "democracy" inclusive of significant sectors of the U.S. working class, as opposed to that imagined by European social democracy, not to mention that of a workers' state. Thus what we are witness to is a double extinction: that of the working class movements that emerged globally from the late 19th century onward outside the U.S. at the hands of a hegemonic U.S. imperialism itself, a U.S. whose political regime is the holdover troglodyte predecessor and (therefore) antithesis of that working class movement, and that of a political regime itself heading towards extinction in all its characteristic political ramifications both "left" and "right". That is the silver lining left out in the picture painted by A. Cockburn. And was it not the last great political mass extinction of oppositional movements, that mentioned above in the mid 19th century that though it bypassed the U.S., also produced Marx and Engels? Cheerfully yours, -Matt ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
