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A View From the American Left
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11494 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1986 |
2,683 Words |
| Author
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Paul Breines
Paul Breines teaches modern European intellectual history at
Boston College and is presently working on an analysis of new
images of Jews in recent pulp fiction. |
The historical Western Left, which since the French Revolution has been the most audible of the egalitarian voices so despised by Gonzalo Fernandez de la Mora, is today stumbling about in utter disarray. This situations is due as much to some of the tawdry triumphs of socialism in power - among them, the suppression of the Solidarity movement in Poland; the Khmer Rouge's scorched-earth debourgeoisification program, or the Castro regime's homophobic politics - as it is to the Left's continued inability to emerge, anywhere in the West, as a significant social force. The Left is of course no newcomer to crisis; it has, in fact, known little else. Today, however, the well-worn leftist method of crisis and stress management - namely reliance on that great totem of scientific socialism, History to correct in the long run the calamities of the present - tends to catch in the throat of many of those who recite the ritual formulas. There are those who try, of course, for orthodoxy's delusions are durable, its death rattle protracted. In this sense, however, de la Mora's repeated denunciation of the Left amount to kicking a dying horse. Characteristically, he has no interest in what may be sprouting from the burial ground.
In numerous, if still scattered, quarters of today's Western Left, there is a budding recognition that the movement's present crisis, in which the matters addressed by de la Mora do in fact have a significant place, is terminal. Forced to reckon with socialist gulags, the dissolution of the radical movements of the 1960s, the victories of Reagan and Thatcher, the criticisms of customary Marxist analyses by feminists and gays, and the philosophical issues raised by such thinkers as Jurgen Habermas and Michel Foucault, many leftists have begun an unprecedentedly deep reappraisal of basic assumptions and beliefs. This, however, is only part of the story. For there are also signs of a genuinely novel sensibility within remnants of the Left. Here and there, one sees leftists who have come to know confusion, ambivalence, uncertainty, and despair, and who are starting to integrate these important emotions into their outlook and programs. Because it is virtually impossible to ignore the erosion of the intellectual and moral ground on which it stood, the Left has had to shed much of its old pomposity. Again, leftist orthodoxies and their inevitably coercive features have not vanished. Yet, segments of the Western Left are coming to recognize that human beings, themselves included, and the structures of their relations, are far more strange and opaque than we had supposed. This is worth noting here because de la Mora, in spite of his rhetorical gestures toward historical specificity and differentiation, treats the Left as a unitary and univocal phenomenon at the very moment it is at once generally more
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