LETTERS
What is Left of the Left?
To the Editor:
William Phillips ("Com–
ment,"
Partisan Review,
4, 1982)
regrets that socialism in America
is no longer a coherent interna–
tional ideology but a media-in–
fluenced, disembodied reformism
whose unthinking antinational
perspective opposes American
power in a manner that benefits
the other antisocialist empire–
the Soviet Union. All of this is to
be
regretted but Phillips offers no
way out. Indeed, by requiring the
American left to address itself to
Soviet authoritarianism and im–
perialism he sharpens the dilem–
ma. How the left in the United
States could take such a position
without being drowned by the lar–
ger cold war chorus is very diffi–
cult to imagine. Adding "and
Afghanistan too" at the bottom
of the posters will hardly solve the
profound problem of working for
the revolutionary transformation
of modern society in a world
whose state mechanisms (both
right and left) tower over their civ–
il societies. The request that the
left within each state tailor its pro–
grams to the requirements of dem–
ocracy and socialism on a global
scale makes that which is now dif–
ficult, impossible. How would
Polish Solidarity have dealt with
the likely possibility that by weak–
ening the Soviet regime in Eastern
Europe it would strengthen the
ability of the United States to over–
throw the Sandinista government
of Nicaragua? In any event, would
such thinking
be
truly interna–
tionalist or merely a left wing ver-
sion of Kissingerian "linkage"?
It
seems to me that it would be better
to leave the destruction of the
Soviet empire to those within it.
No dou bt the left pays a price
for its balkanization. Vision of–
ten narrows to some variant of
particular national myths. But
there may be no alternative.
Nations have come to arrange cap–
italism in so many different ways
while "socialist" revolutions have
combined liberation and domina–
tion in unexpected ways. Gone are
the brave generations whose faith
in the ability of socialism to re–
solve the contradictions of bour–
geois culture mirrored their be–
lief that capitalism had destroyed
(or would soon destroy) all pre–
existing cultures.
Our task today is not to re–
capture a lost ideological rigor
that once made the left confident
and influential-but was also the
source of its defeats and, in victory,
its sins. Our task is to do what can
be done in a world without heroic
opportunities. Perhaps it is incon–
sistent and even dangerous (given
the rigid form of international
relations) to call for the reduction
of the U.S. nuclear arsenal or that
Israel withdraw from Lebanon.
But what would it mean for an
American left not to do so? Soviet
nuclear strategy and PLO policy
are not made in America. U.S.
nuclear policy and (in a meaning–
ful sense) Israeli foreign policy
are.
We live in a world where the
identity of nations is much strong–
er than that of classes. We no long–
er know how to speak in the name
of an international socialism
be–
cause our century has led us away
