A friend asked me the other day whether I thought the divisions on the left could be overcome. The context made it clear that it was the divisions which opened up after September 11 2001 - in response to the events of that day itself, then over the invasion of Afghanistan that followed, and over the war on terror, and over the war in Iraq - to which the question was referring. The following thoughts are prompted by my friend's question.
First, in a sense the left has always been divided: between different traditions of thought, different positions on particular historical and political questions, different organizations and movements or just looser 'currents' of opinion or activity.
Second, division in this sense is not something which any of us on the left with a firm commitment to democratic values and practices should want to see overcome. For this is an integral part, not only of democratic life overall, but also of any authentic and healthy democracy of the left. You cannot put artificial boundaries around the dynamics of argument and disagreement about matters of great importance, such as are the stuff of political life.
Third, I would also put this same point in a less general and more partisan way. To be blunt about it, there are some current divisions on the left which I wouldn't want to see overcome, so long as the kind of views they divide me from continue to flourish. What sort of views am I talking about? Well, as a sample: those which in reaction to 9/11 embodied some version of comeuppance-talk or apologetic evasion; those which represent ways of being 'understanding' about the terrorist murder of civilians and/or think that this is all the fault of the West; those claiming that there is no serious threat of terrorism; those according to which Israel has no right to exist and/or according to which Israel is to blame for everything that happens in the Middle East, including the murder of its own people; those which at the onset of the Iraq war preferred a reverse for American power, as had to mean a triumph for Saddam Hussein and his regime, and those according to which we shouldn't be too choosy as to methods in supporting the Iraqi so-called 'resistance'; more generally, those which in pursuit of an at-all-costs anti-imperialism, often indistinguishable from anti-Americanism, are evasive if not downright apologetic about openly anti-democratic forces so long as these can be presented in some sort of anti-imperialist guise.
I don't wish to be united with views of this sort, or the wider political tendencies of which they are an expression. I want to be divided from them. Depersonalizing those two statements, I don't think that the broad section of the left with genuinely democratic instincts and commitments should yearn for the overcoming of these divisions - except by way of trying to discredit and weaken (through criticizing) the views and political currents which lie on the wrong side of them. This doesn't mean anathematizing the people holding those views or belonging to those currents, since the hope always has to be, when people have fallen under the sway of noxious opinions, that they are better than their opinions are and might be persuaded away from them. Anathema and excommunication, witch-finding, denunciation, are indeed another part of what is wrong with that section of the left with a rather dodgy - to put it no more strongly - post-9/11 profile.
Are there not, then, useful areas of common endeavour and debate to be engaged in, even across some of the current divisions of political opinion and judgement within the left? Of course there are. For the viewpoints I have characterized above do not make up the entirety of the left. To use the disagreements over the Iraq war here as a convenient index: there was a division between those of us who supported the liberation of Iraq and those who opposed the war whose putative aim it was, in which division what was at issue were different, and conscientious, assessments of prevailing circumstance and likely outcome, rather than any of the apologetic, anti-democratic and other negative impulses I have set out above. Across this sort of division there is no reason why key questions of the contemporary world cannot be jointly and fruitfully engaged. There is every reason why they should be.
Key questions? With no pretence that this list offers anything other than some pointers: working out a morally defensible view on military intervention (against genocide threatening or in progress, humanitarian crisis, regimes of extreme tyranny and oppression) which goes beyond the stock and useless responses of 'all about oil', 'imperialism', 'he-was-our-son-of-a-bitch', etc, to some of the moral and political complexities on the ground; addressing the scandal, the daily catastrophe, of global poverty and developing specifically-left responses to it; ditto issues of continuing need and severe deprivation even within the wealthier heartlands of contemporary capitalism; continuing to fight racism (in all its forms); paying attention to the terrible oppression, including enslavement, of women and children in sex and other trafficking; more abstractly - as this is bound to be today, given the weakened state of the left - asking, in common and sober and non-bullshit forms of inquiry, what meaning we can give to the original goals and aspirations that went under the name of socialism.