There's a new issue of Democratiya now up, much of it centred on the 40th anniversary of May 1968. It has pieces by Russell Berman, Dick Howard, Philip Spencer, Marko Attila Hoare, David Hirsh and more.
For once in a way, I shall mark the appearance of the new number of the magazine by taking issue with one of the articles - that by Gabriel Noah Brahm, 'The Post-Left: An Archeology and a Genealogy'. I have already, disagreeing with Alan Johnson, said why I don't find the usage 'post-left' a felicitous one. I don't intend to repeat what I said on that occasion. I stand by it. But looking for Brahm's argument why just that section of the would-be left now under his critical scrutiny should qualify as a post-left, when other previous lefts or segments of the left with a far from salubrious record would still be for him pre-post, so to put it, and therefore not post- but simply left, led me to the strategic passage I go on to quote and then criticize below.
Brahm itemizes the various components, as he sees them, of the new post-left which he is discussing, and it is relevant to note that some of these components themselves carry the 'post' prefix: thus 'postmodernist cultural relativism' and 'post-Marxism' and 'postcolonial' are all in the mix. But these lesser cases of 'post'-ism do not by themselves establish the meaning of 'post' in 'post-left'. For example, someone can be no longer Marxist and yet genuinely of the left, just as it's always been possible to be not-Marxist and of the left. Similarly, because a person's basic philosophical commitments don't always flow straightforwardly, or with consistent logic, into their politics, there are postmodernists who are genuinely of the left. The greater case of Brahm's 'post'-ism is not the simple result of adding up the lesser 'post'-isms by which it is constituted, because 'post' in 'post-left' is intended by him - explicitly - to indicate that those to whom it refers are no longer of the left. So why now, and why just them? Brahm says:
It is hard to overstate the feebleness of this explanation. Regimes of endemic lying, political lawlessness, show trials, the Gulag, and with millions of corpses to their credit - but at least the agendas for murder were 'somewhat hidden'. And so the 'left' categorization may still be thought to apply in their case. In fact the murderous violence of those regimes was hidden only from those who didn't want to see; the essentials were already known during the 1930s.All the departures ('post'-this and 'post'-that) had added up. A post-left was born.
What about previous betrayals of principle on the left, you ask? For sure, Stalin and Mao were hardly pikers in their day, yet this was different. The totalitarians of yore at least kept their agendas for murder somewhat hidden. One could debate the gap between 'means and ends' and be 'surprised' by 'revelations'. Islamists, by contrast, announce their hideous agenda openly; the ends are worse than the means; and the means are a foul new kind of suicide mass-murder terrorism. No. That is not a left by any definition.
Then there's the elision Brahm makes between Islamists (who 'announce their hideous agenda openly') and that section of the contemporary Western left that supports them. I have no warmth for the latter, but they are every bit as evasive as the Stalinist and Maoist apologists of yore, yes-butting their way through the root causes of terrorist violence as supposedly forced upon its perpetrators through no fault of the perpetrators themselves and thanks to the originary sins of imperialism, Zionism, George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Egregious apologists they certainly are, these leftists, but they are not the actual agents of suicide bombing, and gauged against the historical episodes of Stalinist and Maoist totalitarianism their significance is so far rather small. Which isn't to say that they should be looked on with complacency. They should be opposed, vigorously, without quarter, from within the left and from outside it, as the pernicious influence that they are.
Nonetheless, to read these people out of the left by the application of a word, while giving the agents and apologists of the Stalinized regimes a free pass in that regard, shows a want of historical proportion. As seriously, it suggests an unwillingness to face up to a reality which should be familiar by now: those within the left who commit the crimes and/or mouth the apologias do so precisely as leftists, the products of a history that is not clean but bloody and besmirched. There is nothing for it but to try to uphold, and to fight for, the better traditions of the left against its worse ones. Trying to cleanse this history by use of a definitional stratagem is among its worse ones.