We’d prefer if you didn’t leave by the door on the Right: Or a little bit more on Nick Cohen and that war…

David Clark, Robin Cooks special advisor from 1997 to 2001 at the Foreign Office writes an excellent piece in this month’s Prospect. He is writing about Nick Cohen and ‘What’s Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way’ which has already been dealt with here by smiffy.

As he notes:

The conclusions Cohen arrives at are unsparingly critical and deeply pessimistic. Robbed of its historic purpose by the defeats of the 1980s, much of the “liberal-left” (Cohen’s cover-all term for every shade of left opinion) has experienced a “dark liberation” from responsible politics and opted for a self-indulgent oppositionism which at best betrays its most noble aspirations and at worst has turned it into an active accomplice of the authoritarian right, both secular and clerical. In short, the liberal-left is morally and politically bankrupt.

Cohen is right that the doctrine that my enemy’s enemy is my friend has led sections of the left to some truly grotesque conclusions. One was that the great crime committed in the Balkans in the 1990s was not the ethnic slaughter inflicted by Serb paramilitaries but the efforts of western governments to stop it. Another was the transformation of Saddam Hussein from a blood-soaked tyrant into a noble victim of American…

But Clark has a much more nuanced critique of Cohen. He agrees with Cohen that ‘certain leftists are prepared to tolerate or even support totalitarian movements and ideas in the service of anti-imperialism’, but he argues ‘it is his assertion that this is symptomatic of a new and deep rooted malaise on the liberal-left that is wrong’.

He notes that the left embraces a broad spectrum of beliefs (indeed I find Cohen’s use of the word Liberals in the title of his book somewhat puzzling and wonder is that a pitch for US sales). But he clearly indicates that although ‘beyond the utlra-leftists who openly despise liberal democracy, there has always been a fringe of fellow travellers willing to provide soft support…Cohen deplores the failure of protestors on the March 2003 anti-war march to change anti-Saddam slogans, but at least none of them were chanting for him’. And that is different. Clark who belongs on the traditional left of the British Labour party indicates the difference between 2003 and 1968 when the marchers were chanting the praises of Ho Chi Minh and Castro and Ché, but the point is well made. Bar a tiny tiny group there was no visceral support for Saddam either explicitly or implicitly.

Sure, the rhetoric of some on the anti-war side does appear to short-circuit thinking. The continual elision of many different arguments in a sort of boilerplate ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ answer to any issue pertaining to the war is tiresome as ten minutes on the Guardian’s Comment is Free will demonstrate. Blair and Bush war criminals? Well, could well be, but probably not in this world – or if they are we’re going to have to hold an awful lot of others to such a high standard. War for oil? Maybe, who knows. People should make their own history? I entirely agree, but again in a world where everyone is willing to supply arms it’s hard to see how that’s entirely feasible And so on… But that’s to miss the point that even if the given reasons for opposing the war can appear reductionist that doesn’t mean that they don’t have a certain power to them when taken collectively.

And yes, there was a massive contradiction in one respect in so far as had the protests been successful they would have led to the continuation of Saddams reign, and that is no small thing and something progressives should consider long and hard particularly how the left can give more than genuflectory and rhetorical support to societies that are suffering under appalling oppression. But, the dangers – the very real dangers of US intervention – with the unknowable potential for grim ramifications was a genuine and appropriate reason for calling a halt to the process as structured by London and Washington and were intuitively recognised by those who Cohen would be profoundly critical of. I made the wrong call at that time. Given the same, or similar, set of circumstances I wouldn’t although I’m not antagonistic to limited interventions per se.

One might also argue that there were many intermediate positions well short of armed conflict which the US and the UK could have adopted that would have been both more activist and more appropriate than invasion – yet they chose not to do so. Even were one to accept entirely their bona fides on the war (something I do not) the issue as to why these interim measures were not taken speaks for a moral culpability and irresponsibility on their part even before the invasion started.

However Clark has further points to make:

There is something additionally peculiar about the focus of Cohen’s argument. Although the totalitarian left has always been with us, it is probably less significant today as a political force than at any time in the past 100 years. Leninist and Stalinist groups that used to attract tens of thousands of supporters, infiltrating the Labour party…are today a borken force. The largest of them the SWP is a mere 3,000 strong and the Communist Party of Britain has only around 900 members. They do not merit the attention lavished on them by Cohen and others on the pro-war left.

This is crucial. I spend some time entertaining and to some degree educating, myself by following the travails of the further left in the UK and here. But these are tiny formations of often articulate and eloquent people who are very marginalised both from the rest of the left and the society within which they live.

Sure, they achieved a certain prominence during 2003. But can anyone really believe that Respect are the coming thing in the UK, or that Richard Boyd-Barrett is on the brink of achieving state power in the upcoming General Election?

The further left is small (obviously) because it lacks mass support. Inside our bourgeois democracies, however flawed, it is unlikely that they will ever gain mass support, and the democracies by dint of being bourgeois retain sufficient legitimacy to satisfy the broad mass of their populations as evidenced by either passive or active support at elections. We can huff, we can puff, but we aren’t going to blow that particular house down by full frontal assaults or covert chicanery. And as an example of this it’s worth looking at the Workers’ Party (originally Official Sinn Féin, later Sinn Féin – The Workers’ Party) record, surely the closest this country and arguably the UK (seeing as it – ahem – organised in the six counties) ever came to an organisation with both a coherent political ideology and – ahem (cubed) – other muscle capable of at least partially impinging on the state (Obviously another offshoot of Sinn Féin presented a threat to the state, but of a different sort). That failed ignominiously, in part because even at the height of the 1980s and the most severe economic crisis this state ever experienced there was no traction for such an approach. The WP had at it’s height at most 3000 members across the island (although having been a member during that period I’d wonder about the accuracy of that figure) in a society of 2.5 million plus in the South, a vastly more favourable ratio than say the SWP or similar groups in relation to the population of the UK. It had experience in terms of it’s antecedents in covert organisation and such like. And yet it was unable to deliver a truly revolutionary programme. Odd one thinks, if only because it saw itself as a direct heir to the sort of ‘vanguardist’ programmes that actually worked in Russia and elsewhere.

Yet however disciplined the WP it’s doubtful that had it come to the crunch more than a minority within it would have gladly signed up to a coup against the Irish state as constituted at that point in time. Now argument will rage as to the nature of the WP and it’s capacity for bringing about change, but few will disagree that in terms of seriousness and potential capability it’s project was vastly more so than say the SWP.

Now if I know this, and I’m no genius, it’s fairly certain both the longer term members of the SWP, SP and whoever know this (which tells us much about the comforts of struggle for pretty much it’s own sake) and so does Nick Cohen.

So what’s it all about then? Clark suggests that it is in some sense an inability to conceive of Islamists and Islamism as ‘political phenomena rather than as simple manifestations of evil’. Clark considers that ‘this difference is crucial…if terrorists…are influenced by politics, then it is possible to deal with them by a process of engagement- if not with the terrorists and extremists themselves, then certainly by those who might be susceptible to their propaganda… [but if not] then any attempt to accord them a rational explanation is akin to appeasement’.

But he eventually pins the tail on the donkey and sees this as a shift of Cohen and others away from the left entirely. Cohen is according to Clark apparently now unconvinced about comprehensive education and exercised by welfare dependency. If accurate this is terrible news since Cohen has been one of the most significant and persuasive voices on the left for a considerable length of time.

So there is another lesson to learn. And that’s this. That sometimes the Left, or some aspects of it, are on one issue or another going to be wrong from the individual point of view. Appallingly, obviously or just plain stupidly wrong. Just as those on the right accept – because the right is a broad church too – that some aspects of it are less agreeable than others they naturally don’t run to the hills at the first, or even the fifteenth, sign of trouble. They stay and they fight their corner. They argue, the discuss and sometimes, if they’re lucky they may well win their ground. The great betrayal is not as Cohen and others would have it that the left has lost it’s bearings.

Instead, to my mind it is that Cohen and others have themselves become intoxicated by events that when put in perspective appear much less earth shaking than at first sight. The Iraq war was not the defining moral and political event of our time. The Iraq war protests were not the harbinger of the SWP and all it’s works. The internet isn’t representative of all shades of left, even if they happen to be there. The war itself was whatever the intentions of some of those who initiated it a squalid affair which left no ones reputation entirely intact but reflects perhaps worst upon those who refuse to recognise objective reality.

And if that betrayal is to be compounded by a further betrayal, a sort of Flight of the Earls of Intellect from the left because they find it easier to continue to justify the unjustifiable, or in a curious mirror image of the further left and it’s dubious theoretical use of the concept of ‘imperialism’ to continue to play with their own theoretical castles in the sky that evade the central truth that the US could not be an honest broker in this dispute of all, then that too is a tragedy of sorts.

But that also means that the opposite is often true. Take Cohen as an example. His books, and in particular “Pretty Straight Guys”, are an excoriating analysis of New Labour from a perspective not a million miles away from political positions here. That he got it wrong on the Iraq war – a single issue – should no more mean that he is somehow placed beyond the pale (whatever the way in which segments of the self-defined ‘decent’ left have attempted to do that themselves) for socialists and progressives.

There’s a balance to be struck and people should be careful not to depart or be pushed out the wrong door.