The Left is fragmented and filled with dissent — we need solidarity to fight the coming battles

Cursory reflection, leaning as it does on crude political categories like “Left” and “Right”, nevertheless reveals a peculiar feature of our time with surprising clarity. A form of double movement wherein the Left is falling apart while the Right consolidates. Unlike Polanyi’s “double movement” (wherein capitalism is both freed and to be constrained at the same time), what I am describing is a global shearing movement rather than a kind of ambivalence.

Although crude, the categories of Left and Right gain credence in the deepening political schism that has been noted everywhere in the world. More and more national elections are tending to 50/50 outcomes which are often decided on less than a 1% difference in votes. Crude categories for crude times!

These 50/50 election outcomes are simplistically misinterpreted as Left/Right outcomes by many commentators. The American Right represented by the Republican Party is a more cohesive and distinct formation than what is found on the American Left which is more dispersed and involved in a more partial relationship with the Democratic Party.

In South Africa, where the voting patterns are very different from those in the US, the fragmentation of the Left tripartite alliance of the ANC, Cosatu and the SACP itself foretold the fragmentation of the ANC as the leading political party of the Left.

Has it always been this way? Has “the Left” always been an insipid contiguity of splintered causes? Has “the Right” always been such a globe-straddling, sharp-edged edifice? My sense is that it is an emphatic “no” to the former and a qualified “yes” to the latter.

I want to put aside the question of the basis of the unity of the Right and rather bring Left dissension into the foreground as the more interesting phenomenon that needs to be understood — as something that was not always the case.

My own limited experience confirms for me that the fragmentation of the Left was not always the case. I grew up in and on the Left in South Africa and have remained there among some of its many contemporary fragments. The 1980s apartheid state of emergency was the crucible in which so many Lefties were made and largely unified. The ANC-aligned United Democratic Front was diverse yet characterised by a deep solidarity that stood the test of a sustained violent onslaught. Once upon a time, we were comrades on the Left. We asked in the Struggle song: “Who Left? Who Right?”. That was all we needed to know back then.