by JAYATI GHOSH
(Ralph Miliband Lecture on the Future of the Left, London School of Economics, London, U.K., 28 May 2012.)
It is a great honour and privilege for me to be invited to deliver this lecture in the Ralph Miliband series on the future of the Left. Ralph Miliband was not just an outstanding social scientist and innovative Marxist thinker, but also a beacon to progressive people across the world. For many of us, including in India, his own work and the work he promoted in the New Left Review and the Socialist Register expressed the spirit of enquiry and questioning, as well as the fundamental commitment to a socialist future, which made Marxism as a mode of thinking so attractive. This gave us more confidence to interpret the world around us, even when we disagreed with some particular interpretation. Ralph Miliband showed us that ideas could and should be handled not just “with care and with passion” but also without dogma or fear, including the fear of exposing one’s own shibboleths.
In tribute to this inspiring combination of personal commitment, intellectual integrity and fearlessness, I have chosen what may appear to be an excessively ambitious topic. After all, to talk of one single “emerging Left” even in any single part of the world is not just brave but foolhardy. Left politics and Left positions have always been — and will continue to be — extremely diverse, within and across national boundaries. Given the profusion and variation of the multiplicity of approaches, it could justifiably be argued that attempts to fit all types of progressive thinking in very different parts of the world into a common box would be over-simplistic and even misleading.
This perception is also a reflection of the accentuated fragmentation of “Left” positions. For much of the twentieth century, it was easier to talk of an overarching socialist framework, a “grand vision” within which more specific debates were conducted. Of course there were many strands of socialism, however defined, and there were also fierce and occasionally violent struggles between them. Even so, they shared more than a common historical lineage — they also shared a fundamental perception or basic vision. At the risk of crude simplification, this vision can be summarised in terms of perceiving the working class to be the most fundamental agent of positive change, capable (once organised) of transforming not only existing property and material relations but also wider society and culture through its own actions.
But in recent times the very idea of a grand vision has been in retreat, battered not just by the complexities and limitations of “actually existing Socialism” in its various incarnations, but more recently and thoroughly by the ferocious triumphalism of its opposite. Indeed, it may be fair to say that, insofar as any grand vision has existed at all in recent times, the one that increasingly came to dominate public life almost everywhere in the world by the late 20th century was that of the market as a self-regulating and inherently efficient mechanism for organising economic life. This idea had already fallen by the wayside a century previously, before it was resurrected and dusted off for use in a slightly more “post-modern” format that became the theoretical underpinning for the vast explosion of global economic integration under the aegis of finance capital that has marked the period of globalisation.
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