WHAT’S BECOME OF THE LEFT?

Every year at this time, I publish the annual collection of last year’s posts. This year, I’m using the title What’s Become of the Left? The 2025 posts because of the large number of posts about leftish books I’ve been looking at. It’s interesting to look at previous titles of these collections -

Ways of Seeing – the 2024 posts (236pp)
Whistling in the Wind – the 2023 posts (305pp) Have I really become so long-winded?

This too will Pass – the 2022 posts - a title which perhaps fell into the trap of fatalism (191pp)

Voices in the Air – the 2021 posts - a title from the famous quote from Keynes when he talked of the unnoticed influence of books on our minds (224pp)

Peripheral Vision – the 2020 posts. This celebrates the blog’s notion of creativity (244pp)

To Whom it may Concern – the 2019 posts. Normally written in support of someone’s application (282pp)

The Search for the Holy Grail – the 2018 posts Something I’ve been guilty of (169pp)

Common Endeavour – the 2017 posts An important concept for me (183pp)

The Slaves’ Chorus – the 2016 posts (120pp) I remember listening to an emotional rendering of this chorus in a Brno theatre in 1990. I hadn’t realised that the full title of this song is actually the Hebrew Slaves’ Chorus

In Praise of Doubt – a blogger’s year (2015) An allusion to the Brecht poem of that title (247pp)

HOPE

Maude Barlow is a Canadian activist and writer who has produced numerous books of which this is the most recent Still Hopeful – lessons from a lifetime of activism ; Maude Barlow (2022)

The Principle of Hope, published in the 1950s, by the great German philosopher Ernst Bloch saw all of human history as the story of hope for a better future. Deeply marked by the two world wars and the class struggles and divisions within his own country, Bloch distinguished between what he called “fraudulent” or “false” hope and “genuine” hope, which, to be effective, needs to be stoked by “informed discontent.” False hope, he warned, is often used by governments to tamp down dissent among the marginalized and can find us staring at a blank wall, blind to “the door that may be close.”

American Zen Buddhist teacher Joan Halifax clarifies how she sees the difference between optimism and hope.

Optimism, she says, can be dangerous as it doesn’t require engagement. Things will be better on their own, says the optimist, and if they aren’t, one can become a pessimist, taking refuge in the belief that there is nothing to be done. Optimists and pessimists actually have something in common, says Halifax — they are excused from engagement. She calls instead for “wise” hope, and wise hope most surely requires engagement.

The book she talks about is The Principle of Hope Ernst Bloch (1986)

Bloch's theory of cultural criticism is rooted in his anthropological and philosophical perspectives, which are delineated in the first two parts of The Principle of Hope. Part three contains explorations of "Wishful Images in the Mirror," in which Bloch decodes traces of hope permeating everyday life and culture. No philosopher since Hegel has explored in such detail and with such penetration the cultural tradition, which for Bloch contains untapped emancipatory potential. Yet Bloch concentrates not only on the great works of the cultural heritage, but on familiar and ordinary aspects of everyday experience, within which Bloch finds utopian potential. Fashion, grooming, new clothes, and how we make ourselves appear to others exhibit the utopian potential of transforming us into something better.

Perceiving the utopian potential of advertising, Bloch recognizes that it invests magical properties into commodities, which will produce allegedly magical results for the customer. "Shop-windows and advertising are in their capitalist form exclusively lime-twigs for the attracted dream birds". To be sure, the promises of advertising and consumer culture are often false promises and often produce false needs, but their power and ubiquity shows the depth of the needs that capitalism exploits and the wishes for another life that permeate capitalist societies.

Moreover, many people wear masks, often derived from magazines or mass cultural images, to transform themselves, to attempt to invent a more satisfying life. Thus, do youths join subcultures, even fascist ones like the Ku Klux Klan. Criminals and crime provide powerful attractions to oppressed youth, promising transcendence of their everyday misery. Similar motivations lead individuals to join the Klan and other racist groups, to try to get a new and more satisfying identity through immersion in violent subcultures. Magazines, best-selling novels, and film and television also offer advice and models for self-transformation and how to achieve romance, success, and wealth.

Active Hope – how to face the mess we’re in without going crazy Joanna Macy 

and Chris Johnstone (2012)

In any great adventure, there are always obstacles in the way. The first hurdle is just to be aware that we, as a civilization and as a species, are facing a crisis point. When we look at mainstream society, and the priorities expressed or goals pursued, it is hard to see much evidence of this awareness. In the first chapter we try to make sense of the huge gap between the scale of the emergency and the size of the response by describing how our perceptions are shaped by the story we identify with. We describe three stories, or versions of reality, each acting as a lens through which we see and understand what’s going on.

• In the first of these, Business as Usual, the defining assumption is that there is little need to change the way we live. Economic growth is regarded as essential for prosperity, and the central plot is about getting ahead.

• The second story, the Great Unraveling, draws attention to the disasters that Business as Usual is taking us toward, as well as those it has already brought about. It is an account, backed by evidence, of the collapse of ecological and social systems, the disturbance of climate, the depletion of resources, and the mass extinction of species.

• The third story is held and embodied by those who know the first story is leading us to catastrophe and who refuse to let the second story have the last word. Involving the emergence of new and creative human responses, it is about the epochal transition from an industrial society committed to economic growth to a life-sustaining society committed to the healing and recovery of our world. We call this story the Great Turning. The central plot is finding and offering our gift of Active Hope.

There is no point in arguing about which of these stories is “right.” All three are happening. The question is which one we want to put our energy behind. The first chapter is about looking at where we are and choosing the story we want our lives to express. The rest of the book focuses on how we strengthen our capacity to contribute to the Great Turning in the best way we can. Each chapter is summarised here (in 159 pages!)

AN UPDATE ON JOURNALS WORTH READING

Almost ten years ago. I posted about intellectual journals worth reading. As a Xmas bonus I thought it useful to repost it (with a few titles deleted since they no longer operate). I started with a question about which (English language) journals would pass a test which included such criteria as –

- Depth of treatment

- Breadth of coverage (not just political)

- Cosmopolitan in taste (not just anglo-saxon)

- clarity of writing

- skeptical in tone

My own regular favourite reading includes The Guardian Long Reads and book reviews, London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books – and the occasional glance at the New Yorker; New Statesman; and Spiked. This choice betrays a certain “patrician” position – not too “tribal”…….although my initial google search limited itself to such epithets as “left”, “progressive”, “green”;; “radical” and “humanist”. 

It threw up a couple of lists – one with “progressive” titles, the other with “secular”. From these, I have extracted the other titles which might lay some claims to satisfying the stringent criteria set above…..

Current Affairs is a fairly new American radical journal which looks to be very well-written eg this take-down of The Economist mag

Dissent; a US leftist stalwart 

Jacobin; a leftist E-mag which I have grown to appreciate – one of the few to which I subscribe

Lettre International; a fascinating quarterly published in German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian and Romanian. It makes available translated articles with superb etchings..

Literary Hub; a literary site with original selections and frequent posts. Not one I now follow
Los Angeles Review of Books; relatively new journal whose writing occasionally grates 

Monthly Review; an old US stalwart with good solid analysis

Mother Jones; more journalistic US progressive

N+1; one of the new and smoother leftist mags

New Humanist; an important strand of UK thought

New Left Review; THE great UK leftist journal - running on a quarterly basis since 1960. Also one to which I subscribe 

New Republic; solid US monthly

Prospect (UK); rather too smooth UK monthly

The American Prospect (US); ditto US

Public Books – an impressive recent website (2012) to encourage open intellectual debate
Quillette; a "free-thinking" contrarian and libertarian journal 

Resurgence and Ecologist; ditto UK Greens

Sceptic; celebration of important strand of UK scepticism

Slate; more right wing

Social Europe; a european social democratic E-journal whose short articles are a bit too predictable for my taste

The Atlantic; one of my favourite US mags
The Conversation; a rare venture which uses academics as journalists

The Marginalian; an interesting cultural journal which I no longer follow – being a bit too predictable  

The Nation; America's oldest weekly, for the "progressive" community

The New Yorker; impressive US writing which I’ve been tempted to subscribe to
Washington Independent Review; a new website borne of the frustration about the disappearance of so many book review columns

World Socialist Website; good on critical global journalism

Academic journals

I would not normally deign academic journals with a second glance since theirs is an incestuous breed – with arcane language and specialized focus which breaches at least two of the above five tests. But Political Quarterly stands apart with the superbly written (social democratic) analyses which have been briefing us for almost a century. Parliamentary Affairs; West European Politics  and Governance run it close with more global coverage.

Self-styled “Radical“ journals 
seem, curiously, to be gaining strength at precisely the moment the left is collapsing everywhere.

Beyond the small grove of explicitly revolutionary titles lies a vast forest of critical publications. From “Action Research” to “Anarchist Studies”, from “Race and Class” to “Review of Radical Political Economics”, an impressive array of dissident ventures appears to be thriving. As Western capitalism jabs repeatedly at the auto-destruct button, it may seem only logical that rebel voices are getting louder. But logic has nothing to do it with it. Out in the real world, the Left is moribund. Socialism has become a heritage item. Public institutions, including UK universities, are ever more marketised. Alternatives seem in short supply.

So, far from being obvious, the success of radical journals is a bit of a puzzle. And they have proved they have staying power. The past few years have seen a clutch of titles entering late middle age, including those in the Marxist tradition, such as “New Left Review” (founded 1960), “Critique” (1973) and “Capital and Class” (1977), as well as more broadly critical ventures, such as “Transition” (1961) and “Critical Inquiry” (1974). Numerous other titles have emerged in the intervening years. And they are still coming.
Recent titles include “Power and Education”, “Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies” and “Human Geography: A New Radical Journal”. Of course, some disciplines provide more fertile soil for such ventures than others. In cultural studies, politics, geography and sociology, radicalism has entered the mainstream. But even the more stony ground of economics nurtures a wide assortment of dissident titles.

A concept with unrealized potential, I feel, is that of the “global roundup” ” with selections of representative writing from around the globe. Courrier international is a good, physical, Francophone example – the others being “virtual” or E-journals eg Arts and Letters Daily a good literary, anglo-saxon exemplar; The Intercept a political one; with Eurozine taking the main award for its selection of the most interesting articles from Europe’s 80 plus cultural journals

I learn one main thing from this review - how tribal most journals are. Most seem to cater for a niche political market. Only N+1 (and the New Yorker) makes an effort to cover the world of ideas from a broader standpoint...The lead articles which Eurozine gives us from different parts of Europe makes it an interesting read; and Political Quarterly is a model for clear writing - even if it is a bit too British in its scope. But I give away both my age and agnostic tendencies when I say that my favourite journal remains "Encounter" which was shockingly revealed in the late 80s to have been partially funded by the CIA and which therefore shut up shop in 1990....

The entire set of 1953-1990 issues are archived here – and the range and quality of the authors given space can be admired. European notebooks – new societies and old politics 1954-1985; is a book devoted to one of its most regular writers, the Swiss Francois Bondy (2005) 

A generation of outstanding European thinkers emerged out of the rubble of World War II. It was a group unparalleled in their probing of an age that had produced totalitarianism as a political norm, and the Holocaust as its supreme nightmarish achievement. Figures ranging from George Lichtheim, Ignazio Silone, Raymond Aron, Andrei Amalrik, among many others, found a home in Encounter. None stood taller or saw further than Francois Bondy of Zurich.

European Notebooks contains most of the articles that Bondy (1915-2003) wrote for Encounter under the stewardship of Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, and then for the thirty years that Melvin Lasky served as editor. Bondy was that rare unattached intellectual, "free of every totalitarian temptation" and, as Lasky notes, unfailing in his devotion to the liberties and civilities of a humane social order. European Notebooks offers a window into a civilization that came to maturity during the period in which these essays were written.

Bondy's essays themselves represent a broad sweep of major figures and events in the second half of the twentieth century. His spatial outreach went from Budapest to Tokyo and Paris. His political essays extended from George Kennan to Benito Mussolini. And his prime metier, the cultural figures of Europe, covered Sartre, Kafka, Heidegger and Milosz. The analysis was uniformly fair minded but unstinting in its insights. Taken together, the variegated themes he raised in his work as a Zurich journalist, a Paris editor, and a European homme de lettres sketch guidelines for an entrancing portrait of the intellectual as cosmopolitan.

Why Most Academics Write So Badly

I had wanted to say something positive about the beauty of the English language. Instead, I found myself having to wade through the inpenetrable prose of academics who seem to have the greatest difficulty in expressing themselves – the worst examples being -

Language and Power, Norman Fairclough (2019) being far too theoretical
Naming and Framing – the power of words across, disciplines, domains and modalities 

Viktor Smith (2021) far too academic and features too many bibliographical references
The Politics of Language David Beaver and Jason Stanley (2023) too long-winded 

– at 500 pp
Public policy writing that matters David Christinger (2017) as too simplistic
Beyond Public Policy – a public action language approach  Peter Spink (2019) is the only 

text containing more acceptable language

The saving grace is a German trying to make sense of the language of the Nazi regime viz The Language of the Third Reich Victor Klemperer (1946)

I was reminded of Steven Pinker’s book - The Sense of Style – the thinking person’s guide to good writing (2014) which asks -

Why is so much writing so bad? Why is it so hard to understand a government form, or an academic article or the instructions for setting up a wireless home network?

The most popular explanation is that opaque prose is a deliberate choice. Bureaucrats insist on gibberish to cover their anatomy. Plaid-clad tech writers get their revenge on the jocks who kicked sand in their faces and the girls who turned them down for dates. Pseudo-intellectuals spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have nothing to say, hoping to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook. But the bamboozlement theory makes it too easy to demonize other people while letting ourselves off the hook. In explaining any human shortcoming, the first tool I reach for is Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

The kind of stupidity I have in mind has nothing to do with ignorance or low IQ; in fact, it's often the brightest and best informed who suffer the most from it. I once attended a lecture on biology addressed to a large general audience at a conference on technology, entertainment and design. The lecture was also being filmed for distribution over the Internet to millions of other laypeople. The speaker was an eminent biologist who had been invited to explain his recent breakthrough in the structure of DNA. He launched into a jargon-packed technical presentation that was geared to his fellow molecular biologists, and it was immediately apparent to everyone in the room that none of them understood a word and he was wasting their time. Apparent to everyone, that is, except the eminent biologist. When the host interrupted and asked him to explain the work more clearly, he seemed genuinely surprised and not a little annoyed. This is the kind of stupidity I am talking about. 

The “curse of knowledge” is the single best explanation of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn't occur to the writer that her readers don't know what she knows—that they haven't mastered the argot of her guild, can't divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so the writer doesn't bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail……. 

This is good stuff and what follows echoes exactly what my own draft said all these years ago -

How can we lift the curse of knowledge? The traditional advice—always remember the reader over your shoulder—is not as effective as you might think. None of us has the power to see everyone else's private thoughts, so just trying harder to put yourself in someone else's shoes doesn't make you much more accurate in figuring out what that person knows. But it's a start. So for what it's worth: Hey, I'm talking to you. Your readers know a lot less about your subject than you think, and unless you keep track of what you know that they don't, you are guaranteed to confuse them. A better way to exorcise the curse of knowledge is to close the loop, as the engineers say, and get a feedback signal from the world of readers—that is, show a draft to some people who are similar to your intended audience and find out whether they can follow it. Social psychologists have found that we are overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer what other people think, even the people who are closest to us. Only when we ask those people do we discover that what's obvious to us isn't obvious to them. 

The other way to escape the curse of knowledge is to show a draft to yourself, 

ideally after enough time has passed that the text is no longer familiar. 

If you are like me you will find yourself thinking, "What did I mean by that?" or 

"How does this follow?" or, all too often, "Who wrote this crap?" The form in 

which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they 

can be absorbed by a reader. Advice on writing is not so much advice on how to 

write as on how to revise.

Steven Pinker is an eminent psychologist and has a good interview on the book in the current Slate Magazine. My only quibble is with his title – there are a lot of style books out there but I don’t think that’s what he’s actually talking about. He seems rather to be addressing the more crucial issue of how we structure our thinking and present it so clearly that the reader or listener understands and is actually motivated to do something with the insights…..

Once we stop thinking about the words we use, what exactly they mean and whether they fit our purpose, the words and metaphors (and the interests behind them) take over and reduce our powers of critical thinking. One of the best essays on this topic is George Orwell’s “Politics and the English language”  Written in 1947, it exposes the way certain clichés and rhetoric are calculated to kill thinking – for example how the use of the passive tense undermines the notion that it is people who take decisions and should be held accountable for them.

Fifty years before Orwell, Ambrose Bierce was another (American) journalist whose pithy and tough definitions of everyday words, in his newspaper column, attracted sufficient attention to justify a book “The Devil’s Dictionary” whose fame continues unto this day. A dentist, for example, he defined as “a magician who puts metal into your mouth and pulls coins out of your pocket”. A robust scepticism about both business and politics infused his work – bit it did not amount to a coherent statement about power.

My own Just Words - a glossary and bibliography for the fight against the pretensions and perversities of power looks at more than 100 words and phrases used by officials, politicians, consultants and academics in the course of government reform which have this effect and offers some definitions which at least will get us thinking more critically about our vocabulary – if not actually taking political actions.

And the Plain English website is the other source I would recommend. It contains their short but very useful manual; a list of alternative words; and lists of all the organisations which have received their awards. Academics do need to have a read of Michael Billig’s Learn to Write Badly – how to succeed in the social sciences (2013) or have a look at On Writing Well W Zinsser (1976)

Other Relevant Posts

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2020/03/does-being-outsider-improve-quality-of.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2020/03/how-to-write-well.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2014/10/writing-as-power.html