[CasX]

"Bolshevism was socialism in arms. Socialism stripped of its warmth and its joy, and its boundless, reckless optimism."


"Lenin and his comrades took the great rollicking puppy that was the People's Revolution, and in the snows of November snapped the collar of a new political orthodoxy around its too-trusting neck."


"The communists insisted that social democracy and revolutionary change were mutually exclusive. The capitalist state had to be smashed, they said, before a socialist state could come into being.

Well, I can't say I ever much cared for the idea of smashing the state. The historian in me kept objecting that states are not abstract things - they are composed of very real human beings. Which meant that the communist injunction to smash the state was really nothing more than an invitation to smash all the people who disagreed with you.

Left-wing social democrats had been wrestling with the historical legacy of Marxism-Leninism long before Martin Amis made it fashionable. The idea of becoming one of history's earthly apostles, freed from all the normal social and political constraints, has always exerted a powerful fascination.

To wipe humanity's slate clean and begin again - to abolish the past - has always been the greatest of temptations. Thus did Mephistopheles whisper to Faustus. Thus did republican virtue seduce Robespierre. Thus did dialectic corrupt Lenin and Stalin - and Trotsky, too.

For what all the fine phrases came down to in the end were a windowless basement cell and a pair of bloodstained bootcaps. Or a to a hastily dug trench in a silent forest at dawn. Or to a nameless grave in the featureless tundra beyond the perimeter wire of the gulag. As that stubborn old social democrat Karl Kautsky warned Lenin at the very beginning of the Soviet Experiment: ends do not justify means - means become ends.

And so, at least for me, it could only ever be the Labour Party. Better by far to accept responsibility for the tawdry misdemeanours of social democracy, than to spend the rest of my life excusing the huge historical crimes of Marxism-Leninism."


"Is it not the task of all who call themselves socialists to build that shining land? For, has not the wheel of history come full circle? Are we not standing, upon the threshold of the 21st century, where the socialists stood 100 years ago?

Freed at last from the long nightmare of Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky and Mao; released from the web of identity politics and its stultifying political correctness; is it not time to re-dedicate ourselves to the priorities of a truly majoritarian socialism?"


"And so, my answer to the question "What's Left?" must be this. An idea. A memory. A bright vista glimpsed briefly from a high hill. It is liberty extended. It is justice being done. It is seeing someone lying on the road and not passing by on the other side. It is signing a petition, participating in a street march and standing on a picket line. It is joining a progressive political party.

And, in the dangerous months that lie ahead, I believe it means standing up and being counted as one of the millions of people around the world determined to prevent a rebirth on naked Western imperialism. The people of Iraq had already sustained a million casualties through the imposition of UN sanctions. Dear God, have they not suffered enough for the sins of Saddam Hussein?

Ending unnecessary suffering. Ah yes. The Left remains what it has always been - what is always will be: the collective cry of humankind for right to be done and wrong to be vanquished. And the strength of the Left waxes and wanes in accordance with each individual's conviction that such a goal is worthy of their effort.

Bruce Jesson's pessimistic intellect would have almost certainly have told him that the Left in New Zealand is finished. That through a poisonous mixture of elitism, sectarianism, political ineptitude and betrayal, it has handed over the future to the forces of greed and violence.

But I am not so gloomy. Indeed, I am optimistic. Because New Zealanders are full of surprises. A Frenchman visiting these shores 100 years ago described us as socialists without doctrines. Looking back at the havoc that doctrines have wreaked in the course of the past, sad century, I find that observation curiously heartening.

Perhaps it is our fate to be socialists of the heart and not of the head. If so, I - for one - will be well content."