A new Left forming?

Around the world the financial crisis and climate change have focused many minds on a revival of the Left. Some people point to the success of socialists in South America or the election of Barack Obama, other point to the rise of a Left Party in Germany. Even Michael Moore’s latest film, ‘Capitalism, A Love Story’, seems to be a straw in the wind. The fate of the Left was one of the topics at a conference of activists and thinkers at Deakin University recently and was discussed in an editorial of ‘Arena Magazine’ (no. 102). The purpose of the conference was to rethink ideas from that broad political force known loosely as ‘the Left’. In opening the conference, I described the Left’s weakness as ‘the crisis of ideas and values which express alternatives’. Others might call it a crisis in the political vision, or in the theory or the social philosophy of the Left. Perhaps paradoxically I argued that we could draw a lesson from the rise of neoliberalism during the 1980s. Whatever else it illustrated, the rise of the Right showed that ‘social change depends on political ideas embedded in an intellectual and moral framework’.