Introduction: Democracy and the Decline of the Left

by John Keane

THE DECLINE OF THE LEFT

What does it mean to be on the Left today? Few questions are so theoretically and politically significant - and so utterly perplexing. Only the origins of the term 'Left' seem uncontroversial.

It is well known that the idea of the Left is a child of the French Revolution - a metaphorical extension of the seating plan of the 1789 French Estates General, which became divided by the heated debates on the royal veto, with the 'third Estate' sitting to the King's left and the nobility to his right. It is also common knowledge that the idea of the Left played a critical role in nineteenth-century politics. It heightened the perception of the body politic as a broken continuum, as permanently divided by competing attitudes towards social change and political order. In opposition to the foot-dragging conservatism of the Right, with its haughty belief in the need for strict order and social control, Leftists were progressives. They optimistically embraced a faith in science, rationality and industry. They proclaimed their love of liberty and equality, and appealed to the essential goodness and sociability of human nature. The Left sympathized with the downtrodden. It despised the rich and powerful. It denounced parliamentary democracy as a bourgeois institution. It battled for a world freed from the evils of capitalism, material scarcity and unhappiness.

Since the First World War, this classical image of the Left has been crumbling slowly. The Left has become more cautious about modernity. It is less magnetized by the myths of scientific-technical progress and, especially within its green fringes, it has become openly hostile to industrialism; by contrast, it is the Right, from Mussolini to Thatcher, which has abandoned its former nostalgia and circumspection, and pressed home revolutionary or reformist policies based on a deep faith in scientific and economic modernization. In the same period, the levelling image of the Left has been damaged badly by its association with the cruel Stalinist programme of destroying liberty, equality and solidarity by means of cunning, violence, blood and terror - in Spain, in the Moscow trials, the Hitler - Stalin pact, Katyn and the military invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. In consequence, the Left has become widely identified with the mastery of the skills of the lion and the fox, with the passion for political power and the wholesale politicization of personal and social life.

The Left's founding image of international class solidarity and opposition to state violence has also taken a severe beating. The rise of national communist regimes (as in Yugoslavia, China and Vietnam) has demonstrated that Leftism is not synonymous with selfless internationalism. Severe tensions among these regimes - the Maoist denunciation of Soviet 'revisionism' as a right-wing betrayal of communism is a dramatic case in point - and the more recent outbreak of war between these states (as in Indochina) have served to reinforce the image of the Left as a purveyor of self-interested power politics - as a mirror image of its right-wing opponents.

In recent years, the meaning of the term 'Left' has fallen into deeper disarray, especially in the countries of the West. It has become a muddled label which often obscures more than it clarifies. The appearance of the New Left at the end of the 1950s is one source of this trend. The willingness of many Left governments and parties after 1945 to embrace the 'mixed economy' and their more recent fascination with market mechanisms, the profit motive and small business has further blurred its distinctively 'left' qualities. Matters have been worsened by the confused reaction of trade unions, once considered the 'natural' heartland of Left support, to the failure of Keynesian reflationary policies. This confusion has been multiplied by deindustrialization, the growth of a new underclass and the emergence of more 'flexible' technologies, production methods and consumer styles. The western Left's loss of direction can also be traced to its nostalgic defence of centralized state bureaucracy and outdated techniques of management and planning. The conventional belief on the Left that state planning and fixing of markets plus selective nationalization plus spending money equals socialism has come unstuck. And the consequent tendency of some parts of the Left to display more pride in the past than faith in the future has been exacerbated by its intellectual torpor - its bad habit of submitting to the hypnotic powers of the Right, of repeating clichés and making politics through conventional labels.

The writings of Norberto Bobbio, Italy's leading political thinker, are an important reaction to this deep impasse of the Left. His work is pathbreaking because he sees the demand for more democracy as the key to a successful redefinition of the Left. What does democracy mean in this context? Bobbio's unusual 'liberal socialist' understanding of the term has been shaped by his early experiences in the liberal intellectual milieu of Turin in the 1930s, his deep involvement in the anti-Fascist Resistance, his subsequent intellectual and journalistic dialogues with the Italian Left, especially the PCI, and his current role as Life Senator and independent franc-tireur within Italian parliamentary politics.1 Against the backdrop of such experiences, Bobbio insists - in the face of its twentieth-century vulgarization that the concept of democracy is not elastic. It is not a word which can be made to mean whatever we choose it to mean. Democracy is understood by him as a system of procedural rules which specify who is authorized to make collective decisions and through which procedures such decisions are to be made. In contrast to all forms of heteronomous government, democracy comprises procedures for arriving at collective decisions in a way which secures the fullest possible participation of interested parties. At a minimum, according to Bobbio, democratic procedures include equal and universal adult suffrage; majority rule and guarantees of minority rights, which ensure that collective decisions are approved by a substantial number of those expected to make them; the rule of law; and constitutional guarantees of freedom of assembly and expression and other liberties, which help guarantee that those expected to decide or to elect those who decide can choose among real alternatives.

Democracy in this sense is a method of preventing those who govern from permanently appropriating power for their own ends. Those exercising power are subject to procedures which enable others to question, rotate or sack them. The distribution of power in democratic systems tends to reflect the outcomes of political contests framed by permanent decision-making rules. Conflict and compromise are therefore institutionalized, and power becomes secular and 'disembodied'. It is not permanently consubstantial with any particular individual or group - a monarch, for instance - but is exercised instead by flesh-and-blood mortals who are subject to removal and are accountable to others, in accordance with the rules of the democratic game.

Bobbio argues that in general the present-day Left has either muddled or no clear ideas about the importance and nature of the rules of democracy, and in particular whether to reform or replace them. This leads him to challenge several standard Leftist misconceptions about democracy. For example, Bobbio is adamant that the historical emergence of liberal democratic institutions, such as free elections, competitive party systems and written constitutions, represented a great leap forward in the fight for more democracy. Liberal democratic institutions are not necessarily a device for protecting the class interests of the bourgeoisie. Liberal democracy (to paraphrase Lenin) is not the best political shell for capitalism. Liberal democratic institutions are in fact an indispensable bulwark against the unending arrogance of political actors, a vital mechanism for limiting the scope and haughtiness of state power. A post-liberal democracy is thinkable and desirable, but a non-liberal democracy is a contradiction in terms and in fact.

Bobbio is also adamant that the friends of democracy must reject the bad 'New Left' habit of calling for the disappearance of all organization and its replacement by so-called spontaneous action. A democratic polity without procedural rules is not only a contradiction in terms. It is also a recipe for arbitrary decision making and misgovernment. The friends of democracy must also recognize that the full replacement of representative forms of democracy by participatory, direct democracy - which require (in the case of decisions affecting the whole polity) the public assembly of millions of citizens - is technically impossible in large-scale, complex societies. Direct democracy, the participation of citizens in the agora, is suited only to small states and organizatons in which 'the people find it easy to meet and in which every citizen can easily get to know all the others' (Rousseau). More controversially, Bobbio argues that the attempt to foist the principle of direct democracy on to representative institutions - for instance, applying a binding mandate to elected parliamentary 'delegates' - is undesirable, since it contradicts the principle, indispensable in any...