I admit that I don’t always keep up with things the way I should, but I just came across an older posting on the blog of one of the world’s few remaining even semi-unreconstructed Trotskyists, scolding Gabriel Kolko for his 2006 book After Socialism. In it Kolko, dean of American radical historians, dismisses the entire tradition of Marxist socialism and argues for a new left project. I haven’t read the book (and, even as a leftist, I never found Kolko all that interesting) but I did like his (albeit too-charitable) summing up of the legacy of the New Left:
On the whole, when one adds together the secular adventurist revolutionary notions, the Christian-pacifist cult of innocence, uncritical Third World-ism – the belief that most movements in the developing nations are somehow automatically radical – and synthetic, eclectic varieties of wish-fulfillment that thrived from about 1960 to 1975, little of permanent value emerged from the so-called New Left experience.
Even more refreshingly, Kolko breaks with the almost universal dewy-eyed treatment of Saint Rosa Luxembourg, writing of her:
Consummately ambitious herself, she played with radical abstractions–a type of intellectual who has been the bane of the socialist movement since its inception.
All in all, it almost makes me want to pick this one up.
Filed under: American Left | Tagged: after socialism, American Left, gabriel kolko, new left
