New Times, May 1999
Paul Anderson reports from the American left’s annual bean feast in New York
As talking-shops go, it's difficult to beat the Socialist Scholars Conference in New York. It is the American left's big East Coast gathering, held every easter or thereabouts for the past 17 years.
This year, nearly 2,000 people came along to Manhattan Community College on the Lower West Side between 9 and 11 April to listen to the big-name speakers – Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Staughton Lynd, Manning Marable, the Reverend Al Sharpton – and to take their pick among more than 100 panel discussions spread through the weekend.
All of American left-wing life was there: members of Democratic Socialists of America (the more radical of two US affiliates to the Socialist International and the core of the Democratic Party's left wing), environmentalists, feminists, black activists, trade unionists, writers and editors from the Nation, Dissent, Monthly Review and Mother Jones, radical broadcasters, a smattering of Trotskyist and Maoist sectarians.
If that sounds chaotic, it was – but not completely. Anyone who can pay $100 can run a panel, and some of the things people decide to discuss are obscure or eccentric, to say the least. I could have spent Saturday afternoon immersed in 'A left defence of Heidegger' or 'Marxist-Leninist ideology is alive and well'.
Such exotica are very much on the fringe, however. The core of the conference programme is put together by DSA and its friends and is anything but crazy. I went to excellent sessions on the next US presidential election, on the state of non-corporate media and on European social democracy – and I was told I missed some of the best discussions.
Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest talking points was Kosovo – on which there is no more of a consensus on the US left than there is on the European left.
The argument goes right to the heart of DSA, with one of its co-chairs, the political scientist Bogdan Denitch, giving forceful backing to deployment of Nato ground troops against Slobodan Milosevic and another, the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, coming out strongly against the Nato bombing. My sense was that Denitch's position had greater support – but that might just be because I agree with him.
Kosovo apart, the great obsession of the conference was a hardy perennial: the marginalisation of the American left and how to overcome it.
That the left is up against it there can be no doubt. DSA, the biggest organisation on the left and the nearest thing there is to a European social democratic party, has only 10,000 members, and although it has considerable influence in the leadership of the trade union movement, in the Democratic Party its position (and more generally the position of the left) is weaker than for many years.
The Democrats' progressive caucus in Congress has more than 70 members, making it the second biggest organised body of opinion in Congress after the Republicans' conservative caucus. But since funding was withdrawn from the caucuses in the wake of the 1994 Republican Congressional landslide, they have been far less powerful than they used to be. Left-leaning Democrats in Congress have been unable to force any significant concessions from Bill Clinton since his administration took a sharp turn to the right in 1994. And no one I talked to thought there was any hope of the Democrats choosing a presidential candidate next year who came from anywhere but the far right of the party.
Clinton has been such a disaster in the eyes of most DSAers that they cannot understand why Tony Blair has been so keen to emulate his political strategy and to draw him into discussions of the 'Third Way'. DSA's 'project' has since its inception in the 1960s been completion of the American welfare state along European social democratic lines. DSA members cannot fathom how a European social democratic leader could want to get into bed with a president who has done more to dismantle social protection than the Republicans that preceded him.
Yet for all this, there is a vibrancy about the American left that is extraordinarily refreshing. American left publishing is in a far healthier state than left publishing over here. There's a culture of local organisation and agitation as healthy as any in Britain. And Socialist Scholars was – as in previous years – bigger, more inclusive and more exciting than any event the British left has put on in living memory. There's plenty we can learn from the other side of the pond even if we decide we want to keep our welfare state.
