How the left became, in places, the worse right.

This essay is written from the inside. The authors of this archive consider themselves of the left, in the broad sense that the word still has any honest content: opposed to inherited hierarchies, in favour of universal dignity, against the concentration of wealth, against war. It is precisely from that position that the following has to be said.

1. The labour movement that drew the colour line

The European and American labour movements, at the moments of their greatest industrial strength, repeatedly chose racial solidarity with their bosses over class solidarity with workers of colour. The American Federation of Labor excluded Black workers for decades. White Australian unions invented the White Australia policy. The French Communist Party, even at its most powerful, would not commit to Algerian independence until late, and many of its base voted for the war. 'Workers of the world unite' tended, in practice, to mean workers of certain nationalities.

2. The Soviet experiment and its blind spots

The Soviet Union, for all its real contributions to anti-colonial struggles, ran a continental empire of its own in which Russian was the language of advancement, Central Asian republics supplied raw cotton on quasi-colonial terms, and entire peoples (Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Volga Germans, Koreans) were deported overnight under Stalin. The vocabulary of internationalism did not, by itself, dissolve the habits of empire.

3. The third-world wave and its romance

The Western new left of the 1960s and 1970s gave anti-colonial movements crucial political cover. It also, in its weaker moments, romanticised them. The same student who had a poster of Che on the wall in 1969 was often, by 1990, working at an NGO that required the formerly colonised to write grant applications in donor English. The guerrilla had been useful as an icon. The actual person from Mozambique or Vietnam who refused to be an icon was rarely as celebrated.

4. The NGO-isation of solidarity

Beginning in the 1980s, much of what called itself the Western left reorganised itself into a development industry. Solidarity became service delivery. Service delivery required indicators. Indicators required headquarters. Headquarters were in Geneva, London, New York and Washington, and were almost entirely staffed at decision-making level by white Westerners. The formerly colonised became 'beneficiaries', a word that does most of the work the word 'native' used to do.

5. The clean hands problem

The progressive Western voter is structurally able to support, simultaneously: a welfare state at home, a defence budget that bombs the formerly colonised abroad, a consumer economy whose every shelf is loaded with goods produced under conditions they would call slavery if they saw the factory, and a moralism about human rights that is then aimed, almost exclusively, at countries the West has reasons to dislike. These are not separate positions. They are one foreign policy.

6. Identity as substitute, identity as evasion

The recent Western turn to identity politics has produced real gains — in representation, in cultural visibility, in language. It has also, in its corporate form, allowed institutions to update their logos without redistributing a single dollar. The same investment bank that ran the slave trade insurance market in 1830 can today fly a Pride flag, post a Juneteenth message, and finance the next coup against a democratically elected left government in the Global South — all in the same fiscal year, with no internal sense of contradiction.

7. The Gaza moment

The Western liberal consensus's response to the destruction of Gaza after October 2023 was, for many people who had given that consensus the benefit of the doubt, the end of the benefit. Centre-left governments — in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France — supplied weapons, vetoed ceasefires, criminalised protest, and adopted the language of the bomber while continuing to describe themselves as the conscience of the international order. The performance was not believed outside the West, and is now, increasingly, not believed inside it either.

What a serious left would do

A serious left in a former colonial power would, at minimum: campaign for unconditional reparations and the return of looted objects; oppose every coup, sanction and bombing regardless of the political colour of the target; treat migrants and refugees as full citizens-in-waiting rather than humanitarian props; tax accumulated colonial wealth where it sits; abolish the visa hierarchy; cancel unjust sovereign debt; and stop assuming that the formerly colonised require Western tutelage in any domain whatsoever, including the domain of left-wing politics.

None of this is radical. All of it is overdue. The fact that almost no mainstream Western left party currently supports more than one of these positions is the measure of the failure this essay is trying to name.