Changes

The left is undergoing a shattering experience: the progressive movement is being compelled to reinvent its whole project. What tends to be forgotten, however, is that a similar experience gave birth to Leninism. Consider Lenin's shock when, in the autumn of 1914, every European social democratic party except the Serbs' followed the 'patriotic line'. How difficult it must have been, at a time when military conflict had cut the European continent in half, not to take sides. Think how many supposedly independent-minded intellectuals, Freud included, succumbed, if only briefly, to the nationalist temptation.

John Berger recently wrote about a French advert for an internet broker called Selftrade. Under an image of a solid gold hammer and sickle studded with diamonds, the caption reads: "And if the stock market profited everybody?" The strategy is obvious: today, the stock market fulfils the egalitarian communist agenda — everybody can participate in it. Berger proposes a comparison: "Imagine a communications campaign today using an image of a swastika cast in solid gold and embedded with diamonds! It would, of course, not work. Why? The swastika addressed potential victors, not the defeated. It invoked domination not justice." In contrast, the hammer and sickle invokes the hope that "history would eventually be on the side of those struggling for fraternal justice". At the very moment this hope is proclaimed dead according to the hegemonic ideology of the "end of ideologies", a paradigmatic post-industrial enterprise (is there anything more post-industrial than dealing in stocks on the internet?) mobilises it once more. The hope continues to haunt us.

==Source==

[[Category:Works]]

[[Category:Essays]]