The Continuing Relevance of the Next Left: A Response to Petty
By Simon J Black
Published: 01/25/2006
Petty’s analysis of the “The Trouble with the New New Left” (I prefer to call it the Global Justice Movement or the Next Left) is flawed for a number of reasons; let me focus on the two most relevant: First, Petty claims that the “New New Left” made its debut at the 1999 WTO protest in Seattle. In fact, while Seattle may have been the debut of the Global Justice Movement in North America (although some would argue that this was the successful battle against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment in 1998), the Zapatista uprising against NAFTA on January 1st 1994 is widely considered the entrance of the Next Left onto the global political scene. It is important to make this point; too often the Global South (formerly, the Third World) is written out of the history of such movements as many analyses of socio-political events contain a “First World” bias. The second flaw in Petty’s analysis is his tendency to equate mass protest with mass movements. Movements are not defined by spectacles but by the daily work of organizers and activists who fight for common objectives over a significant period of time (like the Civil Rights movement). Why are these two flaws important? Apart from the impact of the Zapatista uprising, the new social movements characteristic of the Next Left have played a vital role in the wave of electoral victories for left-wing parties in Latin America. Many Latin American countries’ leftward shift (most importantly, Venezuela) have been contingent upon the support of a range of social movements within those countries. In fact, here at home, the leftward shift of the NDP, and the Canadian electorate’s positive response, was in part facilitated by the attempt of the Next Left New Politics Initiative to radically alter the structure and objectives of the Party. Second, organizers and activists from the Next Left work daily on numerous campaigns throughout the country ranging from the UFCW’s efforts to unionize Wal-Marts and affordable housing campaigns to anti-poverty work and struggles for third-world debt relief. Far from falling into obscurity or “absurdity”, the “New New Left” is as relevant as ever.
Published in Entrepot