Socialism no.

• Author: Kauffman, L.A.
• Position: What's Left? - American politics

Until recently, I was executive editor of the journal Socialist Review. Before that, I worked for the Marxist magazine Monthly Review. My bookshelves are filled with books of Marxist theory, and I even have a picture of Karl Marx up on my wall.

I am not a socialist.

Of course I know there's a contradiction there. I've learned to suppress my irritation when others label me a socialist, and I'm accustomed to being grilled about this quirk of my political identity. On the face of it, it's absurd: Why would someone who has devoted much of her adult life to explicitly socialist institutions refuse to label herself a socialist?

I feel an enormous emotional attachment to the socialist tradition, more perhaps than many radicals my age. When I worked at Monthly Review in the late 1980s, we had a brown-bag lunch each Tuesday with Paul Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, and whatever other fellow travelers happened to be passing through New York. The visitors might be from the FMLN or the ANC; they might be working with the Greens in West Germany or the Rainbow Coalition here in the States. They might be Americans back from a fact-finding mission to Cuba or Nicaragua; they might be from Eastern Europe or India or Senegal. One struggle, many fronts: Tuesdays at Monthly Review were about socialist internationalism in action.

Or rather, about the remnants of a socialist internationalism long past its prime. People came to MR in part because it was one of the few outposts left of a politics in precipitous decline. Only on the rarest occasions were these socialist visitors too young to have been my parents; more frequently, they were old enough to be my grandparents.

I felt privileged to be there, because those informal get-togethers allowed me, fresh out of college, to have a window into a Left culture that only barely still exists, into a historical moment that I didn't five, and that isn't with us any more. The MR lunches were about a kind of comradeship, a kind of unity in opposition, that I've never seen anywhere else--and that I certainly didn't see during the three months I spent last fall traveling around the country interviewing young radicals.

The most striking thing about the lunches was the palpable feeling of solidarity one got sitting around the office's big wooden table with people from all over the world. Skin color didn't matter, cultural differences didn't matter, gender didn't matter. There was true common ground, based on a certainty about the world, and about radicals' place in it, that was moving--and that was obviously a relic of the past.

"Which side are you on?": The lyrics of this great leftist anthem go to the core of that declining worldview...