The Left Agenda After September 11 An American View DICK HOWARD M ust the intellectual, or the leftist – who need not be identical – always adopt a critical position, declaring that the glass is half-empty? Must the intellectual, or the leftist, always oppose the government, or the impe­rial hegemon? Must the intellectual, or the leftist, always take the side of the minority, the underdog, the victim – and in so doing, ignore any responsi­bility that might fall to that minority, underdog or victim? Is the intellec­tual, or the leftist, faced with choices that are morally clear-cut to the point that political choice and personal responsibility are superfluous? Must the intellectual, or the leftist, always have a good conscience and opt always if not for the side of the angels at least for that of Historical Progress? This series of(rhetorical) questions comes to mind in the face of the new political landscape left by the terrorist attacks of September 11. But they are in fact old(and not just rhetorical) questions, that go back to the origins of left-wing political movements – recall, for example, the polem­ics between Marx and Weitling, Marx and Proudhon, or Marx and Bakunin; think of the debates between reformists, revisionists and ortho­dox Marxists; remember the sad end of the promising»new left« that shook the political culture of the established order in the first, then the second and into the third worlds. But those old debates took place in a landscape defined by the dominance of the capitalist economy, and the need to overcome the exploitation and alienation that it reproduced. As I have suggested elsewhere, it is misleading to make political choices de­pendent on such economic conditions(whose existence, and impact can­not be denied); it is more useful to recognize that modern politics has to take into account the emergence of democratic social relations that repre­sent a challenge to all forms of social domination – as long as those dem­ocratic conditions are maintained. 1 If this is the case, then perhaps the in­1. This thesis is developed most fully in The Specter of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). C.f., also my recent Marx, A l’origine de la pensee critique (Paris: Michalon, 2001). 68 Howard, Left Agenda After September 11 ipg 4/2002