Who’s left?

January/February 2006

The headline of this editorial does not refer to those who were able to escape the Syrian regime’s killing machine in Lebanon. It rather talks about the never-ending tendency among the leftists to label each other. Since the very first days of the emergence of leftist thought, leftists have perfected one thing: Discrediting their fellow comrades and describing them as non-leftists.

Like all radical lines on the different political spectrums, radicals reserve the lion’s share in this. In Lebanon, free lance communists and many of them who are Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) members, see leftist thought through one line: their line.

Radical communists, who usually refer to themselves as being socialists, live in an ideal world of theirs: The economy should be perfectly commanded, political decision should be in the hands of the masses and nations will eventually live happily.

This unrealistic and rather childish sketch casts doubt over the sincerity and actual ability of these people (who can be certainly classified as dreamers but rarely as activists). Marx has once said that posing the right question was half the way to the answer. Along these same lines, we say that pragmatic awareness is half the way to proper solutions.

It makes no one any good to maintain the ancient dogma. Leftist ideology should be the guidelines and not an activism manual. Political parties should be the means for change, never the ends by themselves.

Accordingly, the strive toward the creation of happy nations start with the tolerance of differences in opinion. Anyway, the nation will never be happy if the different political groups can rarely come up with proper debate while the best they can come up with – when arguing – is noise.