Guest Column
After the CND: The left debates itself
- By Fred Rosen
- The Herald Mexico-El Universal
April 2, 2007
Last week’s Democratic National Convention (CND) has renewed the Mexican left’s eternal debate with itself. Once renewed, the debate has continued on op-ed pages, TV and radio talk shows and local encounters.
Organized by the leftist Broad Progressive Front (FAP), the political alliance dominated by the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), the CND consisted of hundreds of open panels and workshops held on Thursday and Friday, March 22 - 23, followed by a plenary session and a massive march to Mexico City´s Zócalo the following Sunday.
The panels and workshops discussed an enormous number of ideological, strategic and organizational proposals, many of which were further debated and voted on in Saturday’s plenary. The approved proposals (no surprises) make up a semblance of a preliminary left-of-center political platform.
Sensitive to the charge that the event was merely a giant photo opportunity for the next presidential run of FAP leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador, most participants have chosen to ignore the role of particular personalities and to engage instead in an ongoing debate over progressive ideology, strategy and tactics. Some self-serving defensiveness aside, this has been all to the good.
Against that background, a continuing discussion has involved the always-contentious question of where the center ends and the left begins. I will briefly comment on that discussion.
Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, a key founder of the PRD, has used the opinion pages of El Universal to complain about the constant calls for the left´s "moderation" and "modernization."
"The promoters of moderation," he wrote this past Thursday, "tend to forget the enormous disequilibria of power established in the country and on a global scale. They forget that we confront a particularly immoderate right, nurtured by the weakness of the state and established in complicity and corruption, in economic transnationalization, internal monopolies, clerical arrogance and a communications empire."
In other words, immoderate militancy is made necessary not by some abstract ideology, nor even by concrete redistributive policy proposals, but by the strength and aggressiveness of the left’s political opponents, opponents who can only be confronted by "a militant social majority, having a radical vision of the nature of the problems and the indispensable means of attacking them." Against this necessity, moderation is futile, and "modernization" is an empty term.
Former Mexico City mayor Alejandro Encinas, also on the pages of El Universal, casts "moderation" in a somewhat different light.
"If the exercise of governmental power demands moderation," wrote Encinas on Wednesday, this "does not signify that [a leftist government] has renounced its principles or ideals," so long as that government remains clear about "the conducting and the identification of the changes" necessary to transform the balance of forces in favor of the poor and dispossessed.
But modernization, he suggests, is not such an empty concept. Among the enormous changes brought about by the fall of the Berlin Wall was the assumption of "democracy as the way to achieve the necessary transformations, and a discourse that reconsiders the distinctive values of nationalism in each country."
Today, he writes, "the action of the left is unquestionably linked to the electoral dynamic, which keeps it in a permanent struggle for political leadership; this leads it… to find an equilibrium in order to defeat those social sectors that don´t sympathize with it and, in the political moment, to place itself in the political center to guarantee stability and governability."
Does a linking "to the electoral dynamic" imply moderation in the pursuit of progressive change? Of course not; it implies a critical, positive transformation of an important part of the old left. Does a desire to rule from the political center imply that yesterday’s center is the same as today’s center? Again, the answer is negative.
Encinas sketches out four "axes" that define the goals of a reorganized Mexican left: (1) the "democratic transformation of the state"; (2) a social policy that confronts Mexico’s enormous social and economic inequalities; (3) "the construction of a more participative and reciprocally connected citizenry;" and (4) "the establishment of mechanisms that ensure effective government."
For many conservatives, the proper end of politics is the prevention of the left from ever coming to power — anywhere. For both Muñoz Ledo and Encinas, despite their differences, beyond any particular set of programs or policies lies the left’s obligation to gain power. This is the issue between right and left: Who will exercise state power, and in whose interest?
- The anti-left´s caveat, which has become the litany of the global right (and a good deal of the political center), is that the left can be permitted to come to power if it is responsible enough to govern just like the right. At that point, and not at the simple moderation of discourse, we have found the line that divides the center from the left.
- frosen144@hotmail.com
- Article at: http://www.mexiconews.com.mx/24022.html
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