By Jonathan Power*

LUND, Sweden | 22 April 2025 (WorldView) — It goes back to the French Revolution of 1789. At the Revolutionary Convention, the most radical of the insurgents decided to seat themselves on the left side. “Why not on the other side, the right side, the place of rectitude, where law and the higher right resided when man’s best hand could be raised in righteous honour?” wrote Melvin Lasky in Britain’s intellectual monthly Encounter. “Anyway, they went left, and man’s political passions have never been the same.”

When Oskar Lafontaine, the West German finance minister, broke with Chancellor Gerhard Schroder in the early days of the last Social Democratic government, he explained it was “because my heart beats on the left.” The right could never say that, even David Cameron, ex-prime minister of Britain, who likes to make out that he is liberal, at least on the environment and foreign aid. When Humpty-Dumpty insisted on his own “master meanings,” he reassured Alice, “When I make a word do a lot of work like that, I always pay it extra…….”

Those who want to study the ambiguities and contradictions of intellectual leftists should be informed that once upon a — a hundred and sixty years ago— there was a writer, a philosopher, who spent most of his time in the British Museum and who moved his family from London’s down-at-heel Soho to posh Primrose Hill. He wanted his maturing daughters to have the chance to meet a better class of men. His wife, too, was pleased because she could now invite ladies to tea. A suitor of one of his daughters was given the door as he seemed unstable with his revolutionary opinions. He wrote that he thought the “historical” process had already started to undermine “bourgeois society”.

One of the most important disciples of the above lived in 1916 as an émigré in Zurich. According to acquaintances, he lived an exemplary bourgeois life. Each morning, he would clean his room in the fastidious Swiss way. When his writing was finished in the evening, he refused to listen to classical music, which he enjoyed because it might excite his emotions. He would complain about the noisy behaviour of fellow émigrés who lived down the hall, especially one who constantly smoked and spent much of his time going to the cinema, which our bourgeois character refused to do. Friends called them the cineastes and the non-cineastes, and some of the sly among them sometimes translated this as the Semites and anti-Semites.

Our three characters were all ardent leftists: the first was Karl Marx, the second was V.I. Lenin, and the third was Julius Martov (the Menshevik leader).

Are political views, whether left or right, influenced by different personality constellations? Marx and Lenin were natural authoritarians. Martov (and we could have added Frederick Engels) was not. So this effort at political classification doesn’t work.

Who’s left? Who’s right? Mao Zedong thought he had solved the problem by unmasking the Communist Party, which he called rightists. “Capitalist-roaders”, he called them. They were people like fellow Long Marchers and apparent backbones of the party – Liu Shao Chi, the head of state; Lin Pao, the minister of defence, Deng Xiaoping, at that time a convinced Marxist, but later a capitalist convert who became the supreme boss of China, and the “Gang of Four” who later tried to overthrow Deng.

How does one describe the political leanings of Manmohan Singh, the recent prime minister of India, who has presided over both a significant build-up of anti-poverty programmes but also of a considerable increase in the acquisition of expensive armaments, or the president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, or Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani of Qatar, or Goodluck Jonathan, president of Nigeria?

Or, reaching backwards a couple of decades, southern Democrats in the US Senate, Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt, Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike, prime minister of Sri Lanka (the first female prime minister to be elected in the world), or, come to that, Charles de Gaulle? Today, we can add Barack Obama, who is left in his books and was a sometimes confusing and ambiguous mixture of left and right as US president.

Thinkers can also have their problems of identity. As Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell once pointed out, Noam Chomsky was hoisted by the Marxist philosopher. “Some years ago, he was accused by a Canadian Maoist revolutionary periodical of being an ‘agent of American imperialism”. It stood to reason. Chomsky’s theories that language capacities are innate and that humanity generates rules through the properties of the mind were characterised quite correctly as philosophical idealism.

As every Marxist knows, idealism is the reactionary philosophy of the bourgeoisie, as opposed to revolutionary materialism. More than that, Chomsky mentioned that the Office of Naval Research had financed the publication of his early research. Why should the American military finance such research if it did not realise that idealistic philosophy would serve to confuse the masses?!”

Who’s left? What’s right?

*Jonathan Power has been an international foreign affairs columnist for over 40 years and a columnist and commentator for the International Herald Tribune (now the New York Times) for 17 years. [WorldView]

Copyright©Jonathan Power

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Image: Collage of photos of Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin and Julius Martov (the Menshevik leader) downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.