Michael Walzer

5 August 2009

What is it about your political beliefs that put you on the Left rather than the Right?
I have always believed that the strongest commitment of leftists is solidarity with people in trouble. I don’t mean a desire to help out of noblesse oblige, charitably, but a desire to join with them, as equal men and women, to deal with the trouble—and a willingness to use state power for that purpose. So the sense of solidarity produces a doctrine and a practice of democracy and egalitarianism.

Internationalism is also a critical left commitment. And that entails support for the supporters of democracy and equality anywhere in the world. It also entails a refusal to support or apologize for tyrannical regimes that call themselves leftist.

What do you consider made you Left wing?
I grew up during World War II, a Jewish kid in New York, so anti-fascism was the original form of my leftist politics. It still goes a long way to defining my commitments: against maximal leaders, and political brutality, and religious persecution, and the cult of death. But I grew to dislike the anti-fascism of the Popular Front, which required us to tell lies about the Soviet Union, and was probably on my way toward ordinary American liberalism—until I met and went to school with the founders of Dissent, who were anti-communist leftists, who argued that socialism was possible only in conjunction with democracy.

How would you describe the sort of society you want Britain to be?
I will write about the US: I want to live in a society committed to a strong version of mutual assistance, that is, to a welfare state far more expansive that our current shoddy version. And I want to live in a democracy where wealth doesn’t translate into political power. That is a minimal program, and then we can argue about how to create a truly democratic and egalitarian society.

What one or two changes would make the biggest difference to bringing that about?
Again, for the US: first, the enactment of a decent health care program, covering all Americans and, second, a radical revision of our labor laws, which would set limits on the power of employers and open the way to union organization. As I said, a minimal program.

What most makes you angry about the way Britain is now?
The US: A lot of things make me angry, but I am probably, along with many of my friends, most angry, everyday, at the sense of entitlement among corporate CEOs and managers—who are also critics of the minimal “entitlements” of our welfare system.

Which person, event, era or movement from the past should we look to for inspiration now?
It is part of the culture of the left, I think, not to make too much of great men (or women). There are people I admire and think of as models of a sort, critical intellectuals like Orwell, Camus, and Silone, but I wouldn’t say that I am inspired by them. We should be inspired by mass movements, popular insurgencies, like the labor, civil rights, and feminist movements, which transformed our domestic politics. And we need to worry about whether those movements, or anything similar to them, can be produced at the global level. For that, we have no models or no good models—since the Communist International was an example not of insurgency but of submission. Faced with a global capitalism, we need a global social democracy, but we haven’t yet found the political space for that kind of politics.

Position: Political Philosopher

2 Comments

2 Responses to “Michael Walzer”

  1. michael_green
    August 5th, 2009 @ 12:02 pm

    “we need a global social democracy, but we haven’t yet found the political space for that kind of politics.”

    I agree 100%. The United Nations has the potential to facilitate a global social democracy, and the European Union, Union of South American Nations and African Union are all showing promise towards supra-national social democracies.

  2. treborc
    August 5th, 2009 @ 7:15 pm

    Like Labour and the green paper to remove DLA, Disability living allowance, boy in all my life I've never ever seen a Labour party which has tried to hurt the most vulnerable , as for Purnell this gent was going to look into my problems on labour list three weeks before his office told me he has left. or was that he is left it's hard to tell anymore…

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