LONDON: The left, almost everyone agrees, is on the run. George Bush’s seizure of power has dragged governments everywhere still further to the right. Most of the world’s media are deeply hostile to progressive ideas. Now the war in Afghanistan has greatly empowered the illiberal men who launched it. 2002, most commentators believe, will be the year of the right.

All this may be true, yet it fails to describe the full scope of problems the left now confronts. The real crisis for progressives, indeed for social democracy in general, arises from a much deeper trend: the gradual atomisation of society.

Collectivism has been both the principal source of social oppression and the principal means of liberation. It has destroyed the lives of women, minorities, heretics and foreigners.

There is a widespread fallacy that the destruction of society was engineered in recent times, notably by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

In Britain, the rise of the merchant class undermined the cohesive power of the church, the monarchy and the aristocracy. Enclosure dispersed the peasantry. The urban proletariat was, paradoxically, fragmented by successful mass action, which helped bring about universal education and a better distribution of wealth and power, in turn enabling people to pursue their own destinies.

Now, the state has little to gain from social cohesion. We no longer require collectivity even in warfare: battles are fought by a handful of specialists, while the rest of us gawk at them on TV.

While we can celebrate the end of socialisation imposed from above, we have also lost the class loyalty, the worker solidarity and the coherent demands for universal rights and services developed from below. Political parties and trades unions are withering. Charities are likely to follow. The absence of effective mass action has enabled tiny numbers of people to capture much of the world’s wealth, and tiny populations of target voters to capture the attentions of government.

The smashing of society provides us with the means of building movements which are not limited by national or ethnic loyalties, by adhesion to the workplace or the village. It may permit us to create an internationalist movement far bigger than any before, united by a common opposition to what is now an international ruling class. But first we progressives may have to abandon almost every strategy which has worked in the past. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service