On the fractious diversity of The Left (Updated)

I’m always surprised by “the left” (whatever that is). There seems to be a rolling, tumultuous mix of a thousand competing ideologies, but with people’s individual views overlapping dozens of them. How any broad grouping can possibly house somebody who argues that human trafficking figures are overblown and that many migrant prostututes chose freely to do so, big (p|m)aternalistic governmentalists, anarcho-greenie localists and pro-market World-Bank-supporting developmentalists all under the same umbrella is beyond me.

I read today in the Economist that Dilma Rousseff, a Brazilian politician who is currently chief-of-staff to President Lula in one of the most financially conservative, rightward-looking “left” governments of South America, was once a Trotskyist. The Wikipedia entry on her is clearly a highly-biased stub, but alleges (without evidence) that in the late 60s and early 70s, she was a member of a revolutionary guerilla group bent on taking Brazil down the route of outright communism. I might be completely wrong, but I think that you just don’t see that sort of change in extremes of position in “the right”, or if it does happen, it does so much, much less frequently.

To some extent, it seems that one of the key differences between the left and the right isn’t so much about ideology (although there is that) but about the practicalities of how to achieve their respective goals. Those on the left seem, on the whole, to prefer to stay in the stratosphere of broad, sweeping statements of ideological policy, while those on the right seem more likely to focus on the particular details of change. It’s a gross exaggeration to be sure, but I imagine that 80% of those on the left are more interested in where we ought to be than in how we can get there and that a further 10% seem to think that the only way to get there is in a single step by revolution.

Here’s a snippet from a recent interview of Karl Rove by GQ magazine:

What’s the biggest misconception about your role in the Bush White House?
That it was all about politics.

If that’s the misconception, what’s the overlooked truth?
Look, I’m a policy geek. What I’ve most enjoyed about my job was the substantive policy discussions. Being able to dig in deeply and, you know, learn about something, ask questions, listen to smart people, and form a judgment [sic] about something that was from a policy perspective.

The lefties may not believe him when he says that (e.g. Kevin Drum), but I’m inclined to agree more with Matthew Yglesis:

I don’t know about Rove in particular, but I’ve been consistently surprised since moving to DC of the extent to which the true policy geeks and the utterly cynical political operatives often really are the same people. These are the folks who while away their days ginning up dozens of bite-sized policy initiatives and selling them around to politicians. They’re the ones who give you your targeted tax credits, and they’re also the ones who are helping lobbyists sneak little tidbits [sic] in here and there. Hard-core ideologues often don’t care that much about the details, because geeking out over the details means you’re talking about incremental change.

Update:

Adam points out my literary ignorance (again) by asking if I’ve read “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (Foyles, Amazon) by Milan Kundera.  Of course I haven’t, but Adam is kind enough to send me some quotes that go along with what I’m saying:

How nice it was to celebrate something, demand something, protest against something; to be out in the open, to be with others. […] He saw the marching, shouting crowd as the image of Europe and its history. Europe was the Grand March. The march from revolution to revolution, from struggle to struggle, ever onward.

[… chapters later …]

The fantasy of the Grand March that Franz was so intoxicated by is the political kitsch joining leftists of all times and tendencies. The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.

[…]

What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.

*sigh*

How bad is human trafficking?

Adam pointed me to this review in the New Statesman by Brendan O’Neil of “Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry” (Foyles, Amazon) by Laura María Agustín. Here is the core of the review:

Agustín points out that some anti-trafficking activists depend on numbers produced by the CIA (not normally considered a reliable or neutral font of information when it comes to international issues), even though the CIA refuses to “divulge its research methods”. The reason why the “new slavery” statistics are so high is, in part, that the category of trafficking is promiscuously defined, sometimes disingenuously so. Some researchers automatically label migrant women who work as prostitutes “trafficked persons”, basing their rationale on the notion that no woman could seriously want to work in the sex industry. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women argues that “all children and the majority of women in the sex trade” should be considered “victims of trafficking”. As Agustín says, such an approach “infantilises” migrant women, “eliminating any notion that women who sell sex can consent”. Ironically, it objectifies them, treating them as unthinking things that are moved around the world against their will.

The reality is very different, the author says. Most migrant women, including those who end up in the sex industry, have made a clear decision to leave home and take their chances overseas. They are not “passive victims” who must be “saved” by anti-trafficking campaigners and returned to their country of origin. Rather, frequently, they are headstrong and ambitious women who migrate in order to escape “small-town prejudices, dead-end jobs, dangerous streets and suffocating families”. Shocking as it might seem to the feminist social workers, caring police people and campaigning journalists who make up what Agustín refers to as the “rescue industry”, she has discovered that some poor migrant women “like the idea of being found beautiful or exotic abroad, exciting desire in others”. I told you it was controversial.

One of Agustín’s chief concerns is that the anti-trafficking crusade is restricting international freedom of movement. What presents itself as a campaign to protect migrants from harm is actually making their efforts to flee home, to find work, to make the most of their lives in often difficult and unforgiving circumstances, that much harder. She writes about the “rescue raids” carried out by police and non-governmental organisations, in which even women who vociferously deny having been trafficked may be arrested, imprisoned in detention centres and sent back home – for the benefit of their own mental stability, of course. It used to be called repatriation; now, dolled up in therapeutic lingo, it is called “rescue”.

For all its poisonous prejudices, the old racist view of migrants as portents of crime and social instability at least treated them as autonomous, sentient, albeit “morally depraved”, adults. By contrast, as the author illustrates, the anti-trafficking lobby robs migrants of agency and their individual differences, and views them as a helpless, swaying mass of thousands who must be saved by the more savvy and intelligent women of the west and by western authorities.

It’s fascinating stuff and goes along with what I’ve previously said about prostitution:

[Slavery] aside (and that’s what people trafficking is – slave trading), you cannot simply save or rescue a prostitute. It is not a problem, if you consider it one, to be tackled. It is not something that you solve, once and for all. Prostitutes are people like everyone else and like everyone else, they think on the margin and respond to incentives.

In that entry I labelled human trafficking as slavery and I stand by that. Nevertheless, it would appear from Agustín’s work that the scale of the trafficking problem may be smaller than we commonly believe.