Welcome, folks, to the first things podcast, Rusty Reno here at the editor's desk.

We're recording the next installment of the editor's desk, the regular First Things podcast that looks at material published in First Things magazine, which if you are not a subscriber now, you really need to be to go to first things.com and become a

subscriber to First Things magazine. And I have with me today, Philip Pilkington, an economist who

in our December 22 issue wrote The Dead End of the New Left. Welcome, Philip. Hi, Rusty. Thanks for having me.

Great. The theme here is the conundrum of the left, as you put at the dead end that they've come to.

But I guess before we talk about the dead end, listeners need to

know something about what makes the new left new. Well, I suppose they're new because they're not

old, will be the short answer. Not very satisfying answer. But I think there is something there.

I mean, so what's come to be called the old left now is the initial

communist left, I'd say. Obviously, there is an older left than that, Roebbe Sheppier and the

Jacobins and so on, but they've been memory-hold since the rise of Marxism. The old left was

effectively the old communist left, I suppose you'd call it now the Leninist

left, the left that was associated with the Soviet Union, with the USSR. And the old left came to

consciousness. Well, I mean, it goes right back to Karl Marx, of course, to Das Capital and the Communist

manifesto. But it really becomes an articulate political movement.

I think basically in the 1900s, or sorry, the early 1900s, so 1900s, 1910s, and 1920s.

I think it mainly arises in Russia during the first decade of the 20th century, probably around the 1985 revolution and so on.

And I think probably the key figure is Vladimir Lenin.

And he, one of the focal points of the old left was anti-imperialism. I think was it when in the

1917 book that you cite imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. So that became

the party line to be anti-imperialist. If you're on the left, you had to be anti-imperialist. Is that right?

Yeah, I mean, the way it developed was actually kind of interesting. It was almost organic in a

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