The heritage and future of the European Left.

The heritage of the European Left Forum depends not merely on its own past but also intractably, on its own future. Inheritance is not a naturally grateful category for the Left, as it would be, for example, for a feudal aristocracy. The Left cannot hope to draw its legitimacy essentially from its past, however grand or inspiring that past may sometimes have been. Indeed, it is in evident danger of being supplanted as soon as it attempts at all strenuously to do anything of the kind. In the organized routine politics of the modem capitalist democracy, the most immediate threat which the Left at present faces is having this heritage filched from it by more agile, more locally perceptive, and less encumbered antagonists. The key question which confronts the forum for the moment is not what its short-term prospects may prove to be, here or there, within the routine politics of individual states or in wider arenas, it is whether it really has a distinctive future of its own at all, whether it can hope to remain alive and to reproduce itself effectively as a political force across the generations to come.