Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016
Since the turn of the millennium, the Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn has been developing a series of formidably ambitious arguments in these pages, providing a near comprehensive overview of global politics, its principal forces, trajectories and tensions, plus the changing aims and tactics of the left.footnote1 At the core of these expansive essays is a juxtaposition between the shape of twentieth-century history and that of the contemporary period—the primary processes by which capitalism has been consolidated or resisted in each era. Its basic premises are as follows. If the industrial age was governed by grand dialectics, pitting capital against labour and colonizer against colonized, its successor does not have the same binary structure. The productive system is no longer primed to create a singular emancipatory subject; which renders visions of an egalitarian future, whether in socialist theory or oppositional culture, increasingly opaque. Menaced by entrenched inequality, climate collapse and hostile geopolitics, the current course of societal evolution defies easy prediction. Perpetual crisis will likely determine the terrain of struggle in the coming years. Marxism was the foremost method of understanding the old reality, but its status in the new one is less certain. By drawing ecumenically on left social thought, however, we can still map the existing political-economic landscape in granular detail, locate its contradictions and identify ‘new masses’—mostly peripheral and surplus populations—that could plausibly transform it.
This project began with ‘Into the 21st Century’ (2001) and culminated in ‘The World and the Left’ (2022). It is marked by several features of Therborn’s wider oeuvre, which stretches back to the 1960s: a gift for extracting theoretical insights from stacks of empirical data, like a miner chipping precious gemstones from a rockface; and a mastery of comparative analysis, drawing cross-connections between protest movements in the Sahel and political experiments in South America, currency crises in the eu and demographic changes in East Asia. The author’s range has always been immense—few others would have the audacity or the ability to produce a two-hundred-page primer titled, simply, The World: A Beginner’s Guide (2011). And his prose has always had an urgent pedagogical tone: lucid and unvarnished, pitched at front-line organizers as much as fellow scholars. Yet alongside these consistencies of method there has also been a significant reorientation of his writing, as it registers the recession of socialist prospects over the past four decades. The insurrectionary spirit of his early work has given way to a more sober and reflective register, even if his political commitment has not wavered. How should we assess this intellectual transformation and the texts that emerged from it? What do they reveal or occlude in the present conjuncture?
Born in 1941, the only child of a provincial landowning family from Kalmar, Therborn had an affluent and bookish upbringing, with the Hungarian uprising and Second Arab–Israeli war helping to crystallize a radical outlook during his teenage years. He studied at his local Gymnasium, where he acquired English, German and French, before attending university in Sweden’s ‘ecclesiastical metropolis’, the medieval city of Lund. As a student activist his affiliations were fluid: by turns he established an anarcho-syndicalist society, drifted into the orbit of the Social Democrats, played a leading role in the independent Socialist Association—running unsuccessfully for parliament on its ticket—and served a stint in the Communist Party. In his twenties he became a regular contributor to the Stockholm-based journal Zenit and eventually ascended to its editorial committee, aiming to rebrand it as ‘the New Left Review of the far north’, with a multidisciplinary staff dispersed across the Scandinavian capitals.footnote2 At the same time he made contact with nlr itself, publishing his first article—a critical survey of the Swedish left—in 1965. Yet it was not until the worldwide rebellion erupted three years later that his name became familiar to readers in the Anglosphere.
‘From Petrograd to Saigon’, written in the early months of 1968 while Therborn was still a graduate student, presented the Tet Offensive as a volta in the history of socialist struggle. Hitherto, the Cold War was widely if erroneously perceived as an equal confrontation between rival systems: liberal-democratic capitalism and authoritarian communism. As long as that was the case, the repression and scarcity associated with the ussr served to quell revolutionary impulses among subaltern populations in the West. Geopolitical antagonism diminished class division. Yet the hot wars of the 1960s could not be framed as a contest between equals. Their asymmetry was unavoidable—as plebian uprisings across Asia, Africa and Latin America met the full force of us firepower. With this shift, socialism mutated from an ‘alien social model’ into a ‘source of emulation’ for the oppressed strata of the capitalist world, led by the insurgent generation that flooded the streets that May. The projection of imperial power in the peripheries had reactivated internal conflicts in the core.footnote3
Therborn’s writing over the following decade was imbued with this sense of imminent upheaval. Its tone is anticipatory, preparing for a moment of political reckoning amid the hegemonic crisis sparked by Vietnam. At this juncture his intellectual priorities were twofold—to develop a rigorous, Althusserian Marxism capable of directing the international workers’ movement, and apply it to what was at once the most pressing and most neglected strategic issue: the dynamics of state power in the First World. His doctoral thesis was a systematic investigation of the ‘social disciplines’—economics, sociology, historical materialism—which sought to define their conditions of emergence and objects of study. Published in English as Science, Class and Society (1976), it argued that each of these traditions had discovered a distinct ‘pattern of societal determination’: the market, with its operations of supply and demand; the ideological community, with its matrix of values and norms; and the laws of historical motion, based on contradiction and class division. Marxism distinguished itself from its predecessors by grasping society as a ‘unity and conflict of opposites’, a field of structural incongruities shaped by the imperatives of accumulation. It replaced the ‘social whole’ with the ‘complex totality’, ‘sovereign individuals’ with ‘relations of production’, ‘cause-and-effect’ with ‘overdetermination’. Any relapse into earlier economic or sociological discourses would, Therborn claimed, betray its unique scientifico-political mission.footnote4
This search for a purified Marxist methodology also motivated Therborn’s scathing attack on the Frankfurt School, whom he accused of pedalling a ‘metaphysical humanism’ that abjured any concrete assessment of the social structure. In the work of Horkheimer et al., theories of man eclipsed conjunctural analysis; a simple dichotomy between capitalist alienation and the human essence obscured the real processes by which the system condensed or displaced its contradictions. The retreat into speculative philosophy, occasioned by the horrors of the thirties, offered no guide to political action after ’68.footnote5 Having diagnosed a similar disjunction between theory and practice, Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism (1976) summarized the most critical questions for post-classical socialism: ‘what is the real nature and structure of bourgeois democracy as a type of State system . . . ? What type of revolutionary strategy is capable of overthrowing this historical form of State—so distinct from that of Tsarist Russia? What would be the institutional forms of socialist democracy in the West, beyond it?’footnote6 As if taking his cue from Anderson, Therborn’s next book, What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules? (1978), set out to address these problems with an organizational theory of the advanced capitalist state, contrasted with its feudal forerunner and proletarian successor.
This apparatus was conceived not merely as a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie, nor a materialized concentration of class relations, but a locus of ‘political technologies’. Among the most important were Weberian bureaucracy and parliamentary government. The first contained the chaos of market competition with a regime of impersonal rationality: a framework of calculable rules that generated specialized and hierarchized forms of knowledge.footnote7 The second managed the conflicting interests of capital’s different factions (mercantile, financial, industrial, agrarian) by institutionalizing disunity—using deliberative decision-making to mediate between rival profiteers.footnote8 During the post-war period these technologies were adapted to accommodate parallel developments in the economies and polities of the West. A growing need for targeted state intervention in private industry supplemented bureaucracy, based on fixed protocols and vertical networks, with technocracy, in which experts would adjust and refine their policies to guarantee optimal efficiency. The widening of democratic participation—a desideratum to secure national cohesion—meanwhile rendered classical parliamentarism obsolete, giving rise to a political culture in which candidates tried to convince the public of their outstanding personal qualities: competence, fortitude, sound judgement and so on.
The anatomy of a workers’ state was fundamentally distinct. Whereas capitalism economized the political sphere, socialism politicized the economy. Whereas bourgeois politicians were bound by no specific mandate once they had sold themselves to the electorate, the legitimacy of proletarian officials was contingent on their ‘class representativeness’. To switch from one mode to the other would require more than sweeping nationalization or revolutionary repression, wrote Therborn. It would mean altering the class character of the state itself: empowering mass organizations at the expense of expert advisory panels, ‘dismantling bureaucracy, technocracy, and the exclusive and ritualistic forms of parliamentary and plebiscitary politics.’footnote9
Convinced that such a transition had ‘again become a concrete possibility in certain developed capitalist societies: especially France and Italy’, Therborn concluded with an analysis of far-left strategy spanning the Second International, the early Comintern, the Popular Front and, most pertinently, Eurocommunism—described as an attempt to end the domination of monopoly capital by assembling a coalition of progressive forces with allied workers’ parties at its centre.footnote10 Like the Swedish Left Party, of which Therborn was a prominent supporter, the pcf and pci hoped to capture bourgeois institutions through electoral campaigns supported by non-violent mass struggle, under the banner of la démocratie jusqu’au bout. They had so far succeeded in rejuvenating the labour movement and exploiting the fissures in Fordism.footnote11 Yet in their repudiation of ‘proletarian dictatorship’ they had not developed a viable plan, tailored to each national context, for overhauling the state machinery: an omission which meant that breakthroughs at the ballot box were unlikely to amount to social revolution. The next frontier for Marxism was therefore to create robust political and ideological defences against the ‘bureaucratic-managerial reproduction of the subordination of the workers’.footnote12
The self-described sequel to What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules? was an immanent critique of Althusser’s theory of interpellation, and an alternative conception of the procedures by which the state produces docile subjects. The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (1980) levelled a number of charges at its author’s theoretical lodestar: that he had understood ideology too narrowly as an ‘imaginary distortion of real relations’, that the consequent separation between true and false consciousness was untenable, and that he had failed to interrogate ideology’s role in curbing or sharpening class conflict. For Therborn, the notion that workers had a fixed set of ‘rational interests’ was a utilitarian hangover in contemporary Marxism with little explanatory value. It elided ‘how members of different classes come to define the world and their situation and possibilities in it in a particular way’. A more accurate theory would focus on the ‘mechanisms of subjection’ operative in different ideological systems: the means they employ to establish a basic sense of ‘what exists, what is good and what is possible’. According to this typology, a regime could sustain itself by presenting its form of rule as inevitable, as morally righteous, or as the best option within the present historical parameters. Where these methods failed, substitutes could be found: compensating for a loss of active support by instilling an attitude of deference in citizens, for instance, or attaching a sense of fear to the pursuit of political alternatives.
Therborn conceded that such techniques had effectively restabilized bourgeois-democratic governments amid the economic shocks of the late seventies: overcapacity, stagflation, rate hikes. He wagered that a revolutionary situation could still take shape, but only with the outbreak of another political crisis in which the socialist movement could dislodge existing interpellative mechanisms and mobilize its own. Straying from the usual vocabulary of structuralist Marxism, he predicted that victory in this endeavour would hinge on ‘harnessing the existential dimensions of human subjectivity’—‘meanings related to being a member of the world, i.e., the meaning of life, suffering, death’, typically addressed by ‘mythologies, religions, and secular moral discourse’.footnote13
Realignment
By 1980, then, Therborn had gone from forecasting the socialist conquest of the state to explaining its resilience. While he had hoped to reconnect social theory with political activity after the detour of Western Marxism, his prescriptions for transcending bourgeois democracy appeared increasingly remote from conditions on either side of the Iron Curtain, as labour was disciplined and expectations were lowered by a redoubtable new right. On a practical level, he reflected, the necessary steps for renewing Eurocommunism were evident, if not easily implementable: mediating between mass politics and parliamentarism, cooperating with social-democratic parties, articulating popular alternatives to austerity and wage restraint, and forging an internationalism that could encompass non-Communist forces in the developing world.footnote14 But the most productive theoretical pathway was less clear, for the central precepts of Therborn’s earlier research had been seemingly called into doubt. The scientific study of capitalist contradictions had little practical purpose if it could not grasp the subjective processes that enabled or inhibited class politics. And preparations for proletarian government were futile if they neglected the more proximate battleground of civil society.
This changing balance of forces prompted a range of neo-Hegelian and neo-Gramscian responses: Jameson’s Kulturkritik, Rose’s metaphysics, Laclau’s left populism. Therborn, however, gravitated closer to the traditional concerns of his discipline—becoming president of the Swedish Sociological Association and publisher of the academic quarterly Acta Sociologica. While teaching in Nijmegen and Gothenburg during the eighties and nineties, he embarked on what were perhaps his most generative works of scholarship: retaining his radical commitments and totalizing reach, but without the same atmosphere of political urgency. If Science, Class and Society claimed that sociological inquiry was anachronistic after the advent of Marxism, Therborn later seemed to resile from that position. Why Some People Are More Unemployed than Others (1986) scrutinized employment patterns and industrial strategies in the oecd countries, demystifying their divergent outcomes, while European Modernity and Beyond (1995) sketched the condition of the continent from the post-war period to the latest fin de siècle, reviewing the major transformations in its social institutions, demographic composition, collective identities, moral foundations and ideological conflicts.footnote15 Therborn also began to draw up an exhaustive account of the ‘geocultural’ family systems of the twentieth century, based on the interlocking norms of patriarchy, marriage and fertility.footnote16 Such monumental studies are beyond the scope of this essay; but for our present purposes we can simply register the shift they represented: away from an engagé standpoint towards an Olympian one; substituting retrospection for prospection; abandoning doctrinal Althusserianism for a comparativist historical sociology which at times seemed to dispense with Marxism—if not leftism—altogether.footnote17
Yet the décalage between early and late Therborn was not just the result of Eurocommunism’s fading prospects. It was symptomatic of a larger world-historical process that he would go on to describe in a compendium of articles for nlr: the left’s gradual relinquishment of a ‘modernist’ perspective, one that ‘turned its back on the past—the old, the traditional, the passé—and looked into the future as a reachable, novel horizon’.footnote18 For decades, this temporal orientation had sustained socialist agitators amid intolerable conditions and rallied countless numbers to their cause. Marxism had proven itself ‘without rival’ as an ‘interpretation, a criticism, an analysis, and, occasionally, a government of modernity’.footnote19 Yet by the year 2000 Therborn was sceptical about not only whether political conditions were favourable to this emancipatory outlook, but whether its fundamental bases still existed.
From its inception, he now wrote, Marxism was rooted in two grand dialectical processes: the opposition between forces and relations of production, and the confrontation between capital and labour, or metropole and colony. These were the active ingredients of twentieth-century history, shaping its major events and inspiring its primary agents. In this dichotomous structure, the dominant side had an ineluctable tendency to generate its antithesis. Inherent in the apparatus of exploitation was a destabilizing element (the industrial proletariat, the colonial subject) capable of effecting its collapse. Alternative realities were imaginable on account of this anti-systemic agent. Socialism was foreseeable because its progenitors already existed in the here-and-now. The future was latent within the present.footnote20
Yet from the eighties onward a new political logic emerged, as ‘labour was weakened and embryonic systemic alternatives fell apart, or were completely marginalized’.footnote21 Therborn began to trace the outlines of this era in ‘Into the 21st Century’ by contrasting the modern state structures that were lost to history with those that had weathered its violent course. He noted that the ‘economically inward-looking, little-trading’ model, in its multiple incarnations, was an abject failure: Communist nations had been prised open, postcolonial socialism in Africa had foundered, import-substitution had run aground in Latin America, and Europe’s traditionalist autocracies had embraced eversion. The general explanation was the rise of intra-industrial trade after wwii, which, by setting in motion technological advances which bypassed states isolated from the world market, compromised their ability to implement coherent national programmes and prompted their relative decline. Outward-looking welfarist and developmentalist models, on the other hand, had benefited from such runaway progress. Years of globalization had so far failed to unravel these formations. The richest countries had seen their public sectors continually expand along with their expenditures, while peripheral export-oriented economies had devised effective methods of controlling and directing capital. Corporations had grown, but not as much as states, which were more capable than ever of undertaking large-scale transformative projects, so long as they could remain competitive internationally.footnote22
The problem, then, was not humanity’s potential to determine its destiny; ‘humankind today is at a historical peak of its possibilities, in the sense of its capability and resources to shape the world, and itself’.footnote23 It was rather that the waning of ‘dialectical modernity’ had routed the socialist movement and eclipsed its totalizing vision for society. For Therborn, the left’s successes over the past century were considerable: discrediting racism and colonialism, establishing the post-war social settlement, beating back cultural reaction and gendered oppression. Its losses, however, were incalculable: misalignment between the ’68 protesters and the labour unions, retreat from the distributive conflicts of the seventies and eighties, geopolitical fractures among Communist regimes and their eventual evaporation. Thanks to these serial defeats, he argued, the secular trend towards the socialization of productive forces had been reversed, nullifying their contradiction with productive relations. The key industries of the developed world were privatized, fragmented, outsourced—their workers deracinated and scattered across supply chains. Class struggle had given way to new forms of contestation centred on ‘life politics, ecology, cultural expression’, left parties to looser activist coalitions.footnote24 Rulers and ruled did not form a divided unity in which the empowerment of one side met the collective resistance of the other. ‘Industrial capitalism has mutated into a form of digital-financial capitalism which does not produce or develop its own adversaries.’footnote25
This marked the transition to a post-dialectical age, in which the working class no longer constituted one pole of a binary societal antagonism. Socialism, by extension, lost its erstwhile meaning as the immanent triumph of this pole over its opposite. This, Therborn stressed, was not quite the ‘historical defeat’ registered by Anderson’s ‘Renewals’ (2000), in which ‘capital had comprehensively beaten back all threats to its rule’.footnote26 It could be better described as a situation of ‘impasse and exhaustion’, where ‘an industrial era of revolution and reform’ had finally run its course.footnote27 What were the implications? Intellectually, it was uncertain whether Marxism could retain its relevance. Since the late nineteenth century, he wrote in ‘After Dialectics’ (2007), this system of thought had triangulated between social science, philosophy and politics—focussing variously on the process of capitalist development, its dynamic of alienation and fetishization, and the power structure that protects it. The final element was the determinant one. Only a political current with revolutionary ambitions could bind the other discourses into a world outlook. In its absence, Marxism had mostly retreated into the corridors of the academy. There was no ruling out a left resurgence in the new millennium, yet its content would probably be novel, perhaps unrecognizable: ‘the underdevelopment of Marxist political theory, together with the social restructuration of capitalist societies, make it unlikely that an ascendant socialist politics would be very Marxist . . . Marx will be rediscovered many times over in the future; novel interpretations will be made and new insights found—but conducive to little ism-ish identification.’footnote28
Without this forward-looking and politically-oriented social theory, much of the left had succumbed to postmodern stasis, while the right had steadily consolidated its own modernist worldview. Neoliberalism promised liberation from backwards regimes, limitless growth and perpetual innovation. Under the project for a New American Century, the dream of socialist revolution had been supplanted by the doctrine of capitalist ‘regime change’.footnote29 One could still imagine alternative futures, but they were increasingly beholden to the market. Therborn’s ‘Class in the 21st Century’ (2012) noted how the utopian energies drained from the industrial proletariat had been reinvested in the middle-class fantasy of ‘boundless consumption’: ‘taking possession of the earth’, liberalizing its every corner, luxuriating in its cheap credit and commodities. This gave the global middle classes an ambiguous political subjectivity. It excluded anyone without the requisite assets or income, demonizing them as ‘deplorables’ and in some cases debarring them from democratic participation. But it also sparked conflagrations like the Arab Spring or Argentine riots, in which intermediate layers aligned with the masses in defence of their economic prospects or personal freedoms.footnote30
This created a temptation for plebeian classes to accept the ‘burgeoning bourgeoisie’ as their political vanguard—hoping that, when neoliberalism failed to deliver on its promises, downwardly-mobile professionals would rise up against the oligarchy.footnote31 But even the most optimistic version of this scenario offered no relief from capitalist realism. The likelihood was that any populist alliance based on a politics of consumption rather than production would split the moment it took power, with poorer fractions banished to its margins. The other option was for the poor themselves to become protagonists. In ‘New Masses’ (2014), Therborn examined three groupings that might do so: pre-capitalist indigenous peoples; extra-capitalist surplus populations—peasants, migrants, casual labourers, slum-dwellers; and manufacturing workers in emerging centres of accumulation—China, Bangladesh, Indonesia. None of these sectors, on its own, was powerful enough to pose a systemic challenge. The first was relatively small and isolated, the second was rarely activated without a ‘triggering event’, while the third was pacified by consumer capitalism and weakened by abundant labour supplies.
A serious opposition movement would therefore need to enlist the salariat as a junior partner—which relied, in turn, on the articulation of a hegemonic ideology that could take the place of Marxism. In pursuit of this vision, Therborn considered the foremost ‘critical themes’ in contemporary culture. During the 2000s, the drive for total commodification and its corrupting effects had generated public interest campaigns targeting corporate racketeers and their political conduits. Climate breakdown had spawned environmental and conservationist movements, giving rise to a ‘planetary consciousness’. And imperial arrogance had provoked reactive forms of solidarity in the Global South, manifest in institutions like the World Social Forum.footnote32 These were not dialectical negations of the regnant order, but disruptive tendencies within it. Their sense of futurity, where it existed, was abstract and often accommodationist. Whether they could metastasize into a societal alternative was unclear.
New lefts
Therborn’s appraisal of the new century, then, yielded several striking conclusions: that the state forms descended from the previous era laid the foundations for continuous human progress; that seizing them from the oligarchy would involve a contest between the working and middle classes to hegemonize anti-neoliberal politics; and that ‘the twenty-first-century left is most likely to be de-centred’, since ‘Europe can no longer provide a global perspective for emancipation’ and no other part of the world-system was primed to take its place.footnote33 Still, without the guiding compass of Marxism, concrete strategies and predictions—of the kind Therborn posited in the seventies and eighties—were out of reach. ‘In the current situation’, he wrote, ‘a certain defiant humility seems to be the most adequate intellectual stance. Defiance before the forces of capital and empire, however powerful. Humility before the coming new world and the learning and unlearning that it will call for.’footnote34 What that meant in practice was sifting patiently through the empirical evidence: tracking the slow mutation of these forces and the moments of resistance they encounter, so as to gauge their primary patterns in the post-industrial age.
This approach was demonstrated most comprehensively in ‘The World and the Left’—a survey spanning every continent, in which Therborn profiled the myriad ‘new lefts’ that have appeared over the last twenty years and the constraints acting upon them. Such oppositions, no longer relying on the propulsive force of structural dialectics, and often disinherited from their political progenitors, were instead driven by an affective impulse in the present: an unmediated indignación at the cruelty of late capitalism. ‘Ignoring the bleak old era of their mothers and fathers, the new left from around the turn of the millennium took radical politics onto a new level.’ It had not revived anything resembling left-modernism; yet its success in preserving socialist politics beyond the historical conditions that spawned it was astonishing. For Therborn, it was only because of the ‘creative dynamism’ of these agitators and organizers, ‘in contrast to the fatigue and despondency of the left in the early neoliberal era’, that social transformation remained conceivable. Such movements, ‘stepping out of the shadows of the great moulders of the twentieth century’, had ‘updated and revitalized the entire radical tradition’. That alone provided ‘rational grounds for cautious optimism’.footnote35
The actors that accomplished this momentous task were varied. The starting-gun was fired by alter-globo, which contrasted an internationalism rooted in solidarity to one based on outsourcing and speculation. Its example of an intransigent left, as heedless of national borders as its adversaries, was followed by militant climate activism, which gained momentum in the mid-2000s and sparked ‘the fastest-growing social movement in history’, Fridays for Future, in the late-2010s. In parallel, urban rebellions—Occupy, 15-M, Gezi Park—skirted the barriers to class consciousness by pitting an undifferentiated ‘people’ against a parasitic ‘elite’. They foreshadowed the combative social democracy embodied by Corbyn, Sanders, Iglesias and Mélenchon, which combined the concrete proposals of twentieth-century reformism with a ruptural strategy to wrest state power from elites.footnote36 Peripheral countries were meanwhile roiled by perpetual industrial revolt, even if the struggles of the new manufacturing proletariat were largely constricted to pay and conditions. In Africa, the ‘imf riots’ against structural adjustment plus ongoing protests against the cost of living and corruption had partially renewed the contestatory spirit of anti-colonialism. And in Latin America, the Pink Tide managed to curb inequality and improve social provision while instating new models of participatory democracy and cooperative production: a considerable achievement given the stranglehold of the world hegemon. Morales and Correa, in particular, combined indigenous communitarian traditions with bold redistributive policies—their focus on conservation and bien vivir offering an antidote to the ‘modernist myopia’ of the old left.footnote37
Twenty-first-century leftism was, moreover, distinguished by its novel tactics and instruments. In lieu of the mass party, the social network; alongside elections and industrial action, divestment campaigns and reclamations of public space. ‘Democracy’ had become integral to its discourse: no longer a means to the end of socialism, but a synonym for it, and a telos in itself. Therborn conceded that none of these movements could boast a perfect record. Alter-globo failed to programmatize its demands; environmentalism was largely assimilated by the liberal centre; transatlantic left populism was repelled at the ballot box; African insurgencies were ephemeral and easily repressed; while the Pink Tide struggled to reconcile communitarianism with developmentalism—splitting its social base and exposing it to right-wing counter-offensives. In each case, ‘the left’s great lacuna was a vision of transformative power or a strategy for winning it’. Outbursts of popular anger may have signalled the enduring possibility of a revolutionary subject by convening ‘coalitions of workers, peasants, students, professionals, indigenous people’s organizations, the precariat and the unemployed youth’ in various configurations. But even when this bloc was powerful enough to topple governments, it stumbled in trying to administer its own.footnote38
If the left struggled to dream up ‘an inspiring imaginary future’—a clear direction for its long march—it could at least take solace in the fact that liberalism, too, had abandoned its modernist orientation. The us-led project of extending ‘market sovereignty over the entire world’ had, by enabling the precipitous rise of China, generated a contradiction between the unfettered advance of capital and the interests of the American juggernaut. In attempting to shore up its strength, Trump and Biden had facilitated the shift away from neoliberalism towards a monopoly capitalism ‘bent upon accumulation within state-defined geopolitical parameters’. With the advent of the New Cold War, this had rapidly calcified into a doctrine of ‘sado-liberalism’. While the us had previously deployed sanctions or shock and awe as the necessary precursors to liberalizing reform, it had since become obsessed with punishing aberrant states ‘without any realistic prospect of behavioural change’, merely for the ‘satisfaction of punishing’.footnote39 Illusions of free-market utopia had vanished. In their place was a weakened empire, unable to accept the prospect of multipolarity, enflaming proxy wars and lashing out at competitors with no pretence of ‘progress’. Ctd....
The last working-class hero in England.
Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018
Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
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