The Radical Left and Social Transformation

Strategies of Augmentation and Reorganization

Robert Latham, Karen Bridget Murray, Julian von Bargen, A.T. Kingsmith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429656347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This comprehensive collection draws upon and reengages with a long history of Marxian-anchored thought to analyze the potential for social transformation through a reinvigorated radical Left, all within the context of the ascendance of an increasingly ethnonationalist, patriarchal, and authoritarian far Right worldwide. The authors identify and reflect on strategies, tactics, and possibilities for analyzing and intervening in advanced capitalist societies by increasing and deepening popular participation and support on the far Left.

The chapters are framed in terms of conceptualizing the capitalist present, organizing "the people" and reimagining the radical Left. Together, in diverse ways that draw upon both qualitative and quantitative approaches, the authors evaluate the difficulties of augmentation across multiple planes, from the tension between migrants and citizen workers, to the uneasy relationship between sovereignty and class, to the contradictions operating across international versus domestic dynamics. How and why (if at all) should the radical Left reexamine its understanding of political consciousness, identity, ideology, and institutions, as they relate to Marxian analysis and various threads of critical theory? The authors suggest new approaches for understanding what the radical Left is up against and how problematic barriers might be torn down, thus disrupting unhelpful binaries such as state versus capital, national versus international, worker versus migrant, activist versus candidate, and freedom versus necessity.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the online journal Global Discourse.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Augmenting the Left
• 2 Contemporary capitalism, uneven development, and the arc of anti-capitalism
• 3 War as politics: a reply to Latham
• 4 Neoliberalism as a historical stage
• 5 Capitalism, imperialism, and modes of exchange: a reply to Karatani
• 6 ‘Life finds a way’: mapping a post-positivist Marxian science
• 7 Did life find its way? A reply to Kingsmith and von Bargen
• 8 Who’s afraid of the people? The debate between political agoraphobia and political agoraphilia
• 9 Democracy and etceteras: a reply to Dupuis-Déri
• 10 Rethinking the left: a view from Latin America
• 11 Deconstructing Latin American development: postdevelopment critical theory or Marxist political economy?: A reply to Munck
• 12 Refugees in Greece: the Greeks as ‘refugees’
• 13 Transcending the nation: a communist strategy in the era of globalization. A reply to Velissariou
• 14 The national question, partition and geopolitics in the 21st century: the Cyprus problem, the social question and the politics of reconciliation
• 15 Domesticating radicalism or radicalising domestic politics? A reply to Trimikliniotis
• 16 Re-imagining the left through an ecology of the commons: towards a post-capitalist commons transition
• 17 Commons manifestos: a reply to Bauwens and Ramos
• 18 Strategies for a radical left
• 19 Power beyond the state: a reply to Allen
• 20 Expanding the horizon: for a Libertarian Marxism
• 21 The possibility of a libertarian Marxism? A reply to Löwy and Besancenot
• Index