Openings and Closures: Socialist Strategy at a Crossroads

Socialists are at a crossroads, pressed by the urgent need to find new directions amid mounting crises. What can the left carry forward from recent strategies, tactics, and organizations that not so long ago seemed so promising? Is the ‘new socialist’ left starting over, or moving on?

The defeat of Bernie Sanders, and then Jeremy Corbyn, has undeniably had a deflating effect on the ‘democratic socialist’ left that exploded onto the scene in 2016. What’s more, these defeats followed on the crumbling of the ‘new parties’ in Europe that had been so important for inspiring this upsurge: in Greece, Syriza buckled in the face of the iron straitjacket imposed by EU institutions; in Spain, Podemos fractured under the weight of its ideological and institutional weaknesses; and Bloco fared no better in Portugal.    

Meanwhile, the Chavez-inspired Bolivarian revolutions in Latin America hit an impasse and are  barely stumbling along. In this context, the left often  saw little alternative but to support the coercive response to a rising tide of hard-right forces by authoritarian neoliberal states as (very) junior components of anti-fascist ‘popular fronts’. This was reinforced as the hard-right intensified its attacks on women's reproductive rights, LGBTQ people, and immigrants, spurring a search for new terrains of feminist, gender, and anti-racist struggle. Others turned to the workplace, and union organizing, as a new direction to build the working-class base for radical politics whose absence seemed so directly responsible for another round of defeats.

International Politics Race & Anti-Racism Sociology