Reinventing the Left in the Global South: The Politics of the Possible

Description

This book offers a fresh appraisal of the nature and significance of the democratic Left in the Global South. The moral and intellectual leadership of the Left is shifting south from its European birthplace. It is in the Global South, most notably in Latin America, that one finds newly self-confident progressive movements. This 'new' democratic Left includes parties and social movements that not only are avoiding the familiar pitfalls that ensnared socialists and social democrats in the twentieth century, but also are coping with the realities of the twenty-first century, especially neoliberal globalization. In analyzing and illustrating three innovative strategies - moderate social democracy, radical social-democratic transition to socialism, and Left populism - this study nudges the debate about the Left out of the well-worn grooves into which it has fallen in recent decades. Cover Half-title page Title page Copyright information Epigraph Contents Figures Tables Acknowledgments 1 Reinventing the Left An overview of the argument The Left and the double movement The realities of society Avoiding the pitfalls? Strategies of the Left Conclusion 2 Alternative visions: leftist versus neoliberal paradigms The dialectics of development paradigms Neoliberalism’s paradigmatic assumptions Challenge and the adaptation of neoliberal doctrine The rise of inclusive neoliberalism The distinctive Left vision Conclusion 3 How neoliberalism fails The socioeconomic record Market volatility and recession Growing inequality Ecological degradation Deadly conflict Conclusion 4 Making history: agency, constraints and realities The politics of the Left Historical and structural constraints The indispensable market Conclusion 5 Pitfalls and promise of the moderate Left What is moderate social democracy? The populist temptation Power relations and the pull of social liberalism Moderate social democracy: cases Moderate social democracy: a model Conclusion 6 The radical Left: moving beyond the socialist impasse The dead end of state socialism Twenty-first-century socialism? Radical social-democratic transition to socialism Conclusion 7 Politics of the possible The national level: adaptive versus disruptive strategies Small-scale experiments in equitable cooperation Reconstructing globalization The Left and climate change Concluding observations Bibliography Index