Has the left declined, been defeated, or is it dead? Is the continuity with the Old and New Lefts of the 20th century, or should we understand 1989 as marking a definitive break?
We use a long essay by Swedish Marxist sociologist Göran Therborn in the latest New Left Review as a plank to examine these questions. Therborn tries to present a synoptic analysis of where the left is, globally speaking, almost a quarter of the way into the 21st century. Is he right that the old dialectics of industrialism and colonialism are no longer operative - and that no new dialectic has emerged?
And is trying to present a "balance sheet" a valid approach in the first place?
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