Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left: Recasting Leftist Imagination

What does the future hold for the left? How does the left adapt to, and prepare for, the crises of our time? In moments of crisis it is always important to rethink longstanding assumptions, jettison wishful thinking and dated ideas, and recover wisdom from the past. In so doing, we have the opportunity to plot a new way forward. The authors of this edited collection do just this: putting forward a diversity of approaches and issues to strategize for the work that awaits us in the 2020s, particularly in the struggle against capitalism, climate change and the far right.

Working within five major thematic areas, the contributors examine how to engage working class people in anti-capitalist struggles, undermine reactionary currents of ethno-nationalism while supporting anti-colonial movements, strategically build power inside and outside the state apparatus, demand new forms of resistance to address environmental crises, and effectively promote solidarity and ecological responsibility. This book provides suggestions for working with popular disaffection, taking the rich, fragmented, conflicted history of refusals and defeats as a starting point for next steps in the struggle against capitalism and the far right, rather than as the basis for more conflict or defeatism.

Robert Latham teaches in the Politics Department at York University in Toronto.

A. T. Kingsmith teaches in the Politics Department at York University in Toronto.

Julian von Bargen teaches in the Politics Department at York University in Toronto.

Niko Block is a doctoral student of political science at York University.