The Radical Left and Social Transformation: Strategies of Augmentation and Reorganization

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.

Robert Latham teaches in the Politics Department at York University, Toronto, Canada. He has published widely on topics including political economy, digital activism, technologies of border surveillance, critical theories of sovereignty, transnational relations, migration, and radical political alternatives. He is the author of Politics of Evasion: A Post-Globalization Dialogue Along the Edge of the State.

Karen Bridget Murray is Associate Professor in the Politics Department at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her research evaluates and theorizes changing forms of modernity with respect to cities, as well as the governance of children and families. Recent publications include articles in BC Studies, Canadian Journal of Political Science, Global Discourse, and Urban Geography.

Julian von Bargen is a Doctoral Candidate in the Politics Department at York University, Toronto, Canada. He employs ethnographic, participatory, and experimental methods to explore how states and societies are reassembling after the Internet. He has published on state surveillance and the information freedom movement.

A. T. Kingsmith teaches in the Politics Department at York University, Toronto, Canada. His research explores the intersections of digital surveillance, social anxiety, and production in urban space. He has published on affect theory, sensory studies, social movements, speculative philosophy, and mixed methodologies.