I just noticed that the new issue of Jacobin is out. It's well worth reading. There is an excellent article by Richard Seymour (previously posted on his blog Lenin's Tomb) entitled "How can the Left Can Win?". Lars T. Lih has a piece as does Paul Le Blanc. There's also a piece by Zizek and a response. I also just finished reading an extremely interesting piece about radical political economy, Marxism and neoclassical economics. Check it out.
I should like to say something about this issue's editorial "Dancing on Liberalism's Grave". It ends with a cautionary note to the Left: Radicals must avoid submerging our identities into an insipid and ahistorical “progressivism”; we must remain firmly anchored to the socialist tradition and never shy away from the ruthless critique of liberalism. But socialists should also be wary of slipping into a rhetorical posture of unrestrained invective that only cements the Left’s marginal status in American political life. Don’t dance on liberalism’s grave. There’s nothing to celebrate. I couldn't agree more with this particular set of claims. I, too, agree that we should reject ahistorical "progressivism" and remain firmly rooted in the socialist tradition. Neither should the Left shy away from the ruthless critique of liberalism. And, it is also true that the Left should avoid sectarian Schadenfreude in the context of the demise of reformist liberalism.
But, having conceded this much, I would like to take issue with the way that the Left is carved up by the authors of the editorial. In their estimation, the Left has "traditionally" responded in two ways to the decline of liberal reformism: by adopting a politically tepid, fiercely dogmatic lesser-evilism meant to roll back the rise of the Right, on the one hand, or by taking a cynical, sectarian delight in the implosion of liberalism on the other. "Traditionally" seems a bit misplaced here, since the authors seem only to have in mind the demise of postwar liberal reformism in the US in the 1960s and 70s. It's not clear that their analysis helps us make sense of previous epochs of reaction and revolt (e.g. the 1920s, on the one hand, and the explosion of left radicalism in the 1930s, on the other). But this is a side note: let's stick with the period that interests them, i.e. the upheavals of the late 60s and early 70s during which postwar liberalism died a painful death as a hard-nosed neoliberalism was born.
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