Since the turn of the millennium, the Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn has been developing a series of formidably ambitious arguments in these pages, providing a near comprehensive overview of global politics, its principal forces, trajectories and tensions, plus the changing aims and tactics of the left.footnote¹ At the core of these expansive essays is a juxtaposition between the shape of twentieth-century history and that of the contemporary period—the primary processes by which capitalism has been consolidated or resisted in each era. Its basic premises are as follows. If the industrial age was governed by grand dialectics, pitting capital against labour and colonizer against colonized, its successor does not have the same binary structure. The productive system is no longer primed to create a singular emancipatory subject; which renders visions of an egalitarian future, whether in socialist theory or oppositional culture, increasingly opaque. Menaced by entrenched inequality, climate collapse and hostile geopolitics, the current course of societal evolution defies easy prediction. Perpetual crisis will likely determine the terrain of struggle in the coming years. Marxism was the foremost method of understanding the old reality, but its status in the new one is less certain. By drawing ecumenically on left social thought, however, we can still map the existing political-economic landscape in granular detail, locate its contradictions and identify ‘new masses’—mostly peripheral and surplus populations—that could plausibly transform it.

This project began with ‘Into the 21st Century’ (2001) and culminated in ‘The World and the Left’ (2022). It is marked by several features of Therborn’s wider oeuvre, which stretches back to the 1960s: a gift for extracting theoretical insights from stacks of empirical data, like a miner chipping precious gemstones from a rockface; and a mastery of comparative analysis, drawing cross-connections between protest movements in the Sahel and political experiments in South America, currency crises in the eu and demographic changes in East Asia. The author’s range has always been immense—few others would have the audacity or the ability to produce a two-hundred-page primer titled, simply, The World: A Beginner’s Guide (2011). And his prose has always had an urgent pedagogical tone: lucid and unvarnished, pitched at front-line organizers as much as fellow scholars. Yet alongside these consistencies of method there has also been a significant reorientation of his writing, as it registers the recession of socialist prospects over the past four decades. The insurrectionary spirit of his early work has given way to a more sober and reflective register, even if his political commitment has not wavered. How should we assess this intellectual transformation and the texts that emerged from it? What do they reveal or occlude in the present conjuncture?

Born in 1941, the only child of a provincial landowning family from Kalmar, Therborn had an affluent and bookish upbringing, with the Hungarian uprising and Second Arab–Israeli war helping to crystallize a radical outlook during his teenage years. He studied at his local Gymnasium, where he acquired English, German and French, before attending university in Sweden’s ‘ecclesiastical metropolis’, the medieval city of Lund. As a student activist his affiliations were fluid: by turns he established an anarcho-syndicalist society, drifted into the orbit of the Social Democrats, played a leading role in the independent Socialist Association—running unsuccessfully for parliament on its ticket—and served a stint in the Communist Party. In his twenties he became a regular contributor to the Stockholm-based journal Zenit and eventually ascended to its editorial committee, aiming to rebrand it as ‘the New Left Review of the far north’, with a multidisciplinary staff dispersed across the Scandinavian capitals.footnote² At the same time he made contact with nlr itself, publishing his first article—a critical survey of the Swedish left—in 1965. Yet it was not until the worldwide rebellion erupted three years later that his name became familiar to readers in the Anglosphere.

‘From Petrograd to Saigon’, written in the early months of 1968 while Therborn was still a graduate student, presented the Tet Offensive as a volta in the history of socialist struggle. Hitherto, the Cold War was widely if erroneously perceived as an equal confrontation between rival systems: liberal-democratic capitalism and authoritarian communism. As long as that was the case, the repression and scarcity associated with the ussr served to quell revolutionary impulses among subaltern populations in the West. Geopolitical antagonism diminished class division. Yet the hot wars of the 1960s could not be framed as a contest between equals. Their asymmetry was unavoidable—as plebian uprisings across Asia, Africa and Latin America met the full force of us firepower. With this shift, socialism mutated from an ‘alien social model’ into a ‘source of emulation’ for the oppressed strata of the capitalist world, led by the insurgent generation that flooded the streets that May. The projection of imperial power in the peripheries had reactivated internal conflicts in the core.footnote³

Therborn’s writing over the following decade was imbued with this sense of imminent upheaval. Its tone is anticipatory, preparing for a moment of political reckoning amid the hegemonic crisis sparked by Vietnam. At this juncture his intellectual priorities were twofold—to develop a rigorous, Althusserian Marxism capable of directing the international workers’ movement, and apply it to what was at once the most pressing and most neglected strategic issue: the dynamics of state power in the First World. His doctoral thesis was a systematic investigation of the ‘social disciplines’—economics, sociology, historical materialism—which sought to define their conditions of emergence and objects of study. Published in English as Science, Class and Society (1976), it argued that each of these traditions had discovered a distinct ‘pattern of societal determination’: the market, with its operations of supply and demand; the ideological community, with its matrix of values and norms; and the laws of historical motion, based on contradiction and class division. Marxism distinguished itself from its predecessors by grasping society as a ‘unity and conflict of opposites’, a field of structural incongruities shaped by the imperatives of accumulation. It replaced the ‘social whole’ with the ‘complex totality’, ‘sovereign individuals’ with ‘relations of production’, ‘cause-and-effect’ with ‘overdetermination’. Any relapse into earlier economic or sociological discourses would, Therborn claimed, betray its unique scientifico-political mission.footnote⁴

This search for a purified Marxist methodology also motivated Therborn’s scathing attack on the Frankfurt School, whom he accused of pedalling a ‘metaphysical humanism’ that abjured any concrete assessment of the social structure. In the work of Horkheimer et al., theories of man eclipsed conjunctural analysis; a simple dichotomy between capitalist alienation and the human essence obscured the real processes by which the system condensed or displaced its contradictions. The retreat into speculative philosophy, occasioned by the horrors of the thirties, offered no guide to political action after ’68.footnote⁵ Having diagnosed a similar disjunction between theory and practice, Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism (1976) summarized the most critical questions for post-classical socialism: ‘what is the real nature and structure of bourgeois democracy as a type of State system . . . ? What type of revolutionary strategy is capable of overthrowing this historical form of State—so distinct from that of Tsarist Russia? What would be the institutional forms of socialist democracy in the West, beyond it?’footnote⁶ As if taking his cue from Anderson, Therborn’s next book, What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules? (1978), set out to address these problems with an organizational theory of the advanced capitalist state, contrasted with its feudal forerunner and proletarian successor.

This apparatus was conceived not merely as a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie, nor a materialized concentration of class relations, but a locus of ‘political technologies’. Among the most important were Weberian bureaucracy and parliamentary government. The first contained the chaos of market competition with a regime of impersonal rationality: a framework of calculable rules that generated specialized and hierarchized forms of knowledge.footnote⁷ The second managed the conflicting interests of capital’s different factions (mercantile, financial, industrial, agrarian) by institutionalizing disunity—using deliberative decision-making to mediate between rival profiteers.footnote⁸ During the post-war period these technologies were adapted to accommodate parallel developments in the economies and polities of the West. A growing need for targeted state intervention in private industry supplemented bureaucracy, based on fixed protocols and vertical networks, with technocracy, in which experts would adjust and refine their policies to guarantee optimal efficiency. The widening of democratic participation—a desideratum to secure national cohesion—meanwhile rendered classical parliamentarism obsolete, giving rise to a political culture in which candidates tried to convince the public of their outstanding personal qualities: competence, fortitude, sound judgement and so on.