The explosion of the 2008 financial crisis has produced a series of unforeseen political consequences, in Europe in particular. How can the forces of the radical left best respond to this unprecedented challenge? The aim here is to explain the analysis that has informed Podemos’s political strategy in Spain: who we are, where we’re coming from and where we want to go—the fullest reflection on these questions that I’ve been able to set down since being elected leader of Podemos last November. It’s also an opportunity to speak in my own voice, outside the format of mainstream media interviews. Of my combined roles as party General Secretary and political scientist and theorist, the first would not have been possible without the second. This is one of the defining characteristics of Podemos.

Faced with the unprecedented political situation created by the Eurozone crisis, our starting-point was a recognition of the twentieth-century left’s defeat, already registered by nlr.footnote¹ Hobsbawm’s ‘short century’, from the Bolshevik Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall, saw the horrors of fascism, war and colonial violence, but was also an age of hope and social progress. After 1945, social programmes in the advanced-capitalist countries brought a limited redistribution of wealth and higher living standards for major sectors of the working class, especially where trade unions were strong. The Russian and Chinese revolutions proved incapable of combining economic redistribution with democracy, but produced undeniable advances in modernization and industrialization; Soviet military strength, primarily responsible for the defeat of Nazism, was also proof of economic development. In the post-war period, the ussr represented a real counter-weight to us interventionism. If the Cold War generated Eastern-bloc satellite states devoid of any real sovereignty, it also opened up space for anti-colonial movements to defy us hegemony, and helped to buttress welfare states and the extension of social rights in the West.

From the 1970s, Washington and the other Western powers wagered on a new set of policies to address the gathering problems of their economies: beating back trade unions, empowering financial sectors, privatizing public assets and accelerating the relocation of production to low-wage zones, along with the establishment of the fiat-dollar system. The fall of the Soviet bloc was an enormous boost for the Washington Consensus, but also for the preponderance of finance capital within the European Union. This took constitutional form in the Maastricht Treaty, whereby member states agreed to surrender monetary sovereignty to an ‘independent’ European Central Bank. The convergence criteria and Stability Pact hedging the new single currency signalled the growing hegemony of a united Germany within the European project; national macro-economic policies were restricted to reducing public spending, imposing wage restraint and promoting privatization—or emigration. Many of the struggles of the past decades in Europe can be seen as defensive stands against the ongoing attrition of national sovereignty. In this context of defeat for the existing lefts, critical thought was largely separated from political praxis—in stark contrast to the organic links between theoretical production and revolutionary strategy that characterized the early twentieth century. It became the work of professionalized university teachers, rather than radical political leaders. Indeed the themes of contemporary critical thinking are intimately related to historical defeat.

Nevertheless, despite the narrowing of political possibilities due to the hollowing of state sovereignty, the past fifteen years have seen the emergence of new adversaries for neoliberalism, not just in the form of social movements but also at state level. In Latin America, in conditions of severe economic and political crisis, popular and progressive formations won electoral victories which they transformed into projects for the recuperation of sovereignty, both in national and regional terms. While the context that produced these processes differed in numerous respects—economic, social and cultural structures, strength of the state, geopolitical situation—from that of Europe, let alone the us, there was one similarity. Latin America too had seen the historic defeat of the old left in the disastrous years of the seventies and eighties. The emergence of these new forces was a reminder that politics, as a stage for struggles in constantly shifting conditions, never comes to a halt, however hard the conditions in which it operates.

Even without the threat of the old spectre, the world order has entered into a period of geopolitical transition over the past fifteen years, an expression in part of the displacement of the industrial balance between the North Atlantic and East Asia. Washington’s unilateral predominance has been qualified, at least, by the emergence of great powers, old and new, whose interests may not easily be subsumed into those of the us. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms demonstrated the viability of a state-planned ultra-capitalism, converting the land of the Cultural Revolution into the world’s foremost productive zone and a powerful international actor. In the ‘pivot region’ of Eurasia, Putin’s semi-democratic Russia continues to demonstrate that Moscow is back on the world stage.

The 2008 crisis has now produced unexpected new political openings, in southern Europe in particular, in forms that few could have predicted. State bailouts for bankrupt financial institutions led to ballooning national debts and soaring interest-rate spreads. The emergency policies to ‘save the euro’ imposed—and soon normalized—by the German-led bloc have had disastrous effects in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain, where millions have lost their jobs, tens of thousands have been evicted from their homes and the dismantling and privatization of public-health and education systems has sharply accelerated, as the debt burden was shifted from banks to citizens. The eu has been split along north–south lines, a division of labour that mandates a low-wage workforce and cheap goods and services for the Mediterranean countries, while the young and better-trained are forced to migrate. The 2014–20 eu budget represents a victory for this line.

Not so long ago, Spain was being hailed as an eu economic success story thanks to a development model based on real-estate bubbles and corrupt urban projects, overseen since the post-Franco Transition by the Partido Socialista Obrero Espãnol (psoe) and Partido Popular (pp). Now, along with the other piigs, it is being forced to surrender historic social rights through austerity policies that Germany and its northern allies would never impose at home. But the crisis itself has helped to forge new political forces, most notably Syriza in Greece—which finally has a sovereign government, defending a social Europe—as well as Podemos in Spain, opening up the possibility of real political change and the recuperation of social rights. Clearly in present conditions this has nothing to do with revolution, or a transition to socialism, in the historic sense of those terms. But it does become feasible to aim at sovereign processes that would limit the power of finance, spur the transformation of production, ensure a wider redistribution of wealth and push for a more democratic configuration of European institutions.