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The Future and the Left

Göran Therborn replies to Oliver Eagleton’s critique of ‘The World and the Left’ (NLR 137). Debates on the nature of dialectics and the triadic crisis of climate breakdown, imperial geopolitics and rising inequality. Could Bloch still be right about the grounds for rational hope?

The World and the Left

In a landmark analysis, Göran Therborn contextualizes the myriad new lefts that have emerged across the globe since the turn of the millennium.

Inequality and World Political Landscapes

Critical assessment of a landmark international survey of electoral demographics, mapping the social fractures blunting opposition to inegalitarian politics. The weight in these of income and education, class and identity, and the longer historical arc of national political orders. What is the outlook for neoliberal economics after the pandemic, not least in the country where they were first violently imposed?

Dreams and Nightmares of the World’s Middle Classes

A survey of new shifts within the world’s vast ‘in-between’ classes and their contrasting trajectories in North and South. How should their theorization—or ideologization?—by development economists and financial journalists be read?

Twilight of Swedish Social Democracy

Hailed with relief for fear of a bleaker outcome, the SAP’s poor performance in the September 2018 election underlines the malaise afflicting social democracy’s global flagship. Therborn charts the country’s SAP-led neoliberalization—and rise of the far-right Sweden Democrats—against the backdrop of recession and refugee arrivals.

Dynamics of Inequality

Behind the political upsets in the Atlantic world lie far-reaching shifts in the distribution of global wealth. Göran Therborn assesses the path-breaking research of Branko Milanovic on world income trends.

An Age of Progress?

Contradictions of social evolution: climate change, stagnant incomes and social exclusion entwined with rising per capita GDP and lengthening life-spans, challenges to racism and sexism, and a mounting capacity for the human species to take control of its destiny.

New Masses?

What social forces are likely to challenge the supremacy of capital in the coming decades? An assessment of potential bases of resistance—from traditional communities overrun by the global market to factory workers and an expanding yet amorphous middle class.

Class in the 21st Century

From São Paulo to Beijing, a rising middle class has been hailed by liberal commentators as a bulwark for consumption and democracy in the decades ahead. Taking stock of these claims, Göran Therborn offers a magisterial overview of the global class landscape and the still prodigious numerical weight of manual workers within it.

NATO’s Demographer

Göran Therborn on Heinsohn, Söhne und Weltmacht. Political demography of the Mid-East youth bulge as threat to Western power.

Transcaucasian Triptych

The dramatic trajectories of Tbilisi, Baku and Yerevan, and differing roles in the present. Göran Therborn tracks the fortunes of Georgia’s capital, seat of monarchs and Mensheviks, through alterations in its physical fabric, setting these alongside the metamorphoses of its Caucasian counterparts.

After Dialectics

Göran Therborn offers a panoramic survey of left social theory since the fall of Communism. The vicissitudes of modernity as contested temporal narrative, and the divergent thematic paths—religion, Utopia, class, sexuality, networks, world-systems—that are emerging in the new landscape.

A Liberal Provoked?

Is patriarchy a structure of power in the family or something wider? Is it largely a pre-capitalist phenomenon? What have been the principal forces dissolving it—commodity relations, liberal ideas, or radical political action? Where are negative rates of reproduction in advanced societies likely to lead? A sharp exchange of ideas beween Nicky Hart and Göran Therborn.

Capital’s Twilight Zone

Göran Therborn on Robin Blackburn, Banking on Death. The fate of pensions in the future of capitalism, as political struggles over them escalate in North and South alike.

Into the 21st Century

States, markets, firms, classes, movements—how are they inter-related and where are they moving in the new century? Göran Therborn offers a panorama of global politics that amounts to a powerful and original alternative to all existing readings of the state of the world.

Reconsidering Revolutions

Göran Therborn on Noel Parker, Revolutions and History, and Fred Halliday, Revolution and World Politics. Two new contributions to the literature on revolution—where does it stand today?

The Limits of Social Democratic Admirableness

“Donald Sassoon’s One Hundred Years of Socialism is in physical form as well as in intellectual content very suitable to its actual object of study, Western European social democracy and labourism after World War ii. It is big (943 pages plus index), heavy, attractive—from the cover to . . .” read more

Dialectics of Modernity: On Critical Theory and the Legacy of Twentieth-Century Marxism

“Students of parliamentary history are familiar with the idea of ‘Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’. Marxism, as a social-historical phenomenon, has been Her Modern Majesty’s Opposition to modernity. Always critical of and fighting against her predominant regimes, but never questioning the legitimate majesty of modernity and, when needed, explicitly . . .” read more

The Autobiography of the Twentieth Century

“How will we and our times be remembered by our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren? What will they, the next century’s historians, and the media of their times, make of us, of our ideas, hopes, fears, efforts and illusions—of our victories and defeats? Will these last even matter? Of . . .” read more

Reply to Mouzelis

“To assess the complex historical experience of what has claimed to be socialism, or efforts in a socialist direction, is an enormous task, which will take a long time, deep digging and hard thinking. It will be enlivened by controversy. Nicos Mouzelis’ reply to my initial bird’s-eye . . .” read more

The Life and Times of Socialism

“As the light of socialist hopes and expectations fades, and the need for clear vision and historical perspective grows imperative, we might look to the owl of Minerva, trusting she will neither be dazzled by the fires of capitalist celebration (or crisis?) nor succumb to the absolute darkness . . .” read more

The Prospects of Labour and the Transformation of Advanced Capitalism

“Even a pair of very myopic eyes are sufficient to discern the mood of the Left today, particularly the Socialist Left, in the countries of advanced capitalism. The general picture is one of gloom, with some extra-dark strokes over the British Isles, some pale-pink touches where holding operations . . .” read more

The New Questions of Subjectivity

“The Dominant Ideology Thesis by Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner is first of all the story of a hunting exploit. It relates how the authors hunt down and finally kill a beast called ‘the dominant ideology thesis’. To save some space for due evaluation . . .” read more

Why Some Classes Are More Successful Than Others

“A theoretical model of class formation must undergird any serious theory of capitalist politics, just as the concrete analysis of class formation must be the prerequisite for the realistic examination of the historical development of any particular capitalist country. So far, in contemporary Marxist research, two approaches to . . .” read more

The Travail of Latin American Democracy

“The shifting complexity of Latin American politics baffles the observer, frustrates the theoretician and challenges both the committed endurance and the tactical subtlety of the revolutionary. Continent of military coups and dictators—but also of (male) bourgeois democracies as old or even older than some West European or North . . .” read more

The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy

“The relationship between advanced capitalism and democracy contains two paradoxes—one Marxist and one bourgeois. Any serious Marxist analysis has to confront the following question: How has it come about that, in the major and most advanced capitalist countries, a tiny minority class—the bourgeoisie—rules by means of democratic forms? . . .” read more

The Theorists of Capitalism

“Even the most abstract theoretical discourses and scientific endeavours are the product of particular societies in a particular historical period. As human beings live in societies and as these societies—like the rest of the universe—have a time dimension, the products of the human mind always have some kind . . .” read more

The Working Class and the Birth of Marxism

“The theory of historical materialism makes it possible to situate Marxism itself—just as much as market economics or normative sociology—in relation to capitalist development and the bourgeois revolution. Historical materialism emerged in the second half of the 1840s, in the heartlands of industrial capitalism. Its birthplaces were the . . .” read more

Jurgen Habermas: A New Eclecticism

“Jürgen Habermas is at present the most celebrated of the successors of the Frankfurt School and the only one as yet well-known outside the Federal German Republic. In an article in nlr 63, I discussed the work of Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse, the original nucleus of the . . .” read more

The Frankfurt School

“In France and Italy, the post-War period has seen the emergence of new schools of Marxist thought (Althusser, Della Volpe). In the German-speaking world, on the other hand, there is a complete continuity from the pre-War years. The veterans Lukács and Bloch are still active and influential, but . . .” read more

Swedish Communism--End of an Interlude

“The Twenty-Second Congress of the Swedish Communist Party—since 1967 called Left Party (Communist) or VPK—on September 19th–21st put an end to a period in the history of the party, hitherto unique in the annals of the international movement. A balance-sheet of this period and of the congress . . .” read more

From Petrograd to Saigon

“The staggering blows that the National Liberation Front has now dealt the American military expedition in Vietnam have changed history. When some half a million American troops with enormous technological superiority are no longer capable of keeping even the us Embassy in Saigon safe, the most rabid . . .” read more

The Swedish Left

“The general societal setting of contemporary Swedish politics has been analysed elsewhere by the present writer in terms of the combination of—to use Gramscian categories—working-class political dominance with a continuing latent hegemony of the bourgeoisie. This situation has positive implications for left-wing action and thinking. Working-class political dominance . . .” read more