Unity on the Global Left: Critical Reflections on Samir Amin's Call for a New International by Barry K Gills & Christopher Chase-Dunn

Author:Barry K Gills & Christopher Chase-Dunn [Gills, Barry K & Chase-Dunn, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367552220
Goodreads: 55738358
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

2. The world left’s early 21st-century false dawns

Although global managers were losing confidence and legitimacy, the various nationally-bound left progressive opposition parties and social movements were not strong enough to provide genuine alternatives. The WSF proclaimed, ‘Another World is Possible!’ – a nebulous phrase indicative of the global left’s low confidence levels – but aside from a few sector-specific sector attacks on global corporate power and neoliberal multilateralism (of which three are described below), international civil society achieved little in this period. The Brazilian turn leftwards in 2003 under Workers Party leadership, and the more radical Latin American Pink Tide countries of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, also ebbed within a decade. The Brazilian Petrobras-financed WSF meetings and various Caracas conferences sponsored by Chavez (where Amin played a leadership role) were ultimately of little use to the global justice movement. And the Latin American leftists’ carbon addictions and export orientation soon proved fatal once the commodity super-cycle peaked in 2011 and crashed in 2015 (e.g. oil’s fall from $120/barrel in 2011 to a low of $26/barrel five years later). Brazil witnessed especially intense social protest, initially from the left in 2014 after the Workers Party adopted more explicitly neoliberal policies such as increased public transport fares. And clampdowns on indigenous, environmental and community activists – generally of the left – were increasingly common there as well as in the Andes and Amazon. Ecuadoran activists, especially, fought a neo-caudillismo that often appeared anti-imperialist (e.g. in opposing Bretton Woods Institution dictates and giving safe harbor to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange) but that then substituted Chinese extractive corporates for their Western predecessors in sacred sites like the Yasuni Park.

Taking another false step, Amin often held out hope that social-democratic allies in Europe would join an anti-U.S. front, especially after 2003s fracturing of the imperial core over the Iraq War. The continent’s increasingly extreme uneven geographical development, dysfunctional currency, and subsequent immigration crisis offered other areas in which activists engaged in vital (if ultimately fruitless) campaigning. They soon found the balance of forces – whether in continental sites like the European Social Forum or in national settings – was becoming more skewed towards capital. Their efforts were inadequate to defeat the fascist tendencies that flowed from these two processes. Hopes that the frustrated working classes of Southern Europe might generate a more radical left were dashed, once in power, by the Greek Syriza and Italian Five-Star parties, and in Spain where Podemos appeared to hit its support ceiling at just over 20 percent in 2015–16. One potential exception, perhaps, is Great Britain: the Labour Party’s remarkable 2017 electoral comeback campaign behind Jeremy Corbyn and his Momentum movement attracted many pro-Brexit and former-UK Independence Party voters, although there, residual Blairite apparatchiks within Labour remain powerful. As divided as the Tories were over Brexit, they still held power during the crucial break from Europe in 2019.

As for the ‘emerging markets’ and semi-periphery, during the 2010s there was occasional rhetorical opposition to Western dominance over multilateralism from leaders of the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) bloc.

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