Socialists are at a crossroads, pressed by the urgent need to find new directions amid mounting crises. What can the left carry forward from recent strategies, tactics, and organizations that not so long ago seemed so promising? Is the ‘new socialist’ left starting over, or moving on?

The defeat of Bernie Sanders, and then Jeremy Corbyn, has undeniably had a deflating effect on the ‘democratic socialist’ left that exploded onto the scene in 2016. What’s more, these defeats followed on the crumbling of the ‘new parties’ in Europe that had been so important for inspiring this upsurge: in Greece, Syriza buckled in the face of the iron straitjacket imposed by EU institutions; in Spain, Podemos fractured under the weight of its ideological and institutional weaknesses; and Bloco fared no better in Portugal.

Meanwhile, the Chavez-inspired Bolivarian revolutions in Latin America hit an impasse and are barely stumbling along. In this context, the left often saw little alternative but to support the coercive response to a rising tide of hard-right forces by authoritarian neoliberal states as (very) junior components of anti-fascist ‘popular fronts’. This was reinforced as the hard-right intensified its attacks on women's reproductive rights, LGBTQ people, and immigrants, spurring a search for new terrains of feminist, gender, and anti-racist struggle. Others turned to the workplace, and union organizing, as a new direction to build the working-class base for radical politics whose absence seemed so directly responsible for another round of defeats.

Greg Albo teaches political economy at the Department of Political Science, York University, Toronto. He is currently co-editor of the Socialist Register. He is also on the editorial boards of Studies in Political Economy, Relay, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Canadian Dimension, The Bullet and Historical Materialism (England). Co-editor of A Different Kind of State: Popular Power and Democratic Administration and author of numerous articles in journals such as Studies in Political Economy, Socialist Register, Canadian Dimension, and Monthly Review.

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Stephen Maher has been writing about Canadian politics since 1989. As a columnist and investigative reporter for Postmedia News, iPolitics, and Maclean’s, he has often set the agenda on Parliament Hill, covering political corruption, electoral wrongdoing, misinformation, and human rights abuses. He has also won many awards, including the Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, the Michener Award for meritorious public service journalism, the National Newspaper Award, two Canadian Association of Journalism Awards, a Canadian Hillman Prize, and has been nominated for several National Magazine Awards.

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