THE SOCIALIST CHALLENGE TODAY
SYRIZA, Sanders, Corbyn

Edited by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin

Haymarket Books (Spring 2020) Audio rights only.

Trade Paper • ISBN-13:9781642591286 • US $14.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 100 pgs.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

With the historic parties of the left and center-left largely discredited amidst neoliberalism’s multiple economic, ecological, and migration crises, political space has opened up for the far right and its ultra-nationalist, racist, sexist and homophobic agendas. Yet it has also restored some credibility to the socialist case for transcending capitalism altogether.

Amidst a significant shift from “protest” to “politics” on the contemporary left, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin provide an essential historical, theoretical, and critical perspective for understanding the potential as well as the limits of three important recent phenomena: the Sanders electoral insurgency in the USA; the Syriza experience in Greece; and Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party in the UK.

Presenting a powerful argument for transcending earlier social democratic and communist practices, Panitch and Gindin stress the need for renewing working-class politics through new kinds of socialist parties. Most important, they insist, will be to foster the development of strategic and practical capacities to democratically transform state structures so as to render them fit for realizing collective democracy, social equality, sustainable ecology and human solidarity. This is the central challenge for democratic socialists today.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Leo Panitch is a Senior Scholar and Emeritus Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto, Canada. Editor of the annual Socialist Register for over three decades, his book (with Sam Gindin), The Making of American Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso Books, 2012), was awarded the Deutscher Book Prize in the UK and the Davidson Book Prize in Canada. 

Sam Gindin was the Research Director of the Canadian Autoworkers (now UNIFOR) from 1974-2000. Over the next decade he was the Packer Chair in Social Justice at York University. He is the co-author, with Leo Panitch, of The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso Books, 2012).