The collapse of neoliberalism since September and October of 2008 has been sudden and spectacular. The failure of the ideas sustaining the Washington Consensus and the practices of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund seems nearly complete. The new world we may be entering could have a dramatically different political opportunity structure than the old one. But what will take its place? What has the Left to offer? What has it learned in recent decades that have been filled with more defeats than victories? What will it have to offer right now when millions are seeking solutions? Our contributors possess no crystal ball. Our answers to these questions are framed historically. How have left movements learned from defeat in the past? What factors have enabled them to exploit moments of opportunity? Analyzing the immediate historical context to the present crisis, historians can suggest which measures promise the most hope of success and which seem doomed to failure. To this end, the papers in this collection concern themselves with left victory and defeat. They show that victory and defeat are more problematic than we might think. Each raises its own particular set of challenges and concerns.

French Socialists currently appear less and less convinced of the relevance of rejecting today's consumption-oriented society and turn increasingly to more center-left models in order to refound their party. (Refoundation is one of the most frequently used terms within the party.) Therefore, it is instructive to go back to the eighteenth-century roots of socialism and note the way many of its founding theorists promoted the establishment of truly social communities set in a perfectly harmonious relationship to the natural environment.

As the intellectual debate was not confined within French borders at the time of the Enlightenment, this study will create a dialogue between those who argued that luxury was absolutely essential in a modern society (Mandeville, and later Malthus, whose views are echoed in the voices of contemporary right-wing politicians) and those who, on the contrary, advocated a return to a voluntary state of nature, which implied the rejection of material accumulation and social inequality (such as Rousseau and later William Godwin, whose concerns are nowadays echoed by the defenders of décroissance). This article also explores the most utopian propositions coming from objecteurs de croissance, individuals who side with the far left while adding their concern for the environment and emphasis on humane values.

Between 1918 and 1929 the British Labour Party, working in conjunction with many of the top names in International Relations (IR), developed a coherent foreign policy centered around reforming the international system. This was a major policy change for a political party that, up until then, had concentrated on domestic social and political issues. The construction of Labour's interwar foreign policy was part of a wider intellectual revolution that produced the separate discipline of IR after the First World War, and the splits in Labour over foreign policy mirrored similar splits in the wider IR literature. Particularly important here were the differences of opinion over the relationship between arbitration, sanctions, and disarmament in a system of League of Nations pooled security. Labour's close association with IR experts and intellectuals resulted in the construction of an international policy that, while addressing socialist themes, drew on an older liberal tradition. The ultimate goal of this policy was to create pacific international conditions favorable to the development of democratic socialism. While events after 1931 forced a major rethinking in the Party, Labour's IR experts continued to provide policy-relevant advice that shaped the Party's responses to the rise of fascism.

In the midst of the freezing winter of 1978 and 1979, strikes erupted across Britain. In what became infamously known as the “Winter of Discontent,” workers struck against the Labour Government's attempts to curtail wage increases. The defeat of this “incomes policy” and Labour's subsequent electoral defeat ushered in an era of unprecedented political, economic, and social change for Britain. Conservative victory, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, not only seemed to signal the dissolution of “traditional” working-class ties to the Labour Party, it also suggested that British working-class politics might finally be on its last leg. Furthermore, a potent social myth developed around the Winter of Discontent, one where “bloody-minded” workers brought down a sympathetic government and “invited” the ravages of Thatcherism upon the British labor movement.

Absent from these various narratives are the experiences of rank-and-file activists, in particular, the growing number of female trade unionists active in these strikes. This article examines the experiences of a group of women trade unionists from the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) who participated in the strikes of the Winter of Discontent. Based on oral histories and corresponding archival material, it argues that the Winter of Discontent provided a crucial “rite of passage” for these women, one which exposed them to an unprecedented level of involvement in grassroots labor activism and leadership. Thereafter, these working-class women began to make significant inroads into NUPE and the Labour Party, which helped to make working women's issues more central to the British labor movement for decades to come. Therefore, rather than being the death knell of British working-class politics, this study of women involved in the Winter of Discontent strikes reveals that while one form of working-class politics was in decline, a reconfigured one was in the process of being born.

This paper explores the gendered concept of community with reference to the activism of women during the UK 1984–1985 miners’ strike. Drawing on texts from the period and reflective discussions twenty years later with women associated with the strike, it interrogates the ways in which the idea of community was used to accommodate the activism of women. We argue that the apparently gender-neutral ideal of mining community carried meanings that had ambiguous political implications for the women and that the strike highlighted paradoxes that question established understanding of female strike activism.

The paper discusses historical lessons offered by the experience of two leftwing movements, the pre-1948 Palestinian Communist Party, and the post-1948 Israeli Socialist Organization (Matzpen). The focus of discussion is the relationship between class and nation as principles of organization.

The Palestinian Communist Party was shaped by forces that shaped the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: British rule, Zionist ideology and settlement practices, and Arab nationalism. At intensified conflict periods it was torn apart by the pressures of competing nationalisms. By the end of the period, its factions agreed on one principle: the need to treat members of both national groups equally, whether as individuals or as groups entitled to self-determination. This position was rejected by both national movements as incompatible with their quest for control.

In the post-1948 period, Matzpen epitomized the radical critique of Zionism. It was the clearest voice speaking against the 1967 occupation and for restoration of Palestinian rights. However, it never moved beyond the political margins, and its organization failed to provide members with a sustainable mode of activism. It was replaced by a new mode, mobilizing people around specific issues instead of presenting an overall program.

The paper concludes with suggestions on how the Left may use these lessons to develop a strategy to focus on the quest for social justice and human rights.

The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen extraordinary political developments in the Latin American left. Indeed, there is no historical precedent for the simultaneous election across the region of governments that can be identified with the political left. From Tabaré Vasquez in Uruguay to Martín Torrijos in Panama; from Néstor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina to Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua; from Michelle Bachelet in Chile to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela; from Evo Morales in Bolivia to Rafael Correa no Ecuador—as well as Luis Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and, more recently, Fernando Lugo in Paraguay—representatives of practically all of the region's formative leftist currents have taken over the governments of large, medium, and small countries.

This article takes Brazil under Lula's government as a case study in order to explore the relationship between the various dimensions of the region's lefts: the social and the institutional, civil society and the state, the national and the international, and stability and transformation. Indeed, the election to the presidency of a survivor of the extreme poverty and harsh droughts of northeastern Brazil, a one-time metalworker with little access to formal education, had a profound impact on both the country's social movements and the political party that he founded and led. By examining the hopes and frustrations, dilemmas, and accomplishments of Lula's government, we can better achieve a more dense and nuanced understanding of the larger historical process through which the Latin American Left has reached power.

The Labor Movement has entered a crisis. Declining support for unions and for socialist political movements reflects the exhaustion of a reformist growth strategy where capitalists and state officials accepted unions in exchange for labor peace. While winning real gains for workers, this strategy undermined labor and its broader democratic aspirations by establishing unions and union and party leaders as authorities over the workers themselves. In the upheavals of the late-1960s and the 1970s, dissident movements, directed as much against reformist leaders as against employers and state officials, pushed protest beyond traditional limits toward demands for popular empowerment and democracy. Union decline began then, not because workers had lost interest in collective action but because employers and state officials abandoned collective bargaining to find alternative means of controlling unrest. Capitalism entered a new post-union era, when national leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan used policies of open trade and capital flows and high unemployment to discipline labor. Abandoned by their capitalist bargaining partners, reformist unions and political parties have withered. Now, without social space for reformist movements, the labor movement can only advance by openly avowing its original goals of popular empowerment and the establishment of economic democracy.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, critical attention has increasingly focused on the remaining world system, capitalist in nature and anchored in the World Trade Organization (WTO), founded in 1994 as the successor to the 1948 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). As the 1990s progressed, a smattering of exciting new intellectual work began to appear on the social and environmental impacts of the international trade and investment regime, especially given its apparently negative impact on many developing countries and the world's working people. “The distinction somewhat comfortably maintained by ‘trade hands’ who managed the post-World War II international economy—that trade is strictly a commercial function with no immediate connection to social concerns—has evaporated under the pressure of political and social forces generated by the globalization of the economy.”

The recent growth of the working classes in various parts of the Global South (or what was called the Tricontinent of Africa, Asia, and Latin America some years ago) has important consequences for labor historians. For a very long time labor history was mainly based in the North Atlantic region, though there have also been important nuclei in the so-called socialist countries, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, and some institutional labor history could also be found in other parts of the world at least since the 1920s. Now, however, the Global South is playing an increasingly important role in the development of working class historiography.