SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
left-wing
C. J. Polychroniou on Socialism, Left Internationalism, and the Climate Crisis
The return of Left internationalism inspired by the vision of socialism needs a dramatic turnaround on the global ideological and political landscape.
May 28, 2025
Has neoliberal globalization run its course? Should the Left be on the side of tariffs or protectionism? Can Left internationalism be revived? Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou tackles these questions in an interview with the independent French-Greek journalist Alexandra Boutri.
Alexandra Boutri: In a recently published essay, you argue that the Left should endorse a new vision of globalization and fight accordingly for a new world order. Can you briefly spell out the pitfalls of neoliberal globalization and why the current world order is a failure?
C. J. Polychroniou: The first thing that stands out about neoliberal globalization is that it has led to an extremely high degree of economic inequality by altering patterns of income distribution and resource allocation while at the same time undermining economic and social rights. As Miatta Fahnbulleh put it a few years back in an essay that appeared in Foreign Affairs, the system “is not working in the interest of the majority of people.” The actual record of neoliberal globalization on economic growth has also been quite dismal, with postwar “managed capitalism” outperforming the neoliberal model on every count. On top of that, under the form of globalization prescribed by neoliberalism “the average global temperature has risen relentlessly,” as Robert Pollin has pointed out. Neoliberal globalization has been bad for people and the environment alike.
Trump’s domestic agenda is the most neoliberal since the onset of neoliberalism.
As far as the current world order is concerned, it would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic. We have a world in permanent crisis literally since the end of the Second World War, with the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over humanity’s head. The Doomsday Clock is now closer than ever to midnight. The current war in Ukraine, the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza and the seizing of land in the occupied West Bank by violent religious extremists under the protection of the Israeli army speak volumes of the dramatic failure of the United Nations and the so-called international community. There is no lawful world order. International law only applies when it suits the strong.
Alexandra Boutri: Has neoliberalism’s model of globalization run its course?
C. J. Polychroniou: The current system has been in a terminal state since the outbreak of the global financial crisis of 2007-08. The resurgence of right-wing nationalism across the globe is interrelated to the profound contradictions built specifically into the neoliberal version of globalization. The backlash against globalism by the likes of U.S. President Donald Trump and his MAGA faction needs to be understood in connection with the changes that are occurring in the world economy. Trump is using protectionism as a means of altering the global supply chain in favor of U.S. production and imposing tariffs to reduce the U.S. trade deficit but is simultaneously unleashing the most vicious form of neoliberalism inside the country. He is attending to the mythology of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny by trying to reassert the dominance of the United States in the world economy while destroying functioning government as part of a plan to axe safety-net programs and letting corporations run roughshod over labor. Trump’s domestic agenda is the most neoliberal since the onset of neoliberalism. It constitutes an open war against working people and social rights, against the poor and the environment. It’s all about making the rich richer and the poor poorer. It’s a domestic agenda based on the politics of astonishing greed and shocking cruelty. Trump’s election therefore does not mean the end of neoliberalism or of globalism.
Alexandra Boutri: Free trade or protectionism? Is this an actual choice for the Left?
C. J. Polychroniou: It depends on what one means by the “left.” You have left-wing liberals, social democrats, left-wing socialists, communists, and anarchists. Left with capital L tends in some circles to refer to the anti-capitalist, socialist-communist-anarchist camp. Personally, I don’t consider the Democrats in the United States or the Social Democrats in Europe as part of the Left. Their loyalty is to capitalism. Hence, they are not agents of transformational change. They want to maintain the existing socioeconomic system but with some modifications in place to make it less disagreeable. The social democratic tale was about capitalism with a human face. It was a popular political program for the first few decades after the end of the Second World War, and it was of course an improvement over laisses faire capitalism and a bourgeois state that catered exclusively to the interests of the capitalist class. Nonetheless, we should be reminded of an old radical dictum: There cannot be democracy, social justice, and equality as long as power belongs to capital.
It may have taken voters quite a long time to realize that the parties of the establishment left had sold out to global capitalism, but when they did, the consequences were cataclysmic in their impact.
The debate regarding free trade versus protectionism is as old as political economy. For what it’s worth, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels confronted this issue back in the 1840s, in the struggles over the Corn Laws. Marx saw free trade for what it is—i.e., “freedom of capital,” and mocked the claim of free-traders that the absence of tariff barriers would abolish the antagonism among classes. But this does not mean that Marx took the side of protectionism, which he saw as a system to defend the status quo. Thus, as he put it, “One may declare oneself an enemy of the constitutional regime without declaring oneself a friend of the ancient regime.”
Interestingly enough, though, Marx ends up in the end endorsing free trade but purely on political grounds because he saw the free trade system as accelerating the prospects of radical change.
The goal of the Left is to move beyond capitalism by constructing an equitable and sustainable economy and a just world order. Rudolf Hilferding, in his book Finance Capital, published more than a century ago, wrote: "The proletariat avoids the bourgeois dilemma—protectionism or free trade—with a solution of its own; neither protectionism nor free trade, but socialism, the organization of production, the conscious control of the economy not by and for the benefit of the capitalist magnates but by and for society as a whole."
Alexandra Boutri: Until recently, antiglobalization was exclusively associated with parties and movements of the Left. However, internationalism has historically been a core component of the Left’s ideological worldview. What happened to Left internationalism but also to social democratic parties whose collapse coincides with the collapse of the antiglobalization movement and the emergence of right-wing antiglobalism?
C. J. Polychroniou: The antiglobalization movement came to life in the 1990s and peaked during the early 2000s. It was inspired mainly by so-called far-left ideologies which saw free trade agreements, multinational corporations, and international economic organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank promoting a new version of colonialism. During those years, millions of people turned out across the world to raise their voice against global corporate power. Center-left and reformist left parties in general did not join the protests against global capitalist expansion for the simple reason that they had embraced neoliberalism and were being showered in turn by campaign cash from big corporations and the financial sector. In a word, they had betrayed the working class in the same manner that the socialist parties had betrayed internationalism in 1914 at the start of the First World War.
The history of European social democracy may be summarized as follows: a period of rather impressive achievements on the social, political, and economic fronts during the first few decades following the end of the Second World, which were made possible because of the role of different actors in the emergence of a social democratic consensus, and capitulation to neoliberal capitalism in the latter part of the 20th century, especially after the end of an era where you had leaders like Willy Brandt in Germany, Bruno Kreisky in Austria, and Olof Palme in Sweden who were undeniably dedicated to the struggle for social justice and economic democracy. The leaders that came after them across the European continent took the position that Keynesian economics no longer had applicability in the new world economic order that had emerged following the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and that fiscal orthodoxy was the way to go. In the 1980s, the so-called socialist governments of Francois Mitterrand in France, Bettino Craxi in Italy, Felipe González in Spain, and Andreas Papandreou in Greece not only failed to carry out even the minimal set of promises they had made to voters during the pre-electoral period, but their economic programs followed the neoliberal prescriptions proposed by the IMF and the World Bank.
The antiglobalization movement of the 1990s was associated with far-left politics and was attacked as such by mainstream media and the establishment parties across the political spectrum. In the eyes of many citizens across Europe, the “left” was still represented by social democratic and socialist parties. It may have taken voters quite a long time to realize that the parties of the establishment left had sold out to global capitalism, but when they did, the consequences were cataclysmic in their impact.
In 2000, 10 out of 15 countries in the European Union still had social democratic or socialist parties in government even though they had abandoned all the traditional social democratic ideas and policies. Nearing the end of the second decade of the new millennium, we could find social democratic parties in government in only two countries in Europe. Even the euro crisis did not help the parties of the traditional left to make a comeback. What was happening instead is that far-right parties were gaining ground across Europe and around the world. The far-right was reinventing itself with a backlash against globalism. The European far-right even adapted the language of the left to its own ends. Of course, it succeeded in doing this by taking advantage of the betrayal of center-left parties as well as of the left’s fractiousness and disunity—issues that have long plagued the left worldwide. Defeating the far-right is, of course, of paramount importance for the future of democracy and of the Left.
The history of Left internationalism is too long and complex to discuss here. Suffice to say, though, that it has both positive and negative aspects. The Second International betrayed the cause of socialism. The Third International, which was created by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky in 1919, was a powerful force toward world revolution, a major step toward world socialism. However, under Josef Stalin, it became purely an instrument of Soviet state policy to advance the Stalinist view of “socialism in one country.” And the Red Lord officially dissolved the Third International in 1943.
It's hard to revive Left internationalism when the left is fractured and there is so much confusion about what the left even represents in today’s world. Of course, there is a plethora of progressive social movements at the forefront for social change, but the return of Left internationalism inspired by the vision of socialism needs a dramatic turnaround on the global ideological and political landscape.
In the postwar era, Cuban internationalism stands virtually alone as an alternative form of globalization. Still, the Left needs a new internationalism that combines solidarity and the quest for social justice and equality with a global climate change policy. The latter is by far the most important issue facing humanity in the 21st century, and nothing would be of greater importance than if the new Left internationalism was built around taking on the greatest challenge of our times—i.e., preventing Earth from becoming unlivable.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Neo-Feudalism: the Enemy the Left Must Name to Defeat
The only way forward is to complete the unfinished revolution against feudalism—not through reactionary nationalism, but through systemic transformation.
Mar 18, 2025
In 1776, America declared independence not just from a king, but from an entire feudal order. The promise was radical: no more lords and vassals, no more aristocratic monopolies, no more inherited rule. It was a vision of self-governance, economic freedom, and political democracy.
As we know, this promise was deeply flawed from the outset—built atop the brutal reality of chattel slavery, which entrenched a racial caste system even as the revolution sought to break from feudal hierarchy.
Still, the revolutionary spark—that governance should belong to the people, not an inherited elite—set a course for future struggles, from abolition to labor rights to civil rights. The unfinished promise of 1776 has always been to extend that right to everyone, dismantling old forms of domination wherever they persist.
The fight against neo-feudalism must be reclaimed by a left willing to challenge entrenched power at its roots, not merely manage decline.
Yet nearly 250 years later, we find ourselves under the shadow of a system that eerily resembles the one we once revolted against. Power is no longer held by monarchs but by corporate oligarchs and billionaire dynasties. The vast majority of Americans—trapped in cycles of debt, precarious labor, and diminishing rights—are not citizens in any meaningful sense.
We talk around this reality. We call it “money in politics,” “corporate influence,” and “economic inequality.” But these are symptoms, not the disease. The disease is neo-feudalism—a system in which power is entrenched, inherited, and designed to be impossible to escape. And unless we call it by its true name, we will never build the movement needed to fight it.
Feudalism may have faded in name, but many of its structures remain. Today’s hierarchy mirrors the past in ways we can no longer ignore.
- Then: Lords owned the land, and peasants worked it under their control.
Now: A handful of corporations and investment firms own vast swaths of housing, farmland, and industry. - Then: Aristocracies passed power down through hereditary privilege.
Now: Dynastic billionaires and corporate monopolies ensure that wealth remains concentrated in a ruling class. - Then: The peasantry was bound to their lords by custom, debt, and necessity.
Now: Student debt, medical bills, and stagnant wages trap entire generations in perpetual economic dependence. - Then: Political power was controlled by a small elite who ruled by divine right.
Now: The illusion of democracy masks the fact that billionaires fund both parties, controlling policy no matter who is elected.
This is not the free society America was supposed to be. It is a highly stratified system in which the many serve the interests of the few, with no meaningful path to real power. And worse, the establishment left—rather than challenging this order—has come to represent it.
The Democratic Party was once the party of the working class. Today, it has become the party of the professional-managerial elite—the bureaucrats, consultants, and media figures who believe that governing is their birthright.
The establishment left has in many ways absorbed the role of the aristocracy—not just in terms of wealth but in the way it positions itself as the enlightened ruling class. They claim to stand for “equity” and “democracy,” yet do nothing to challenge the real structures of power.
Instead, they manage decline while maintaining their own privilege—careful not to upset the donor class that sustains them.
As newly elected Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin put it, “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money. But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.”
Pronouncements from global elites certainly don’t help either. The now-infamous slogan “You’ll own nothing and be happy”—popularized by the World Economic Forum and widely interpreted as a blueprint for a hyper-managed future—only fuels growing resentment toward an emerging system where ownership, autonomy, and mobility are increasingly out of reach for the average person.
This is why figures like Steve Bannon and reactionary populists have hijacked the narrative of neo-feudalism. Despite his own ties to oligarchs, Bannon has correctly identified that America is no longer a capitalist democracy but a feudal order where power is locked away from ordinary people.
He explicitly frames this crisis as a return to feudal hierarchy: “The ‘hate America’ crowd… they believe in some sort of techno-feudal situation, like was in Italy, back in the 14th and 15th century… where they are like a city-state, and there are a bunch of serfs that work for them. Not American citizens, but serfs, indentured servants.”
He has also drawn direct comparisons between modern economic conditions and serfdom: “Here’s the thing with millennials, they’re like 19th-century Russian serfs. They’re in better shape, they have more information, they’re better dressed. But they don’t own anything.”
However, Bannon’s solution—a nationalist strongman government—represents just another form of vassalage.
Reactionary populists like Bannon, President Donald Trump, and Tucker Carlson exploit real economic grievances and redirect them into a revenge narrative. Instead of seeing neo-feudalism as a system that transcends party or nationality—one that has evolved from medieval serfdom to corporate vassalage—they reframe it as a nationalist grievance.
Bannon likens “globalists” (an ambiguous term) to feudal overlords, but insists that nationalism can break their grip. Trump labels the deep state and liberal elites as the enemy, but assumes the role of a strongman to restore justice. Carlson says the working class is being crushed, but blames cultural elites rather than the billionaire class as a whole.
This misdirection is key. Rather than exposing the true architects of neo-feudalism—corporate monopolists, financial barons, and entrenched dynasties—these reactionaries redirect public anger toward an amorphous “cultural aristocracy” of media figures, academics, and bureaucrats. The real oligarchs escape scrutiny, while the working class is fed a narrative that pits them against cultural elites rather than the economic structures that keep them in servitude.
The only way forward is to complete the unfinished revolution against feudalism—not through reactionary nationalism, but through systemic transformation. The fight against neo-feudalism must be reclaimed by a left willing to challenge entrenched power at its roots, not merely manage decline.
The question is no longer whether neo-feudalism exists. The question is whether the left will finally recognize it—and act before it’s too late. If it fails, the fight will be lost to those who see the problem but offer only deeper subjugation as the solution.
Keep ReadingShow Less
What Can Be Done About the Left’s Diminished DNC Presence?
The recent race for DNC chair raises questions about how the progressive wing of the party can and should move forward toward 2028.
Feb 09, 2025
Just before starting to write my lament about what a dramatic step backward the recent campaign for Democratic National Committee chair had been, I opened an Our Revolution email that told me, “We beat back the party establishment at the DNC.”
Now Our Revolution being a direct organizational descendent of the 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, and me having been a 2016 Sanders convention delegate, I feel pretty confident that our ideas of who “we” means are pretty much the same. So what accounts for the widely divergent takes?
For those who haven’t been following this, Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chair Ken Martin was just elected to lead the DNC for the next four years, defeating Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler by a 246.5–134.5 vote margin. There was no contested election four years ago, because by tradition a just-elected president selects the new chair; contested elections generally follow defeats. In the last one, in 2017, former Obama administration Secretary of Labor Tom Perez won the job, beating Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison in a second round of voting, 235--200.
At the moment there is no one obviously positioned to take up the Sanders’ mantle in the 2028 presidential campaign.
Ellison’s candidacy came in the wake of his having been just the second member of Congress to support Sanders in the prior year’s presidential primaries, and the fact that Sanders people harbored serious grievances with the DNC over its perceived favoritism for the ultimate nominee, Hillary Clinton, lent a distinct edge to the election, bringing it considerably more buzz than the one that just occurred. At the time, former Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, a vociferous opponent of Sanders’ run—who had once declared, “The most effective thing liberals and progressives can do to advance our public policy goals... is to help Clinton win our nomination early in the year”—now thought there was “a great deal to be said for putting an active Sanders supporter in there,” so as to clear the air “of suspicions and paranoia.” But Clinton and Barack Obama apparently didn’t think so, and Clinton’s past Obama cabinet colleague, Perez, took up the torch in a race that produced a level of grassroots involvement seldom if ever before seen in this contest.
Although the office is traditionally considered organizational rather than ideological and the 2017 candidates did run on those issues, the underlying political differences were obvious to all. This time around, the race was generally understood to involve little if any political disagreement on the issues. By way of explaining its support for new party chair Martin, Our Revolution characterized runner-up Wikler, as “an establishment candidate backed by Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer, and bankrolled by the billionaire class.” We understand that election campaigns are about sharpening the perception of differences between the candidates, but still this seems a rather thin, flimsy basis for hailing the vote as an anti-establishment triumph, given that Martin has publicly stated that he doesn’t want the party to take money from "those bad billionaires" only from "good billionaires;”and one of the two billionaires who gave a quarter million dollars to Wikler’s campaign was George Soros—probably the DNC’s model “good billionaire.” Besides Musk/Bezos/Zuckerberg probably aren’t thinking of donating anyhow. Oh, and Chuck Schumer actually supported Ellison eight years ago.
Actually, “we” did have a horse in the race—2020 Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir. Shakir, who has been running a nonprofit news organization called More Perfect Union, dedicated to “building power for the working class,” argued that Democrats needed a pitch for building a pro-worker economy to go with their criticism of U.S. President Donald Trump’s policy proposals. His viewpoint presented a serious alternative to that of Martin, who told a candidates forum that “we’ve got the right message... What we need to do is connect it back with the voters,”—seemingly a tough position to maintain following an election in which NBC’s 20-state exit polling showed the majority of voters with annual household incomes under $100,000 voting Republican, while the majority of those from over-$100,000 households voted Democrat. But even though Shakir was a DNC member and thereby able to get the 40 signatures of committee members needed to run, he entered the race far too late to be taken for a serious contender and ultimately received but two votes.
Mind you, none of this critique comes as a criticism of the work of the two state party chairs who were the principal contenders. Martin touts the fact that Democrats have won every statewide election in Minnesota in the 14 years that he has chaired the party, and anyone who understands the effort that goes into political campaign work can only admire that achievement. Nor is Our Revolution to be criticized for taking the time to discern what they thought would be the best possible option in a not terribly exciting race that was nevertheless of some importance.
At the same time it’s hard not to regret the diminished DNC presence of the “we” that Our Revolution spoke of, after “we” legitimately contended for power in the last contested election. Certainly this lack of interest was in no small part a consequence of the extraordinary circumstances that produced a presidential nominee who had not gone before the voters in a single primary—for the first time since Hubert Humphrey in 1968.
More importantly, it raises a serious question for those of us who believe that the structure and history of the American political system require the left’s engagement in the Democratic Party—uncomfortable and unpleasant as that may be at times. As the social scientists like to say, politics abhors a vacuum, and absent a national Democratic Party presence for the perspective that motivated the Sanders campaigns, people seeking action on the big questions on the big stage may start to look elsewhere. And elsewhere always looms the possibility of the cul-de-sac of yet of another third party candidacy that holds interesting conventions and debates, but ultimately receives only a small share of the vote, but a large share of the blame for the election of a Republican president.
At the moment there is no one obviously positioned to take up the Sanders’ mantle in the 2028 presidential campaign. But we may have to make it our business to find one.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular