The Left Alternative by Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Verso, £7.99
On November 9 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. With astonishing speed this dramatic event was used by the corporate elite and their hired hands in the political mainstream to announce the global triumph of political and economic neo-liberalism. This theme was fast developed by Francis Fukuyama in his controversial book The End of History and The Last Man in 1992 which absurdly declared “what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such… That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.
Whilst there was a degree of paralysis on the left it certainly wasn’t bankrupt of a vision. Almost before Fukuyama’s book hit the shops there came the Zapatista insurrection in Mexico which completely rejected this economic philosophy that worships the free market and serves only the super-rich.
Brazilian social theorist, politician, and Harvard law professor Roberto Unger engages this debate in The Left Alternative and asks the vital question of our time: where do we go from here? Confronting the major debates in the world today – about national economies and alternative political road maps – Unger argues that there is a set of national and global alternatives that we can begin to develop with the tools at hand: opportunities available to us only if we learn to recognise them. In arguing this line Unger postulates the postmodernist view that the radical grand projects have been defeated and have produced an awareness that everyone and every culture is different and so consigns meta-analyses such as socialism to the dustbin. By implication he seems to believe none of the challenges we face today can be solved by organised collective action.
In this analysis Unger quite remarkably ignores the social and political developments in his own region, Latin America. Far from the end of the Cold War leading to a prolonged period of US hegemony and economic control in Latin America, the left has re-emerged as a serious political actor, socialist political forces are in government right across the region and radical social movements with strength and power unparalleled in recent history continue to challenge neo-liberalism from Mexico to Argentina. Whilst the resurgence has taken many political scientists and commentators by surprise, Unger loses credibility in not exploring what these exciting new developments mean, globally as well as nationally, especially since his stated ambition is to explore the future of the left.
He also fails to address another urgent question of our time: how we can fight back against the corporate capture of our political system. Democratically elected governments have, over the past 25 years, willingly and not so willingly surrendered control of the global economy to a new elite of super rich free-market oligarchs. This risk prone, anti-union, pro-privatisation economic model has led to the globalisation of poverty on a record scale and is characterised by the fact that the wealth of the top 500 earners equals that of the bottom 416 million.
Unger uses colourful language to sketch his thoughts but, all too often, is unsubstantive in his intellectual formulations. His approach to political action, which he calls “context-smashing”, undermines his ability to tackle the problems that plague the globe today such as income inequality, poverty and environmental degradation.
There is a need and demand for a text that sets out a clear democratic socialist vision for the 21st century. A tract that will unite and build the disparate voices of the left nationally and globally; which gives economic, philosophical and political clarity as well as hope. Unger’s ideas will be discussed in political think tanks and in polite society in much the way the philosophy of communitarianism fascinated a few in the mid 1990s. A broad manifesto for those fighting for a fairer world is required. Unfortunately this is not it.
Enrico Tortolano
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