Return of the Spectre
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Left and the various social movements associated with it have been caught in a cycle of helplessness. From the riots of the Anti-globalization movement to the Occupy movement, social ferment erupts onto the scene in the form of mass protests, only to be crushed by police power and then co-opted by hegemonic liberalism. This process is dialectically both a symptom and a cause of an ethos that reduces politics to a set of individual moral endeavors, rather than a collective project of liberation. Unable even to raise Lenin’s (in)famous query, “What is to be Done?”, a Left seemingly afraid of its own shadow has been stuck asking itself – “What do we want?”
