Over the last three decades, the ideas of Karl Polanyi have moved from the margins of social science discourse to the center. Scholars as diverse as Sheri Berman, Peter Evans, Nancy Fraser, John Ruggie, and Wolfgang Streeck have drawn heavily on the insights of this Hungarian refugee intellectual. But since the late 1990s, there has been a second important development; Polanyian ideas—admittedly often without acknowledgment—have increasingly entered the theory and practice of left movements and parties in different parts of the world.
This has happened in parallel with the declining mobilizing power of Marxist ideas within the global Left. While there have been imaginative recent efforts to reinvent the Marxist tradition, this project confronts the formidable problem of recasting a theory from the middle of the nineteenth century to fit the very different circumstances of the twenty-first century. Polanyi, in contrast, attempted to reconstruct socialist politics on a non-Marxist foundation just over 70 years ago in his 1944 book, The Great Transformation . Polanyi’s intellectual development involved a sustained engagement with Marxism, but he became deeply critical both of Marxism’s economic determinism and of the undemocratic nature of Soviet socialism. His version of socialism centered not on the transformation of property relations but on the extension of democratic control over the economy. In recent years, his radical and democratic-socialist vision has converged with the thinking of a new generation of left militants trying to challenge global neoliberalism. (One of the first studies to recognize this convergence was Marcos Ancelovici, “Organizing Against Globalization: The Case of ATTAC in France,” Politics & Society 30 [September 2002]: 427–63.)
Richard Sandbrook’s remarkable book is a sustained effort to map out this convergence. Using a Polanyian theoretical framework, Sandbrook carries out a richly nuanced analysis of three distinct currents within recent left politics in the Global South. To be sure, most of his empirical focus is on the “pink tide” in Latin America that brought the Left to power in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Venezuela. However, he also draws on the experience of left-wing governments in the state of Kerala in India and in Mauritius and South Africa. But the choice of cases is effective because the author’s goal is to explain the dilemmas of left strategy so that readers will be able to apply his lessons to cases that he has not examined.
Sandbrook sets the stage with a powerful chapter that lays out the failures of neoliberalism in the Global South. By demonstrating its inability to produce sustained growth and its links to rising inequality and environmental destruction, he shows why many voters have turned toward political parties that promise an alternative. He then categorizes these alternative left political programs into three distinct types—Left populism, radical social democracy, and moderate social democracy. Most of the book is devoted to analyzing the strengths and pitfalls of each of these strategies.
The author insists that Left populism is distinct from earlier forms of populism in its unambivalent embrace of the Left and its commitment to radical or popular democracy. But drawing on the experiences of both Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Michael Manley in Jamaica in the 1970s, he argues that while populist policies can lead to significant redistribution, they have little ability to expand economic output since businesses are reluctant to invest when they have been politically marginalized. Moreover, because Left populism tends to emerge where political parties are weak, such regimes are usually dependent on the charismatic appeal of a leader. The result is that despite their embrace of democratic rhetoric, such regimes tend to reproduce earlier patterns of clientilistic relations between government and the people.
Sandbrook also is skeptical of the strategy of radical social democracy that he associates with Salvador Allende in Chile and a series of left-wing governments in Kerala. He does acknowledge the impressive achievements in Kerala of a government led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in redistributing income and reducing inequality, but that administration also proved unable to spur investment and economic growth. Sandbrook’s view is that given the current global economic context, the possibilities that a government pursuing this strategy will be successful both electorally and economically are slim indeed.
The author’s sympathy and hope lie with the strategy of moderate social democracy that he associates with Chile under Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet and with Brazil under the Workers’ Party. He also includes here the cases of Mauritius and Costa Rica, although these are discussed in less detail. His model of moderate social democracy involves four main elements. First, these countries pursue relatively orthodox economic policies that avoid antagonizing business at home or abroad. Second, within this constraint, they pursue redistribution by expanding access to education, health care, and income support programs. Third, they work to deepen democracy by creating new channels through which citizens, particularly at the local level, can influence decisions over budget priorities. Finally, they use public agencies to grow the economy by facilitating innovation and the upgrading of existing industries.
Sandbrook recognizes that there are dangers in this kind of incrementalist strategy. Too much adherence to financial orthodoxy can block the other initiatives, and so the regime ends up providing no real alternative to neoliberalism. He also understands that external pressures, such as the abrupt end to the global commodity boom, can put economies such as Brazil and Chile under intense pressure that can jeopardize this entire political strategy. But one of his central points is that if these moderate social democratic societies can stay on course, they can help to shift the rules of the global economy in a way that would open up more space for this social-democratic path.
The idea is that social-democratic countries, working in coordination with global social movements, have the potential to win reforms in global institutions and global regimes. If, for example, there were a significant increase in the availability of development finance through the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) Bank, the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the Global Green Fund, more countries could copy Brazil’s use of the Brazilian National Development Bank as a driver for both clean energy and industrial development. And this, in turn, would open up the possibility of a more radical restructuring of globalization that would further expand opportunities for patterns of development that are democratic, inclusive, and sustainable.
Given the realities of global terrorism, financial meltdowns, failed states, and climate change, it is child’s play for social scientists to construct dystopian narratives about the future of the planet. The great achievement of Reinventing the Left in the Global South is that Sandbrook constructs a narrative of a positive future that is not clouded by utopian thinking and that is grounded in the actual experience of specific social movements and political parties in the Global South. This is an achievement that deserves a broad audience.
