Rebuilding the Left

By Marta Harnecker
Zed Books
January 2007
Also read Ideas for the Struggle.

Marta Harnecker

What future is there for the left, faced with the challenges of the twenty-first century? Based on a lifetime's experience in politics, Marta Harnecker addresses the crisis facing the left today.

At its heart, this book is a critique of social democratic realpolitik. Harnecker reminds us that, contrary to today's orthodoxy, politics is not the art of the possible but the art of making the impossible possible by building a social and political force capable of changing reality.

She believes that the social experiments being carried out in Latin America today hold out hope that an alternative to capitalism is possible; they are essentially socialist, democratic projects in which the people are the driving force. To create a real alternative to capitalism, though, the left must change.

Rebuilding the Left offers real hope to those who still believe that we can create a different world.

Read the full book below.

Open publication - Free publishing - More socialism

"For Harnecker, politics is the art of discovering the potential in the present in order to make possible tomorrow what appears impossible today. In this book she does just this for Latin America and in particular Venezuela. But first she ditches the dogmas of the past with a disarming frankness. The result is an original and valuable contribution to rethinking left politics."

-Hilary Wainwright author of Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy and co-editor of Red Pepper.