Horizons for a New Left
The Next New Left: A History of the Future

http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/4503
Date Written:  2015-09-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2015
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX21287

Book review of Alan Sears' The Next New Left: A History of the Future.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Sears begins with a fundamental question asked in articles, meetings and casual discussions amongst radicals in recent years: Why hasn't more come from this time of austerity and aggressive neo-liberalism - more politics, more organization, more groups in motion, more fightback?

"This," as Sears states on the book's first page, "should be a heady time for anti-capitalist organizing….Yet, at the present time people are not flocking in large numbers towards radical activism."

Key to Sears' analysis is the concept of "infrastructure of dissent," which he defines as "the means through which activists develop political communities capable of learning, communicating and mobilizing together."

Essentially, such an infrastructure is the ground upon which left activism stands, consisting of informal community, workplace, and leisure spaces, as well as more formal and organizational ones. What might be perceived as spontaneous political action arises from such spaces.