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  3. Building Progressive Alternatives

This series seeks to provide a space for, and to encourage the production of, high quality academic work by economists, political economists and other social scientists united in a common mission: to use their scholarship to create a coherent, credible and progressive economic growth strategy which, when accompanied by an associated set of wider public policies, can inspire and underpin the revival of a successful centre-left politics in advanced capitalist societies. The fact that such a series can and needs to be proposed speaks to two important absences in and around the policy-making processes of democratic states. Together they weaken left-wing political forces in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent recession. The first is the current absence of a fully thought through, clearly articulated and plausible set of drivers for sustainable economic growth that might operate in a non-predatory manner. The second is the dominance, within mainstream academia, of more conservative, predominantly neoliberal paradigms of economic and social thought and the under-representation of alternative theoretical perspectives. This series aims to address these current imbalances. In both the academy and the public square, the urgent need for a revitalized and self-confident alternative to economic austerity is now all too evident - a need that will be met only as and when a new set of academics, activists and policy-makers bring their collective skills to the design of a progressive economic theory and a set of progressive economic policies that tackle head-on the major issues of the day.

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7 results in Building Progressive Alternatives

Divided They Fell
  • Crisis and the Collapse of Europe's Centre-Left
  • Sean McDaniel
  • Published by:
    Agenda Publishing
    Published online:
    23 January 2024
    Print publication:
    23 February 2023
  • Why has Europe's centre-left failed to respond to the crisis of neoliberalism in Europe? Rather than opening up a moment in political time for the centre-left to puncture the dominance of neoliberalism, the multitude of crises in Europe since 2008 have consolidated its difficulties and contributed to the rise of radical and populist alternatives.

    Divided They Fell examines the failures of mainstream politics, and in particular the inability of the centre-left to respond to the global financial crisis more effectively. By exploring the cases of the UK Labour Party and France's Parti Socialiste, the book investigates the role of, and interplay between, institutional intra-party dynamics, the parties' ideational landscapes and the wider political economy in shaping their responses to the crisis.

    Important reputational, ideational and strategic path dependencies in both parties, it is shown, constrained the flow of fresh ideas and entrenched their internal organizational divisions, leaving them unable to offer an effective post-neoliberal economic alternative. Ultimately, this fractured the parties and sparked a crisis of centre-left identity that opened the door to emergent alternative parties and movements in both cases.

    Divided They Fell helps to diagnose what has gone wrong for the centre-left in Europe and forces us to consider whether such parties are, in the context of new and emerging crises, still fit for purpose.

Pursuing the Knowledge Economy
  • A Sympathetic History of High-Skill, High-Wage Hubris
  • Nick O'Donovan
  • Published by:
    Agenda Publishing
    Published online:
    20 January 2024
    Print publication:
    26 May 2022
  • In the 1990s, the 'knowledge economy' was hailed by policy-makers in developed democracies as an antidote to the anxieties arising from the era of market liberalization - an era characterized by the decline of skilled blue-collar work, increasing levels of social exclusion and widening regional inequality. The shift to knowledge-driven growth appeared to offer policymakers a way of harnessing technological progress and global economic integration for progressive purposes, and justifying progressive policies in terms of the economic benefits that they would produce.

    Nick O'Donovan tells the story of how the techno-optimism once associated with the rise of the knowledge economy came to be supplanted by widespread anxiety about technological progress, and how the political consensus that formed around a knowledge-driven growth agenda has unravelled, paving the way for the electoral upheavals experienced by many developed democracies in recent years. By examining the rhetoric and reality of knowledge-driven growth over the last three decades, the book highlights the flawed assumptions underpinning this policy agenda, showing how its economic shortcomings map on to patterns of political discontent evident today. It assesses whether there is scope for rebooting this policy agenda in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, or whether politicians will need to reach beyond it if they are to deliver inclusive prosperity and equitable growth in the future.

The European Social Question
  • Tackling Key Controversies
  • Amandine Crespy
  • Published by:
    Agenda Publishing
    Published online:
    20 December 2023
    Print publication:
    13 January 2022
  • Over recent years it has become increasingly clear that the European Union is falling short of its promise to enhance social cohesion across the continent. Welfare state modernization has been at the centre of divisive debates over the redistribution of wealth and imbalances between a wealthy European core and its peripheries. Some see the policies and governance of the EU as part of the problem, others rather as the solution.

    This book examines the key issues facing the EU's social policy-making. Each chapter focuses on a single challenge and explores the arguments and considerations that coalesce around it. The book helps students and researchers alike to understand how the EU operates and shapes social policy on multiple levels, and to better assess the EU's role in supporting social cohesion.

Corbynism in Perspective
  • The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn
  • Edited by Andrew S. Roe-Crines
  • Published by:
    Agenda Publishing
    Published online:
    20 December 2023
    Print publication:
    22 July 2021
  • Jeremy Corbyn proved to be one of Labour's most popular and yet one of its most divisive leaders amongst the membership. From his surprise election in 2015, he was characterized as both hero and villain. A conviction politician, determined to do things his way, he was leader of the opposition during one of the most fraught and difficult periods in modern history. And yet, despite opposing a minority government, Corbyn made little headway in uniting his own party and translating the country's discontent into ballot success.

    In this collection of carefully researched essays, Corbyn's influence on and legacy for the Labour Party are assessed. Each chapter focuses on an aspect of his time in office, his approach, his political thought and policy formation in an attempt to posit what constitutes 'Corbynism'. Chapters assess his leadership style, his attitude towards antisemitism and women in the party, his controversial foreign policy positions, as well as his views on the European Union. The essays also engage with a range of wider debates about populism, identity politics and fandom.

Race and the Undeserving Poor
  • From Abolition to Brexit
  • Robbie Shilliam
  • Published by:
    Agenda Publishing
    Published online:
    09 August 2023
    Print publication:
    30 June 2018
  • Over recent years, tabloid readers have become familiar with the concept of the 'white working class', those thought to have been 'left behind' by globalization, including immigration. Such sentiments were weaponized by politicians on all sides to fuel the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Brexit campaign. And this racialized narrative has emerged repeatedly in mature democracies - in the political campaigns of Trump, Le Pen and others - and continues to gain traction in the guise of economic nationalism and populism. The need to understand the putative emergence of the white working class has become both intellectually significant and politically urgent.

    In Race and the Undeserving Poor, Robbie Shilliam does just this. He charts the development over the past 200 years of a shifting postcolonial settlement that has produced a racialized distinction between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor, the latest incarnation of which is a distinction between a deserving, neglected white working class and 'others' who are undeserving, not indigenous, and not white. Shilliam's analysis shows that the white working class are not an indigenous constituency, but a product of the struggles to consolidate and defend imperial order that have shaped British society since the abolition of slavery.

Flawed Capitalism
  • The Anglo-American Condition and its Resolution
  • David Coates
  • Published by:
    Agenda Publishing
    Published online:
    16 August 2023
    Print publication:
    30 April 2018
  • Drawing on over four decades of research and writing on the political economy of the UK and United States, David Coates offers a masterly account of the Anglo-American condition and the social and economic crisis besetting both countries.

    Charting the rise and fall of the social settlements that have shaped and defined the postwar years, Coates traces the history of the two economies through their New Deal and then their Reaganite periods - ones labelled differently in the UK, but similarly marked by the development of a Keynesian welfare state and then a Thatcherite neoliberal one.

    Coates exposes the failings and shortcomings of the Reagan/Thatcher years, showing how the underlying fragility of a settlement based on the weakening of organized labour and the extensive deregulation of business culminated in the financial crisis of 2008.

    The legacies of that crisis haunt us still - a squeezed middle class, further embedded poverty, deepened racial divisions, an adverse work-life balance for two-income families, and a growing crisis of housing and employment for the young. Flawed Capitalism deals with each in turn, and makes the case for the creation of a new transatlantic social settlement - a less flawed capitalism - one based on greater degrees of income equality and social justice.

    As members of the millennial generation come to their maturity on each side of the Atlantic, Flawed Capitalism offers the critical intellectual tools that they will need if they are ever to break decisively with the failed public policies of the past.

Reflections on the Future of the Left
  • David Coates
  • Published by:
    Agenda Publishing
    Published online:
    09 August 2023
    Print publication:
    30 September 2017
  • What is the future for progressive politics in advanced capitalism? With its political fortunes so low, how might the Left move forward?

    These essays from leading left intellectuals - Dean Baker, Fred Block, David Coates, Hilary Wainwright, Colin Crouch, Wolfgang Streeck, Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin and Matthew Watson - reflect on the scale and nature of the task that the Left now faces and consider the following questions: (1) What in modern capitalism has brought the Left to this impasse?; (2) What role has the Left played in its own failings?; (3) What lessons can be learnt for progressive politics going forward?; and (4) What are the immediate options and how can they best be pursued?

    The views and opinions expressed vary, but all offer searching insights into the task the Left now faces. All point to the intellectual and practical experience on which the Left now needs to draw as it deals with its contemporary challenges. These essays represent a major statement on the future for centre-left politics and offer a frank appraisal of the Left's current capacity to keep conservatism at bay and to strengthen radical politics again.