Editors’ note: This is the fourth and final part of “The Emerging Left in the ‘Emerging’ World,” by Triple Crisis founding contributor Jayati Ghosh, originally delivered in 2012 as part of the Ralph Miliband Lecture Series at the London School of Economics. Find the first three parts of the lecture here, here, and here. In this week’s post, Ghosh discusses two areas of “strong continuity” between the traditional left and the emerging left: “the attitude toward the significance of the nation state and the attitude toward imperialism.”
None of these emerging left positions [the “seven common threads”] is completely new. There are many strands of earlier leftist thought that contain some of these features. The concern with women’s rights and the recognition of other forms of oppression, for example, can be found in the writings of Marx and Engels, as well as other socialist thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Still, the features outlined above do represent significant departures from the traditional left paradigm.
Meanwhile, there are two crucial features of strong continuity between the traditional and the emerging left: the attitude towards the significance of the nation state and the attitude towards imperialism.