Miguel Afonso Caetano"Meagan Day: What accounts for the Left’s relative failure to replicate this?
Lea Ypi: The abandonment of the critique of capitalism as a class project. You have the environmentalist left, the feminist left, the anti-racist left, and there’s been a critique of universalism that has made it difficult to connect these identity-based struggles into one vision. Paradoxically, the Left has inherited the same culturalist approach that the Right takes to understanding conflict — saying it’s about racism or gender without fitting those critiques into a critique of the broader mode of production.
What the Left really lacks is an alternative cosmopolitanism. When I was a student in the late ’90s and early 2000s in Italy, that was the moment of the alter-globalization movement. You had the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, the emerging idea of an alternative globalization. But that movement was suffocated by the hegemony of neoliberalism, which insisted that you didn’t need another politics, you just needed the right policy. All you had to do was cater to the Third Way: policy fixes, a little redistribution, compromise with economic elites.
Those of us who were on the streets were seen as ridiculous romantics who didn’t understand that the Cold War was over and there was no alternative. That’s what we lost, and that’s what we’re struggling to recover.
Meagan Day: The Left has been suspicious of the nation-state for good reason. But in recent history, it’s largely been within this context that the weak have been able to express their power. Is there anything redeeming about the nation-state?
Lea Ypi: Pragmatically, yes, because the nation-state is the site of coercive power. If you want to take and exercise power, you need to know where it resides. Otherwise, the social struggle just remains everywhere and nowhere."
https://jacobin.com/2026/04/left-cosmopolitanism-politics-internationalism-ypi
#PoliticalTheory #Cosmopolitanism #Internationalism #Nationalism #Left #Politics
The Left Needs an Alternative Cosmopolitanism
While many critics view rising global chaos strictly in geopolitical terms, political philosopher Lea Ypi argues that it’s really ideological — the result of an increasingly coordinated global right. To compete, the Left must internationalize in equal measure.
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