Dogmatic Marxism reduces the contemporary capitalist crisis to an economic one. Reducing this crisis simply to economic factors is not very different from the ideological discourses emanating from mainstream economic commentators and analysts. This volume does not reject the importance of economic mechanisms and processes in contributing to the crisis of capitalism, but argues that it is not sufficient to merely hold up declining profit rates, output levels, or the presence of financialised practices to explain it. This volume breaks new ground in understanding the complexity, totality and spatial spread of the contemporary capitalist crisis. Many of its features are unprecedented, such as the climate crisis and peak oil. For many activists as well as movements and progressive scholars, this historical specificity is crucial for a compelling analysis. The contributors to this volume rise to this challenge to show what is new and distinctive in contemporary capitalism's crises and how these crises are understood among global left forces.

Beyond thinking about capitalism's crises, a number of chapters in the volume highlight the emergence of new forms of resistance, which challenge neoliberal capitalism with a new politics and new institutional political forms. This takes us beyond twentieth-century vanguardist politics. Social movements that have emerged over the past few decades are driving struggles from below in relationships with left think tanks, parties, alliances and trade unions. The chapters in this volume highlight a post-vanguardist politics, practice and imagination in the making among the new global Left and as part of the new cycle of resistance. At the same time, some of the cases in the volume also demonstrate that where the mass democratic impulse from below is curtailed by left parties, like Brazil's Workers’ Party, contestation through the streets and mass symbolic actions, including voting for the opposition to challenge technocratic class pacting at the top, are all possibilities. In places such as India, where the Left has demonstrated a dogmatic and formulaic vanguardist politics in its approach to national politics, this has ended in disaster. The unwillingness to rally and unite an array of progressive social forces from below has opened the way for right-wing fundamentalist forces to capture mass discontent while continuing neoliberalisation, despite its limits in economic terms and its negative social impacts.