Now in its fourth edition, From Consent to Coercion: The Continuing Assault on Labour remains an invaluable tool for understanding how the state and capital manage the subordination of labour. The new edition contains timely material that wrestles with the pressing issues of precarity and polarization and the dire need to rebuild and renew socialist politics. The following is excerpted from the book.

The real challenges for the left today are not about big names and bold ideas. They’re about identity and mobilization. We’ve been led to believe that elections are about individual voters examining parties and their policies like consumers looking for the best deal while parties are policy entrepreneurs just trying to meet consumer demands. But research on voters and party behaviour doesn’t support such a view.

For Doug Ford’s Conservatives, democracy is but one more apparently inefficient entanglement getting in the way of business. The 2019 budget makes clear the alignment of the Ford regime with the authoritarian right-wing populism gaining traction around the world as it moves to extend the era of “permanent austerity,” which has been a hallmark since the 2008 recession.

The old Communist and social-democratic projects have run their course. The consequence for socialists is a certain opening to structural and ideological creativity emerging in the space vacated by the traditional Left.