ABSTRACT
If both communism and free-market capitalism are highly undesirable, this raises a difficult question for the democratic left to answer: Why was every alternative to communism and laissez-faire capitalism in decline as the twentieth century closed? If social democracy was a desirable alternative to both free-market capitalism and communism, why has its message weakened and its influence declined since the 1970s? If a libertarian socialist economy is superior to both capitalism and communism, why did no libertarian socialist economy materialize in the twentieth century, and why did libertarian socialists become all but invisible by midcentury? If the new left was an advance over the old left, why did the new left never achieve as much political success as the old left in its heyday, and why were the new social movements spawned by the new left weaker at century's end than during the 1970s and 1980s?
