The Left’s Missing Strategic Horizon

This editorial by Raúl Zibechi appeared in the July 11, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier leftist daily newspaper.

Every so often, portions of the left get excited about the latest media hype promising happy times, only to have that fervor fade without consequence, as they rarely look back to assess the results. These days, the names of ostensible socialist Zohran Mamdani, as a possible mayor of New York; and Jeanette Jara, as a presidential candidate for the “progressive” Unity for Chile block, are apparently cause for rejoicing and hope. 

For some analysts and the left-wing outlet Sin Permiso, Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primaries has caused a “political earthquake” so profound that, according to the analyst, “the ramifications of this reversal will be felt for years, throughout the United States and the developed world.” Because he is apparently a socialist, Muslim, and ostensibly pro-Palestinian, the left is deluding itself that his arrival at the mayor’s office in this emblematic city will change things, despite all evidence to the contrary.

For the leftist weekly El Siglo, Chilean communist Jara embodies “the real possibility of the people governing with their voice, their demands, and their dignity at the forefront.” For progressive media outlets, such as Argentina’s Página/12 , the mere fact that Jara does not come from the elite embodies “the hope for a better life.“

The left is increasingly resembling the mainstream media it criticizes so much. Huge enthusiasm in massive headlines achieves an immediate, yet short-lived effect. However, once that effect wears off, they don’t ask themselves what happened to those hopes that managed to excite their followers. I think it’s necessary to recall the outbursts of passion when Podemos emerged in Spain and when SYRIZA came to power in Greece. 

They are merely fireworks intended to keep afloat a rickety left wing, which has lost all strategic depth, incapable of going beyond fleeting tactical maneuvers that change nothing and are quickly forgotten.

It strikes me as odd that many Chileans are falling into this trap once again. They were fooled by figures like student leader Camila Vallejo, who in 2011 promised to change the country and whom the opportunistic British outlet The Guardian compared to Subcomandante Marcos. I’m even more surprised that collective memory can’t even go back to 2019, when a Constituent Assembly (convened by the right and solely by a leftist figure, current President Gabriel Boric) led a large part of the social movement to dissolve its regional assemblies and turn out for the polls.

I want to draw a contrast. Last weekend, three Brazilian comrades close to the Teia dos Povos (People’s Network) toured half a dozen retakes (land reclamations) of the Guarani Kaiowá people in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, near the border with Paraguay. In the exchanges we had, they described the power of these spaces, one of which occupies 600 hectares, the diversity of crops, and the power of the reterritorialized communities. 

One of the settlements is contesting 11,000 hectares of land with agribusiness, although “they are in a very vulnerable situation, with nightly attacks by gunmen from the landowners with whom they dispute their ancestral territory, who drive by in 4×4 trucks and fire at the community. They managed to hold on intermittently during 47 years of recovery,” says Silvia Adoue. 

Regarding that space, Pakurity, our friend Esteban del Cerro writes in Quilombo Invisível that since the recapture of the land in 1986, “there have been decades of permanence and circulation in Pakurity through other means: temporary jobs on the farm, use of the nearby forest for the extraction of medicinal plants, herbs and roots, fruits, hunting and fishing; movement of relatives in the region; memory of the dead and ancestors.”

The text concludes: “From north to south of the continent, Indigenous peoples echo the Zapatista cry for the commons and non-ownership, and the retaken lands continue to make clear that the insurgent path is the path to victory. The insurgency also shows that the recovery of lands gives us hope, even in the midst of the trenches, for a new way of relating to living things.” Land transformed into territory opens up horizons for life.

Land recoveries across the continent, supported by collective actors in rural and urban areas, possess the strategic depth that the left lost by settling into the comfort zone of the state and institutions. It is no longer surprising that those who celebrate minimal electoral “victories” are turning their backs on struggles that are rebuilding the popular movements, working for collective survival during the systemic storm that is battering us.