This is an attempt to locate the idea of socialism and the socialist and working-class movements in history. This will here be done by relating the trajectory of socialism to capitalism, as a rival, and by highlighting the main social forces carrying the idea of socialism in the 20th century. These forces were two grand social dialectics, that of industrial capitalism and its generating working-class growth and strength; and, little studied, the dialectic of capitalist colonialism which needed and created a subordinated colonial intelligentsia, which came to organize and lead anti-colonial movements to independence, very often under a banner of socialism. Both dialectics have now largely expired. The victories of socialism were nowhere constructions of fully postcapitalist societies but vehicles of precapitalist development. Here achivements were considerable, as were socialist reforms within capitalist societies. However, catching up with its older and richer brother caitalism turned out an ever elusive goal of socialism, and the socialist horizon faded. A new postcapitalist vision is emerging with the climate crisis.

The literature on political participation has consistently found that protest positively and significantly correlates with voting. However, Chile can be considered a deviant case to this pattern. During the last decade, Chileans who participated in street demonstrations were unlikely to participate in elections. What explains this anomaly? We argue that this rupture between participation in protest and in elections results from an effective distancing between social-movement organisations (SMOs) and institutional politics. However, this distancing of SMOs from party politics has not been homogeneous. To examine this heterogeneity, we conduct a comparative design of two cases: the labour and student movements. Based on a mixed-methods study that combines interviews with movement leaders and surveys of protest participants in marches, we seek to highlight the mediating role of SMOs in the promotion of different forms of political participation.

Michael Wilkinson’s Authoritarian Liberalism puts forward a challenging and controversial claim: the history of European integration and the trajectory of the constitutional orders of the founding Member States have always been driven by authoritarian liberalism. This comment focuses on a certain slack, in Wilkinson’s analysis, between the material constitution of European states and authoritarian liberalism as a form of government. More specifically, the comment highlights the need to retrieve a more conflictual relation between, on one hand, the material constitution of the welfare state and its industrial involvement, and on the other hand, the constitutional forms adopted by authoritarian liberalism.

Scholars interested in labour in Latin America have traditionally paid little attention to trade unions’ legal mobilisation. However, the increasing number of legal complaints filed by workers with labour ministries and/or the courts in countries like Argentina, Brazil and Chile calls for a more serious debate on the role that trade unions play in this process. This article focuses on the Chilean case. Drawing on various sources, it shows that Chilean unions have turned legal complaints into a weapon to gain more rights and curb employers’ power. This process has involved the strongest and most combative unions, and is due to two historical conditions: (1) the obstacles placed in the way of successful resort to more disruptive tactics; (2) the increase in institutional opportunities to report infringements of the law. Overall, the article challenges the current image of the Chilean unions by foregrounding their agency and their achievements over the last decade.