ABSTRACT

This chapter juxtaposes the three main historical and contemporary strands of Western leftist activism – reformist social democracy, revolutionary MarxismLeninism and radical autonomism and anarchism – in terms of their competing notions of power and global governance and yet, conversely, their coordinated struggle for a more just, egalitarian, democratic, peaceful and ecologically sustainable world. A number of points will be developed herein. First, the core themes of this book, namely globalization, power and activism, are complex. Facile or one-dimensional definitions are unhelpful in terms of both theory and practice. As sociologist Tomlinson (1999: 14) observed of globalization, ‘lose the complexity and you have lost the phenomenon’. The same goes for power and activism. Furthermore, it is important to note that although globalization processes have fragmentary or disintegrative effects, they are also driven by and reinforce unprecedented concentrations of economic, political, social and cultural power. This power is concentrated in global governance bodies ranging from informal, unelected and unaccountable to inter-governmental, partially democratic and thus considered somewhat legitimate. Most visible and contentious of these are transnational banks and corporations, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and the post-2007 economic crisis nodes of the Group of 20 (G20) leading industrial states and the ‘G2’ of the United States and China – the latter emerging as a key dyadic stumbling block to a strong climate treaty at the 15th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (COP15) negotiations in Copenhagen in December 2009.