ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the meaning and international pattern of the left-right distinction and gives an overview of the global left in an oecumenical sense, as a web of egalitarian networks. It analyses its nodes of governments, parties and movements and their contents in terms of the major ideological currents of the left. It deals with its changes since the twentieth century and with its twenty-first-century prospects in the global context of politics, economics and culture. It identifies two main issues central to an emergent global left, namely the climate crisis-inequality nexus and the re-emergence of geopolitics in the form of the US-China trade war. With regard to the former, there is an evident new set of intellectual currents that might be termed a ‘planetary enlightenment’, which bring together ecological liveability and human inequality alongside scientifically grounded critiques of the existing world order to inspire left activism for profound systemic change. As the first enlightenment prepared the ground for the French and the American revolutions by undermining the authority and the legitimacy of state, church and aristocracy, the new planetary enlightenment may be beginning to prepare the ground for a wider and more complex process of global change.
