ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies three historical cycles of the left – a long 200-year global cycle of labour leading up to 1989, and then two much shorter cycles of a more culturally focused left, the first centred mainly in the global South in the World Social Forum and alter-globalisation movement from 1995 to 2010, and the second centred mainly in the global North in the form of the Occupy Wall Street movement around 2011–2016. There is now a need for a fourth cycle which must be both global and materialist, with a clear focus on capital and its contradictions in the world system. We need a New International which should be anti-capitalist and communist, revolutionary rather than reformist and multi-scalar from the local to the global. Its goal should be the fundamentally universalist goal of the Left, which is equal freedom for all. Its mission should focus on achieving full democratic control over private capital accumulation, underwriting new labour-property regimes, engaging in public planning and the provision of public goods, dismantling the liberal international order and working out other radical tools for human and planetary reproduction and survival that can never be realised under the capitalist law of value.
