The Global Left in a Multipolar World: Towards a Planetary Politics of Justice and Survival explores how a transformative global left politics might be advanced in the context of the emerging multipolar world order and the urgent climate crisis. The book argues that the era of the purely national left is over. Instead, the twenty first century needs a new global left that will address the critical four elements of class, imperialism, ecology and democracy in a unified way, and that will combine ideas and interventions at a multiplicity of scales from the local to the global. Chapters written by leading left scholars from the global North and the global South explore different aspects of contemporary left thought and practice and articulate different visions of potential global lefts. They offer radical and inspiring suggestions for global left programs that can tackle both the injustices of neoliberal globalisation as well as the new threats from an advancing global right, continued neo-imperialism and the increasingly critical climate-ecological planetary crisis. Taken together, they offer a compelling vision of a global left that seeks justice – for labour, for the global South and for oppressed peoples everywhere – and survival – for everyone on our warming planet – based in and secured by a truly democratic planetary politics. The Global Left in a Multipolar World injects new energy into left thinking and shows how the left can move from a politics of resistance towards a politics of alternatives. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of global politics, international relations and sociology and to left-wing activists seeking a better world.
The Global Left in a Multipolar World: Towards a Planetary Politics of Justice and Survival explores how a transformative global left politics might be advanced in the context of the emerging multipolar world order and the urgent climate crisis.
Chapter
1. Introduction: Global Lefts and Global Rights in Global
Politics
Chapter
2. The Twenty First Century Global Left: Forces,
Organisation, Challenges and Prospects Part 1 Class
Chapter
3. Workers of
the World Unite: Then and Now
Chapter
4. Workers Struggles Across the Globe
Chapter
5. Three Cycles of the Global Left and a Call for a New International
Part 2 Imperialism
Chapter
6. States and Left Internationalism: Challenges
and Opportunities for Collective Action from the Global South
Chapter
7.
China's Role in the Continuation of the Global Left's Ideals in Twenty First
Century
Chapter
8. BRICS and Global Left Debates: Uni-Polar, Multi-Polar or
Non-Polar Politics? Part 3 Ecology
Chapter
9. Faulty State Sovereignty in
the Polycrisis: Arguments for Considering Ecological Sovereignty in Left
Internationalism
Chapter
10. Planetary Socialism: A Left for the Earth Part 4
Democracy
Chapter
11. The Anarchist Turn in Contemporary Social Movements
and What it Means for the Global Left
Chapter
12. On the Future of the Left:
The Role of World Political Parties
Dena Freeman is Distinguished Professor of Global Studies at Shanghai University, China. Prior to moving to China, she taught in the Anthropology departments of the London School of Economics, University College London and Cambridge University. She is the author or editor of several books, including most recently Global Democracy: The Key to Global Justice (2022) and Can Globalization Succeed? (2020).
