By Dena Freeman and Heikki Patomäki
The Global Left in a Multipolar World is a new open access book which explores how a transformative global left politics might be advanced in the world-political context of the 2020s, 2030s, and beyond. The book argues that the era of the purely national left is over and examines various possibilities to replace it. Among the book’s early reviewers, Walden Bello highlights the “deadly synergy” of many ongoing crises – from ecology to geopolitics – and concurs with the calls for “a spirited and militant mass movement across borders”. Thomas Piketty, in turn, argues that “the rising global right needs to be confronted with a powerful and imaginative global left. This book is a key step in that direction.”
Critical realists may recall that Roy Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism contained similar aspirations, even if expressed only in terms of abstract philosophy and political theory. Bhaskar’s books Dialectic and Plato Etc. made a serious effort to develop the philosophical and social-theoretical foundations of left-globalist politics. Bhaskar described the post-Cold War world of the 1990s, in which political power was attempted to be organised into a “new world order” (he also wrote about “a new world disorder”), maintained through military sanctions and surveillance. Economic power was based on the rapidly changing structures of the global capitalist economy, consumerism, and post-Fordist modes of production. Discursive power was increasingly replaced by a harmonised, ideologically driven transmission of news. Culture was dominated by the coexistence of Disneyfication and McDonaldization alongside poverty and waste.
Bhaskar’s response was expressed in unambiguously globalist albeit abstract terms, for example:
[T]he dialectic here calls for the retotalization of the periphery in the mutual recognitions of identities-in-difference and unity-in-diversity, mediated therefore by mutual recognition of differential (personal, social, local, etc.) identities and involving a degree of recentrification (psychic, social, local and global) in a transformed transformative praxis for the retotalization of the human race.
Nonetheless he worried that “we still lack plausible models of what a socialist economy, democracy or world-order might look like”.
The Global Left in a Multipolar World involves twelve attempts to answer that question and to outline concretely what “truly humane human global society” or “a naturalistically grounded social humanity in a transspecific pluralistic global order” could look like (Bhaskar’s expressions). Many of the chapters also consider the feasibility of alternatives and develop ideas about possible transformed forms of transformative action and agency.
The starting point of the authors of The Global Left in a Multipolar World is the world of the 2020s, which has both similarities and differences to the world of the 1990s that Bhaskar wrote about. Neoliberal globalisation has given way to economic nationalism and rising geopolitical tensions between North and South, East and West, capital has become ever more concentrated in the hands of billionaires and oligarchs, the global-nationalist right has risen, global ecological problems have deepened, interdependence has been increasingly weaponised, and new wars have erupted. In this context, how might a left politics be revived and developed?
The book emphasises that previous models of left politics are no longer adequate. As Freeman writes in the introduction:
While the twentieth-century national left focussed on a fairly linear struggle between labour and capital within the confines of the nation state, the emerging twenty-first-century global left must focus on a much more complex and multidimensional struggle, articulated at various scales, and combining struggles regarding the critical four elements of contemporary left thought and practice – namely, class, imperialism, ecology and democracy.
Within this broad framework there can be many possible kinds of global lefts. The authors, leading left scholars from different disciplines and from different parts of the world, suggest a variety of innovative directions.
Anthropologist Don Kalb argues for a global left that is globalist and socialist, calling for a revolutionary New International which should strive to achieve full democratic control over private capital accumulation, underwrite new labour-property regimes, dismantle the liberal international order, and engage in global and local level public planning and the provision of public goods, in order to achieve human and planetary reproduction and survival which he believes is impossible within capitalism.
The chapters by political scientists Heikki Patomäki and Stefan Pedersen both argue for a global left that is globalist and social democratic. Placing the climate and ecological crisis squarely at the centre of analysis, Pedersen combines insights from Earth System Science with post-national political analysis, to offer a compelling vision of a multi-scalar democratic ‘Planetary Socialism’. Patomäki focusses on the complex process of the democratisation of transnational and global social relations necessary to bring about true global representation and to push for change. He argues that the global left should organise as a political agent in the form of a world political party based on participatory and representative democracy, pluralism and cosmopolitan principles. Ultimately, both authors envisage a global layer of institutions with state-like functions and powers for eco-social-democratic purposes such as to enable long-term planning and planetwide cooperation to ensure both justice and survival for humanity on our fragile planet.
International Relations scholar Zhiguang Yin takes a more internationalist or sovereigntist approach to the global left. He argues that China’s modernisation should be understood as part of a long, worldwide project of transforming the unequal structure of the modern world system, an aspiration which has been central to both the international socialist movements and the national liberation movements of the global South. He suggests that the countries of the global South, unified in aim and vision although heterogeneous in history, culture and identity, can work together as a type of global left in order to create a more balanced international order based on traditional left values of equality, collectivity and justice. Patrick Bond criticises this idea and questions whether BRICS represents progressive and anti-imperialist leftist values or rather extractivism and subimperialism. Instead of multipolarity, he calls for ‘non-polar’ world politics.
Brazilian sociologist Sabrina Fernandes also takes a more sovereigntist approach but argues for a radical re-conceptualisation of ‘sovereignty’ which moves away from states and instead foregrounds peoples, citizens and nature. She suggests that this new conceptualisation can inform a new anti-imperialist and non-capitalist type of thinking, based on de-growth and eco-socialist frameworks, which will prioritise global immunity to catastrophe over profits or comparative advantage, and which will inspire communities and social movements in multiple geographical spaces and scales to mobilise in practices of ‘eco-territorial internationalism’ which will seek to enhance the ecologically sovereign interests of different peoples in different places at the same time.
These and other chapters inject new energy into left thinking and begin to show how the twenty first century left can move from a politics of resistance towards a politics of alternatives. The Global Left in a Multipolar World aims to start a new conversation rather than to offer a ready-made blueprint for either global left organisation or a left-globalist future. In our troubled times such a conversation is phenomenally important. Hopefully this book will inspire left scholars across all disciplines to move away from despair and to join the conversation.
The Global Left in a Multipolar World. Towards a Planetary Politics of Justice and Survival. Ed. Dena Freeman, Routledge, May 2026, open access: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003466239/global-left-multipolar-world-dena-freeman.