To get a handle on the current position of the left, at a global level, it may be useful to start by comparing this century to the last. Epochs turn according to their own temporality, rather than following the Gregorian calendar; yet for those living them, the calendar can still provide a handy tool on which to mark historical ruptures and transitions. The 20th century was shaped and driven by two systemic dialectics, industrial capitalism and capitalist colonialism—‘dialectical’ in the sense that the development of each system served to strengthen its exploited part: here, the working classes and the colonized peoples. Dialectics is not progress by evolution, innovation and growth. It is change brought about through contradictions of the systemic dynamic, involving conflicts and the unintended consequences of the actions of systemic rulers, often at great cost; in this case including devastating wars and genocide. The crucial point of a social-systemic dialectic is that the contradictions, conflicts and human costs of suffering have a developmental tendency: in the 20th century, they brought about historic human advances in living standards, life expectancy, democracy, freedom, sex-gender emancipation and decolonization.

However, by the end of the 20th century these dialectics had stalled. The working class had advanced in the industrial societies, but finance capital was the winner of industrialization’s demise. The anti-colonial dialectic ended with the—limited and conditional, as it turned out—liberation of the colonized. Though many of its achievements persisted—labour rights, welfare states, women’s emancipation, democracy—the left of the outgoing century provided no perspective forward, no inspiration and little hope. Significantly, the neoliberal era operated as a hinge between the two centuries, not just in a chronological sense. Neoliberal-capitalist globalization put an end to the left of the 20th century; but it also generated, by its excesses, arrogance and economic crashes, a new 21st-century left. Furthermore, it became the vehicle for the rise of China and other non-Western countries, challenging the world domination of the us and thereby starting its own demise.

Instead of ushering in a post-industrial society, as dreamt by Daniel Bell—where ‘human capital’ would produce ‘enormous growth’ in ‘the non-profit area outside of business and government’footnote¹—neoliberalism produced an even rawer and more ruthless type of capitalism, bent on capitalizing education, healthcare and other public services. The 21st century harbours no grand social dialectic; the new forms of financial and digital capitalism do not develop and strengthen their adversaries. They may generate well-deserved anger among their employees and even successful attempts at unionization; but the social trend of working-class employment is rather a tightening of the noose of surveillance. Outsourced industrialization will gradually invigorate an industrial working class in the Third World, but not as big a one as in Europe, nor even as in the us and Japan. National shares of manufacturing and industrial employment are already going down in Asia and Latin America and stalling at a low level in Africa.footnote² Industrial societies shaped and driven by the class dialectic of industrial capitalism are gone forever, with the past century. The dialectic of colonialism has also run its course.

Instead of the stern but ultimately hopeful dialectic of industrial capitalism, the 21st century is burdened with its disaster-generating legacies. The effects of climate change have already become tangibly calamitous, from North America to Australia, from Central Europe to the Sahel, China, Pakistan, Sudan and Latin America: record-breaking temperatures, unprecedented drought, massive wildfires, storms, floods and landslides. The Emergency Event Database recorded 432 disastrous events in 2021, up from an annual average of 357 for 2000–20, affecting more than 100 million people.footnote³ The Cold War ended, but it soon turned out that the last Cold Warriors had left a poisonous gift to posterity. The us ‘deep state’, originally under the direction of Carter’s security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, followed up by the Reagan Administration, had decided to arm and finance reactionary Islamists against ‘Godless Communism’ in Afghanistan. The Islamists interpreted the collapse of the Soviet Union as their victory over one of the two non-Muslim superpowers and prepared to take down the other one. This blowback then unleashed Bush Jr’s ‘war on terror’, with devastating shock and awe inflicted across a belt of countries from Libya to Yemen, Somalia to Iraq, while cia agents kidnapped suspects and shipped them off to torture chambers helpfully provided by the new democracies of Poland, Lithuania and Romania.

A ruthless imperial geopolitics, unbound by the Cold War’s unofficial code of conduct, thus accompanied the 21st century from the start. But the contradictions of imperial geopolitics do not constitute a systemic dialectic, whereby development tends to strengthen the exploited and oppressed. Instead, the bloodshed in the ‘Middle East’ remained a sideshow to the oceanic flows of neoliberal globalization. Digital and financial capitalism are driving the dynamics of the 21st century with a technological revolution, shaking up every aspect of everyday life, from internet addiction to driverless electric cars. The speed of the high-tech companies’ surge and the scale of their world-market dominance have no precedent in world history: Microsoft’s Windows operating system drives 75 per cent of the world’s desktop computers; Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram have captured 82 per cent of the world’s social-media traffic; Google has conquered 92 per cent of the global search-engine market, and its Android operating system drives over 80 per cent of the world’s smartphones.

Comparable processes have taken place in finance, where a handful of ‘asset management’ firms manage the enormous capital assembled by institutions such as pension funds, and the super-rich. Only two countries, the us and China, have gdps greater than the wealth managed by BlackRock, whose assets hover around $10 trillion. The ten largest asset-management firms together control $44 trillion, which is the sum of the annual gdps of the us, China, Japan and Germany. Among the twenty largest firms, fifteen are American. The rulers and owners of these digital and financial corporations, for all their business acumen and their studiedly informal dress, are among the greediest and most ruthless capitalist classes since the age of the robber barons and slave plantations. Unanimous in denying their workers the most elementary union rights, as in their elaborate schemes of tax evasion, they milk public subsidies wherever possible. The gross profit rate, after the costs of components and manufacturing, of an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy was over 60 per cent in the 2010s.footnote⁴ This is the third disaster-generating legacy bequeathed to the 21st century: galloping inequality. The ruthless new capitalism has not benefited the majority populations in the countries of the core, nor even their overall national incomes, which averaged only 1.8 per cent annual growth for 2000–19.

Nevertheless, the 21st century has produced a plethora of new lefts that have been impressively creative and radical in form, starting from their own indignation rather than from the defeats of their predecessors. This essay is an attempt to understand the context of the 21st-century left and its innovative responses to the major challenges of the present conjuncture: the looming climate catastrophe, the new world of imperial geopolitics and the abysmal economic inequalities among an increasingly interconnected humankind. What are the prospects for the 21st-century working class and for the ideas of the left? Nearly a quarter of a century ago, addressing these questions in a characteristically sharp editorial, Perry Anderson concluded that the necessary starting-point for a realistic left was ‘a lucid registration of historical defeat’. He by no means considered this final, even though he saw neoliberalism as ‘the most successful ideology in history’, under which ‘little short of a slump of inter-war proportions’ would be ‘capable of shaking the parameters of the current consensus’.footnote⁵ At the time, I found Anderson’s essay a model of integrity and steadfastness; I still do. But with almost twenty-five years of hindsight I also think that our 20th-century legacy needs to be pictured somewhat differently, so that we can better grasp what has happened in recent decades and what might unfold during the rest of the century—the hottest on Earth for the last 12,000 years.footnote⁶ In what follows, I will briefly sketch the main determinants of the 20th-century left and the ‘hinge’ of neoliberalism, before going on to examine the different contexts in which 21st-century lefts have taken root, contrast their forms and repertoires, analyse their impact and assess the challenges ahead—in Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as the ‘Global North’. ‘The left’ here will be taken in a broad ecumenical sense, and the world as the planet.