Since the emergence of capitalism the world has been divided into rich and poor, colonialist and colonized, First and Third Worlds, developed and developing countries and now, as they are termed, the Global North and Global South. This dichotomy is beginning to shift, as the globalization of capitalism is beginning to create a global labour force that increasingly experiences the same precarity wherever it is located. Whether it becomes a fully developed global working class, conscious of its own interests, depends on the internal struggles within the labour movement as much as on the development of the global economy.

I start with an analysis of the progress experienced in the North by the working class since the Second World War under the New Deal and the welfare state, the gradual unpicking of this settlement with the advent of neoliberal market policies and the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, up to the present-day gig economy. The following chapter takes up the story of the workers of the Global South in the same timeframe from the postcolonial 1950s to the new division of labour in the 1970s, which saw a massive increase of the working class and its ability to impose some improvements in labour standards. Finally, I chart the emergence of a new labour scene in the 1990s, which saw the North and South fading as the dominant analytical paradigm, to be replaced by that of the “global precariat”: a precarious proletariat, with a global constituency. It is the struggles of this “global precariat”, as part of the working class and not opposed to it, that will decide whether there is a new global working class in the decades to come.