We live in interesting times, yet sometimes our thinking is framed in terms from an older era. The world has changed dramatically over the last quarter of a century yet many paradigms for understanding it lack complexity and are constrained by a narrow nation-state optic. This book proposes to rethink global labour and boldly proclaim a new era of renewal and reinvention for the labour movement. What we call “globalization” or “neoliberalism” has meant, in practice, a huge expansion of market forces and a seeming reduction of space for alternative ways of organizing society. But this unparalleled expansion of capitalism has also led to an equally unprecedented emergence of a global working class, predicted by Karl Marx back in the 1880s, but usually dismissed as wishful thinking. Today the workers of the world are indeed unified under the same capitalist order even if their experiences of it are not the same and they do not yet act in concert.

In contrast to the dominant left-wing or progressive worldview that denounced globalization when it emerged as the dominant trope in the 1990s, I will argue that it opens as many doors for labour as it has closed for national governments: there are always alternatives. The processes of internationalization happen from above but also emanate from below: workers, women, peasants and students are beginning to unite across national frontiers in pursuit of global justice. Today there may yet be an opportunity to recreate the ethos of the early labour movement in the middle of the nineteenth century and to forge a new global labour movement that improves the lives of everyone wherever they are.

The world today is very different from the one in which the proletariat – free both of alternative means of sustenance and of extra-economic coercion – emerged. The world of work has been transformed for many and yet the capital/wage labour relation persists. Much work and many repressive social contexts are the same as they were in the first part of the nineteenth century.