Part 2
The instrument we no longer have
Something was lost in the twentieth century and has never been replaced. The Third International was dissolved in 1943, a wartime accommodation to allies who wanted it gone. Whatever its faults, and they were grave enough to deserve a separate reckoning, it was an instrument. Its dissolution, followed decades later by the collapse of the wider movement, left working people without any durable body through which to act together across borders.
What survives is honourable but increasingly thin, fragile, and beleaguered. Global union federations, campaigning networks, human rights organisations, and solidarity committees do serious work on small budgets, usually on the defensive, and generally after the harm has been done.
Capital suffers no such weakness. Employers, investors, and states maintain a dense and permanent international architecture: trade rules, arbitration tribunals where a company can sue a government for protecting its own people, industry associations, central bank networks, and consultancies that carry the same restructuring plan from one country to the next. Capital acts as a class across the world. Labour, for the most part, still acts as a collection of localities. That single asymmetry explains a great deal about the last forty years.
The objections that deserve an answer
Three arguments are made against everything written so far, and they are made by serious people. A movement that cannot answer them in the open does not deserve to be trusted in private.
The first is that the market has already done what we propose to do. The past four decades have seen the largest fall in absolute poverty ever recorded, most of it in Asia, and it would be dishonest to wave that away. Hundreds of millions of lives are longer and less desperate than they would otherwise have been. But look closely at where it happened and how. The countries that climbed fastest did not follow the prescription they were given. They industrialised behind state direction, controls on capital, public ownership of land and banks, and long protection of young industry, while several of those that opened themselves fully on advice were rewarded with debt crises and lost decades. Notice, too, what the measure measures. The international poverty line sits barely above destitution, and to cross it is to survive rather than to live.
Nor are the gains secure: a pandemic, an inflation spike or a currency shock pushes tens of millions back across that line within a single year. Above all, the climb was accomplished by working people themselves, in the hours they worked. The argument was never about whether their effort creates wealth. It has always been about who keeps it.
The second objection is the record of the twentieth century, and it is the heaviest thing on the scales. Famine, camps, secret police, whole nationalities deported, strikes broken and neighbours invaded, all of it carried out by states that used the language of the working class while denying workers the right to organise against them. That cannot be hurried past or brushed aside as a footnote. It is the single greatest obstacle facing anyone who makes the case for social justice and economic equity today. But the conclusion to draw is not that the aim was worthless. It is that the method contained its own undoing, and that the first things abandoned were the ones that mattered most.
No movement should ever again place a state above its own members, let one centre command the rest, or treat dissent and the right to strike as luxuries for calmer times. These principles were never embellishments. Abandoning them is precisely what made the crimes possible. What is proposed here is solidarity between the independent organisations of working people, accountable downward to the members who fund them. Should any such body begin to resemble what came before, the people who built it should be the first to walk away.
The third objection is the most practical. Nearly everything workers have won was won nation by nation: the eight-hour day, the weekend, pensions, public education and health services, a safe workplace, and the right to organise. Internationals passed resolutions while parliaments passed acts. That is true, and it is true for a reason. Those victories were won when the employer was largely national too, tied to a factory, a workforce, and a country he could not easily leave, because his wealth, status and power depended on them. That era has ended. A company can now move production within eighteen months, transfer its profits to places where it employs nobody, and evade an inconvenient law by stepping outside its reach.
National bargaining is still the instrument that wins things, and it should not be weakened. It now lacks reach, and reach is exactly what solidarity across borders supplies. This is not a theory awaiting its first test. Dockers who refused to unload South African cargo helped bring down apartheid. After the Rana Plaza collapse, global unions and brands signed a binding cross-border agreement that put independent inspectors inside more than a thousand Bangladeshi factories and made them measurably safer. Those were not resolutions. They were results.
What has to be built
The workers of one country can no longer defend themselves inside one country. That is not a doctrine. It is a description of the nature of the supply chain.
A new international solidarity needs no blueprint handed down. It needs practical and unglamorous construction, such as:
- Unions linked along the entire length of a supply chain, so that the people who make, ship, store and deliver one corporation’s goods can face it together instead of one at a time.
- Common demands and a shared calendar, so that a strike in one country never stands alone.
- Debt justice, and an end to rules written by creditors and enforced against debtors.
- Migrant rights treated as workers’ rights, with no exception. Wherever one worker can be threatened with deportation, every worker’s wage is threatened.
- A climate transition with a guaranteed livelihood attached, negotiated by the people who do the work.
- Opposition to wars that set worker against worker and benefit neither.
- Concrete support for those who organise under repression: strike funds, legal defence, publicity, and the plain insistence that their names are known.
Its character will matter as much as its programme. It must be plural, holding many traditions without demanding uniformity. It must be democratic from the root upward. It must belong to no single state, no single party and no single city or town, because we have seen what happens when it does. And it must be built with a memory long enough to include its own defeats.
To those who make the world
None of this is given, and none of it arrives on its own. No government will grant it without pressure from below, no court will award it unprompted, and no market will offer it out of compassion. It gets built by ordinary people who decide that a docker in Durban, a warehouse worker in Illinois and a garment worker in Chittagong have more in common with one another than any of them has with the person whose shares they enrich.
That is not an act of faith. It is the everyday reality we face. It is the plain fact of how a shirt; a phone and a cup of coffee reach us in the morning. The world’s work is already shared. What remains is to share its fruits fairly.
The people who make the world are entirely capable of governing it.
