The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

(Antonio Gramsci)

I have now passed the age of 80.As I cannot guarantee to produce another such compilation in 2027, I thought I might do one now, in what for me is not so much an auspicious year but, yes, one that makes me ponder a surprising survival to this age. I am thinking of the past decade or so, with two or three life-threatening health conditions, treatments, operations. And that I should be grateful for still having my head and heart in some kind of working order - another thing I cannot guarantee for 2027.

Clearly I am inspired by the sombre view of Gramsci quoted just above. I am grateful, further, to Novelli and Ferus-Comelo (2010:55) for reminding me what Gramsci noted: that every ‘revolution has been preceded by an intense labour of criticism’. For, whilst I favour ‘global social emancipation’ over ‘revolution’, it occurs to me that my recent writing has mostly been such an intense labour. And we will see that it reveals a return to labour internationals and internationalism after much writing on the World Social Forum and the ‘global solidarity and justice movement’ of which the WSF forms a part.

Now for my subtitle: Questioning the global legacies of labour and the left; devising new languages of struggle. At the risk of homogenizing left inter/nationalisms, I have long argued that these were either internationalisms, or internationalisms. Stressed either way, these were and are projects of solidarity from the epoch dominated by the nation state, or state-defined nations (there are various others). Given capitalist globalisation, not to mention informatisation, such internationalisms are increasingly revealed to be archaic.