The Twenty-First Century Revolutions and Internationalism: A World-Historical Perspective

• Main Author: Şahan Savaş Karataşli
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University Library System, University of Pittsburgh 2019-09-01
• Series: Journal of World-Systems Research
• Subjects: Social Revolutions; Social Movements; Internationalism; Global-political Organizations; Samir Amin
• Online Access: http://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwsr/article/view/951

In his essay, “It is imperative to reconstruct the Internationale of workers and peoples”,  Samir Amin (2018) suggested that in order to “deconstruct the extreme centralization of wealth and the power that is associated with the [capitalist world] system”, we should seriously study “the experience of the worker Internationales [...], even if they belong to the past. This should be done, not in order to ‘choose’ a model among them, but to invent the most suitable form for contemporary conditions.” In this paper, I will follow Amin’s (2018) suggestion and provide a brief examination of the past experiences of first Internationales in the nineteenth century and conditions that produced them with an eye to the present moment.  By comparing the political climate of the early twenty-first century to analogous comparable periods in world history, I will argue that today we need two distinct forms of global political organizations that are modeled after the International Workingmen’s Association and the Communist League.  First one should serve as a horizontal “movement of movements” that would reflect the spontaneous and creative energy of mass movements from below; the second one should serve as a hierarchically organized world communist party.