The religious and intellectual history of early modern and modern Islam is often reduced to a teleological and Arabo-centric narrative, in which modernity began with Napoleon’s Egyptian Expedition or the Nahḍa, the Arab Renaissance. Within this narrative, the succession of Sufism, Islamic reformism, Islamism, and Salafism is seen as a “genealogy of Islamism.” Using a regressive history approach, and presenting the currents of international historiography on Islam between the fifteenth and the twenty-first century, this article seeks in contrast to illuminate the plurality of possible pathways and the heterogeneous nature of historical moments. Moving backward through time, it attempts to identify ruptures and continuities, and to highlight successive interpretations of medieval authors and concepts (such as salafiyya). In so doing, it endeavors to demonstrate the constructed nature of the received historiographical narrative of late nineteenth-century “Islamic reformism,” as well as that of “Arabic thought in the liberal age.” Historiographical debates on the “neo-Sufism” and Aufklärung of the eighteenth century have led to a better understanding of Islam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, a thirst for renewal (tajdīd) flourished in hadith, Islamic law, and Sufism. Recent research on the process of “confessionalization” over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has highlighted the importance of political factors in developments of Islam during the age of the three Empires (Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman).

This paper looks not at workers’ struggles, which had their ups and downs over the last two hundred years, but specifically at the revolutionary socialist movement, which aims to eliminate capitalism. While there have been contributions to the vision of a classless, stateless society by utopian socialists and anarchists, the paper concentrates on Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and their legacy. It identifies three bifurcation points in this particular revolutionary socialist tradition where a substantial part of the movement abandoned democracy, internationalism, or both, and argues that this has had a disastrous effect on the movement and needs to be reversed.

In early modern times, workers, especially the unskilled, in many countries were already striking against low wages and long working hours before the advent of the trade union movement. These modern trade unions on the other hand were mainly a form of organization invented by skilled labor from around 1800. Trade unions became a part of the labor movement or the workers’ movement. For over a century the movement of the workers and the workers’ movement merged although this marriage was not always a very happy one. There have been periods of tensions between the two. Since the crisis of the 1970s both have been on the defensive, which can be seen from lowering union density rates and the plummeting of strike activity in most Western countries.

Many trade unions have been connected to the political part of the labor movement (more specifically social democracy) which in turn grew into the existing political and socioeconomic form of capitalism.1 Can a bureaucratic trade union movement that is so embedded in capitalist society be able to become the advocate of a future rise of working-class struggles? Is there a future for trade unionism or will another form of organization arise? And will the strike as a weapon of the working class really disappear as was predicted so many times? And was there a moment in time when both strikes and trade unions took the path that took them into the dangerous direction where they ended up in such life-threatening circumstances. Let’s go back in time to look for answers to these questions.

As labor in the capitalist system practically tripled to some three billion workers, solidary organizations of labor simultaneously dwindled in relative size and power. This is true globally but also for the historical core countries. While this is a paradox, it is not a contradiction. Capital is a (spatialized) social relationship. The globalization of capital since the 1970s has shifted the power relations with localized labor fundamentally in favor of capital, as Charles Tilly noted in this journal almost thirty years ago. Over time, power balances within capitalist states, and between capitalist states and transnationalizing capital, have reflected that basic class-relational shift. This article explains why the globalizing cycle of weakened labor may now be reversing.