As is well known, the period since the early 1970s has been one of massive historical structural transformations of the global order, frequently referred to as the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism (or, better, from Fordism to post-Fordism to neoliberal global capitalism). This transformation of social, economic, and cultural life, which has entailed the undermining of the state-centric order of the mid-twentieth century, has been as fundamental as the earlier transition from nineteenth-century liberal capitalism to the state-interventionist, bureaucratic forms of the twentieth century.

These processes have entailed far-reaching changes in not only Western capitalist countries but communist countries, as well, and led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and European communism in addition to fundamental transformations in China. Consequently, they have been interpreted as marking the end of Marxism and of the theoretical relevance of Marx's critical theory. And yet these processes of historical transformation have also reasserted the central importance of historical dynamics and large-scale structural changes. This problematic, which is at the heart of Marx's critical theory, is precisely that which eludes the grasp of the major theories of the immediate post-Fordist era—those of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jürgen Habermas. Recent transformations have revealed those theories to have been retrospective, focused critically on the Fordist era, but no longer adequate to the contemporary post-Fordist world.

Emphasizing the problematic of historical dynamics and transformations casts a different light on a number of important issues. In this essay I begin to address general questions of internationalism and political mobilization today in relation to the massive historical changes of the past three decades. Before doing so, however, I shall briefly touch upon several other important issues that become inflected differently when considered against the background of recent overarching historical transformations: the question of the relation of democracy to capitalism and its possible historical negation—more generally, of the relation of historical contingency (and, hence, politics) to necessity—and the question of the historical character of Soviet communism.