I suggest that three elements in the earlier revolutionary narrative can be expected to survive the new globalization: the prospect/threat of change; the belief that a challenge can be mounted against some arbiter of power or other, and a corresponding expectation of capacity on the part of some human group or other to reconstruct society for the better. It is the last two that require close attention. The target for challenge, and the corresponding agent to make any challenge, are now problematic. The first has long been the easier of these two to identify. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the second has often been a derivative of the first: i.e. the people of the nation could be identified as the agents of a challenge because they had first been the subject of the unifying power of a given state's institutions. The internationalist idea that it was the given class that was the agent of challenge and change was always far less firmly grounded in socio-political organization than the idea that the nation governed by the given state was that agent -- though the two ideas have been successfully combined. The key issue here is the formation of contending groups. We need to look afresh at the processes that identify the group and speculate about how that identification may happen under conditions of globalization.