LEFT-WING academics and authors including Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein launched the Progressive International (PI) initiative on Monday, which will hold a founding conference in September.

Forty notable figures, also including Greece’s former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, Iceland’s Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir and exiled former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, were joined by the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM) and the Sanders Institute to launch the PI’s website.

The PI says that its activities will be “divided across three pillars: the movement, aimed to forge a global network; the blueprint, to develop a policy blueprint for a progressive international order;  and the wire, which offers a newswire service to the world’s progressive forces.”

It aims to hold an inaugural summit in Reykjavik in September, co-hosted by Ms Jakobsdottir’s Left-Green Movement.

With the Covid-19 crisis deepening economic inequality, coupled with the rise of the far-right, Professor Chomsky said that the PI is necessary to challenge international neoliberalism and its structures.

The group’s co-ordinator David Adler said: “Only a common international front can match the scale of our crises, reclaim our institutions and defeat a rising authoritarian nationalism.”