ABSTRACT
The enormous power of globalized capitalism can be appropriately acknowledged without, at the same time, becoming so overawed by the productive forces of capitalism that it is impossible to contemplate effective opposition. An economic determinist rendering of Marxism risks concurring with conceptions of globalization that diminish the agency of labour by overemphasis on the dynamic role of capital as it spreads itself around the globe. Currents within Western Marxism that critique economic determinism and its corollary, fatalism, are pertinent to the analysis of labour organizations internationally, many of which do not accept that their futures are determined absolutely by structures over which they have no sway. Class composition is attained when the working class displays 'a determinate level of solidification of needs and desires, as a dynamic subject'. Capital responds to working-class composition and recomposition by seeking to decompose the working-class; capital does not determine economic development.
