ABSTRACT
We are going through an exceptionally interesting period in the history of the capitalist mode of production. The financial crisis, which started in early 2007, ushered in a new zeitgeist affecting the way the economy and society are generally understood among the politicians, managers of the economy and universities, as well as among the people at large during the past 25-30 years. Then, the present and the future were all about neoliberalism and globalisation. Now these key concepts – almost ‘master signifiers’ giving meaning to many other economic and political phenomena – are progressively coming under scrutiny even in the pages of some of the truly global and globalist publications such as the Financial Times. With their high-power columnists, these publications had spearheaded the attempts to popularise the idea that there were no alternatives to neoliberalism and that it was futile to resist globalisation which was irreversible and truly global. Today they are no longer certain that globalisation indeed has a future, because as even Martin Wolf accepts, it is a human product and could easily be reversed.1
