ABSTRACT
After several decades of rapid growth and development in the post-World War II period—what French historians have dubbed 'the thirty glorious years'—the world economic order was in disarray and the underlying system in crisis. What we have in the globalization-antiglobalization movement, in effect, is a class war with two opposing sides and alternative projects to restructure the existing world economic system or to dismantle and change it. The antiglobalization movement in the current context appears to have this potential. Karl Marx in an earlier historic context wrote of the capitalist system as generating its own gravediggers. There is no systemic evidence of any imminent collapse in the capitalist system. At the same time the economic, social and environmental—and political— costs of the capitalist globalization process are reaching crisis proportions and are just as clearly generating the political conditions of a worldwide global movement of resistance and opposition.
