ABSTRACT
The understanding of the class politics of globalisation is elucidated through a critique of the neo-Gramscian and post imperialist accounts of capitalist globalisation by claiming that their tendency to reify ruling-class agency obscures the centrality of class struggle both domestic and international - in the configuration of hegemonic 'historic blocs'. It considers those theorists of globalisation that identifies a fragmentation and, the conceptual extinction of the two antagonistic classes which Marx and Engels claimed defined capitalist society: bourgeois and proletarians. The qualification is that little of what follows is premised on an empirical account of the global constellation of classes under capitalism. The basic tenet of the Thompsonian understanding of class - that class emerges out of historically determined relations of production which generate an antagonism of interests and values between different social groups - appears as the most suitable starting-point for a Marxist interpretation of class and globalisation.
