‘Globalization’ and Labour Strategy: Towards a Social Movement Unionism

Abstract

Globalization has become today the key word for understanding recent developments in the capitalist world economy. While it is a highly contested concept, conventional accounts of globalization have come to constitute a kind of ‘globalization orthodoxy’ (Harman 1996), based on arguments that are widely accepted both in (left and right) popular and academic milieux.¹ Globalization orthodoxy generally characterizes working classes as passive vis-a-vis the challenges generated by the alleged process of globalization unless they develop globally organized forms of resistance.