Neoliberal policies focus less on profits resulting from growth due to productive investments on a more national scale, and are oriented more towards profits on the basis of redistribution of existing wealth and markets on a world scale. Loans and capital movements become more independent of the production sphere first of all in a less regulated international context. A first consequence is the growing debt in the South since the late sixties and the later debt crisis in the eighties. The battle for the existing world market and wealth is the next step. It is based on efficiency on a world scale, which essentially means best profits. In this battle for the world market, economic policies tend to facilitate better positions for transnationals in the conquest of the existing world market. Policies in favour of mergers and acquisitions, privatisation of state enterprises, and measures promoting openness of existing markets (mostly induced on the basis of the debt crisis in the South by policies of the IMF and the WB) to foreign capital, all favour the battle for existing markets on the basis of efficiency but at the cost of ever-lower growth of markets as a whole, and progressive exclusion. This battle for the existing world market, based on efficiency, generates less employment, worsens economic and social security, stimulates severe income inequality instead of growth, and leaves constantly less place to local and national capital.

Expectations of US transnational profit rates turned positive after a shortfall on behalf of the events of September 11. Stock markets in the US showed a marked recuperation up to the end of December. Stock markets in Europe, Australia and Canada, instead, did not show positive signs in comparison with their levels at the beginning of September. Most stock markets in peripheral countries, and surely in Asia, fell even further. The renewed and aggressive repartition of the world market looks to become a battle between the "West", first of all the USA, against the "Rest". In the near future, there will not even be room for all transnationals. In this new world war, exclusion acquires a new geographic, social and political design.

Asymmetry in the war against terrorism requires more intelligence than armaments. It does not justify an anti-rocket shield. Political justification of that is essentially due to the ongoing recession in the USA. Defence expenditures have to substitute the slowdown of consumption in the private sphere, and may reactivate the US economy for sev-eral years. This permits and supposes a more centralised government regulation in the USA to force further economic deregulation in the rest of the world. Sooner or later, however, armaments have to be sold to redistribute their unproductive costs. This implies the necessity of a prolonged war scenario, as announced by the Bush administration. Worldwide legitimating difficulties will become more severe, and movements against this stage of aggressive globalisation will gain space at a world level.

While armaments are sold outside the USA, world growth will slow down even more, and world recession will become more severe and prolonged. Protectionist, nationalist and regionalist responses will become ever-more generalised, affecting dominant transnational interests. The case of Argentina will show that neo-liberalism unavoidably leads to protectionism. The war spiral cannot avoid global downturn nor protectionist responses, and sooner or later will push even the US economy into a severe recession. Transnationals of any country will be the biggest loosers of protected markets. Exports will fall severely, uncountable debts will have to be written off, and dominant financial capital will show far bigger losses than in the thirties. It will look to be the end of transnational and financial capital just as the depression of the thirties and Second World War made an end to colonialism. An alternative will appear to be unavoidable.

The utopia of an alternative in the midst of war
What kind of alternative may we expect? It is worthwhile to remember that liberalism in the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was export-oriented as well. About eighty percent of exports were agricultural products. In the same way as the depression of the thirties and consequent Second World War induced protectionism in agriculture in the North, worldwide protectionism in the North and South not only in agriculture, but in industry and even services as well, may be expected in the

future. Neo-keynesian voices will emerge, focussing first of all on a better income distribution on a world scale, banning speculative capital and fiscal paradises, and looking for stability in currencies. But they will have one big problem to resolve: how to link up investments with productive sectors on the basis of competition. The only way out will be a new economic rationality.

Technological lifespan nowadays is close to zero, and so also is competition on the basis of the permanent acceleration of technological substitution. Possibilities of further technological substitution have come to an end, and with this, capitalist rationality. Production forces cannot be developed any more under the existing economic rationality. The only solution is a slowdown in technological substitution, even to save profits in a first stage. As of then, it makes less and less sense to regulate technological knowhow by intellectual property rights. Intellectual property may become world patrimony, as Keynes had already pointed out as a necessity. The essence of most unequal development may disappear with it. With a longer lifespan of technology and products, competition sooner or later will depend almost only on the quality of products.

The battle for inclusion at any cost and the struggle for an alternative with a place for all
Rather than dreaming about an utopia about a world with place for all, social movements need to analyse the actual world situation. We are in an excluding world with room for less and less people. There is even the danger that there is not enough room for all dominant capital. In a world where there is no room for all, two roads are open. One is to create a world with at least enough room for those who think they have more right to exist. This road implies ever-stronger exclusion – political, economical and military. It implies a radicalisation of the free market to the benefit of the chosen nation, race or civilisation. The second road is to seek a different economic rationality, to create a world with room for all. This seems the most logical but the less plausible choice, and it will become a clear target of struggle the more the first road appears inevitable.

Nowadays we are on the first road. Neoliberal exclusion policies have acquired a clearer geopolitical expression since the Asian crisis of 1997. A world where there is less room for all dominant capital to conquer the world market becomes more aggressive. This context induced the monetary bombing of "Asian Tigers" currencies and implied the beginning of a new kind of world war aimed at the economic submission of the East Asian economic block to the dominant Western interests. It left not only the Tigers but even Japan in a chronic economic recession. It meant a process of globalisation with progressive geopolitical confrontation of "the West against the Rest". One year earlier, Samuel P. Huntington published a book under this title, and justified the confrontation in ideological terms, preparing an ongoing political and even a military process to deepen the repartition of the world market.

The "invisible hand" of economic fundamentalism strangles whole national economies and implies what Jean Ziegler as a special rapporteur of the United Nations calls a gradual deliberate slaughter, a silent genocide and a crime against humanity. It is a kind of official invisible terrorism. The attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 have to be condemned as well as official terrorism. These terrorist acts, attributed to Osama bin Laden, have a clear message: if there is no place in this world for our civilisation, culture and religion, there will be no place either for the dominant civilisation, religion and culture, not even the most invulnerable ones. Official terrorism thus generates the terrorism of the dominated. Both forms of terrorism reaffirm the ongoing process of exclusion. Neither points to an inclusive alternative. The social movement struggling for an inclusive alternative cannot but reject the exclusion of terrorism wherever it comes from.

The neoliberal process of exclusion and silent genocide becomes more visible when it is not just managed by an "invisible hand". It has to be justified by the superiority of the chosen cultures, religions, races or civilisations, and so, tends to degenerate into neo-fascism.

This danger of a "clash of civilisations" on the basis of terror is the most perverse battle. The inclusion of the chosen at the cost of anything and everything will be almost impossible to legitimate in the long run. As time goes on, legitimisation becomes much harder, even in the supposed chosen nation, culture or civilisation. With ongoing economic recession, dominant capital interests will leave no room even for their own people. The crisis of legitimisation will become unsustainable everywhere. Consciousness will grow that nobody will be saved in this world. It will become clear that, if we want to save ourselves as a person, culture, religion, nation or civilisation, there is no other alternative than to save and give space to the other person, culture, religion, nation or civilisation. In this context, it will become clear that the only way out is to look for an inclusive alternative based on tolerance and solidarity. And it is precisely the social movement and its struggle that will develop and anticipate this process.

Prospects of contemporary social movements in a violent and excluding world
The repartition of the world market not only divides the West and the East. It also confronts the big powers of western capital. A new repartition of the world market will unavoidably imply a growing confrontation of the interests of western transnationals and finance capital. As we already saw with the MAI and the WTO, the space for negotiated multilateral agreements without the use of extra economic forces closed up. Criticism of multilateral institutions has become more and more frequent since 1997, even amongst the powerful. The triumphal neo-liberalism of the first half of the nineties has given way to ongoing criticism and generated a legitimisation crisis of the Bretton Woods institutions.

In this context, the global justice movement was able to emerge and to propose alternatives. The "silent" struggle against the MAI and the conflict of interests between industrialised countries in the OECD meant that in 1998 there was no agreement at all. The emerging global justice movement had its first triumph. This led in January 1999 to "the other Davos" (an alternative to the of World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland since the seventies). At the end of 1999, at the WTO world meeting in Seattle, the big powers tried to force agreement on their own conflicting interests but failed to obtain it. "The other Davos" grew into the World Social Forum, held for the first time in January 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where the global discussion about the movement's horizon of and alternatives to neo-liberalism came of age.

After Seattle, the global justice movement emerged around the world, and grew in quantitative and qualitative terms. Protest movements organised themselves around concrete specifics. The simple sum of particular struggles will not change economic rationality. Awareness of the necessity to integrate particular struggles implies long-term agendas. Long-term agendas require the definition of common mid- and long-term goals. This process of defining short- and long-term goals leads gradually to a more explicit new utopia. Since Seattle, more and more social forces entered the global justice movement. Coordination and cooperation strengthened between ecologists, trade unionists, feminists, students, Indigenous and human rights organisations, small farmers, and so on. Bit by bit, a process of globalisation from below emerged with a renewed and strong belief that another and just world is possible. The protest movement is gradually transforming itself into a movement with long-term propositions.

The radical nature of a global movement from below does not consist in violence but in radically changing the existing economic rationality. The problem is that the struggle for an inclusive alternative based on tolerance and solidarity, must develop in the midst of growing violence. The struggle to include the chosen at any cost generates terrorism of all types. This radical process of survival of the strongest at any cost becomes progressively more illegitimate as time goes by. It will become evident that, on this basis, there is no way out not even for dominant capital, as we already mentioned. Such an outcome may take time, but it will create the objective conditions for implementing an alternative.

Neo-keynesian alternative proposals will emerge to produce centralised planning and markets to preserve the existing rationality of capital accumulation in a more inclusive world context. These attempts will fail on the limits of ongoing technological substitution. The historical alternative of centralised planning without mediation by market mechanisms, as developed in real existing socialism, showed the limits of the substitution of the pure liberal market by a system entirely based on centralised planning. Vertical centralised planning was unable to place the economy at the service of people and by people at the same time. It meant the substitution of one totalitarian system by another.

The future will probably reveal a more dialectical outcome in this historical process. The radical character of the alternative consists not only in a changed economic rationality, derived from the exhaustion of technological substitution, as we already pointed out. This process of exhausting production forces surely implies another way of "taking" power. It will be radical but probably gradual and not necessarily violent. In the desired utopian society, the economy must be placed gradually in the service of the people and controlled by the people. It cannot be a preconceived model, to be installed at any price; that would easily lead to a new totalitarian system. Rather, it means a worldwide democratic process, not only in form but principally in content. Which leads us to our last conclusion: if the utopia is to be a democratic outcome of a process, social movements cannot struggle for it with an advance guard based on exclusion and vertical structures. This implies a radically different concept of what constitutes an advance guard. It will require a more horizontal and inclusive concept of leadership.

Wim Dierckxsens is currently a research fellow at the Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones (DEI) in Costa Rica.