To highlight the coherence and controversial issues of the strategy of the alterglobalisation movement, twelve assumptions must stand out in the analysis of the current situation and the transformation projects put forward by the alter-globalisation movement.

Assumption 1

The situation is characterised by a global crisis. Above all, it is an interwoven dual crisis: crisis of neoliberalism and crisis of capitalism.

The situation is a crisis of neoliberalism as the neoliberal phase of capitalist globalisation. This phase, which began in the early 1980s, is now exhausted. It is a crisis of the capitalist system itself, a crisis that developed as a result of the depth of the current crisis. This multi-dimensional crisis has given rise to the possibility of an end to a longer cycle that dates back more than five centuries: the cycle that built a capitalist Western civilisation.

Assumption 2

The current crisis, which is a financial, monetary and economic crisis, has much deeper roots. It is a social, democratic, geopolitical and environmental crisis, and in general terms a crisis of civilisation.

The current crisis is a social crisis, a crisis of inequality, poverty and discrimination. It is a democratic crisis, a crisis that calls into question freedoms and equality everywhere where progress had been made in these areas. It is a geopolitical crisis, a crisis of unfinished decolonisation and the challenge to the hegemony of the United States and its European and Japanese allies. It is also an environmental crisis, one where humans meet the limits of the ecosystems of the planet.

Each dimension of the crisis highlights the unresolved problems of previous major crises that the dynamics of capitalism were able to contain without resolving them.

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- Extract from Gustave Massiah, Une stratégie altermondialiste. Ed La Découverte, published in

January 2011.