"In the current of globalisation and multiculturalism, the absolute value of national sovereignty and the national culture legitimising it are questioned," wrote recently a well-known sociologist in the leading newspaper. It is possible to speak meaningfully about globalisation, not regarding it as a natural process mercilessly forcing down wages, social expenses and reforming the pension system? According to sceptics, globalisation is rather an ideology with the task to make accepted the global change in power developed in the past two decades. The analysis of inequalities in the global system addressed in the past issues of Eszmélet now is completed with the category of hegemony. Theoretical and practical initiatives against the modern forms of hegemony – mostly based on national and popular considerations – are presented in the present issue.

Table of contents

1. Samir Amin : Globalisation or global polarisation?
2. Peter Taylor : Modernism and global hegemony
3. Susan Zimmermann : From the idol of family to the idol of market – Changes in gender relations in developed industrial societies
4. Riselia Duarte Bezerra : Samba and (counter)hegemony – Bodies and contradictions in the Brasilian society
5. Görög Tibor : The new Russian ideology in the making
6. Krausz Tamás : World system and self-management in the period of perestroika
7. Pach Zsigmond Pál : Reflections to the Hungarian soviet republic
8. K. Gorsenyin : “If you do not implement the command, you will be shot”
9. BAL : Lessons from the demonstration of Szekszárd meat workers
10. Tőkei Ferenc : On the “change of system” – messages from te 19th Century
11. Tőkei Ferenc : On the centralisation of capital – messages from the 19th Century
12. Birgit Mahnkopf, Elmar Altvater : The limits of globalisation
13. Derek Kerr : on Bonefeld-Holloway: Global capital, nation state and the politics of money
14. Hugo Radice : The question of globalisation
15. Szikszai Szabolcs : The Ecologist
16. Andor László : Reembedding through counter-movement – 6th Polanyi Conference
17. Eszmélet : Eszmélet Day – December 7, 1996