As often happens with such terms, the word "globalisation" has become popular in our country only belatedly. To be exact, it has become popular among us at the very moment when people around the world have ceased talking about the rise of a new global economy, and instead have begun talking about its crisis. The fact that our commentators and theoreticians have begun speaking of globalisation later than those in the West does not indicate that the process has passed us by or that its impact has been delayed. It simply testifies to the backwardness of our social thinking.

There is worse to come. In discussing globalisation, our press split immediately into two camps. Some commentators see it as an irresistible "process of nature" that we are compelled to join in. Others see it as a conspiracy against Russia by sinister forces that must be fought against. Both views are quite wrong. Globalisation is the result of the neo-liberal economic policies that have triumphed on a world scale. As a result of these policies, not only are Russian workers in most sectors now on the verge of starvation, but American workers are receiving smaller wages than twenty years ago after inflation is taken into account. These policies are not aimed against Russia, any more than against America. It is simply that international finance capital has been victorious over industrial capital. The working class throughout the world has suffered from this. It is clear that poorer countries have suffered more than richer ones, but there is nothing new in this; such is the logic of capitalism.

Now that a world economic depression is ripening, Russia cannot remain on the sidelines either. Most likely it will suffer less from the crisis than the US or Western Europe. But what does "less" mean in practice?

Our situation is already grave. If it deteriorates further, will it be any consolation for us that things are also bad for others? In the economic and financial sense, the Californian energy crisis is a far greater shock for America than the catastrophe in the Maritime Region, where thousands of people have been left without heating in fierce winter weather, has been for us. Nevertheless, the residents of the Maritime Region would nevertheless be delighted to change places with the citizens of California.

The market economy is basically cyclical, and in this sense, predictable. In post-war Europe, and to some degree even in the United States, the state regulated economic life in accordance with the ideas of J.M. Keynes, implementing "counter-cyclical investment policies". The essence of these policies consisted of sharply increasing state spending and investment during the period when market demand was falling, and then reducing them when growth resumed. This was aimed at evening out the swings of demand and supply, and ensuring stable development.

Neo-liberal economists criticised these policies on the grounds that they would lead to a gradual rise of inflation, and also noted that in warding off crises, the state was preventing the "junking" of inefficient enterprises. Crises are essential for capitalism to maintain its competitive dynamic, and to allow a periodic "cleansing" of the economic organism. It is precisely during a period of depression that the principle of "survival of the fittest" is realised in full measure.

When local currencies began to collapse in the countries of Southeast Asia, and production volumes then started declining just as steeply, everyone expected that this would mark the beginning of a world crisis. Subsequent events seemed to confirm this assumption. The crisis began to spread. After Southeast Asia, it seized hold of Russia. After the ruble had collapsed, financial difficulties took hold of Latin America. The Brazilian real, which had not only been the strongest currency in the region, but also a symbol of economic recovery on the continent, lost half its value. The international financial centres then began to panic; voices rang out calling for a return to regulation and control over the global movement of capital.

The crisis of 1997-98 did not, however, spread throughout the world. Where financial monsters had fallen on hard times, huge sums were thrown into saving them from bankruptcy. Governments began printing money. Multi-billion-dollar credits were allotted to a wide range of stabilisation programs, which at times duplicated one another. Whether the methods employed were good or bad is not so important, but the situation stabilised. As we know, the position in both Russia and Brazil started to improve after the devaluation of the national currency.

The second "warning signal" appeared in April 1999, when share prices in the US fell steeply for the firms that made up the "new economy" (these prices are listed on the Nasdaq index). It had emerged that few of these firms, which were involved in supplying a range of services on the basis of internet technologies, were yielding significant profits; the fall in share prices thus led quickly to a wave of bankruptcies. Nevertheless the Dow Jones Index, which records the share prices of more traditional companies, held up. Nasdaq, after being shaken, also leveled out. The fall in share prices was characterised as a necessary correction, though to everyone's surprise, a correction did not occur. The share prices of the surviving companies remained extremely high.

After the shocks that hit the stock market in the spring of 2000, the spectre of a major crisis was firmly installed in the US. However, no-one knew when, where or how it would begin. So long as the economy of the US continued to grow, a world crisis was impossible. For Russia, it is true, the crisis on the American stock market was even a boon. In 1999, when renewed economic growth in Asia caused world oil prices to rise steeply, no-one expected this increase to last for long.

Thanks to the credit and stock market inflation in the US, vast funds had been taken out of the "real economy" throughout the world over the previous fifteen years, and had been pumped into the area of financial speculation, mainly of an international character. Russia in this case was no exception; on the contrary, it was situated in the first ranks, moving in the same direction as the US. The governments sincerely believed in the monetarist theories which contended that the only sources of inflation were state spending and the printing of paper money. As a result, no-one was taking measures to restrain credit and stock-market inflation; indeed, it was considered beneficial, and was stimulated in all sorts of ways. The point is not just that American firms were over-valued on the stock market. All this was occurring in circumstances where for almost ten years the paper money had not been devalued. In other words, speculative financial capital was growing out of all proportion to the growth of production, and the devalued "non-cash" money could for the time being be converted freely into folding greenbacks. All that was needed was a mechanism that would allow this to be done without quickly ravaging the stock exchange (if everyone started selling their shares, the effects on Wall Street would be nightmarish). Whoever found a solution to the problem first would come out the winner.

The rise of oil prices ensured that such a mechanism of redistribution would operate. In the economy of the West, a sort of "inflationary overhang" emerged, similar in its way to the Soviet "conserved inflation" (readers may recall how everyone's bank savings kept increasing in the USSR, while prices were stable). In the Soviet economy, "excess" money was bound sooner or later to create an insurmountable problem of "shortages". In the US the "excess" money has poured, in the final analysis, onto the oil market. To the degree that the dollar "overhang" collapses, inflation will sooner or later run out of control, and the "excess" money, having burst free, will in any case sooner or later spread throughout all sectors of the economy. The buying power of ready money will be doomed to fall, and a devaluation of the dollar will be on the agenda. Throughout the second half of the 1990s, the dollar grew constantly stronger in relation to the German mark and the Japanese yen. Now the Europeans and Japanese will be able to take their revenge.

It is a quite different matter that the price of this victory could turn out to be too high for everyone's liking. The irony lies in the fact that the first oil shock disorganised the system of state regulation, and undermined the "socialism of redistribution" that held sway in the West. The second oil shock, by contrast, will disorganise the system of market-corporative regulation, and will strike a blow at neo-liberal capitalism. The response to the oil shock of 1973, albeit with a certain delay, was the beginning of a shift of the world economy to the right, toward the liberal model. This time, the most probable response (also after a certain pause) will be an analogous movement to the left. The wheel will have turned full circle.

These processes will not pass us by. On the one hand, modern-day Russia is characterised by an incredible openness, an extraordinary degree of integration into the world economy. On the other, the discrepancy between the approach chosen by Gref, Putin and company and the new, growing global dynamic will become more and more obvious. At a time when predictions of a major impending crisis are becoming almost universal, criticism is growing of the governments and international financial institutions that are responsible for pursuing the neo-liberal course on a global scale. On the level of the mass movement, protest against the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation became a reality in Seattle in 1999 and Prague in 2000, when thousands of people blockaded the work of the WTO, IMF and World Bank. The enlightened Russian intelligentsia gazed in disbelief at what was happening, asking itself why, in the "advanced West", hundreds of thousands of people would come out and protest on the streets, as if driven mad by too much good living. In America and Europe, meanwhile, there is a growing understanding that we are far from living in the best of all possible worlds, and that it is necessary to change something urgently before it is too late. Russia is at risk of becoming, in five or six years, the last bastion of economic liberalism, of "globalisation" and "free capitalism".

This is quite natural for a backward state. Tsarist Russia repeatedly played the role of the decisive bastion of international reaction; one need only recall its role in suppressing the European revolution of 1848-49. But even with the whole strength of the Russian bureaucracy, it is hard to put a stop to history. Sooner or later, therefore, the new radical anti-capitalist movements that are developing in the West will "infect" our country, just like the ideas of the French revolution and Marxism. And the sooner the better.