Davos, the Swiss mountain resort, is host each year to the meetings of the World Economic Forum. To this informal gathering of those business and financial magnates with real economic power in the capitalist world are invited political leaders, cultural and religious organizations and even some trade unionists. The aim is to define global economic strategies.

Then one year, for the first time, a counter-Davos gathering brought together on the same date social movements representative of resistance and struggles across five continents. These movements were Brazil's Landless People's Movement, the Trade Union Congress of South Korea, the National Peasant Federation of Burkina Faso, the Quebec Women's Movement and the French Movement of the Unemployed. They met with a number of eminent economists, sociologists, historians and political scientists. The dialogue had been initiated, in association with Le Monde Diplomatique, by ATTAC (the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the benefit of Citizens), the Coordinating Centre against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), the World Forum for Alternatives, and the Latin American branch of SAPRIN (the Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network).

The aim was to demonstrate, by means of very different analyses and the presentation of concrete alternatives, their opposition to the dominant ideology of neo-liberalism and the dictatorship of capitalism over global society. This book is a compilation of these discussions. Its impact has already resonated around the world with publication in Arabic, Burmese, Dutch, French, Hindi, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, Vietnamese and a number of other languages.