GLOBALIZATION
THE NEW PHASE OF COLONIALISM
Before we can discuss globalization, we
need some agreement about what that economic, social, and political phenomenon
is all about. When did it start? Is it the inevitable development of historic
forces or do governments and international institutions control it? What are
its primary features? How do we recognize it? One would think, after nearly 30
years of debates, studies, and mountains of literature on the subject, there
would be some clarity and agreement on the fundamentals. But when powerful
vested interests derive benefit from obfuscation there is nothing but a
proliferation of theoretical mumbo-jumbo and apologetics. One is more likely to
get a straight, coherent answer from a sweatshop worker than an economist or
historian.
What serious-minded people are talking
about when we talk about globalization is modern capitalism and the dramatic,
wrenching transition it has been going through for the past thirty to forty
years. To understand this historic transition, there is no need to pin down a
specific date since that would make a mockery of analysis. Globalization began
to emerge in public awareness, though in a fragmented way, sometime in the
1970s and 1980s. That’s a close enough time frame for an analysis. The
transition was most marked, though little understood, in the US by the
off-shoring of the garment industry which closed down US factories and began
moving operations to places like South Korea—one of the first sweatshop nations.
It is foolish to do what renowned
theoreticians, including Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, have done
by tracing globalization to primordial times; or to the development of trade
and a market economy in the third millennium BC; or 600 years ago and the
conquest of the Americas by Christopher Columbus; or to the 11th century Sung
epoch in China; or any other epochs in ancient history where trade and the
market economy began to emerge--or even to the industrial revolution. That’s
classic obfuscation under the guise of intellectualism that has nothing to do
with people’s serious concerns about what is going on now.
There’s no question globalization has
ancient roots but if we’re going to scrutinize history for antecedents, then
the history of colonialism is far more relevant than tracing trade routes and
market patterns in the ancient world because if there's any analog in history
for globalization, it is classic, barbarous colonialism. Modern globalization
can certainly be traced to World War I fought over colonial powers dividing up
the world & to World War II where the unresolved competitions erupted
again. This led to the formation at Bretton Woods of the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in 1944 and the formation of the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947. These are the primary, though
not the only international institutions managing globalization. But whether the
role of those agencies is known or understood, to most people globalization
refers to the transition that began to emerge in the 1970s with outsourcing of
entire industries to overseas plants with low wages, vulnerable and
super-exploited child and female labor, and weak trade union organization.
Pro-capitalist journalists &
economists talk about globalization as though it were part of the inevitable
processes of the capitalist system—a system they consider desirable and part of
natural law, a reflection of human nature. They portray globalization as
development, as scientifically, culturally, and economically beneficial, even a
way to eradicate inequality and poverty. The economist Amartya Sen won himself
a Nobel Prize peddling that line; economist Milton Friedman was feted for
promoting its barbarism as progress; and journalists Thomas Friedman and Paul
Krugman have made careers shilling it. They treat globalization as a
determinist process driven by the engine of economic development and something
that cannot be thwarted or opposed.
There is an element of determinism about
globalization. As Karl Marx pointed out, capitalism has within it the seeds of
its own destruction. That isn’t just a pithy little solace since capitalism is
unlikely to collapse on its own though it is relentlessly fraught with conflict
because it is based on inequality and competition. Modern capitalism cannot
function without social hatreds, particularly racism and misogyny. As long as
such massive oppression is required to maintain the system, there will be
instability and conflict. Inexorable conflict. As long as capitalism is based
on the nation-state, there will be competition over markets—and that means
wars. Inevitable wars.
The capitalist system is also vast and
complex and while decisions about how to resolve crises are made in boardrooms,
government cabinets, and executive suites, the system has an independent life
of its own. Large elements of it are unmanageable—even to the capitalists--and
must be uprooted and overthrown because they are so violently at odds with
human civilization.
The way we know that human intervention
and decision-making are critical to capitalism and that globalization is not
just an inexorable economic process is the military apparatus and coercion
necessary to maintain and enforce it. Along with the development of
globalization has come constant, multiple wars; military fleets and bases all
over the world. Militarism is the dead-give-away that decisions, not
determinism operate the system.
So what exactly is globalization?
Despite the mountains of theoretical treatises that make it unintelligible, it
is the same thing as neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism. The
system is chaotic, irrational, and in constant internal conflict, but the
agencies of international capitalism—like the IMF, World Bank, and GATT—have a
matrix of policies from which they operate in order to manage the system. These
agencies are systematically, and using repression against popular opposition,
restructuring the system to alter the relationship between the ruling
oligarchies and the working class (to the immense disadvantage of working
people) and between the richest nations and the plundered nations (to the
immense disadvantage of working people in the poorest countries). It’s a
restructuring to disempower the international working class and reduce it to
beggary.
What are the features of this
restructuring? It is truly important to understand them from an international
perspective because being provincial in our understanding leads to “chickens
coming home to roost” writ large. First and foremost, globalization means the
widespread development of sweatshop economics in the plundered countries,
justified over and over again as economically necessary by economists and
journalists like Krugman, Friedman, and Kristof who are the minions of
oligarchy and do not speak for working people, most emphatically not for
sweatshop workers.
Globalization means monopolization,
particularly in agriculture where five multinational enterprises now control
the entire world food supply. It means industrial farming and plantations which
backed by the IMF, World Bank, and national capitalist regimes forcibly
expropriate hundreds of thousands of small farmers, rural workers, and
indigenous tribes who are forced to migrate to urban slums or other countries
for work. This has led to the most massive human immigration crises since World
War II—even before the refugee crises from Africa and the Middle East.
Globalization means multinational
enterprises forcibly expropriating indigenous tribes to build hydroelectric
dams and to strip mine for natural minerals with reckless disregard and which
contaminate and destroy the environment. It means deforestation projects, one
of the main factors which lead to climate change. It means violent political
repression, especially of indigenous tribes who resist expropriation and
environmental destruction. It means the cultural destruction and social
cohesion of peoples all over this world on every continent in the interests of
private profit. It means fostering
ethnic conflicts and genocide to justify military intervention.
Globalization means repressing and
undercutting adult labor and promoting more easily bullied and exploited child
labor. It means eliminating social services for working people like public
education, healthcare, pensions, and privatizing sanitation, access to clean
water, and waste management. It means population control programs which are a
disguised form of racist eugenics. It means the growth of urban slums and
general unemployment—or employment picking through mountains of toxic trash to
earn pennies per day. The more you examine globalization, the harder it becomes
to distinguish from colonialism. It is, in fact, a modern form of it.
The internet has been an indispensable
tool for globalization and that plus military purposes is primarily why it was
developed. There is a very useful body of literature on that subject. Market
conditions, capital transfers, political reports, weather reports, surveillance
photos, communications of all sorts can be done in an instant where previously
it could take days or weeks. What wasn’t intended was that the internet would
become so powerful a tool for the oppressed and for reporting the news from
around the world that ‘wasn’t fit to print.’ That’s a feature of globalization
the power elite didn’t count on and which interferes with their management
schemes.
If globalization is the management and
restructuring of capitalism at our expense, we can intervene into that process
on behalf of our own interests, to advance the cause of working people. That
does not mean opposing sweatshop economics because what we consider our jobs
are outsourced to other countries and we want to bring them back home. It means
joining forces with working people around the world—and developing the
organizations necessary to implement that—to guarantee workers’ rights, safe
working conditions, union-scale wages, and the end of child labor for working
people everywhere, with no second-class status for the poorer countries and no
phony solidarity at their expense.
There is no way out from under the
scourge of neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism, that tries to short
circuit the imperative of international solidarity with working people
everywhere. That is the sine qua non of social transformation involving
opposition to war, military occupation, and support for immigration/refugee
rights. The fight for democratic rights, including free speech and the right of
assembly is fundamental to that struggle.
Working people have a daunting historic
mission but it is possible and necessary if we want our children to come of age
in a world suitable for human beings to live and love in.
[MARY SCULLY]
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