So what is required? More Globalisation?

The World's poor, on the sharp end of Globalisation, are clearly suffering and the inequities of rapid Globalisation have been patently nightmarish. Globalisation has not provided a gap to allow them to strengthen their weak institutions in response. But is it right to emphasise the pernicious negatives in relation to the positives? A Marxist* might say that an acceleration of Capitalism would quicker bring about it's demise, particularly when it runs up against the limits of environmental sustainability. Also, as Negri would attest, Globalisation brings forth it's own opposition, a new politics that seeks to reform the world's institutions; a bottom-up Globalisation that forms a coherent resistance to it's worst aspects. Of course, this would constitute some sort of massive labour to ensure a universality of rights and more even distribution of wealth. Surely, that's a call for a new positive collectivity in the face of the destruction of previous collective structures. Or is that a wildly ambitious stretch?

Obviously, I can see many of the diffculties in discussing Globalisation (capitalism without a centre) come from the fact that is a process of different speeds and is currently set against a backdrop of the retrenchment of the Nation State (control of oil markets through the invasion of Iraq, China's ability to lift it's citizens out of poverty by strictly controlling it's markets, barriers against labour mobility whilst there is broader liberalization of world trade...etc,.).

*a hypothetical Marxist.

Cranius wrote:So what is required? More Globalisation?

The World's poor, on the sharp end of Globalisation, are clearly suffering and the inequities of rapid Globalisation have been patently nightmarish. Globalisation has not provided a gap to allow them to strengthen their weak institutions in response.

I don't agree with this account. Partly because the concept of gap or lag is misleading. Structural Adjustment policies (neoliberalism in action) and much "third world" aid were mechanisms for dismantling public infrastructure and institutions and the privatization of what might otherwise be called the commons. David Harvey has termed such practices "accumulation by dispossesion." And the chief organs of SA - the World Bank and IMF - are not at all examples of decentralized capitalism. They're dominated by American state/corporate interests, in fact. Another issue with the concept of a gap is that it draws on developmentalist and stadial discourses of history which make me uncomfortable. Conversely, talk of a gap doesn't account for the relations of unequal exchange and exploitation through which such conditions of poverty are inextricable from - and in some though not all cases the very ground for - those of wealth and affluence.

But is it right to emphasise the pernicious negatives in relation to the positives? A Marxist* might say that an acceleration of Capitalism would quicker bring about it's demise, particularly when it runs up against the limits of environmental sustainability.

That would be what's called a "vulgar Marxist" though, right? One who buys into the kind of determinism associated with the long discredited 2nd International. As "disaster capitalism" attests, collapse, catastrophe, and scarcity are no impediment to capitalism as yet. Quite the contrary. Capitalism learns to feed on its own contradictions. I don't subscribe to the idea that the penetration of capital deeper and further into all realms of existence is a boon for our post-capitalist futures. For most people, it's much easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. It's hard to see the immanent potential in such circumstances.

Also, as Negri would attest, Globalisation brings forth it's own opposition, a new politics that seeks to reform the world's institutions; a bottom-up Globalisation that forms a coherent resistance to it's worst aspects.

Negri aside, the sticky words above are "new politics" and "coherent." "New politics" tends to signify a post-solidarity politics devoid of organization and lacking the will to take or transform state power (and not w/o good reason, given the terrible results of so many postcolonial nationalisms, of identity politics, etc.). Faith in such "new politics," however, disavows the persistence of state power in mediating between "the global" and "the local," in being that simultaneously bullying and legitimating mediator of capital, on one hand, and that public shield, bulwark, and safety net, on the other. Negri's para-Spinozist mythopoetics of "the multitude" is, in general, difficult to take seriously.

Of course, this would constitute some sort of massive labour to ensure a universality of rights and more even distribution of wealth. Surely, that's a call for a new positive collectivity in the face of the destruction of previous collective structures. Or is that a wildly ambitious stretch?

But rights discourse is predicated on the nation-state as its guarantor. If one is advocating a politics that disavows taking or transforming state power, rights discourse is a symptom of impotence and incoherence as much as ambition. There is a demand for adequate health care for all human beings in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, for example, but it is nonetheless functionally irrelevant.

To get back to your point about sustainability though, David Graeber (an anarchist anthropologist) put things this way in a recent letter to the LRB:

[C]apitalism will not be around for ever. An engine of infinite expansion and accumulation cannot, by definition, continue for ever in a finite world. Now that India and China are buying in as full players, it seems reasonable to assume that within fifty years at most, the system will hit its physical limits. Whatever we end up with at that point, it will not be a system of infinite expansion. It will not be capitalism; it will be something else. However, there is no guarantee that this something will be better. It might be considerably worse.

I'm skeptical of his time frame, but it's clear that green capitalism is only making things worse: both in terms of throwing a life line to current (unsustainable) habits of consumption (rather than a move away from them) and in terms of scarcity, soil depletion, etc (e.g., supplanting agri-industrial food production - itself a problem - with something worse: the global biofuel industry). Thisis one of my favorite examples of green capitalism in action. Meanwhile, the quality of life in the West is also negatively impacted by globalization in important ways.... longer work days, declining class mobility, incredible insecurity, etc.

30 or 40 years of neoliberal restructuring have lead many to what is technically a reactionary desire for a return to the Keynesian welfare state. I see this play out in a few different ways. On one hand, it puts ostensibly progressive, left-Labor political parties and politicians in the awkward position of effectively calling for a return to "the way things used to be" (sometimes aligned with a nostalgia for a productivist industrial economy). Moving toward the center, many socially conscious people who essentially believe in capitalism but believe it must be constrained by civil society (i.e., liberals) have no trouble with critiques of "neoliberalism," where they balk at critiques of capitalism itself. Thus, we find ourselves in a strange time when radical left currents have seldom been less visible, yet when such currents seem the only positions desirous neither to turn back the clock to an earlier capitalism nor to affirm the ruthless, emergent one.

And you know, buses run, high rises go up, new movies come out. The world looks just fine to a lot of people. And I agree that globalization is not without its great pleasures and emergent potentialities - kind of in the sense of Marshall Berman's take on modernity. It's the precondition for who we are, and thus difficult to refute or reject wholesale. Dialectical thought is out of style, but I still think there's something to be said for the challenge of thinking about capitalism as - simultaneously - a condition of increasing possibility and one of intractable, deepening horror and unfreedom.



(Meanwhile, Rick, I'm not piqued by your clownish bullshit, including your implicit demand that I defend myself against your dumb accusations)

I fancy globalisation. I am looking forward to a non-superpower 'Merica that can collectively assess her priorities and become more like Jolly Ol'.

Let China run this motherfucker stat, thanks please.

Rick Reuben wrote:

Andrew. wrote:(Meanwhile, Rick, I'm not piqued by your clownish bullshit, including your implicit demand that I defend myself against your dumb accusations)

Okay. When I have a little time, I'll dig up a bunch of quotes from you where you support every leg of the globalist agenda, and then you can run away from your own words.

I've just told you directly I don't give a shit. And that, of course, has compelled you to commence one of your Great, Obsessive-Compulsive Personal Attack campaigns. If you weren't you, you would realize that my utter indifference puts me in a position of complete superiority to your pathetic investment in virtual shit-slinging. Happy searching, de-contextualizing, misappropriating, etc, etc. Godspeed. I for one won't read any of it.

To the Andrews: thoughtful work, good writing.

Given the extent and entrenchment of globalisation, I'm more leaning towards this positive/subversive interaction with the phenomenon that Cranius seems to be describing. How, Buddha knows. But, aside from the real possibility of complete, global catastrophe (rather than the millions of daily personal catastrophes that we're currently shielded from), this system is not going to fail or shift in one revolutionary leap.

Vague thoughts, but the past few weeks in India have forced a sort of determined confusion on me - it is either that or pure terror. Which leads me back to one of the more incisive and chilling paragraphs that I've read on this forum:

Andrew. wrote:And you know, buses run, high rises go up, new movies come out. The world looks just fine to a lot of people. And I agree that globalization is not without its great pleasures and emergent potentialities - kind of in the sense of Marshall Berman's take on modernity. It's the precondition for who we are, and thus difficult to refute or reject wholesale. Dialectical thought is out of style, but I still think there's something to be said for the challenge of thinking about capitalism as - simultaneously - a condition of increasing possibility and one of intractable, deepening horror and unfreedom.

I cannot disagree, but as I said, it is too a gruesome sight to behold without blinking.

I think the biggest problem with globalization is the deceptive, corrupt and backhanded manor its being advanced...

Personally I prefer 'bottom up' decentralized forms of 'globalization' which empower the individual and remove inequality and class divisions, like the internet, wikipedia etc, over the 'top down' centralized forms of globalization by a bunch of inbred oil barons and railroad tycoons...

David Rockefeller, Dick Cheney & CFR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9NAlYt9920

Robert Anton Wilson wrote:"Frankly, I'd find life a bore if I weren't playing for very high stakes in a very high risk situation. We do have the chance now, for Utopia and even for immortality. If we who see this opportunity aren't smart enough, adroit enough, and fast enough to seize the chance, then we don't deserve to initiate the next stage of evolution... Meanwhile, until they shovel me under, I still think our side is winning and that the power brokers that you worry about are a bunch of dying dinosaurs."

"We should always try to have a reality-tunnel this week, bigger, funnier, and more hopeful than we had last week, and we should aim even higher next week. Besides, paranoia is a Loser script; it defines somebody else as being in charge around here except me. I prefer to define myself and my friends as the architects of the future. If David Rockefeller has the same idea about himself and his friends, well, the future itself will decide which coalition was really on the Evolutionary Wave: the Money people or the Idea people"

This could turn into something interesting

http://www.forbes.com/markets/feeds/afx ... 03065.html

Or it could turn out to be really really boring.

Doesn't the miniscule principality (is it a country?) of Liechtenstein get accidentally invaded every few years by the Swiss army, fumbling and jabbing with those multi-utility blades they keep next to their cheese pouches?

Thanks for the thoughtful and sober repsonse, Andrew. It's given me a lot of to meaningfully consider.

Andrew. wrote:I don't agree with this account. Partly because the concept of gap or lag is misleading. Structural Adjustment policies (neoliberalism in action) and much "third world" aid were mechanisms for dismantling public infrastructure and institutions and the privatization of what might otherwise be called the commons. David Harvey has termed such practices "accumulation by dispossesion." And the chief organs of SA - the World Bank and IMF - are not at all examples of decentralized capitalism. They're dominated by American state/corporate interests, in fact. Another issue with the concept of a gap is that it draws on developmentalist and stadial discourses of history which make me uncomfortable. Conversely, talk of a gap doesn't account for the relations of unequal exchange and exploitation through which such conditions of poverty are inextricable from - and in some though not all cases the very ground for - those of wealth and affluence.

I can't argue with that. The modern-day enclosure of these commons has really prepared the ground for the wholesale misery of many. And structural adjustment, with the help of opportunistic, undemocratic NGO's (indiscernible from corporations) has only really operated on behalf of the most powerful Nation States. But the Nation State itself has also been threatened by the escape of capital to a global scale and has definitely seen a decline of sorts. And in response globalisation has opened up a new social space of its own, but this, as you say, may only be symptomatic of it's processes.

What globalisation has done is throw into sharp relief the fundamental nature of State's most miserable functions (its desire subordinate and exploit its own populations, to marshal its citizens to war and to concentrate it's own power, the "coils of the serpent"). Moreover the Nation State still seems to be the biggest obstacle to wider solidarities. But I take your point on why it's not necessarily desirable or right to circumvent reform of the nation state, given it's dual operations (the mediation of capital and defense against it).

That would be what's called a "vulgar Marxist" though, right? One who buys into the kind of determinism associated with the long discredited 2nd International. As "disaster capitalism" attests, collapse, catastrophe, and scarcity are no impediment to capitalism as yet. Quite the contrary. Capitalism learns to feed on its own contradictions. I don't subscribe to the idea that the penetration of capital deeper and further into all realms of existence is a boon for our post-capitalist futures. For most people, it's much easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. It's hard to see the immanent potential in such circumstances.

I agree. The historical inevitability of the marxist project has never been assured and is in someways it's own obstacle (Negri is perhaps over-invested in this area). And the agility and endless recombinatory modes of capitalism are not to be under-estimated. You seem to say that a slowing down, perhaps brought about by environmental sustainability, will eventually check the excesses of capitalism as it stands. Is that right? That the material constraints of the ecosystem will have the final say?

30 or 40 years of neoliberal restructuring have lead many to what is technically a reactionary desire for a return to the Keynesian welfare state. I see this play out in a few different ways. On one hand, it puts ostensibly progressive, left-Labor political parties and politicians in the awkward position of effectively calling for a return to "the way things used to be" (sometimes aligned with a nostalgia for a productivist industrial economy). Moving toward the center, many socially conscious people who essentially believe in capitalism but believe it must be constrained by civil society (i.e., liberals) have no trouble with critiques of "neoliberalism," where they balk at critiques of capitalism itself. Thus, we find ourselves in a strange time when radical left currents have seldom been less visible, yet when such currents seem the only positions desirous neither to turn back the clock to an earlier capitalism nor to affirm the ruthless, emergent one.

Yes, I can intuitively grasp this impasse and the doubt that comes from it...(my own doubts about the immanent potential of the 'joyful' mutlitude).

Cranius wrote:You seem to say that a slowing down, perhaps brought about by environmental sustainability, will eventually check the excesses of capitalism as it stands. Is that right? That the material constraints of the ecosystem will have the final say?

Without a real, effective, movement to check the march of neo-conservatism this is bound to be the case.
As far as I can see the result however will be an ever increasing spiral down into bloodier and bloodier wars of resource scarcity.


And I am not trying to be as inflammatory as Rick but I do fail to see how any movement that would attempt to check the march of neo-conservatism could do so without identifying it's agents.
From what I have gathered of what both yourself and Andrew have said you see the problem as a free floating system uncontrolled and unsponsored by anyone or any group.

Perhaps I'm wrong - in which case could you try and identify some agents or organisations that could be accused of developing, prolonging the appalling record of the neo cons?

I'm not asking that you agree with those who Rick might identify. But would you identify anyone (or any group (s)) or not?

Earwicker wrote:

Cranius wrote:You seem to say that a slowing down, perhaps brought about by environmental sustainability, will eventually check the excesses of capitalism as it stands. Is that right? That the material constraints of the ecosystem will have the final say?

Without a real, effective, movement to check the march of neo-conservatism this is bound to be the case.
As far as I can see the result however will be an ever increasing spiral down into bloodier and bloodier wars of resource scarcity.

Well, full-spectrum technological dominance of the battlefield has not guaranteed victory for the US (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan). The problem that any dominant power has is that, despite overwhelming and fearsome weaponry, the capacity to hold and maintain resources is weak. Wars of the future will not be able to be won in the sense that that we've previously understood. And as we have seen, the neo-con project seems to have faltered pretty early on this century, despite what the PNAC might desire.

(I do believe it is possible to seperate neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism)

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how the problem of resource scarcity will play out, but a pragmatism towards the problem will have to be arrived at (it seems to be of rising importance globally). We are slowly becoming ecologically minded and governments are beginning to face up to that. Whether they are doing so in good faith is another matter. Green capitalism sounds like disastrous folly to me; invariably it seems to fuel consumption and environmental destruction, conveniently assuaging our guilt at the same time.

And I am not trying to be as inflammatory as Rick but I do fail to see how any movement that would attempt to check the march of neo-conservatism could do so without identifying it's agents.

Neo-Conservatism has apparently checked itself, I'd say.

I'm not sure that the naming of the agents is that effective when it's the reform of systems, particularly the least democratic ones, such as the IMF, WTO and World Bank--which have historically engineered markets to allowed global capital to operate as smoothly as possible. More transparency and democracy would be a start.

From what I have gathered of what both yourself and Andrew have said you see the problem as a free floating system uncontrolled and unsponsored by anyone or any group.

Perhaps I'm wrong - in which case could you try and identify some agents or organisations that could be accused of developing, prolonging the appalling record of the neo cons?

Sure there is a whole planopy of interconnected private power systems, but capital and it's operations transcend them all. If you remove one hierarchy, another can easily take it's place. That's why the holistic critique of capital is vital. The naming of individuals is not an effective approach in my book.

I'm not asking that you agree with those who [...] might identify. But would you identify anyone (or any group (s)) or not?

At a push...off the top of my head...the US military-industrial complex is a massive block to the prosperity and self-determination of others. It's a matrix of power so enmeshed in the US political system, I can't envisage it being dismantled...except by some sort of monumental internal effort.