| The human costs involved in sustained pressure aimed at countries to submit to the western economic model through the process of globalization. By Bryan Carter The protests throughout the country, in places like Washington, District of Columbia and Seattle, Washington are a reflection of a growing trend in the new millennium. Activism and dissension are again on the rise after a long hiatus here in the United States. The people protesting are concerned about the trend toward globalization that they have seen unfolding in the last several decades. I will explain my theories on globalization and what they may mean to humanity in the near future. I will attempt to answer another, perhaps more ominous question: Is the world�s present, prevalent capitalist system compatible with global democracy? Globalization is a complicated process. The best place to start is an attempt at a definition. The Webster�s new world dictionary defines it as organizing or establishing something worldwide. The people of Chiapas, Mexico are familiar with a more expanded definition of the process. Their government is attempting to throw them, as a people, to the wayside because they are viewed as a blight on the national economic landscape, a problem that won�t go away. The Chiapas based Zapatista Army�s Subcommandante Marcos has a pretty plausible theory on globalization: �At the intercontinental encounter for humanity and against neo-liberalism we said: a global decomposition is taking place, we call it the fourth world war. Neo-liberalism: the global economic process to eliminate that multitude of people who are not useful to the powerful- the groups called �minorities� in the mathematics of power, but who happen to be the majority population in the world. We find ourselves in a world system of globalization willing to sacrifice millions of human beings. The giant communications media: The great monsters of the television industry, the communications satellites, magazines, and newspapers seem determined to present a virtual world, created in the image of what the globalization process requires.� In the case of his country, he says the process works like this: �We have spoken of three Mexicos, and the businessmen have spoken about three Mexicos: the North works, the South sleeps and the Center consumes what the North produces, they say something like that. We said: the North is being absorbed, the Center is being fought over, and the South has been forgotten." So that is the most extreme view. In Marcos�s eyes, Globalization prefers certain groups to others. It basically pits the powerful against the �minority� majority. An extreme view, perhaps, but one that is representative of the opinions of many indigenous peoples through out the world. Marcos mentions neo-liberalism here, and I think that it�s an important concept to define in relation to the globalization process. Simply put, liberalism is an ideology that encompasses both politics and economics. Academic Paul Treanor says that Neo-liberalism has become an end in itself: �Neo-liberalism defined. Often the word is used for global market-liberalism (�capitalism�)��� Neo-liberalism is a philosophy in which the existence and operation of a market are valued in themselves, separately from any previous relationship with the production of goods and services, and without any attempt to justify them in terms of their effect on the production of goods and services; and where the operation of a market or market-like structure is seen as an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action, and substituting for all previously existing ethical beliefs.��� Liberals define liberalism itself as �freedom�: therefore few of them think consent is required for the imposition of a liberal society. In fact, most would say it cannot be an "imposition". After the Cold War this belief has acquired a geostrategic significance: many western liberal-democrats now believe that a war to impose a liberal-democratic society is �Just���Liberals believe in formal equality among participants in a liberal society, but almost all liberals also believe in inequality of talent. Many liberals were therefore sympathetic to biological theories of inequality. (Theories of hereditary racial differences in intelligence are now popular among US neoliberals).���Liberals are hostile to economic self-sufficiency - so strongly, that they believed in war to �open up markets�. The most famous example is the Opium War, when Britain forced the Chinese Empire to allow the import of opium. This liberal belief in market expansionism has revived after the end of the Cold War.�� �Without the entrepreneur there is no free market, therefore market liberals demand a privileged social status for the entrepreneur.���This preference of liberals, and its widespread acceptance, has created what in the US is called "the business community". A real and identifiable social elite, with specific cultural preferences, specific clothing, and often specific language use (sociolect) does in fact control the economy in liberal-democratic states. Although this was probably not foreseen by early liberals, market liberalism has become an ideology in support of this elite. Their culture, attitudes, and ethics, have greatly influenced neo-liberalism.���For neoliberals it is not sufficient that there is a market: there must be nothing which is not market.���Summarizing neo-liberalism: -transaction maximalisation -maximalisation of volume of transactions (global flows) -contract maximalisation -supplier/contractor maximalisation -conversion of a maximum of social acts into market transactions -artificial maximalisation of competition and stress -creation of quasi-markets - reduction of inter-transaction interval -maximalisation of parties to each transaction -maximalisation of reach and effect of each transaction -maximalisation of hire/fire transactions in the labour market (nominal turnover) -maximalisation of assessment factors -reduction of inter-assessment interval -creation of artificial assessment norms (�audit society�)� An example of this artificial maximization of stress is illustrated by Dr. Michael Parenti�s example of General Motors: �Transnationals have developed a global production line. General Motors has factories that produce cars, trucks, and a wide range of auto components in Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, Spain, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Nigeria, Singapore, Philippines, South Africa, South Korea, and a dozen other countries. Such �Multiple sourcing� enables GM to ride out strikes in one country by stepping up production in another, playing workers of various nations against one another in order to discourage wage and benefit demands and undermine labor union strategies.� But, here at home, transnational corporations would have us diminish federal power in favor of a more easily manipulated individual state system. They propagate this myth to throw attention away from themselves and to seem wholesome, against �Big Government�, while at the same time working to turn our planet into one big going out of business sale. |