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The Prospects for Future Social Movements After the Consolidation of Globalization By
Thomas J. Wheat For Sociology 1 Submitted to Professor D. Paolson Historically, in America, early social movements developed out of the alleged immorality of exploitation in regards to Christian ideals of egalitarian souls before God. Later that ideology translated into a humanist value of the equality of human potential irrespective of race and gender. Examples of early movements based on such moralism as being the predecessor and required impetus for social change were the abolition movement, women's movement, and early Union movements. The Crest of social movements came during the 60's and seventies. Liberal humanist social movements could be directed at easily identifiable foes or maladies to social progress. These being institutional racism, sexism and War waged solely out of ideology that lacked popular national consent. In short the Social movements of these times could be easily differentiated between who was the progressive and who was essentially the bigot. Today the picture for social change has become more abstract, and conceptualized by the ideology of interdependent globalization. The view is a pessimistic one i.e., its all been done before, and its best to carve out your own niche, rather than demand for real substantive change. Political and Economic factors have further complicated the situation as well in which the agenda of neo-liberal free trade has uprooted the source of traditional culture of localized protest from an identifiable regional or national cause to an interdependent faceless global system of which few people other than the members of the IMF and the World Bank have any control. Whole nations are now subservient to the will of international banking institutions including the United States. Globalization and the weekly grind of work has eroded the base of popular support for any further social movement, because more people have more or less become wedded to the system by necessity. Evidence for this can be seen in the decline of Labor Union membership, small business, US manufacturing and the increase of those employed by large transnational service oriented corporations. Transnational corporations also indoctrinate and demand ideological uniformity of belief among all their employees, and such a practice is discreetly used as a means of leverage on the moral inclinations of individual employees. These corporations largely do not sell a product rather a service, which makes it difficult for the employee to gauge or collectively bargain for the true economic worth of the service rendered. Social movements of the past 60 years have historically relied on a strong manufacturing base of free workers, who had relatively some collective bargaining power. The Civil rights movement of the 50’s and sixties was sustained by the massive increase of manufacturing jobs created from the mass production required to sustain and win WWII. The post war economic surplus allowed those who previously had no chance for class mobility to join the ranks of the middleclass. In the fifties and sixties one could still be blue collar trained and have middle class comforts. In the present day and age as a direct result of globalization, America lost 40% of its manufacturing base to countries such as China and Mexico. To some extent this is also the cause of the American Public’s anomie toward social change since a good deal of these changes it is believed have been wrought upon the workforce by Corporations as gradual long term reprisals for demanding better working conditions and wages. With the erosion of manufacturing union jobs the remaining US labor market has little relative collective bargaining power. In the process these global corporations have facilitated the process of manufactured consent for the status quo, i.e., the corporate agenda—the biggest bang for the smallest corporate buck. Go against the company line and you lose your identity as a worker. To complicate this process further is the effect of new technology on manufacturing and on the economy as a whole. The process of automation and deskilling has rendered many well paying specialized fields obsolete and the replacements are low paying low skill and heavily repetitious jobs. According to Tessa Morris-Suzuki,[1] in her book, “Robots and Capitalism,” such a system translates into a “paradox of contemporary capitalism.” Increased technology will essentially make the average worker obsolete. Strangely, Economic theory posits that Technology as a product of innovation increases the means by which societal living standards and working conditions and productivity are improved with the arrival of more efficient tools, capable of rendering a sufficient surplus for trade, profit and expansion. In reality the techno-information revolution has been a mixed blessing. On the one hand an Internet of vast free flowing information was created and on the other the transfer from old file and retrieval systems to paperless, digital storage devices has rendered whole fields of employment as obsolete without equally sufficient replacement. Now that Corporations have made the move to entirely digital filing systems, the technological boom of Silicon Valley has largely gone bust. The evidence for this is that the NASDAQ has lost 60% of its value since 2000. Thus, the information age created the digital divide of which the former was entirely an outgrowth of globalization. In identifying globalization one would be confronted with an abstract paradox that while globalization, and interconnected global information networks constituted a form of social revolution they also dramatically redefined the accessibility to the knowledge acquiescence required to access those newly created informational knowledge structures, --rather pithy to the few. Essentially a whole new elite centered information discourse and language was created. The benefits touted by the techno-information boom were short term for the worker and in the long term favored the corporate third world carpetbagger. Profits were no longer derived locally or regionally rather globally. In essence after civil rights, and hippies, social movements termed morally or environmentally progressive have entered a period of stasis. According to Thomas Friedman, This phenomenon has occurred in part due to the economic Golden Straight Jacket. Essentially, according to Thomas Friedman in his book, “The Lexus and the Olive Tree," all social movements are created by economic development and expansion of which globalization is just the next epic level of our civilization. In his book he correlates his idea of the golden straight jacket, with the idea of the Electronic Herd. According to Friedman since the Fall of Communism and the Berlin Wall traditional East West conflicts have given away to somewhat forced global economic integration in the Name of the Electronic Herd. “"The Electronic Herd is made up of all the
faceless stock, bond and currency trades sitting behind computer screens
all over the globe, moving their money around from mutual funds to
pension funds to emerging market funds, or trading on the Internet from
their basements. And it also consists of the big multinational
corporations who now spread their factories around the world, constantly
shifting them to the most efficient, low-cost producers. This herd has
grown exponentially thanks to the democratizations of finance,
technology and information -- so much so that today it is beginning to
replace governments as the primary source of capital for both companies
and countries to grow. Indeed, as countries increasingly have to run
balanced budgets to fit into the Golden Straitjacket, their economies
become ever more dependent on the Electronic Herd for growth capital. So
to thrive in today's globalization system a country not only has to put
on the Golden Straightjacket, it has to join this Electronic Herd. The
Electronic Herd loves the Golden Straitjacket, because it embodies all
the liberal, free-market rules the herd wants to see in a country. Those
countries that put on the Golden Straitjacket and keep it on are
rewarded by the herd with investment capital. Those that don't put it on
are disciplined by the herd -- either by the herd avoiding or
withdrawing its money from their country... This interaction among the
Electronic Herd, nation-states and the Golden Straightjacket is at the
center of today's globalization system." (p. 109-110) In a parallel perspective, According to Samuel Huntington, book the “Clash of Civilizations”[2] Globalization entails an initial clash of civilizations, the rise of third world nationalism towards the perceived imposition of western material culture upon native tribal culture. In this essence the anomie of Americans towards social change is a form of the anomie of terrorists who see America as upsetting the natural economic and cultural balance of their society. According to a Conference paper published by the RAND Corporation, future social movements will be framed in the context of globalization. The paper argues that while the democratization of information has occurred there will be an increasing economic gap between the rich and poor. While the paper argues that major forms of social protest will not likely come from the US or North America, protest and resistance will come in the form of nationalism from the third world especially from the Middle East as a direct response to the movement for globalization. In my view there will also be a tendency on the part of governments to equate future American protest against the unequal or economically uneven aspects of globalization as being equivalent to silent support for terrorist action. While for many American protestors this is definitely not the case. This new ideology will be a challenge to future social protests, and movements in America since the focus of protest as well as US government policy has adapted in response to regional economic antagonisms now being made part of global antagonisms. In reality, our government is wedded to globalization and to a certain extent our elites have benefited most from the global-information revolution. In order for future social movements to be successful in addressing the challenges posed by globalization it will be necessary for them to adapt the institutional structures of the new techno-information age since the one benefit of this new age has been increased access to information and ideas. Online Bibliography The Global Course of the Information Revolution: Political, Economic,
and Social Consequences Proceedings of an International Conference,
Richard O. Hundley, Robert H. Anderson, Tora K. Bikson, James A. Dewar,
Jerrold Green, Martin Libicki, and C. Richard Neu, CF-154-NIC, 2000 http://www.cia.gov/nic/pubs/research_supported_by_nic/cf/cf154/
The study was prepared for the National Intelligence Council under the
auspices of RAND's National
Defense Research Institute Friedman, Thomas, L. “The Lexus and the Olive Tree:
Understanding Globalization,” Author’s
Website: http://www.lexusandtheolivetree.com/ Selected Quotes available @ http://www.glreach.com/eng/ed/art/rep-eur22.php3
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