Globalization is a spatio-temporal process and ‘the transtionalization of capitalism, interconnected to world economic system’ . Gayatri Spivak uses the concept of ‘globe girdling’ to denote the sense that the world is shrunk and all parts will become the same. The role of the nation state, democracy, power relations and the binary logic of homogenization and heterogeneity of culture are being questioned and reconfigured. This paper attempts to provide a framework for understanding the way globalization has reshaped the terrain and parameters of social, economic and political relations both at the national and global levels, and exerted pressure on the resiliency capacities of capitalism. It will also stress on how global capitalism, in turn, have brought a myriad of inequalities in the increase of income inequality both among and within nations, in high chronic levels of unemployment in Western Europe and elsewhere, and, most of all, in the devastating consequences of unregulated financial flows.
ABSTRACT:
Globalization is a spatio-temporal process[1] and ‘the transtionalization of capitalism, interconnected to world economic system’[2]. Gayatri Spivak uses the concept of ‘globe girdling’ to denote the sense that the world is shrunk and all parts will become the same. The role of the nation state, democracy, power relations and the binary logic of homogenization and heterogeneity of culture are being questioned and reconfigured. This paper attempts to provide a framework for understanding the way globalization has reshaped the terrain and parameters of social, economic and political relations both at the national and global levels, and exerted pressure on the resiliency capacities of capitalism. It will also stress on how global capitalism, in turn, have brought a myriad of inequalities in the increase of income inequality both among and within nations, in high chronic levels of unemployment in Western Europe and elsewhere, and, most of all, in the devastating consequences of unregulated financial flows.
INTRODUCTION:
Definition of Globalisation:
Maybe it is not really possible, at least not in the foreseeable future (…) to undermine the global capitalist system because we cannot imagine any alternative to it.[3] (ˇZiˇzek, 1999: 352)
Globalization involves a stretching of social, political and economic activities across political frontiers, regions and continents. It suggests the intensification, or the growing magnitude, of interconnectedness i.e. flows of trade, investment, finance, migration, culture and so on. The growing extensity and intensity of global interconnectedness can be linked to a speeding up of global interactions and processes, as the evolution of world-wide systems of transport, and communication increases the velocity of the diffusion of ideas, goods, information, capital and people. The growing extensity, intensity and velocity of global interactions is associated with their deepening impact such that the effects of distant events can be highly significant elsewhere and even the most local developments may come to have enormous global consequences. In this sense, the boundaries between domestic matters and global affairs become increasingly blurred (McGraw 2000)[4]. Globalization is not just a spatial or scalar phenomenon; it is also temporal. It is best studied in terms of differential articulation of time-space distantiation and time space compression and their repercussions on power relations and social dynamics.
Global Capitalism – An Ideological Facade of Imperialism?
Today no one can dismiss the fantastic concentration of power that is embodied in what are called financial markets, dominated by exchange speculation. With the advance of globalization, those markets are now the most profitable. Therefore, and increasingly, the distribution of world income responds to virtual operations performed in the financial sector. This is the clearest manifestation of an emerging reality well described as global capitalism, the precursor of a future world system of power[5]. Fukuyama (1992)[6] admires globalization as the triumph of capitalism and its market economy, and Friedman (1999, 2006)[7] welcomes a ‘flattening’ and fibre-optic global world with unbounded enthusiasm. Even if we ignore these popular triumphalists who defend a globalizing world as united, it is a harsh reality that the economic logic of contemporary capitalism penetrates every corner of human life across the globe. Already in the middle of the nineteenth century, Marx predicted a global move toward unconstrained capitalist expansion:
All that is solid melts into air [...]. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. [...] In one word, it creates a world after its own image. (Marx and Engels, [1848] 1998: 38–40)[8]
Historically, Marxist critics have defined globalization as the developed countries and multinationals’ imperialist expansion ‘without colonies’ (Magdoff, 2003)[9] through absorbing surplus from the so-called ‘third world’ and thus undermining its technological, political, economic, cultural conditions. Confronting the age of imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a revolutionary Marxist like Lenin ([1916] 1969)[10] sees the colonialist mechanism of dominance in terms of the rise of monopoly and the export of capital abroad. Luxemburg ([1913] 2003)[11] posits the birth of imperialism in the capitalist need for surplus outlets in non-capitalist formations. Globalization represents an ideological facade that camouflages the manifold operations of imperialism. In fact, the concept of globalization has effectively replaced the term imperialism in the lexicon of the privileged class for the purpose of exaggerating the global character of capitalism—as an all-encompassing and indefatigable power that apparently no nation-state has the means to resist or oppose[12]. Furthermore, it deceitfully suggests that capitalism is no longer dependent on the nation state. This position occludes the fact that a large portion of production in Western European countries takes place within national boundaries. Moreover, the globalization thesis maintains that whereas state power can be used in the interests of the large multinational corporations, it cannot be employed in the interest of the working class.
Global capitalism weakens national states through its adverse impact on their claims to time sovereignty as well as to territorial sovereignty. In the early 1970s, Stephen Hymer noted that “an international capitalist class is emerging whose interests lie in the world economy as a whole and a system of inter-national private property which allows free movement of capital between countries . . . there is a strong tendency for the most powerful segments of the capitalist class increasingly to see their future in the further growth of the world market rather than its curtailment” (Hymer, 1979, 262)[13]. Globalization involves an “epochal shift” in the development of the world capitalist system (Burbach and Robinson, 1999)[14]. Specifically, it represents the transition from the nation-state phase to a new transnational phase of capitalism. In the nation state phase, the world was linked together via commodity and financial flows in an integrated international market. In the new phase, the worldwide social linkage is an internal one springing from the globalization of the production process itself and the supranational integration of national productive structures[15]. Globalization therefore redefines the relation between production and territoriality, between nation-states, economic institutions and social structures.
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[1] Held, D. and McGrew, A. (eds) (2007) Globalization Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press
[2] Gregory Jusdanis in Lazarus, Neil. Charting Globalisation.
[3] ˇZiˇzek, S. (1999), The Ticklish Subject: the Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London: Verso.
[4] Held, David / Anthony McGRAW. 2000: The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate. Polity Press.
[5] Jameson, F. 1991. Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso.
Harvey, D. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell.
[6] Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press.
[7] Friedman, T. L. (2006) The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. New York:
Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
[8] Marx, K. and F. Engels ([1848] 1998) The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition. London: Verso.
[9] Magdoff, H. (2003) Imperialism without Colonies. New York: Monthly Review Press.
[10] Lenin, V. I. ([1916] 1969) Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline. New
York: International Publishers.
[11] Luxemburg, R. ([1913] 2003) The Accumulation of Capital. London: Routledge
[12] Lenin, V. I. ([1916] 1969) Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline. New
York: International Publishers.
[13] Hymer, Stephen. 1979. The Multinational Corporation: A Radical Approach. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
[14] Burbach, Roger, and William I. Robinson. 1999. “The Fin De Siecle Debate: Globalization as Epochal
Shift.” Science & Society, 63:1 (Spring), 10–39.
[15] Burbach, Roger, and William I. Robinson. 1999. “The Fin De Siecle Debate: Globalization as Epochal
Shift.” Science & Society, 63:1 (Spring), 10–39.