Gobblization: The Neoliberal Project for World Conquest

What is Globalization?

“Globalization” is a term that is used by many people in different ways, often focusing on one aspect of a phenomenon that has many dimensions. In the larger sense, however, it refers to the set of interrelated and simultaneous processes operating on a worldwide scale that are increasingly integrating economic activity, interlinking political institutional and movements, and blending cultures toward a global system, an end state called “globality.”

Four scholarly views of globalization are that it is a lot of hype, that it is primarily an economic process, that it is primarily a political process, and that it is primarily a cultural process. Globalization is a Myth

The skeptics insist that accounts of globalization are incorrect, imprecise, or exaggerated. Their arguments fall into three categories. The first group disputes its usefulness as a sufficiently precise analytical concept. The second group of critics points to the limited nature of transnationalizing processes, and argue that the term “globalization” overstates the actual state of affairs. A number of researchers in this category focus on transnational economic processes, which they claim are primarily centered on North America, Japan, and Europe, and is not a global phenomenon. The third group disputes the novelty of transnationalization, and object to the term “globalization” as limiting study to recent events rather than observing the larger sweep of history. World-system theorists argue that capitalism has been a global phenomenon since its inception five centuries ago. In many ways, the world is less integrated now than it was at the outbreak of the First World War.

Overall, then, all three groups of globalization skeptics make an important contribution to the academic debate on the subject. Their insistence on a more careful and precise usage of the term forces the participants in the debate to hone their analytical skills. Moreover, their intervention serves as an important reminder that some aspects of globalization may neither constitute new developments nor reach to all corners of the earth. However, by focusing too narrowly on abstract issues of terminology, the globalization skeptics tend to dismiss too easily the significance and extent of today's globalizing tendencies. Finally, the representatives of these three groups show a clear inclination to conceptualize globalization mostly along economic lines, thereby often losing sight of its multidimensional character (Steger 2002). Globalization is an Economic Process

Some of the earliest writings on globalization focused on the global integration of markets and the transnationalization of corporations, leading to increased global economic interdependence. From this perspective, the essence of globalization involves “the increasing linkage of national economies through trade, financial flows, and foreign direct investment by multinational firms.” (Gilpin 2000, 299)

Many scholars who share this economic perspective consider globalization a real phenomenon that signals an epochal transformation in world affairs. They propose that the study of globalization should be moved to the center of social-scientific research. According to their view, the central task of this research agenda should be the close examination of the evolving structure of global economic markets and their principal institutions (Steger 2002, 25).

The value of international trade has grown from $57 billion in 1947 to $6 trillion in the 1990s.

Two of the most important aspects of economic globalization involve the changing nature of production processes and the internationalization of financial transactions.

The emergence of a transnational financial system accelerated dramatically in the late 1980s as capital and securities markets in the United States and Europe were deregulated. The liberalization of financial trading allowed for greater mobility. National boundaries became increasingly more porous to capital flow, and a global view of investment opportunities developed. Advances in data processing and information technology contributed to the explosive growth in tradable financial value (Steger 2000, 27).

Multinational corporations rose to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, as various Japanese, North American, and European firms invested in other countries. At first, this was simply a matter of setting up the same kind of operation as in the home country, but to instead serve an overseas market. For instance, General Motors built factories in Europe to manufacture Chevrolets for sale to Europeans. This production process was multinational. In contrast, the latest stage of globalization is characterized by transnational supply chains: Iron ore is mined in Nation A, smelted into steel in Nation B, shipped to manufacture gears in Nation C, which are assembled into transmissions in Nation D, which are finally integrated into the final automobile products in Nations E1, E2, and E3. Considering all of the many different types of systems that go into an automobile, it is easy to see that any given vehicle is the integrated product of dozens of countries. What has made transnational supply chains possible is the dramatic reduction in cost of transportation and communication. The delivery of commodities to distant points can be coordinated so that they arrive when they are needed (“just in time inventory”). Consequently, each individual segment of the manufacturing process is free to seek the least-cost combination (of land, labor, and capital) world-wide. The global application of least-cost manufacturing and just in time delivery results in the most efficient production processes. Globalization is a Political Process

However, overlooked by many scholars who focus on the economic dimension of globalization is the fact that transnational production systems have enhanced the ability of transnational corporations to bypass the nationally based political influence of trade unions and environmental movements.

As a consequence, multinational firms have become extremely important in determining the economic, political, and social welfare of many nations. Controlling much of the world’s investment capital, technology, and access to global markets, such firms have become major players not only in international economic, but political affairs as well (Gilpin 2000, 22).

This observation segues into a discussion of a third school in the study of globalization, which focuses on its political component.

Most of the debate on political globalization involves the weighing of conflicting evidence with regard to the fate of the modern nation-state. In particular, two questions have moved to the top of the research agenda. First, what are the political causes for the massive flows of capital, money, and technology across territorial boundaries? Second, do these flows constitute a serious challenge to the power of the nations-state? These questions imply that economic globalization might be leading to the reduced control of national governments over economic policy. The latter question, in particular, involves an important subset of issues pertaining to the principle of state sovereignty, the growing impact of intergovernmental organizations, and the prospects for global governance (Steger 2000, 28-29).

Within this school that focuses on the political implications of globalization, one influential group of scholars sees politics as being “rendered almost powerless in the face of an unstoppable and irreversible technoeconomic juggernaut that will crush all governmental attempts to reintroduce restrictive policies and regulations.” And not only are political institutions no longer in control of national economies, but economic interests are now in control of national policies. According to this view, we are now “in a new phase in world history in which the role of government will be to reduced to that of a handmaiden to free-market forces.” (Steger 2000, 29) Not that this is a particularly novel insight, for Marx characterized government as the handmaiden of the bourgeoisie a century and a half ago, as the 19th century era of globalization was in full swing. In any case, in the most extreme expression of this view, national borders will ultimately cease to be meaningful concepts, and the fate of the planet will be entirely in the hands of global capitalist forces.

A second group of scholars, rather than viewing large-scale economic changes as simply happening to societies like earthquakes and hurricanes, instead declare the central role of politics in unleashing the forces of globalization. This group champions the power of active human agency. As Shakespeare said, “Men at some time are masters of their fates; the fault lies not in our stars... but in ourselves....” They point to a political agenda in the 1980s to lift international restrictions on capital. “Once the decisions were implemented in the 1980s, the technology came into its own. The speed of communication and calculation helped the movement of money to reach astronomical proportions.” (Singer 1999, 186-187) Since political decisions were responsible for steering the world in the direction of economic deregulation, privatization, and trade and capital market liberalization, a new and different political agenda could take the world in another direction. The political backlash against deregulation, privatization, and liberalization is a case in point. If these political forces were to become powerful enough, the process of globalization could be slowed, and some objectionable aspects of it actually reversed (Steger 2000, 31).

Yet another group of scholars views political globalization from the perspective of global governance and the emergence of a global civil society. They point to the proliferation of international institutions and transnational non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating at a number of levels, facilitating cooperation between nation-states and empowering grass-roots movements. David Held envisions “the emergence of a multilayered form of democratic governance based o Western cosmopolitan ideals, international legal arrangements, and a web of expanding linkages between various governmental and nongovernmental institutions.” Richard Falk describes the vision of an emerging global civil society as a popular-democratic “globalization from below” to counterbalance the market-driven, corporate “globalization from above.” The nation-state is viewed as continuing to operate, but in an altered context of relevance in a complex relationship with subnational and supranational entities of governance (Steger 2000, 33; Held 1995; Falk 1999, 7). Critics of this idealistic vision argue that as cultural patterns become increasingly interlinked through globalization, the possibility of resistance and opposition to Western democratic ideals is just as plausible as that of tolerance and pluralism. Globalization is a Cultural Process

A number of scholars have pointed out the importance of culture in debates on the nature of globalization. Sociologist John Tomlinson has said, “Globalization is lies at the heart of modern culture; cultural practices lie at the heart of globalization.” (Tomlinson 1999, 1) Steger describes the cultural debate on globalization as a vast landscape, and deliberately limits his discussion to the question, “Does globalization increase cultural homogeneity, or does it lead to greater diversity and heterogeneity? Or, to put the matter into less academic terms, does globalization make people more alike or more different?” (Steger 2000, 34)

Tomlinson defines cultural globalization as a “densely growing network of complex cultural interconnections and interdependencies that characterize modern social life.” (Tomlinson 1999, 28) He cites the impact of mega media corporations beaming mass culture across the world, uprooting facets of culture from their formerly fixed locations to cities and countries like a tornado, hurling them into the airwaves that stream around the planet. The aggregate flotsam and jetsam of culture now exists in a global milieu, seeking a new, global context. The forces of cultural globalization present a serious challenge to parochial values and identities.

Some scholars argue that the increasingly homogenized global culture has an underlying Anglo-American value system. Some sociologists see the mass media driven onslaught as overwhelming more vulnerable cultures, limiting the expression of human creativity and cultural difference. Particularly disturbing to Benjamin Barber is the soulless consumer capitalism of “McWorld” that is rapidly transforming the planet’s diverse population into a blandly uniform market (Barber 1996, 17).

Barber speaks of the jihadis being driven in part by a reaction to American cultural imperialism, a rejection of the soulless culture (Barber 1996, 19). The Manichean conflict of Jihad vs. McWorld is struggle of the realm of values vs. the world of prices, of salvation vs. commodification, the invisible god vs. the invisible hand. “Guided by opposing visions of homogeneity, Jihad and McWorld are dialectically interlocked in a bitter cultural struggle for popular allegiance. Barber insists that both forces ultimately work against a participatory form of democracy, for they are equally prone to undermine civil liberties and thwart the possibility of a global democratic future.” (Steger 2000, 36)

Roland Robertson points to another aspect of the complex interaction of globalization and locality-based culture, that this cross-fertilization enabled by globalization diversifies and enriches local culture, a process he calls “glocalization.” (Robertson 1992,) So What Is Really Going On?

While breaking down the process of globalization into conceptual components is essential to analyzing specific phenomena in detail, one must also be able to step back and see the entire process and the interrelationship of globalization’s various dimensions. Economic and political processes have been in a push-pull relationship, propelling us toward globalization. The collapse of the 19th century era of economic globalization and the resulting First World War led to the first attempt at a global political institution, the League of Nations. Its failure, along with the Great Depression, led to the Second World War. From these experiences sprang not only the United Nations (UN) and its many associated agencies--the second effort at global political institutionalism--but also the Bretton Woods institutions for global economic order. The pursuit of peace and prosperity are inexorably intertwined.

The institutions that have provided the underlying structure for economic globalization--the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO), are international agencies, i.e. constituted via the cooperation of national governments. The community of nations created these bodies because each one came to the conclusion that to do so was in the national interest--a political calculation that includes, but is not limited to, economic concerns. Although the purpose of these agencies is economic, the officers of these agencies are political appointees of the member nation-states. As will be discussed later, the particular case of the transformation of the IMF away from Keynesian principles towards neoliberal ones points up the power of political processes to influence the ideological orientation of these agencies, and through them, the direction of globalization. Also, it must be pointed out that a political agenda to deregulate financial institutions--primarily in the United States under Ronald Reagan and the United Kingdom under Margaret Thatcher--led to the evolution of the global financial markets in the late 1980s.

At the same time, global economic interdependence has political implications. A nation-state can no longer pursue economic policy in isolation. An individual nation’s fiscal and monetary policies operate in a global milieu, and the reaction of global economy in turn affects the efficacy of national economic policy. Thus global economic integration limits the power of political leaders to control the economy within national borders and constrains their choices. Friedman calls this narrowing of policy options the “Golden Straightjacket.” This translates to national foreign policy as well. Trading partners have an economic incentive to work together for peaceful solutions to political disputes rather than to resort to wars that would unravel their interdependent national economies. The hope of San Francisco (where the UN was born) and of Bretton Woods (where the global economic institutions were conceived) was that planetary political and economic meltdowns like the World Wars and the Great Depression could be avoided, and in this sense they have succeeded. That there have been numerous “splendid little wars,” festering civil and ethnic conflicts, and occasional economic recessions only points out the obvious, that these global institutions, like the individual human beings who lead them and in whose names they operate, are not perfect.

The concern over American cultural imperialism could be expressed as a metaphor in which each geographically-based, historically-based culture is becoming simply a different set of toppings on the same pizza dough, but the opposite idea seems more plausible, that everyone has different cultural substrate onto which everyone is applying the same American veneer. If it seems that many of the people who take to the streets of the Third World in anger at the United States wear blue jeans, drink Coca-Cola, and watch hip-hip videos on MTV, they are not necessarily embracing the deeper American values of individual liberty and tolerance of diversity; rather, they have merely become another consumer group of superficial American mass culture, while retaining their own identities and agendas. The jihadis eat Big Macs at Logan Airport, then fly airliners into the World Trade Center.

Does globalization make people more alike or more different? The short answer is “Yes” to both. A number of processes are occurring simultaneously. People are acquiring bits and pieces of each other’s culture, thus they are becoming more alike, yet at the same time, each individual tends to become culturally richer. Returning to the pizza analogy, the original Neapolitan pizza was very simple fare, but in the hands of Americans it has become Italian garlic supreme, all-veggie, Hawaiian, Mexican, ad infinitum. While Barber talks about the Big Mac attack, it is the infinitely adaptable, ever-morphing pizza that is achieving global domination, simultaneously insinuating itself into and assimilating every culture on Earth.

Tacit in the above perspectives on globalization is the role of advancing technology in facilitating the ever-higher level of global integration. Globalization would be impossible without the ability to cost-effectively move commodities around the planet in a matter of hours or days, or the ability to move information around the planet in seconds. The study of the impact of technology on society is not yet recognized as a “capital D” Discipline, as is Economics, Political Science, Cultural Anthropology, or Sociology. Manuel Castells points to technology as transcending and transforming economics, politics, and culture. He envisions the rise of a “network society” in which all three social components continue to play changing roles in response to evolving technology. Although global integration necessarily means the decline of national sovereignty, nation-states will remain crucial bargaining agencies in the world of changing power relationships. As political institutions redefine their roles and scope in reaction to economic forces and advancing technology, culture becomes more important in holding together the fabric of society. “Culture as the source of power, and power as the source of capital, underlie the new social hierarchy of the Information Age.” (Castells 1996-1998, 3:379) Liberalism and the First Age of Globalization

Classical liberalism had its roots in the ideas of British philosophers Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Herbert Spencer, describing a market that would be self-regulating (through the “invisible hand” of the aggregate decisions of millions of entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers) if government got out of the way and allowed the market to evolve into a perfect mechanism. Their laissez-faire, free trade agenda both enabled and legitimated the rise of Britain as the global hegemon in the 19th century (Steger 2002, 9-11). Seeing the success of Britain, other nations raced to liberalize their economies as well. However, the colonial empires of the European powers had been built on an entirely different economic theory--mercantilism--which exalted the power of the state in shaping and guiding the national economy, and carrying out foreign policy (usually involving war) to enrich the nation and impoverish enemies. Classical liberals had successfully discredited mercantilism, but the colonial empires remained. Essentially huge, exclusive trading blocs that operated asymmetrically to the interest of the colonial power at the expense of the exploited colonies, these empires presented formidable barriers to the global liberalization and integration of markets. However, the expanding, liberalizing economies of the colonial powers demanded new, more open markets, even if those markets must be forced open. The contradictions of liberalism and the vestiges of mercantilism collided, and the first era of globalization collapsed with the outbreak of the First World War. The Retreat of Liberalism During the World Wars

The economic turmoil that followed the First World War led to the reinstitution of trade protectionism. The Great Depression reinforced the reversal of economic liberalism, as governments raced to be even more protective of their economies. This only discouraged trade and drove the global economy deeper into decline, magnifying the misery of the Great Depression. Yet another process that destroyed global trade was round after round of competitive currency devaluations in which each country sought to undercut the others by making their exports cheaper (Lairson and Skidmore 1993, 57-58).

While protectionism was eventually seen to be a considerable evil, another lesson of the Great Depression was that markets do not necessarily operate perfectly. British economist John Maynard Keynes believed that the government had a legitimate role in regulating the economy, using its power under the right circumstances in ways that the free market could not. In particular, he established a solid theoretical explanation for why not everything that is produced can be sold at some equilibrium price, why full employment is impossible, and therefore why aggregate demand for goods and services at some point becomes insufficient to sustain the economy, resulting in a decline. In Keynes’ theory, the problem of restarting a faltered economy was not insufficient capital for investment, but insufficient demand for consumption. In other words, the rich were unwilling to invest in new production and create jobs because the prospect of profit was bleak, and the poor didn’t have the money for new spending that would incentivize new investment and production. Keynes called this the “liquidity trap,” where an economy could reach equilibrium at a very low level of activity and remain there for years (where the Japanese economy has been for the past decade). While laissez-faire economists argued that in the long run the market would correct itself, Keynes dismissed this attitude as doing nothing to alleviate the suffering of the Great Depression. “In the long run, we’re all dead.”

Philanthropy having its limits, there was no obvious mechanism in capitalism for the “haves” to give enough money to the “have-nots” to stimulate new spending, so government must provide this mechanism. Lowering taxes on the lower and middle classes put more money in their pockets, which they would readily spend on deferred necessities. Increased spending, especially on infrastructure and education, an also on the military, created jobs, which again put money in the pockets of those most likely to spend it. According to Keynes, the government could employ armies of people to dig holes and fill them in again. It was not necessary that the government spent the money productively (although this was obviously preferred), the important point was that the government ran a deficit, spending more money that it was receiving through taxation, thereby pumping money into the economy. As people spent this money, private investment was stimulated to produce to meet rising demand, creating new jobs. As the upward spiral reinforced itself, the economy recovered. Hitler used this strategy to pull Germany out of the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt used the same strategy to a lesser degree, constrained as he was by the political opposition of a democratic process.

The Keynesian vs. laissez-faire debate was interrupted by Hitler’s Lebensraum and Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which marked the resurgence of imperialism under new names. The resulting the Second World War put everyone to work... those who weren’t killed. The Triumph of Keynes at Bretton Woods

As the Allies planned for the post-war economic order in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944, a number of issues were well understood. First, Europe must be rebuilt or the economic devastation caused by the war would lead to political instability and extremism. Furthermore, America was emerging from the war unscathed, and a greatly expanded economic power, accounting for half of the world’s industrial output. But it needed overseas markets to sell its products to, or it would sink back into the Great Depression. The International Bank of Reconstruction and Development, more commonly known as the World Bank, was created to fill these needs. The purpose of the World Bank is to provide seed money for infrastructure projects that will stimulate economic development and reduce poverty (Stiglitz 2002, 11).

Secondly, it was agreed at Bretton Woods that there must be an international institution in place to discourage a country from taking external measures, such as competitive currency devaluations, to protect its economy during a slump. Instead, this international financial institution would lend money to a country to finance Keynesian deficit spending in order to stimulate an economic recovery. The purpose of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is to endure global financial stability (Stiglitz 2002, 11-12).

Finally, it was recognized at Bretton Woods that an international regime should be put in place to work for the reduction of trade barriers, such as tariffs and quotas. An International Trade Organization was envisioned. However, many trade issues proved intractable. A number of countries wanted to protect their agricultural sector rather than open their markets to foreign competition and thereby become dependent on foreign sources of food. Yet other nations wanted to protect strategic industries such as steel in the name of national security. Even Keynes, a principle architect of the Bretton Woods institutions, felt that a fully open market weren’t necessarily a good thing, that unrestricted competition could do great damage to economic sectors that weren’t prepared for it. Thus, in place of a formal organization, after some delay (1947), a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was put in place that was designed to evolve through round after round of trade negotiations (it has been said that GATT really stands for the General Agreement to Talk and Talk). It wasn’t until the Uruguay Round of negotiations in the early 1990s that a World Trade Organization (WTO, which came into existence in 1995) was finally agreed to that would adjudicate and enforce the many provisions of the GATT that had developed during four decades of negotiation rounds. The purpose of the WTO is to provide a forum for the negotiation of future trade agreements that will further lower trade barriers, adjudicate trade disputes under the GATT and subsequent agreements, and provide an enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance (Stiglitz 2002, 15-16).

It is important to understand that although the World Bank and the IMF are international institutions, in reality they are the creatures of the G7 industrialized countries. By custom, the president of the World Bank is always an American, that of the IMF a European. Voting power in these institutions is formulated by the relative financial contribution of each member country. The US is by far the largest contributor to both institutions (17.7% for the IMF, 14.4% for the World Bank). Both are headquartered in Washington, DC, literally across the street from each other.

The Bretton Woods institutions worked well for a quarter century while Europe recovered from the World Wars. Thanks to the IMF’s timely, Keynesian interventions in temporarily troubled economies, the system of fixed currency exchange rates remained stable, and after the reconstruction of Europe and Japan, the World Bank found a new role for itself in the Third World as colonial empires were dismantled and newly independent states needed investment capital to build infrastructure and stimulate economic growth. The GATT continued the dialog leading to round after round of trade barrier reductions. During these years, Keynesian principles were in the mainstream of economic thought. Even Richard Nixon, an economic conservative, declared in 1971, “We are all Keynesians now.” Nixon’s imposition of a regime of wage and price controls to stabilize an economy overheated by Great Society social spending and the Vietnam War was hardly the action of a laissez-faire ideologue. Laissez-Faire Redux

By the end of the 1960s, however, the US was beginning to run huge trade deficits in the face of stiff competition from re-industrialized Europe and Japan. Added to this trade imbalance were the massive US military expenditures overseas: its long-standing bases in Europe and East Asia, plus its presence in Vietnam. These factors combined to place more and more dollars in the hands of foreigners, who became increasingly less confident that these dollars could be redeemed from the gold reserve in Fort Knox. Under these pressures the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates collapsed in 1971, and Richard Nixon abandoned the gold-based fixed-rate system to let the value of the dollar float in terms of other convertible currencies. The Arab-inspired oil embargo by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1973-74 in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War send further shockwaves throughout the global economy. Due to the combined effects of increased competition from Europe and Japan and an economic hangover caused by Lyndon Johnson’s simultaneous “war on poverty” and war in Vietnam without raising the taxes to pay for it all, US suffered through a period of “stagflation” to the end of the 1970s, a period marked by low economic growth, high interest rates, high unemployment, and high inflation rates (the combination of the last two factors is referred to as the “misery index”).

Laissez-faire economists pointed to this period of misery as an indictment of Keynesian economics, including Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society social spending programs. “Government is the problem, not the solution,” Ronald Reagan proclaimed. This was the birth of neoliberalism, and its radical agenda of deregulation and privatization. A sea-changed rapidly occurred at the World Bank and the IMF as Reagan and Thatcher installed neoliberals in positions of power at these institutions. Together, the World Bank and the IMF formulated the Washington Consensus of how the other national economies of the world should conduct themselves, and how these institutions should deal with them when they didn’t conform to the Consensus.

Under this ideological onslaught, the IMF reversed its lending policies. Instead of lending money to finance Keynesian deficit spending and stimulate economic recoveries, IMF loans now come with draconian strings attached called “structural adjustments.” To receive IMF loans, governments must agree to austerity measures, to live within their means rather than run up debts. Government workers are laid off, creating unemployment. Government services are reduced, adversely affecting the poorest members of society. Government subsidy of vital staples such as grain and dairy products are reduced, driving up prices. Government assets are sold off at fire sale prices to raise money to pay off debts. Often the private investors who take advantage of these opportunities cut services and raise prices in order to operate these formerly government-owned assets at a profit. Interest rates are driven up in order to attract foreign investment; however, doing so drives domestic companies out of business, creating even more unemployment. High interest rates, high unemployment, and higher prices… exactly the misery the US suffered through in the 1970s. It would seem that misery does indeed love company. Globalism and the End of History

Half a century ago, sociologist Daniel Bell postulated in The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties the utter exhaustion of both Marxist socialism and classical liberalism, the two great 19th century Western ideologies. According to Bell, ideas such as the “inevitability of history” or the “self-regulating market” had lost their lure in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the monstrous evils of Stalin and Hitler. In his view, the debate was shifting from ideology to the search for administrative solutions to the technical problems faced my modern society. Bell’s technocratic vision seemed to be refuted by the upsurge of tensions between the US and USSR in the Cold War, as well as the ideological foment of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and 1970s (Bell, 1960; Steger 2002, 1-2).

However, the sudden collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, as well as the gradual rollback of communism in China, unexpectedly re-energized the “end of ideology debate.” In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama asserted that the passing of Marxism signaled the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution,” that although many societies had embraced liberal democracy and free-market capitalism to markedly varying degrees, and some not at all, no ideological alternative to these now existed. Fukuyama argued that liberalism (with its political and economic components of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism, respectively) is the only way of life that has the ability to satisfy all three Platonic components of the human soul. Those societies that have largely embraced liberalism are nearly at the end of history, while other societies remain substantially “in history” with a long road ahead of them. While there are many roads to the end of history, of different lengths, coming from different directions, composed of different types of surfaces, and containing different numbers of lanes, and there are some obstacles to pass over such as religious fundamentalism, racism and sexism, the ultimate destination in each case is the same. Thus neoliberalism, the triumphalist, post-communist, more ideologically pure form of liberalism, makes similar claims to “historical inevitability” that Marxism once did (Fukuyama 1992).

If we are truly at the end of history, what is there left to talk about? Doesn’t “the end” mean “the end?”

If only one valid ideology remains, politics becomes largely irrelevant, other than in the context of freeing the economy of governmental constraints. The overarching political debate becomes one of making the free market perfectly free: privatization of government assets and functions, and deregulation of private enterprises. Since neoliberalism makes claims to historical inevitability, those on the other side of the debate are simply fighting a delaying action. As Margaret Thatcher put in the 1980s, “There is no alternative.”

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

The purpose of ideology is to provide a simplified and normative description of the world. It both represents and distorts reality in some preferential way in order to empower a certain group. Neoliberalism is the ideology of the capitalist. It thus serves to enshrine capitalism and to legitimate the position of the capitalist in our society. It is the ideology of the powerful, by the powerful, for the powerful, which being historically inevitable, shall not perish from the earth. Rather, it will spread to the four corners of the earth in the process that has become known as globalization. To this extension of the extremist neoliberal agenda to encompass the entire world, Manfred B. Steger gives the name “globalism.” Globalism, like globalization, is a term that is used in different ways by different people. Steger employs it to describe It is a political-economic ideology, an interpretation of the globalization process that serves to legitimate the neoliberal agenda of shaping that process in a particular way to achieve a particular end (Steger 2002).*

Just as Marxism is the ideology of the “have-nots” that seeks to empower them to have something, globalism is the ideology of the “haves” that enables them to have even more. But as obvious as are the contrasts between neoliberal globalism and Marxism, even more startling is the similar nature of their claims to “historical inevitability.” They are alike in their hard-edged deterministic interpretation of a universe that is also probabilistic and uncertain. They are mirror images of each other, the black and white extreme worldviews of a world that is mostly shades of gray and a spectrum of color.

How valid are the claims of globalism to historical inevitability, as well as its other claims, likely to be, dependent as they are on the validity of economic neoliberalism? A Beautiful Model

Smith, Ricardo, Marx, and other classical economic thinkers were more than simply economists in the sense that the word is now used. Their work studied more than purely economic issues, but rather studied the relationships between money and power in society. As such, they were political economists. However, in the course of more than a century, the most prestigious economic schools have drifted away from the study of political economy and have retreated into an insular world of theoretical models, where the real world of power politics and market imperfections is not allowed to intrude. It is profoundly disturbing the degree to which the story of John Forbes Nash’s struggle with schizophrenia (A Beautiful Mind) is a metaphor for the history of his entire academic discipline (Nasar 1998). The modern economist assumes a set of basic principles, and from these deduces a world entirely of his own making. In its drive to be ever more mathematical and scientific, the field of economics has suffered a total break with reality. I do not mean to make light of Nash’s valiant struggle; on the contrary, I suggest that the field of economics needs to undergo a comparable self-examination and struggle.

In some of the universities from which the IMF hires regularly, the core curricula involve models in which there is never any unemployment. After all, in the standard competitive model--the model that underlies the IMF’s market fundamentalism--demand always equals supply. If the demand for labor equals supply, there is never any involuntary unemployment. Someone who is not working has evidently chosen not to work. In this interpretation, unemployment in the Great Depression, when one out of four people was out of work, would be the result of a sudden increase in the desire for more leisure. It might be of some interest to psychologists why there was this sudden change in the desire for more leisure, or why those who were supposed to be enjoying this leisure seemed so unhappy, but according to the standard model these questions go beyond the scope of economics (Stiglitz 2002, 35).

Economists claim that the market, as described in their standard model, is rational. If the real world doesn’t behave as predicted in the standard model, that just means that the real world is irrational. The narrowly focused field of modern economics is a rational, mathematical pursuit. It’s the rest of the world that’s crazy.

The proposition that politics and power don’t matter, that economics is the only thing that matters, is itself a political statement that is intended to enhance the power of a particular class in society and to cut off debate by those who presume to dissent. Thus neoliberal globalism’s inherent contradiction: it espouses a political agenda in the name of an economic theory that assumes the absence of politics. Crack Capitalism

Such are the theoretical underpinnings of neoliberalism, which prescribes that government should get out of the way and let capitalism make all of us rich beyond our wildest dreams. Some commentators have called it “Second-Coming Capitalism” and “Turbo-Capitalism,” while Thomas L. Friedman urges nations to upgrade their economic operating systems to DOScapital 6.0 (Steger 2002, 11, Friedman 2000, 154). Another way to look at neoliberal globalism is that modern neoclassical economists and their political middlemen have processed all of the ideological impurities out of their product, distilled it down into neat little rocks, and priced it for distribution on the street. Call it Crack Capitalism. Go ahead, try a sample… the first fix is free.

Take the case of Long-Term Capital Management LTCM, a highly-rated hedge fund management firm. Economists Robert C. Merton and Myron S. Scholes shared the Nobel Prize in 1997 for their studies on how complex financial instruments, known as derivatives, could be used by global investors to offset risk, so they were the perfect consultants for LTCM. Acting on their advice, in 1998 LTCM racked up the biggest losses in hedge fund history (Friedman 2000, 16).

Go ahead, give it a try. It won’t hurt you.

Particularly harmful has been the rise of international capital markets, what Friedman calls the “Electronic Herd,” the millions of faceless investors who move capital from country to country at the click of a mouse. The international capital markets are exalted in the name of economic efficiency. Capital naturally flows to where it has the best prospect of making a profit. However, such investment is not necessarily productive. If it is free to move from place to place without being restricted to a minimum length of time at a given location, such investment can be highly speculative. Speculation does not build a single factory. What the Electronic Herd does is stampede into a country on the rumor of being able to make a fast buck from a currency fluctuation, buy up the currency, thus driving up its price, then stampede out, taking its quick profit, selling the currency and thereby driving down its value. Capital thus sloshes across the planet in wave after wave, leaving economic turmoil in its wake. Five Central Claims of Globalism

In the view of Steger, what is problematic about globalism is that it serves to empower the already powerful; that it perpetuates and even accentuates power asymmetries and social injustices rather than mitigates or alleviates them; that it raises up competition as the noblest human activity to the disparagement of cooperation; that it elevates machine-like efficiency as a deity to the of the detriment of human compassion; that it prizes the pursuit of personal wealth over the promotion of the common good.

The free-market ideology is free of any moral anchor other than Gekko’s commandment, “Greed is good.” Societal goods, unlike material goods, cannot be sold at some equilibrium price, and therefore are held to have no objective reality. Serene in its assurance of empire over matter, it sees no reason to critically examine its assumptions. The cargo cult of free-wheeling capitalism believes in a wealth-generating perpetual-motion machine, world without end. It trusts entirely in the mechanics of mathematically modeled system to maintain its own stability, as a gyroscope, while the neoliberal agenda spins the world faster, ever faster. This blind faith in the “invisible hand” refuses to acknowledge, let alone to investigate, possible signs that the system is in danger of flying apart or spinning out of control.

As an ideology, globalism makes a number of claims, but as Ira Gershwin said of the Bible, “It ain’t necessarily so:” Liberalization and Integration of Markets

Globalization is about the liberalization and global integration of markets.

This is only partially true. It treats only one aspect of globalization, ignoring the rise of international institutions, transnational organizations, cultural cross-fertilization, and the complex interdependence of these phenomena. In fact, three international institutions in particular, the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO, have played an indispensable role in furthering economic globalization. Meanwhile, the ideological and political battle against globalism is primarily carried on by its critics who have formed countervailing activist transnational organizations. These transnational organizations are manifestations of antiglobalist globalization. Inevitable and Irreversible

Globalization is inevitable and irreversible.

A foreknowledge of the future would be required to prove the statement. However, a knowledge of the past is sufficient to cast doubt upon it. There have been eras of globalization in the past, and they have been reversed. The collapse of 19th century globalization led to the two World Wars and the Cold War. Since globalization has been reversed before, it is plausible to postulate that this could occur again. It should also be noted that Karl Marx made similar claims regarding the inevitable crisis in and collapse of capitalism, and the rise of communism. What reason is there to believe that globalist claims of historical inevitability are any more or less valid?

It is noted with considerable irony that neoliberal economics treats the market as an ahistorical phenomenon, yet globalism as an ideology makes claims to historical inevitability. No One Is in Charge

No one is in charge of globalization.

The statement is true as far as it goes. There is no universal “Minister of Globalization.” But the fact that no one is in charge does not logically imply that some ones are not in charge. The various agents of the Washington Consensus have worked tirelessly for decades to construct the environment in which their vision of globalization now flourishes. This has not come into being on its own. Everyone Benefits

Globalization benefits everyone.

This claim flies in the face of neoliberal theory, which being founded on the principle of competition, mandates that there must be winners and losers. A worker, who is laid off when production is moved offshore, derives no benefit from cheap imports, since he can no longer afford to buy them.

The neoliberal mantra that “a rising tide lifts all boats” is seductively metaphorical in its optimism. Giving this alluring metaphor closer inspection, however, it is clear that there are large and small boats, having varying degrees of seaworthiness. Neoliberals would have us believe that globalization is a force of nature, but a more accurate simile might be to liken their version of globalization to global warming, a human-created phenomenon that is profoundly affecting the forces of nature. Indeed, neoliberal globalization has unleashed “perfect storms” that have swamped many boats. The S.S. Mexico, the S.S. Thailand, and the S.S. Indonesia are just a few of the ships of state that have had to be bailed out. Navigation on the globalist high seas has hardly been a pleasure cruise. Spreading Democracy

Globalization furthers the spread of democracy in the world.

Globalists claim that the economic process of liberalizing markets is in a push-pull relationship with the political process of liberal democracy. Such a complex and sweeping proposition cannot be easily dismissed. It is certainly true that there are far more democracies in the world today than there were a generation ago, when the current era of globalization was getting underway, and that both the processes of democratization and of globalization have accelerated since the end of the Cold War. However, simultaneity is not necessarily causality.

Central to the neoliberal claim linking freer economic life to freer political life is the contention that the former necessitates smaller, less-intrusive government, which in turn enables the latter. This does not necessarily follow. It is not the size of government in and of itself, but the principles upon which it is founded and the extent to which practices them, that is determinative of the state of liberty of its people. Western Europe is replete with social democracies, large but permissive welfare states. On the other hand, there have been many small and repressive governments, delivering few services to the people, and allowing even less political participation.

Furthermore, while the quantity of democratic governments has undoubtedly increased, the quality of democracy is in considerable doubt. As corporations have merged together, growing in size but fewer in number, they have exercise ever increasing control over civil society and political discourse.

Consider, as more and more newspapers, radio stations, and television channels are owned by ever fewer corporations, how political viewpoints are restricted to the few that are condoned by the media magnates.

Consider, as more and more public places become privatized, what happens to the right of the people to peaceably assemble, or to freedom of speech? During the Second Gulf War, a man was arrested in a privately owned shopping mall in Albany, NY simply for wearing an anti-war T-shirt--a T-shirt that had been purchased at the same mall earlier that day (Vann 2003). This is what happens when the public square becomes corporate fare.

Consider, that during the twelve months leading up to the first actual selection of national convention delegates, candidates for their party’ nomination contend not for votes, but for dollars. This year before the primary season has become known as the “money primary.” It is an indisputable fact that in every presidential nomination campaign since 1980, in both major parties, the eventual party nominee was the candidate who had raised the most money by December 31 of the year before the general election. In other words, since 1980, the American people have had the best presidents that money can buy. The choice has been taken out of their hands and placed in the hands of those who deliver suitcases full of cash (Brock 2000).

Consider, that the 2000 US presidential election was ultimately decided by a single vote, that of an unelected Supreme Court justice.

Yes, we have more democracies, but do we have healthier democracies? Antiglobalist Challengers from the Political Left and Right The Left/Right Distinction

Norberto Bobbio defined the political left as those who support the idea that political and social institutions are socially constructed. The power of human reason should be capable of reducing social inequalities such as power, wealth, educational opportunity, et cetera. On the other hand, the political right maintains that many of these inequalities are part of a “natural order” that is largely unalterable. They view schemes to change traditional social arrangements with skepticism, and caution against undermining social stability (Bobbio 1996, 60-71).

The neoliberal project of globalization has the rare distinction of having incurred the wrath of both the left and right. It threatens traditional socioeconomic relationships and cultural values, but does so in a way that perpetuates and even accentuates power asymmetries and social injustices. The Nationalist-Protectionist Right

In general, nationalist-protectionists blame globalization for most of the economic and social problems in their individual countries. They feel threatened by the decline of old social patterns, traditional ways of life, and local economic relationships in the face of global free trade, foreign investment, and world culture. International economic interdependence erodes national sovereignty, and global media destroys national culture. Such nationalist movements thrive in developed countries, where workers fear “the giant sucking sound” of their jobs going south, and in the underdeveloped south itself, where people fear domination by northern transnational corporations. In many countries, these movements rail against the Americanization of the world, but even in the United States such nationalist rhetoric resonates. The Internationalist-Egalitarian Left

Internationalist-Egalitarians, on the other hand, have a more equitable view of north-south economic relationships, environmental impact, labor rights, and human rights than the neoliberal vision of globalization allows. This group insists that the benefits of a developing world economy should accrue to all, not a few, and that economic development should be planned with a view toward environmental sustainability rather than simply being out for the quick buck that depletes natural resources. The Battle of Seattle and Its Aftermath

While egalitarians have a strong internationalist bent in terms of the proliferation of democratic values and the equitable distribution of the economic returns of globalization, they also deplore the loss of local political control to the power of global corporations, of the loss of corporate accountability to public scrutiny. It is in this sphere that the nationalists and the internationalists synch up: the concern over the diminishment of self-determination; the right dwells on the decline of national sovereignty, the left on the decline of individual and popular sovereignty. It is here that the Pat Buchanans and the Ralph Naders of the world find common ground. It has long been said politics makes strange bedfellows. Globalization has made for the strangest sleep-mates of all. They used one of the quintessential tools of globalization--the Internet--to communicate, to discover that common ground, to organize, and to coordinate their strategy. These strange sleep-mates came together in the streets of Seattle and awakened the world to an alternative dream of globalization, and it was the neoliberals’ worst nightmare. In the last month of the 1900s, as the computerized world wrung its hands over the Y2K or Millennium bug, the Battle of Seattle sent a message to the Information Age.

The Battle of Seattle, which was occasioned by a ministerial meeting of theWTO in that city, was hardly the first antiglobalist protest. Grassroots antiglobalist movements had grown up over the previous decade. Both Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot campaigned for president in 1992 opposing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that drastically lowered trade barriers between Canada, the United States, and Mexico, and they continued their denunciation of NAFTA and the WTO in their 1996 campaigns. It was no coincidence that the Zapatistas in the state of Chiapas, Mexico launched their rebellion on the very day that the WTO was born. On June 18, 1999, the occasion of a summit of the eight richest industrialized countries (G8) on Cologne, Germany, protests were coordinated via the Internet in the financial districts of major European and North American cities. Hackers around the world coordinated more than 10,000 cyber-attacks against the in formation systems of major corporations. In London, a march by 2,000 protesters turned violent, resulting in dozens of injuries and considerable property damage.

The significance of Seattle was that the antiglobalist revolt finally came to the streets of an American city as a transnational force. More than 700 transnational groups were present in Seattle. Joining these internationalist-egalitarians were radical right-wing American nationalists, fascists, and anarchists. While many protesters came to Seattle well trained in the techniques of non-violent confrontation, more radical but far less numerous elements came with violence on their agenda.

In the aftermath of the Battle of Seattle, WTO officials made vague pronouncements regarding the need for reform, for more transparency in its decision-making processes. The idea that an institution that was only five years old required reform points up how badly flawed the concept of the WTO was at its inception.

Protests have continued in venues throughout Europe and North America, both in the venues of economic conferences and in other locations but timed to coincide with those meetings. Meanwhile, one must question whether trade and financial organizations are serious about opening their proceedings to public scrutiny when the WTO resorts to holding its annual meetings in locations such as Qatar Dubai, which are not only remote from most protesters, but absolute monarchies where what few protesters who were allowed entry visas found that civil liberties fell far short of internationally recognized norms. It would seem that the neoliberals have chosen to hide rather than seek an accommodation with their critics.

Meanwhile, as protests at meetings of the World Bank, IMF and the World Economic Forum (WEF) continue, two disturbing trends are evident. These occasions have provided cover for violent fascist and anarchist groups to loot shops and destroy property. This partial co-option of their movement by violent groups with their own agendas (such as Basque separatists and anti-immigration thugs) presents the internationalist-egalitarian left with a difficult problem. At the same time, police forces are ramping up their response to demonstrations, using tear gas, pepper spray, clubs and attack dogs on peaceful marchers who are doing little more than chanting, singing, handing out leaflets, and performing various forms of street theatre to explain their opposition to the neoliberal policies of the Bretton Woods institutions. The repression of legitimate acts of free speech exposes governments to the charge that they are the handmaidens of the capitalists, abandoning the rule of law for the brutal enforcement of order when people object to laws that favor the haves over the have-nots. The dilemma of force is that it further corrodes the legitimacy of an authority that has already in some measure lost the consent of the governed.

In the long run, a more subtle and moderate globalist response to the antiglobalist challenge is necessary. In addition to continuing to reinforce the legitimacy of their own world-view through corporate control of the mass media, the media is also used to discredit the critics of globalism. This is not accomplished through some “vast right wing conspiracy,” but occurs simply due to the nature of the corporate-owned media beast. Newspapers, news magazines, radio and television networks that were once relatively independent have been subsumed within vast media conglomerates: Time and Warner Brothers and now merged into a company that also owns the Cable News Network (CNN); the American Broadcasting Corporation is owned by the Walt Disney Corporation; Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation owns 20th Century Fox, the Fox TV broadcast network, the FX cable channel, and the Fox News cable channel. The newsroom has become an appendage of the entertainment industry, more profit-oriented and less objective, and as a natural consequence news tends to be covered with a slant that pleases the owners, the advertisers, and also pleases the viewers by not upsetting them with troubling, paradigm-shifting truths. As Peter Finch’s character in the motion Network declared, “We’ll tall you all the shit you want to hear!” Thus, the message that permeates the ether and the printed page is typified by Thomas Friedman’s dismissal of the Seattle protesters as “a Noah’s ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for the 1960s fix.” And of course, once the corporate media has had its say, it can simply change the subject to something more mindlessly entertaining, such as Neil Conan’s National Public Radio program about breast implants in lieu of discussing environmental degradation on Earth Day, or Larry King’s CNN Bastille Day interview of Traci Lords about her life as a teenage porno star rather than discussing the rift in Franco-American relations in the aftermath of the Second Gulf War (Conan 2002; King 2003). Future Prospects

Steger outlines three possible trajectories for the future. The first of these he characterizes as “rhetoric of reform, business as usual.” Neoliberals and the Bretton Woods institutions they have commandeered will continue to mouth empty platitudes about “globalization with a human face,” while fulfilling almost none of their promises to make globalization “work batter for all people.” This will probably continue as long as the critics are seen as a motley collection of fringe groups rather than a credible threat to the hegemonic paradigm (Steger 2002, 136-139).

This is unlikely to be a successful long-term strategy. In the absence of substantive reform, as neoliberal globalization spawns more economic inequality and propagates greater environmental damage, it will breed more discontent. A violent backlash is the second trajectory that Steger foresees (Steger 2002, 139-145) In the estimation of Hungarian-Canadian political economist Karl Polanyi, we are heading for a socio-economic catastrophe that will dwarf the world wars that resulted from the 19th century laissez-faire experiment in free-market capitalism (Polanyi 1944, 29). Now, just as then, unrestricted economic competition is breaking down the complex social fabric of reciprocity, mutual obligation, cooperation, and support. As the economic losers become more numerous, they will organize to wield political power to counterbalance the economic power of the winners. These armies of the dispossessed will become more radicalized as they become more desperate.

Polanyi asserts that the 19th century laissez-faire project led to the political backlash of Russian communism, Italian fascism, and German national socialism. While none of these nations had strong democratic institutions, the depredations of free-market capitalism extinguished any hope of democracy and allowed totalitarianism to flourish in its place, and in turn, these totalitarian regimes imposed their own peculiar but severe limitations on the market (Polanyi 1944, 237). In our own time, however, neoliberalism is not merely a specter that is haunting Europe; rather, the entire world is the laboratory for the 21st century neoliberal experiment. What right does anyone have to expect that it will be any more successful this time than it was a century ago? The utopian vision of a self-regulating free-market can only be a utopia for the few who win and a dystopia for the many who lose. How can anyone expect such a system to be sustainable? If it is not, then the specter of violent backlash against globalism also haunts the entire world. While extremist protectionist movements would begin as individual national phenomena, they could quickly and easily join forces and spread, just as the Mussolini-Hitler Axis enabled Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War and then linked up with Tojo in the Tripartite Pact. In an age where the world is supposedly becoming more integrated, the list of nationalist anti-integration movements is troubling: Patrick Buchanan in the USA, Jörg Haider in Austria, Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, Gerhard Frey in Germany, Gianfranco Fini in Italy, and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Moreover, the internationalist-egalitarian left has shown increasing willingness to join in strategic partnerships with the nationalist-protectionist right in opposing globalism. Ralph Nader and Patrick Buchanan have had an enduring relationship since the fight against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992-1993. The New Republic reported that the actions of leftist groups including Nader’s Public Citizen were partially financed by South Carolina textile magnate Roger Milliken, a generous contributor to right-wing causes for half a century. It has long been observed that politics makes strange bedfellows. Such alliances can only become more commonplace as the gap between rich and poor widens and environmental destruction accelerates.

However, is this rising discontent anchored in a coherent ideology? For now, the ideological clout of the left has been greatly dissipated by the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the rollback of social democracy in Western Europe. Many on the left are looking to the center, attracted by such rhetoric as “the third way,” “the new middle,” “globalization with a human face,” “compassionate conservatism,” and “pragmatic centrism.” British Social thinker Anthony Giddens seems to agree with Fukuyama’s “end of history thesis. “At the present time, no one can see any effective alternatives to combination of a market economy and a democratic political system--even though each of these has great deficiencies and limitations (Giddens 1998).” It may be that we are not at the end of the road of socio-economic development, but paused at a wayside while the mists clear and new directions become apparent. Even so, if for the time being, the market economy and the democratic political system are all we will have for a time, two observations should be made.

The first of these, simply that we have both market institutions and democratic institutions, is obvious to the casual observer, although apparently not to the neoliberals, who emphasize market institutions almost exclusively and give short shrift to democratic institutions, who constantly harp that “government is the problem.”

The second observation is that a truly democratic government is inevitably in dialectic with the market. The market operates to reward winners and punish losers; in contrast, democracy operates to restrict the power of economic winners and give losers a chance to get back in the game; the market operates to accumulate and consolidate power, democracy to separate and diffuse power; the market operates to create inequalities, capture market share, and foreclose opportunities, the purpose of democracy is to defend equality, share power, and provide opportunities. As long as these two institutions survive, they will be in conflict. The question is whether this dynamic is stable. How far can the pendulum be allowed to swing before the clockwork breaks? It seems unlikely that both go on forever in an eternal stalemate. Capitalism and democracy are both historical systems. They each had a beginning, and presumably, they will both come to an end.

The neoliberal project for global economic conquest calls into serious question the future of democracy. The Bretton Woods institutions--the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization--are economic agencies that are global in their reach, and they are undemocratic in their structure, in their practice, and in their purpose. Yet there is no democratic institution to equal the power of these economic agencies, nor is there yet a civil society of global scope. This lack of countervailing forces constitutes a profound social imbalance that must be redressed if democracy is not to fall to a hostile takeover by corporate raiders or be violently overthrown by political extremists.

The third trajectory is what Steger calls the construction of a “global new deal.” This agenda if the internationalist-egalitarian left includes greater democratic accountability of the global marketplace. Both international political and economic institutions must be restructured and redirected to this end. Free trade must be replaced with fair trade agreements that recognize and redress the power asymmetries that perpetuate and widen the gap between the wealthy North and the impoverished South. Proposals developed in 2000 at the summit of the World Social Forum in Brazil include:

· Blanket forgiveness of all Third World debt.

· Levying a tax on international financial transactions (often called the Tobin tax, after Nobel laureate James Tobin).

· Abolition of offshore tax havens for wealthy corporations and individuals.

· Implementation of stringent global environmental agreements.

· Establishment of a new world-development institution financed largely by the global North through such measures as a financial transaction tax but administered largely by the global South.

· Establishment of international labor-protection standards, perhaps as clauses in a profoundly reformed WTO.

· Greater transparency and accountability provided to citizens by national governments and international institutions (Steger 2002, 146).

Some of these proposals sound reasonable, while others need to be examined. For instance, wouldn’t the blanket forgiveness of all Third World debt cause severe economic dislocation in the global North? Millions of Americans, including this author, are invested in the global South through 401(k) plans and other financial instruments. Should the burden of forgiveness be disproportionately shouldered by the wealthiest investors, who are not only more able to forgive, but have had a greater hand in devising the financial strategies that contributed to the indebtedness of the South in the first place? If a new global development institution were financed by the North but administered by the South, what mechanism would assure Southern accountability while it played with Other People’s Money?

Above all is the problem that no mechanism exists for instituting such a sweeping agenda. How do we get there from here? Despite the remarkable growth of internationalist-egalitarian alliances in recent years, they are still no match for the dominant neoliberal power structures. “Moreover, old state-centered strategies of social and economic reform have lost much of their appeal in a neoliberal context that has witnessed the curtailment of the power of nation-states to control the economic activities of the private sector. The fundamental challenge for global new dealers is to reconstruct a Keynesian system of controlled capitalism on a global scale (Steger 2002, 147).” While Michel Rocard, a former social democratic prime minister of France, envisions “an alliance of progressive forces” including trade unions, leftist political parties and NGOs, Steger questions whether such groups, many elements of which are enervated by the centrist rhetoric of “globalization with a human face,” have the will to organize and press for such dramatic reforms, much less serve as the genesis of a new system of global democratic governance. On the other hand, such groups are likely to be re-energized by the rising discontent. The trick, then, will be to acquire enough clout to implement effective reforms and head off a violent, nationalist-protectionist backlash. Final Reflections

“The market is rational,” declares Representative Dick Armey (R-TX), in his arguments for privatization and deregulation (Armey 1988). (He also says, “Government is dumb,” which naturally leads one to ponder, in the tradition of Mark Twain, the extent to which the Congressman fulfills his own pronouncement.) Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the market is rational, the logical conclusion is that a world ruled entirely by market principles would be entirely rational. In such a world, social relationships would count for little, such as family, or romantic love. Having divined the perfect market world from an isolated set of basic assumptions, modern economists are succeeding beyond the wildest dreams of the medieval alchemists; they are transmuting the Golden Rule into leaden self-interest, steel industries into rust belts, and the very Earth, Water, and Air are consumed in Fire to produce a toxic Quintessence.

In the rational world of the market, everything is commodified, everything can be had for a price. Marriages are reduced to mergers; domestic partnerships must be strategic partnerships, first and foremost. In double-income households, children mature like junk bonds, devoid of family ties. In our youth-oriented culture, parents have always been a drag, but to be an economic drag in the Market World is an unpardonable sin. Privatize Social Security and Medicare? Certainly! So what if it doesn’t work? Old people are unproductive anyway! Nor are children immune to the venality of neoliberalism. Cut taxes! So what that our schools are falling into ruins? Everything our kids need to know they can learn in one day’s training at McDonald’s. Behind the disingenuous Mom-and-apple-pie campaign rhetoric that suckers the uncritical electorate out of their votes, these are the true “family values” of the neoliberal politicians.

Cooperation has no intrinsic value, and its only extrinsic value is as a temporary alliance to achieve a short-term goal, for the long-term goal is always to get ahead, beat the competition, leave everyone behind, and die with the most toys. What is the meaning of the Team Effort in a world in which all the players are free agents who are ready to bolt to the next team that offers a bigger contract? The totally rational Market World is a Hobbesian horror in which Homo economicus, who is defined only by acquisitiveness, exists in an economic state of nature, and must contend from cradle to grave in the financial war of each against all in the futile hope of snatching some fleeting securities. The difference between this post-modern civilization and the prehistoric savagery Hobbes described is that, thanks to modern medicine, one can look forward to an existence that is insecure, undervalued, indebted, indentured, and long… if you have the right insurance coverage.

Each human being must roll off the assembly line with the biggest set of standard equipment or else get it enhanced, must acquire the most accessories and options, and must be able to perform at any time of the day or night, because the competition is always just over your shoulder. And there is a corporately produced and marketed pharmacopoeia to help us all cope with the constant stress of competition from every quarter and the inevitable feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, and depression. The sardonic twist that Aldous Huxley gave to Shakespeare’s words in the 1930s could hardly be more apt at the dawn of the 21st century:

“How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world that has such people in it!”

However, there those who measure themselves in terms other than what they buy, sell, or hold; who make their lives real enough to obviate the need for watching reality television programs; who resist being programmed by the corporate media; who hold values other than maximizing self-interest at every transaction. It remains to be seen whether they are numerous enough to be a significant counterforce to corporatism.

Many observers are skeptical that the Battle of Seattle and the antiglobalist demonstrations both before and since signal the emergence of a global popular revolution. It is an open question whether the disparate threads of discontent can weave themselves into the sturdy fabric of a global civil society and challenge the corporate globalism in which the neoliberals are attempting to blanket the world. It is true that there are a myriad of groups, some of which only use globalization as an excuse advance their narrow agendas, while others disagree in their visions of a nonglobalist globalized world and their theoretical descriptions of the end state called globality. But this is not cause for doubt, but rather for hope. The point is that there are choices to be made, and that Margaret Thatcher to the contrary, there are alternatives. The point is that global communication technology first of all gives people the means to discover that there are choices, then to discuss the possibilities, to reach a consensus on the general direction that globalization should take, and finally the power to steer the process in the desired direction. To some extent it is the very decentralized nature of the resistance that defies centralized attempts to control the process toward a self-serving end. Since the resistance is pluralist, the shifting consensus will result in periodic course corrections, confounding corporate hired guns with a plethora of moving targets.

Despite the globalists’ best efforts, it seems that more and more people are unplugging themselves from the safe, seductive, soporific Matrix. A few here and a few there swell in numbers to become a few thousand here and a few thousand there, from Seattle to Prague to Melbourne. Although Time Warner AOL and Yahoo! may have the most popular portals on the World Wide Web, no one owns the Internet, and for now there are too many Internet service providers (ISPs) for any one entity to effectively control its content. The World Wide Web is still a wide-open window to the world for those who wish to look. It is a world of authoritative information, muddled misinformation, and deliberate disinformation, so let the browser beware. Although it has the defects of its virtues, containing everything from the wisdom of the ages to the bloggings of teenagers, it is the open range of the information frontier. It is the apotheosis of what Friedman calls the democratization of information (Friedman 2000, 60). As such, it constitutes a potent threat to neoliberal efforts to monopolize the media and the message. There are voices out there in the cyberspace wilderness who may have difficulty being heard above the global cacophony, but who cannot be silenced. Once like-minded people find each other’s universal resource locators (URLs) and email addresses, the revolution has already begun. They can communicate and coordinate in cyberspace to make their presence felt in the public square. Resistance is not futile, it is inevitable… and eternal. A century ago, Woodrow Wilson said, “The history of liberty is the history of resistance (Wilson 1912).” It was true then. It has always been true. References

Armey, Dick. 1988. The road away from serfdom. Liberty Haven. Reprinted from Imprimis, the monthly journal of Hillsdale College. February 1988, Vol. 17, No. 2. Internet. Available from http://www.libertyhaven.com/politicsandcurrentevents/taxesandtaxation/roadaway.shtml; accessed 27 April 2003.

Barber, Benjamin R. 1996. Jihad vs. McWorld. New York. Ballantine Books.

Bell, Daniel. 1960. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Glencoe, Illinois. Free Press.

Bobbio, Norberto. 1996. Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction. Chicago. University of Chicago Press.

Brock, William E. 2000. Nominating future presidents. Report of the Advisory Commission on the Presidential Nominating Process. Internet. Available from http://www.rnc.org/media/pdfs/brockreport.pdf; accessed 13 February 2003.

Castells, Manuel. 1996-1998. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. Oxford. Blackwell.

Conan, Neil. 2002. “Mainlining Cosmetic Surgery,” Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio, 22 April.

Falk, Richard. 1999. Predatory Globalization: A Critique. Cambridge. Polity Press.

Friedman, Thomas L. 2000. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York. Anchor Books.

Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York. Free Press.

Giddens, Anthony. 1999. The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. Cambridge. Polity Press.

Gilpin, Robert. 2000. The Challenge of Global Capitalism: The World Economy in the 21st Century. Princeton. Princeton University Press.

Held, David. 1995. “Democracy and the New International Order.” In Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order, ed. Danielle Archibugi and David Held. Cambridge. Polity Press.

King, Larry. 2003. Larry King Live, Cable News Network, 14 July.

Lairson, and Skidmore. 1993. International Political Economy: The Struggle for Wealth and Power. Fort Worth. Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

Nasar, Sylvia. 1998. A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash. New York. Touchstone Books.

Polanyi, Karl. 1944. The Great Transformation: The Poltical and Economic Origins of Our Time. Reprint 1957, Boston. Beacon Press.

Robertson, Roland. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London. Sage.

Sackrey, Charles, and Geoffrey Schneider with Janet Knoedler. 2002a. John Maynard Keynes. In Introduction to political economy, p. 79-103. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Economic Affairs Bureau, Inc.

Singer, Daniel. 1999. Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? New York. Monthly Review Press.

Steger, Manfred B. 2002. Globalism. Lanham, Maryland. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2002 Globalization and Its Discontents. New York. W. W. Norton & Company.

Tomlinson, John. 1999. Globalization and Culture. Chicago. University of Chicago Press.

Vann, Bill. 2003. Peace T-Shirt Arrest Sparks Protests in New York. World Socialist Website, 8 March. Internet. Available from http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/mar2003/down-m08.shtml; accessed 6 May 2003.

Wilson, Woodrow. 1912. Address, New York Press Club, 9 May.