[asia-apec 105] Globalization or Internationalism?

[RVerzola]

INTERNATIONALISM VERSUS GLOBALIZATION

While internationalism would celebrate the achievements, struggles and
creativity of the poor, and the equal rights of all peoples of the
world to develop in dignity, sufficiency and security, globalisation
and global capitalism requires the humiliation of hundreds of millions
of people and keeping them in constant insecurity, pitting them
against one another in a competitive struggle for survival.

By Jeremy Seabrook Third World Network Features

We are all globalisers now. The insistence on globalisation has
eclipsed and usurped internationalism; indeed sometimes masquerades as
if it were the same thing. It is time to rescue what internationalists
have always worked for from the clutches of a rapaciously expansive
and ultimately, colonising, globalisation.

   We hear the arguments daily from the holders of power; the very
fatalism with which they speak about the inevitability, the
irreversibility of globalisation, suggests they are aware that control
over events is slipping through their fingers. The rhetoric becomes
more and more desperate: We must compete in an increasingly integrated
world. We must educate and train our people for the challenge of the
21st century. We have to take on the Asian tigers and beat them at
their own game. (Of course, it was our game originally, which is why
we find it so disconcerting when they beat us. What's more, it isn't a
game; it's deadly serious, particularly for the losers, the people of
those countries prematurely used up by work and want, and whose
children are dying daily from avoidable sickness and malnutrition.)

   Globalisation then, means the absorption of all the countries of
the world into a single economic entity: a bleak vision of a
choiceless future, in which 'choice' nevertheless figures so
prominently.

   Internationalists spoke of other forms of integration, more
harmonious, less violent, more just, long before the apostles of
globalisation began promoting their lurid vision of a whole world
refashioned in the image of the universal market-place, from every
platform, at every conference, at every international gathering, in
every transnational meeting- place on earth. That other version of
integration required only that the powerless unite, that the
disadvantaged combine in order to resist and make common cause against
what William Morris 100 years ago referred to as 'the iron rule of the
World-Market'.

   The fading of that internationalism is the distant, and perhaps
most disastrous, consequence of the death of the Soviet Union. It is
not the loss of the ideology of Communism that has cancelled hope for
the poor: it is rather the absence of any check upon the florid and
aggressive necessities of unchecked capitalism. Whenever poverty and
inequality are 're-discovered' by the media, this is no longer
accompanied by a sense of moral outrage. These are now simply facts of
life.

   Much of the internationalism which animated the early labour
movement has now declined into a desultory and ritualistic exchange of
fraternal greetings on special occasions; organised labour having
been, for the main part, enlisted in the grisly crusade of
'integrating' unequal partners into an interdependent world. For
interdependence between unequals means the institutionalising of
subordination.

   In this sense, the exalted project of 'globalisation' is yet
another refuge for racism, because the majority of the world's poor
are non-white, and the rich white or Japanese. The freezing of
relationships of existing inequality annuls hope for the poor. The
1996 UN Human Development Index report states that in the last 40
years the richest 20% of people have seen the differential between
themselves and the poorest 20% double: where in the 1950s the richest
one-fifth of humanity received 30 times as much as the poorest fifth,
this has now increased to 60 times as much. And this outcome occurred
even while a potential alternative - however malign - still to some
degree inhibited a capitalism as yet unsure of its 'ultimate' triumph.

   The governance of the poor countries has ceased to rest with their
nominal leaders, and has increasingly been passed over to Western
financial institutions, and those transnational entities for whom the
preservation of Western dominance is axiomatic. Their talk of poverty
abatement, structural adjustment, their touting of economic success
stories - once Brazil, now New Zealand, once even Nigeria, now
Thailand - are calculated to conceal the real purpose of the
'integrated world economy', which is the supranational management of
worsening inequality.

   Those who control the vehicles of this noble endeavour often speak
of themselves as if they were helpless functionaries, compelled to
comply with higher laws, as if they were merely 'carrying out orders',
were sacerdotal intermediaries of a providential distribution of human
destinies. They don't put it quite like this. They invoke economic
realities, the necessities of the market, as though these things were
aspects of universal natural laws. 'The market is our master,'
proclaims Michael Heseltine. In a more spiritual age, this would have
been called idolatry.

   It is now considered both improper and unthinkable that anyone
should try to stand in the way of 'the global economy', as it rolls
over the world, crushing ancient patterns of living, destroying benign
symbiosis between resource base and humanity, breaking modest ways of
answering need, evicting people from forests, subsistence agriculture,
forcing them from the security of traditional settlements, and
sweeping them up in vast involuntary migrations to a single
destination - the stifling, loveless embrace of the universal market.

   People object in vain that the global free market is not even what
its defenders and proponents claim for it. It is not even free. Only
goods and capital are permitted to move unhindered around the globe,
while people and labour are not. Free markets, captive people. When
they try to escape from the ghettoes, the enclosures, the camps, the
kraals, the homelands, the free trade zones - which are also sometimes
graced by the term 'countries' -in which they are confined, they are
called economic migrants and sent home.

   Home to the places where the regimes, the ruling elites, the
emissaries and representatives of a misshapen global unification, have
been suborned to ensure that the real flow of wealth is maintained
from poor to rich; at a rate which no one really knows - some say it
reaches at least $400 billion annually, when terms of trade, transfer
pricing within transnational companies, usurious debt and the brain
drain, and all the multiple forms of dispossession dreamed up by the
ideology of political economy are all taken into account.

   And here is an interesting paradox. The West - the official West,
that is - talks endlessly about its abhorrence of racism. All European
countries, the US, Canada and Australia have enshrined this sacred
principle in legislation of various kinds. But how is that racism to
be kept at bay in the civilised Western heartlands? Only by perpetual
economic growth and expansion, which alone will keep the people of the
West from those melancholic distractions which convulsed Europe
earlier this century, from that racism which animated centuries of
imperialism in the centuries that preceded it.

   And how is that growth and expansion to be assured? Why, as it
always has been: by the exploitation of primary commodities and the
resources of others, by control of trade, by the exploitation of
workers on plantations, in agribusiness and on industrial estates, in
the spreading sweatshops of the cities, in the infernal workshops,
forges and factories in the towns and cities of the South. Only this
way can the rich countries remain rich enough to keep their fractious
and insecure peoples from turning against marginalised and threatened
minorities.

   In other words, the official detestation of racism at home can be
given practical shape only by practising it more an more intensively
abroad. This is how the age of imperialism has survived all the
liberation movements and the struggles for freedom from colonialism.
Organised, institutionalised hypocrisy has woven an elaborate fabric
of concealment to shroud the real relationships between North and
South; any discussion of which is rigidly excluded from mainstream
political discussion in the West. This is why we, in the popular
imagination, figure primarily as givers of aid, as rescuers, as
deliverers, as bestowers of assistance, instruction and wisdom to a
poor, suffering, wasting Third World.

   The distaste for racism in the West is merely another luxury of
privilege, paid for by turning over lands of Brazil to vast
agribusiness enclosures, and sending the people to squat in the
violent suburbs of Nova Iguacu in Rio and the favelas of Sao Paulo; by
the million or more young women who have entered the garments
industry, where they receive less than $1 for a 14-hour day for the
privilege of providing us with the amenity of cheap clothing; by the
continued transfer of produce and treasures of most of the countries
of Africa at knock-down prices to their former political masters.
Racism abroad to serve a non- racial society at home; what a
formidable, cunningly wrought construct it is.

   In the first half of July 1996, India, for instance, figured in the
so-called quality press and television of Britain, not because of the
energy, endurance and heroism of its poor in their efforts to survive,
but because there was a stampede at a Hindu shrine in Madhya Pradesh,
because India will have the largest number of people with HIV in the
world within the next five years, because there was another atrocity
against low-caste labourers in Bihar, because of government corruption
and the usual floods and excesses of nature which come with every
monsoon. The relationships in a globalised world are the object of
rigorous and tightly- controlled misrepresentation. It is the work of
internationalists to unmask this, to celebrate the achievements, the
struggles and the creativity of the poor, to recognise our common
humanity and the equal rights of all peoples of the world to develop
in dignity, sufficiency and security.

     Dignity, sufficiency and security. Potent words, for these are
the elements of a noble, realisable project of internationalism. It is
what a real 'Commonwealth' might have looked like, after the
dissolution of empire, if uneven and lopsided 'development' had not
been the objective of the former imperial power. Such a version of
internationalism must be snuffed out by globalisation, which depends
for its 'success' precisely on the avoidance of dignity, sufficiency
and security.

    It requires that the people of the world should aspire to more and
not to sufficiency, because this alone will feed the engines of
perpetual economic expansionism. It requires that people remain prey
to constant insecurity, because this is guaranteed to set them against
one another in an ever fiercer competitive struggle to survive.

   Globalisation is inherently unstable and violent; and that even
before it starts to strike against the limits of the earth's resource
base. The most urgent task is to retrieve internationalism from
globalisation - this caricature and distortion of a coming together of
global humanity.

   Globalisation presses a whole planet into the service of a system
that has long since outlived its usefulness in serving us, and indeed,
frequently no longer even pretends to do so: autonomous, triumphant,
while we anxiously await news of the health of the economy, the
weakness or vitality of markets recovering from a bout of nerves or a
spectacular fall, their buoyancy or depression, as though the market
were a perpetually ailing monarch, whose well-being is of paramount
concern to his subjects; while all around us, the people perish.

   And not only in the poor countries. The UN Human Development Index
states that Canada and the USA occupy the first two places in the
world. If the USA is presented as the goal and summit of human
achievement, with its 20,000 annual shotgun murders, its million
prisoners in jail, its 28 million recorded crimes, its addicted,
obsessive and isolated humanity, as one person in three lives alone,
as well as its prodigality and waste, its loss of cohesion and
community, its extremist individualism, and pathological inability to
understand all the things that people can and must do together if the
world is not to perish - well, if the USA is the object of universal
aspiration, then we have lost even the capacity to formulate a vision
of what a decent society might look like.

   Disengagement, self-reliance, a celebration of the local and of our
capacity to answer our needs for ourselves and each other; breaking
the dependency - not on welfare, but on a global market - so that our
daily bread no longer comes courtesy of transnational conglomerates,
and we are not compelled to drink value- added chemicalised beverages
because there is no safe drinking water. The satisfaction of all our
needs has been enclosed and held captive, precisely by those
'globalised' monopolistic interests which promote themselves as
representing free markets. We are then bidden to bless our unfreedoms
as the highest liberty.

   The language of internationalism has been plundered and distorted
for alien purposes. The meaning of words has also been polluted,
contaminated by the effluent of hyperactive and insomniac media
interests; the resulting incoherence ensures that we can scarcely
perceive the difference between human and economic well- being,
between the needs of people and the necessities of economic growth.

   Global integration means a more systematic abuse of people and
their resource base all over the world. For the privileged it means
more waste, excess and superfluities while basic needs remain
unanswered; for the poor a more total dispossession of livelihood and
life. Internationalism is a rescue mission of all the people of the
world from a globalisation that represents nothing less than the
usurping of the whole of creation by capitalism. - Third World Network
Features

About the writer: Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist and author
based in London.

For more information, please contact: Third World Network 228,
Macalister Road, 10400 Penang, Malaysia. Email: twn at igc.apc.org;
twnpen at twn.po.my Tel: (+604)2293511,2293612 & 2293713; Fax:
(+604)2298106 & 2264505