[asia-apec 107] Re: Globalization or Internationalism?

[Steve Freedkin, Managing Director]

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At 08:55 AM 9/11/96 -0800, you wrote:
>
>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
>
>
>


Steve Freedkin
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