[Despite the overwhelming cacophony as regards "Globalisation" and "global capital", the moment the "crisis" struck, the immediate reflexive response was to erect "protectionist barriers" by the "national" states in the interests of their own capitals. Even the countervailing measures considered necessary to avoid further disruption of economy on the global scale and consequent common ruination, likely to be triggered by such competitive protectionism, had to be deliberated and negotiated by the G-20, not the WTO.
That's all about the claim as regards the withering away of the "nation states" under the impact of "Globalisation" and emergence of a unified global capital.] The shape of things to come There is one final conclusion that the globalisation consensus can lead to: that the system, although uncontrollable, is less dangerous than in the past. This is because states, with their heavily armed military forces, are supposed to be of decreasing relevance to capitalism. It may need a state to protect it against revolt from below, to deal with “rogue” regimes which will not obey the normal rules of the game, to guarantee the sanctity of contracts and to provide certain parts of the infrastructure. But capitalism does not need rival states which disturb the free movement of capital and trade. It should be able to settle for one hegemonic power (presumably the US) which will supervise a world order in which free trade is increasingly the norm and in which military conflict plays a more marginal role. The refutation of the consensus should lead to a very different view of the way in which the world system is going, one which is characterised by international conflicts and wars as well as by uncontrollable economic crises. Different firms have different interests and will look to the individual states over which they have influence to achieve these. There are firms which will look to establishing global domination though free trade – either from nationally based production which can put down all competitors or by global assembly lines. This is clearly the perspective of very important sections of US business, and of some British based multinationals prepared to operate in alliance with them. But even in the case of these firms, their “national” state – and especially the Pentagon with its huge arms contracts – is of key importance in sustaining production. It is their national state, too, that they depend on to enforce their interests against others when it comes to shaping the system as a whole. Hence, for instance, the protracted efforts by the US state to get enforcement of “intellectual copyright” during the last GATT negotiations, and its insistence that international agencies like the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation endorse a “free trade” approach to economic development. Other firms can, however, follow different strategies for conquering world markets – strategies which imply a different attitude to the role of states. So most Japanese firms built up their global presence by exporting from within an economy in which the national state and national business practices provided them with a strong degree of protection. Then, at a certain point, faced with threats of tariffs or quotas from other states – threats to which they often reacted by conceding “voluntary restraints” on exports – they have begun to turn to production through local subsidiaries (the “Toyotaist” or “glocalisation” approach). Once this is done, they can quite happily accept, even encourage, protectionism from the local state as a way of warding off competition from rival multinationals based elsewhere. German and French firms are tending to expand from their national bases into neighbouring parts of Europe, which leads them to look to a regional European policy to be enacted through strengthened European institutions rather than to worldwide free trade. None of these strategies means we are witnessing a turn towards the division of the world into virtually self-contained national or regional economies, as tended to happen in the 1930s. World trade goes on rising. But it is not free trade, based on non-interference by states, so much as “negotiated trade”, in which states continually pressurise each other to concede the demands of the capitals associated with them. Much of British capitalism stands in a category of its own. Ruigrok and van Tulder point out that it is the only advanced industrial country with “weak cohesion”. [54] There are an exceptionally high number of foreign investors in the domestic economy and they come in nearly equal numbers from the US and the European Union. [55] At the same time, the British based multinationals carry out a much higher proportion of production abroad than is the case with those from the other large advanced countries – and again this production is not concentrated in one region, but is divided almost equally between Europe and North America, with a smaller amount in East Asia. These facts perhaps explain the enthusiasm for talk about “globalisation” in Britain. Writers are generalising to the whole of world capitalism from the experience of one, declining, sector. But, in the process, they are not taking into account the complexity of that experience. For some of the investment is from multinationals which have worldwide production strategies (for instance, IBM), but the fastest growing investments are from multinationals which have Europe wide strategies (not just the European firms, but also the American and Far Eastern motor firms). And, at the same time, there are key British based multinationals (BAe, GEC, Plessey, Rolls Royce) which are dependent on the considerable military spending of the British state for much of their research and development and a significant chunk of their markets. These divergent perspectives of different sections of multinational capital in Britain lead to quite different interpretations of the international strategy which should be followed by the national state, particularly when it comes to the attitude to economic and monetary union in Europe. For some sections such union is a natural corollary to their increasingly European organisation of production. For others it could turn into a dangerous obstacle to their global ambitions. The argument is not between those who rely on the state to do their bidding and those who do not. It is rather between different strategies for using the state, one which sees it as a base from which to negotiate global deals, and one which puts the stress on European restructuring. And the picture is further complicated by the presence of important sections of medium and small industry which still operate within an overwhelmingly national perspective. The fashionable talk about “globalisation” cannot throw light on these divisions because it fails to distinguish the quite different ways in which different firms restructure in the face of international competition. And if it obscures rather than illuminates issues in Britain, the most internationalised of the major economies, it completely misleads in the case of the other economies. Developments in the world system may be changing the relations between states and firms. But they are not leading to a loss of connection of firms to states, and neither are they leading the major capitals that battle for world dominance to lose a certain national hue. This is not the world portrayed by globalisation theory, based on the “neo-classical” model of a system made up of evenly distributed atoms of capital which interact freely with each other. Rather it is a world in which a limited number of states and multinationals press against each other, pushing and pulling as each tries to cajole others to do its will, like giant octopuses with intertwined tentacles. And the cajoling is not restricted merely to economic manoeuvres, for this remains a world in which the biggest industrial states insist on retaining their military capacity, despite the end of the Cold War, and the fastest growing of the East Asian NICs are involved in an arms race with each other and with their neighbours. The system is unstable and dangerous precisely because capitals retain ties to states, with the possibility of a resort to force continuing to play an important role as multinationals battle each other for global dominance. The fact that the force is normally deployed outside the advanced countries themselves does not diminish its horrific effects on local populations or its destabilising impact on the system as a whole. The bombing of Baghdad is as much part of the logic of the system as the Multifibre Trade Agreement or haggling over royalties for using the latest software. Globalisation theory cannot see this. Nor can those reformists like Hirst and Thompson who are nostalgic for a mythical Keynesian past, however correct the individual points they make against globalisation theory. But it is something revolutionary socialists have to be able to understand. It means that economic crises always express themselves in political convulsions. And it also means that the struggle is not just against material deprivation, but for the very survival of humanity, for socialism against barbarism. [*Excerpted from 'Globalisation: A Critique of a New Orthodoxy'(1996) by Chris Harman at <http://www.marxists.de/imperial/harman/global-e.htm>*.] --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
