The attached work in progress was prepared for the left journal Australian Options. Comment is invited. It was written before seeing the exzcellent material from Charles Andrews which was posted by Rob Schaap. Glblstn4.TXT What's All This About Globalisation?? The term "Globalisation" is nowadays bandied about by every self-proclaimed guru. It covers up and confuses understanding of the process by which sinister and faceless forces have almost captured the world. For the people of the World Economic Forum at the Casino in Melbourne are an unelected dictatorship who rule the world through their corporations and connections. They are the top executives of the top 1000 multinational corporations. And they were invited here by the Business Council of Australia, consisting of the top hundred Australian monopolies. The term "Globalisation" hides two related but different things. Firstly, the SYSTEM -- the accumulation of huge profits and the concentration of great wealth and power in the hands of very few, and the spread of their corporate domination through the whole world economic system. Secondly, also to describe the set of PRACTICES and POLICIES, which has been foisted onto us by those world rulers and their hangers on, in politics, the media, universities. (More of that later.) How did We Get Into Such an Insane System? The present set up - late capitalism, monopoly capitalism, imperialism, or globalised capitalism, as it is called in various writings - is the inescapable result of private ownership and 'free enterprise' of the 19th century -- the worldwide culmination of the system of private profit. Global corporate capitalism really developed a hundred years ago and grew all during the 20th century, with companies, economies and cartels fighting for and redividing their spheres of interest, even by world wars. The growing piles of profits were accumulated into ever-larger investment funds and power. This 'Capital' becomes the relation of power created by the finance which has become concentrated in single corporations and trusts, buying the use of workers who are dependent on them to earn a living, and who are set working to make even more profit. Under competition the corporations drive out the individual businesses, technological change wipes out the older companies, the largest companies break and take over the smaller. During each decade's economic crisis the strongest corporations grow richer. Big becomes bigger; thus competition and the regular crises actually breed monopoly. The need for unending expansion and profiteering at the expense of working people leads to cost cutting, 'rationalisation', sackings, the search for more cheap labour to exploit, more areas of commercialism and control. Concentration of wealth and power has become awesomely gigantic, until - after the last postwar boom ended, a period of new monopolisation set in together with a major assault on all countries and peoples in their way. Mega-monopolies have become interlocked in control of the world economy, production, trade, and finance. The massive flows of capital funds, for investment by purchase of potential labour to be exploited to produce more profits, for unproductive company and land takeovers, and for currency and other speculation, has reached close to fifty times the money value of world ordinary commodity trading. The penetration has gone to all corners of the globe. They have run out of space and, to keep expanding their profit and capital, they need to step up their super-exploitation of all humankind. The controllers of world capital took over the US Reserve Bank, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (reversing its purpose), and GATT which they turned into the World Trade Organisation, with powers to penalise governments! They are still trying to impose a Multilateral Agreement on Investment on resisting governments and public. And they are not finished yet - they plan to conquer all knowledge/intelligence, culture, and even food and the cells of life! The inevitability of this expansion and monopolisation as a feature of the fundamentals of capitalism had become clear by the start of the 20th century, and was revealed years before by Marx and later Engels, whose analysis was later elaborated by the German Hilferding, the Russian Bukharin - whose 1915 book is still probably the best explanation of how the process developed. The Belgian Mandel and the American Gordon have added more recent accounts. They all showed that as long as we have basic capitalism we are stuck as a result with this consequence. A huge volume of political-economic literature describes the consequences in all walks of life. So much for those who bleat that capitalism has ended, and the marxian analysis of it is out of date. Much of this process is blind and unthinking, driven by "the markets" - that is the illogic of the profit system. It is not simply a conspiracy which we can eliminate and get on with life under what they call "free enterprise". The monsters at the World Forum are driven by economic imperatives while they plan their greater wealth and exploitation of the globe. A current ABC educational series tries to make out that therefore "globalisation" was all natural, historical, inevitable, and quoted as examples - past travel and migration. The spiel is that you can't fight it; it is inevitable. But that is not true. Our present economic system is not the only one possible. It can be changed -- with difficulty! But that doesn't mean we have to go along with it. Their Policies Can be Rejected and Reversed. The multiple revolts against Globalisation actually becomes a challenge and danger to the whole edifice of world corporate monopoly capitalism. Such is the historic significane of the alliance born of Seattle, S11 and the other global challenges to the globalised capital system. The Second Aspect of "Globalisation" Secondly, the term "Globalisation" hides not only a pernicious SYSTEM but also the PRACTICES advanced by the leaders of that system, and the POLICIES pushed by its supporters, which are certainly not necessary or inevitable. (Hence the growing world coalition of people campaigning against this wonder-god.) We are being conned by the agents of these massive and criminal corporations, to encourage and facilitate the growth and power of world monopolies, to hand over political sovereignty and control of the economy to them, to beat down unions and reduce wages and conditions of work and living. The guilty are the politicians of all major parties, the financial journalists and commentators, the hacks in universities, starting with Milton Friedman from Chicago, all the way though to Rogernomics in New Zealand, and to our own greatest treasurer (for the global monopolies) Keating. Reagan claimed that the riches of the wealthy would "trickle down" onto the heads of the rest of us, and used this to soak the poor and the working class while enriching the millionaires. Thatcher boasted the "There is no such thing as Society" while trying to wipe out unionism. They boast their greatest triumph was the "miracle" of Chile under dictator Pinochet, whose economic adviser was Friedman. The Gates crew prattles nonsense about a "new economy", communication, the wonders of technology (which is assumed to be always good) and breaking down isolation. Economists and politicians tell us that what they call "free trade" will benefit farmers and exporters, and indirectly all of us. You get this lying propaganda every day from Murdoch and Packer. Usually called Neo-Liberalism (Some idiot journalist in Australia called it "economic Rationalism"), they push for freedom for big money from all controls and limitations. Thus they talk of 'deregulation' and 'freedom', which actually mean passing regulation and control to the global monopolies. The New Right program will be familiar to everyone. It seeks to: - Abandon control of capital funds and banking, tariffs, and import controls; reduce taxation for the rich and big business; decimate public health and education; sell off public assets; use sackings and competition to beat down wages; cut out award conditions, safety and environmental provisions; spread casualisation of labour, sweatshops, outsourcing and child labour; switch employment to the lowest wage countries and take advantage of $1-a-day slavery; reduce government expenditure on social needs; propagate ideas of consumerism, individualism, selfishness, anti-social attitudes, and the philosophy the "Greed is Good". They take over the world media, get all the governments and main political parties in their pockets; organise the genocide of indigenous landholders; introduce shoot-to-kill legislation against the civil population; bash up and in some countries murder anyone who protests. They have set out to destroy the sovereignty of countries, to demolish all indedendence and culture, curb rights of free speech, establish a global slavery of working people on starvation wages, to destroy the world environment and national and self-sufficient economies, -- so that they have complete freedom to do anything THEY like, in the interests of further vast accumulation of super-profits and economic and political power. A Revolt Has Begun. But the power of global capital is not absolute and unchallenged. By its fundamentally overreaching nature it begets its own opposition. We see the globalisation of resistance to such programs, first of all in countries like Peru, Brazil and the Zapistas of Mexico, then in the worldwide rejection of the plans for a Multilateral Investment Agreement. But the series of actions at Seattle, Davos, Washinton, Melbourne, and Prague in the last few months have had enormous significance in identifying the crux of the system and directing world attention to it, as well as bringing into its umbrella the protests of great strands of people and movements who have found out that their own concerns are all linked by the octopus of global corporatism. The aim of Seattle for "simultaneous transformation of the capitalist social order - building alternative social and economic structures based on co-operation, ecological sustainability and grassroots democracy" corresponds with the aims of most on the genuine left. As so often happens with revolutionary movements, the challenge has come in unexpected ways and places , involves many new forces, and is growing with great rapidity and consciousness in a way that does much good to the spirit of 'oldies' like this writer. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Brian T.Carey <bcarey@pcug,org,au> ========================================= _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
