The big problem’s name is capitalism, not globalization

 

There are those who consider that globalization must ridden by capitalism, and those who believe that nationalism must replace globalization all the while accepting capitalism. Two ways, one winner: Capital.

Globalization is a long process within which humanity is being built. The Earth only became known, in its main contours, with the integration of the Americas, Australia and the Pacific Islands, to which the names of Columbus, Gama, and Magellan are forever linked… The establishment of sea routes consolidated and intensified trade relations, cultural exchanges, miscegenation, without forgetting the defilement brought by wars, looting, religious struggles, slavery, and genocides.

 

As this globalization accelerated, China and Japan locked their borders in a nationalist closure that would only cause them humiliation and to lag behind.

China, which in the fifteenth century was technically able to run a maritime route to Europe, closed in on itself, burning its huge 2000 t ships long before the construction of the European galleons which, in the seventeenth century, were still around 600 t.

Much coveted, China was shredded into occupied zones of influence, destroyed by wars that only ended with Mao's triumph in 1949. Japan, for its part, only emerged from its isolation at the threat of Admiral Perry's guns in 1854. Although in different ways and in separate historical times, they quickly learned the capitalism’s advantages over rurality and feudalism, and mounted on the globalization horse. Today, along with other countries in their geographical area, they are evidencing the new political and economic centrality of the planet – in the Western Pacific or East Asia, whichever you prefer, given that the planet is round.

This new scale rendered obsolete the feudal order, its duchies and counties, as it ruined the Italian city-states based on Mediterranean trade and finance. As a result, Germany and Italy only emerged as states and actors in inter-imperialist competition long after England and France divided the world among themselves. That delay resulted in territorial ambitions that led to two world wars.

While empires were extinguished, historical reliquaries such as the Austro-Hungarian empire or the Ottoman one were entering an era in which the expression “to each people their state” corresponded to the desires of every bourgeoisie to claim ownership over a territory – as if heiress to the former feudal lords – and the exclusive rights to exploit their resources; and above all, the work done by its population, in constant dispute with its neighbors.

The colonized nations – "non-civilized" – would for some decades still be left out of these rights of autonomy, once inserted into the interstate, inter-imperialist competition among the various globalized national capitalisms.

Globalization is a process of rapprochement of peoples, predating capitalism, which undoubtedly deepened and extended it. The limits inherent to capitalism in its now dominant neoliberal version are known – concentration of capital in the financial area, capture of peoples and states through debt, thinning of labor’s rights and income, low growth (that fetish of capitalism), abandonment of much of humanity to disease and starvation, disregard for the side effects of production and circulation in the environment and the food chain, under-utilization of existing technologies and knowledge, commodification of lives…

Nowadays, politically, the hierarchy of capital is determined by the financial capital and the multinationals that direct the action of the national, regional or global political classes towards the “management of human resources” through a placebo called representative democracy, the administration of funds raised through fiscal punishment, with people submerged in huge flows of skewed information and cascades of debt.

Today, the vast majority of national states have their sovereignty reduced to the use of the anthem and the flag, since the jealous national bourgeoisies, which once dwelt in their territories, have been substantially replaced by multinational global business networks that integrated the resources of nation-states, leaving the parochial businesses to the local capitalists.

In face of this situation in which globalization has been harnessed and amplified by the logic of capital, there are two paths that can be pointed out as alternatives:

One of these paths is the romantic return to the nationalisms that shaped state entities until the Second World War in Europe; or until the late 1960s, in the case of the former colonial spaces, following decolonization. Their current advocates believe in Keynesian measures, anchored in public spending, difficult to implement given the income constraints of the impoverished populations and because production is segmented and distributed across territories, only being consistent at a global level. The return to a national currency is a fast track to inflation, requiring appropriate repression, led by tamed unions, in a policy with similar effects to the current “internal devaluation”. This nationalist drift, focusing on a greater relevance of borders, easily becomes xenophobic as difficulties develop; and patriotism easily becomes fascism, as witnessed in the inward-focused conjuncture of the 1930s. On the other hand, how to rebuild nation-states whose main economic structures are part of multinational networks and where the indigenous bourgeoisie are little more than sets of decapitalized companies facing populations with little purchasing power? Finally, in all right-wing or “left” nationalist drifts, globalization is pointed to as the cause of all ills, implicitly admitting that capitalism must continue as long as it is reinforced by nationalizations… as long as they do not touch foreign capital, as could be seen in Portugal in 1975. 

A second way is to overcome capitalism, a necessary move when central banks themselves recognize that they have no way of overcoming the next financial crisis as they did after 2008. If global debt grows at rates clearly above the GDP growth, and if the income from many countries’ populations is anemic, the solution will have to include a huge shrinkage of the financial capital in return for the cancellation of much of this mathematically unpayable debt.

Given this high probability scenario one should take into account:

a)   That there is not an updated and popular anti-capitalist narrative, that is democratic and critical of labor societies, this fact leaving on the ideological ground the old authoritarian, bureaucratic, GDP-growth-believing logic common in the left margins of parliamentary regimes. That said narrative being marginal and, in face of the current social crisis, nationalist, xenophobic, and fascist logic paths develop which are capable of great electoral support, from which Brexits, Trumps or Le Pens, poverty and war come out.

b)   Any anti-capitalist narrative cannot reject the unity of the human species, accelerated by capitalism in recent decades, and, on the contrary, must answer to the union of capital with the unity of the multitude of workers, former workers and marginalized, regardless of their place of birth, nationality, “race”, religious confession, or gender.

One hundred years ago that union had a name, meanwhile forgotten – internationalism; and it will certainly not be cemented through proletariat dictatorships, but with the creation of local / regional rhizomatic networks acting in a concerted and solidary manner, and through radically democratic decision.

19/2/2017

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