June/July 2002
Community
Consciousness
Eric Sirotkin
Peace
and Nuclear Disarmament: A Call to Action
Congressman Dennis Kucinich
We
Are Not An Isolated Fringe
Kayla M. Starr, MPH
Rejecting
Neo-Liberal Globalization Will Diminish Causes of War and Conflict
Gerald Cavanaugh
War,
Inc.
Mike Ferner
Hell
to Pay: The Proving Ground
William Rivers Pitt
Liberation
Psychology and The Power Elite
Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.
The
Age of Inequality
Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Industrial
Agriculture Poisoning Our Water and our Home
PR
Firms Help Corporations "Infect the World"
George Monbiot
Book
Reviews:
The Democracy Owners Manual and The Global Activists Manual
Green
Beings: Plant Mind, Planetary Mind
Jesse Wolf Hardin
The
Yearly Round
Richard Moeschl
Keep
Your Tubes Outta Me … It's a Good Day to Die
John Darling
The
Movie Mystic: Waking Life
Stephen Simon
Soy
to Enjoy and Soy to Avoid
Rebecca Wood
Cosmic
Calendar
Salina Rain
Rejecting Neo-Liberal Globalization Will Diminish Causes of War & Conflict
By Gerald Cavanaugh
“The notion of globalization as it is commonly used to describe some natural and inexorable force, the “telos” of capitalism as it were, is misleading and ideologically loaded. A superior term would be “neoliberalism.” This refers to a set of national and international policies that call for business domination of all social affairs with minimal countervailing force. Governments are to remain large so as to better serve the corporate interests, while minimizing any activity that might undermine the rule of business and the wealthy. Neoliberalism is almost always intertwined with a deep belief in the ability of markets to use new technologies to solve social problems far better than any alternative course. The centerpiece of neoliberalism is invariably a call for commercial media and communication markets to be deregulated. What this means in practice is that they are “re-regulated” to serve corporate interests. [So understood, what we have] is the newest stage of class struggle under capitalism and the antidemocratic implications of neoliberalism move to the front and center of the debate …
Neoliberalism
is more than an economic theory, however. It is also a political theory. It
posits that business domination of society proceeds most effectively when
there is a representative democracy, but only when it is a weak and ineffectual
polity typified by high degrees of depoliticization, especially among the
poor and working class. It is here that one can see why the existing commercial
media system is so important to the neoliberal project, for it is singularly
brilliant at generating the precise sort of bogus political culture that permits
business domination to proceed without using a police state or facing effective
popular resistance.”
– Robert W. McChesney, “Global Media, Neoliberalism, and Imperialism,”
Monthly Review, March 2001
As the epigraph indicates, we must be clear about the phenomenon of so-called “globalization” or, better, “neoliber-alism.” In the first place, it is not entirely new. Rather we are living through a continuation of a historical trend toward “a world market that gives a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.” The words are those of Marx (and Engels), in the Communist Manifesto, written in 1847.
In that Manifesto,
Marx presciently, and at that time uniquely, pointed out that the logic of
capital entails the expansion of its markets globally:
There is no magic bullet, no technological fix, no instant success, but citizen
activism, protests, and politicking can make a difference. Here are some thoughts
on what everyone can do to see that the changes so many of us realize are
necessary do take place.
• Get active.
Do some research first—unless you see and understand the problem(s),
you cannot be effective in action.
• Join with others. As Ralph Nader says, we know what the solutions are;
we must get them off of the shelves and im-plement them. But it takes political
activism. Help get the vote out, there are good Democrats running. Or participate
in the Green Party, which is offering a real and feasible alter-native.
• Join/volunteer/parti-cipate in NGOs that are doing the best, necessary
work—Health Care For All-Oregon; Physicians for a National Health Plan;
Anti-nuke groups; Friends of the Earth; Headwaters; S. O. ANSWER; etc. Coa-litions
are crucial.
• Encourage your church group to take public stands.
• Write letters to editors, bombard them; shame them; complain to the
network and local TV moguls: threaten to turn them off. Support the alternative
or progressive media.
• Communicate with your “representatives” con-stantly, as individuals
and as groups.
• Attend public forums and show you are involved and paying atention.
• Shake up the allegedly “progressive” groups.
• Give money to the groups you support—everything costs.
“Capitalism, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations into [modernization]. It batters down all Chinese walls, it compels all nations under pain of extinction to adopt the capitalist mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into its midst, that is, become capitalist themselves. In a word, it creates a world after its own image.”
But there are
changes along with continuities. The most dramatic and influential of these
changes is the massive growth of the Transnational Corporations (TNCs). The
500 hundred largest TNCs account for one-third of all manufacturing exports,
75 percent of all commodity trade, and 80 percent of the trade in technology
and management services, and these trends are accelerating.
With production and sales in every profitable place on the globe, over the
decades since 1945 the TNCs have gradually cut themselves loose from any necessary
connection to a “homeland,” thus their watch-word is “Capitalists
have no country.” The CEO of Colgate-Palmolive has proclaimed: “The
United States does not have an automatic call on our resources. There is no
mind-set which puts this country first.”
The TNCs have in practice escaped most of the controls and directions sovereign states once applied to them. Technological devel-opments have, of course, enabled and accelerated this escape; computerization of both manufacturing and services operations (especially financial services and speculation); robotization and numerically coordinated machinery have released capitalists from most reliance on skilled workers; transportation and communications advances have facilitated the explosion of coordinated global production, and have allowed “wage arbitrage” to beat down the wages and benefits of all workers.
These corporate/economic potentialities were all exploited and made fully operational by means of political interventions. Beyond being what Marx described as “the executive board” of the capitalists, political leaders are today themselves the capitalists, as the Enron infiltration of the Bush administration (one of many) demonstrates. Thus, the quite anti-democratic “Fast Track” phenomena of NAFTA, the WTO, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and many other multilateral and bi-lateral agreements, all the result of ostensibly “democratic” political decisions, are in fact representative only of the needs and wishes of corporate hegemons, the official rhetoric of “free Trade” and “democracy” notwithstanding. As the Archbishop of Mexico City said in regard to NAFTA, “It was passed behind the backs of the Mexican People,” so, too, was it and all such agreements, passed behind the backs of the American people.
So, what is the
connection between the “neoliberal globalization” and war and civil
conflict? A list will suffice to sketch out the pathologies:
• Increasing and accelerating division globally between the few rich
and the many poor. Two hundred years of globalization have moved the gap between
rich and poor countries from 3-1 up to 19-1 in 1998. Within the richest countries,
in 1960 the top 20 percent had 30 times the income of the poorest 20 percent.
By 1997, the top 20 percent received 74 times the income of the bottom 20
percent. In the mid-nineties, the income gap between the rich and the poor
in New York City was greater than in Guatemala. And this trend of increasing
inequality is clearly manifest in the great majority of “developing nations.”
Merrill Lynch’s World Health Report 2001 finds that an exclusive club
of 7.2 million “high net worth individuals” had financial assets
valued at $27 trillion in 2000, almost the size of the world’s total
GDP. And the income of the richest 10 percent of the US population (25 million
people) is equal to the total income of the poorest 43 percent (almost a billion
people) of the rest of the world.
• Having suborned or otherwise taken over governments, global corporate power has engaged in the destruction of trade union power by weakening unions, stripping away legal labor rights and laying off workers, who are replaced by automation and cheap foreign labor. The use of non-lethal means is the usual method in places like America and Great Britain; in the rest of the world more direct brutal and lethal means are used against those who would dare to organize. What we are seeing is both the feminization of the labor force and the reintroduction of easy acceptance of child labor in the developing world. In Europe, 35 million are unemployed and another 15 million are unwillingly in part-time work or have given up the job search. In the “developing world,” there are more than two billion un- and underemployed workers. And there will be more than 700 million people entering the labor market between now and the year 2110.
• “Poverty is the greatest single source of underlying cause of death, disease and suffering worldwide.” (WHO 1995). And poverty is increasing despite the claims, and because of the consequences, of neoliberal globalization.
• Environmental degradation, global warming, destruction of habitat, and species extinction are all accelerating despite the claims of those who say that the reverse is the case or that a technological “fix” is at hand. It must be emphasized that this irreversible destruction has enormous economic costs as well as enormously disruptive social consequences.
• Structural adjustment programs forced upon the developing nations include forcing open their markets to foreign goods, thus destroying the local industries and farms; coercive and corrupt selling off, at bargain prices, of public goods such as water systems, electrical grids, and telecommunication systems to TNCs, leading to higher prices and unequal access; slashing funding for education, health care, and social security; implementing measures to protect foreign investment and interest rates. All this leads to loss of democratic sovereignty in relation to social, environmental, and economic decisions.
The 20th century system of aggressive and expansive nationalist imperialistic states and alliances has been superseded by an integrated world economy in which there are shared material interests, but not, yet, shared equitable returns, by the reality both of American military hegemony and equally important shared ecological and resource constraint interests. In terms of war we are unlikely ever to see the return of “World Wars.” This makes even more obscene our present military budget and structure, as if the Cold War were still a factor or as if China were a rational replacement for the USSR as a meaningful threat. What we are seeing and will continue to see, if we do not address their causes in a non-military fashion, are “low intensity Third World conflicts manifesting themselves as insurgencies, paramilitary crime, sabotage, terrorism and other forms of intrastate violence.” (Report of the U.S. Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, 1988.). Every one of these types of conflict are intimately related to distinct local conditions and causes, most but not all of which pre-existed the advent of globalization, but which have been exacerbated and inflamed by the socially and politically disruptive consequences of that neoliberal intrusion.
Before the TNCs moved into the developing world, most peoples there lived mainly in rural settings, in extended families in settled communities, poor, perhaps, but stable, traditional, and mutually supportive. Once their undemocratic military and oligarchic regimes allowed the TNCs to “invest” in their lands, these powerless peoples were pitch-forked directly into the 20th century and, as if to facilitate their transition, these people, now dispossessed of their lands and livelihoods, were driven by brute force and necessity into the massive, unplanned “free Trade Zones” of the developing world. There they were converted into a proletariat experiencing the worst sweatshop excesses, a stopover on the way to “modernization” that threatens to be a permanent hell-hole.
With entire cultures being destroyed, with all traditional values and belief systems overwhelmed, with anomic misery in place of their previous collectively-shared poverty, with incessant social and economic changes confronting them, all within an imported pop culture emphasizing materialism, selfishness, and violence, with repressive regimes and their own political and economic impotence staring them in the face, it is small wonder that, given the ready availability of “small arms” with massive firepower, “low intensity conflicts” are endemic in so many of these lands.
The solution, of course, cannot be more fire power, more tactical nuclear weapons, more “special forces” and anti-terrorist brigades parachuted into exotic lands or into our own urban and rural ghettos. The solution must be economic justice; it must be social justice and an end to outright and brutal exploitation; the solution is in making sure that all peoples have access to enough food, water, shelter, education, health care and the opportunity to fully develop their unique potentials within stable societies, cultures, and families in peaceful and constructive ways.
The solution lies in rejecting the ideology and mechanisms of “neo-liberal globalization,” replacing it with the philosophy and mechanism of social goods, of truly democratic decision-making instead of rigged “market imperatives,” of an ethic of cooperation rather than competition.
It seemed once that democratic societies had learned the lesson of how foolish and destructive it had been to rely upon the utopia of the market to provide for all human and social needs and that henceforth the market must be consciously subordinated. The catastrophes of wars and depressions of the early 20th century, which were intimately related to such wholesale reliance on market mechanisms, ought to have brought home that lesson for good.
I am calling here for a revolution in both consciousness and in our economic structures and mechanisms. This may at first seem like too much to ask, but in my view, it is the minimum required of us if all peoples are to live lives of peace and dignity.
Gerald Cavanaugh is a resident of Ashland, OR and an activist for peace and social justice. After receiving an M.A &. Ph. D. from Columbia University (European History and Social Theory), and a J.D. from Golden Gate (S.F.) School of Law, Gerald taught at Columbia, Princeton, and UC Berkeley.
There is no magic bullet, no technological fix, no instant success, but citizen activism, protests, and politicking can make a difference. Here are some thoughts on what everyone can do to see that the changes so many of us realize are necessary do take place.
• Get active.
Do some research first—unless you see and understand the problem(s),
you cannot be effective in action.
• Join with others. As Ralph Nader says, we know what the solutions are;
we must get them off of the shelves and im-plement them. But it takes political
activism. Help get the vote out, there are good Democrats running. Or participate
in the Green Party, which is offering a real and feasible alter-native.
• Join/volunteer/parti-cipate in NGOs that are doing the best, necessary
work—Health Care For All-Oregon; Physicians for a National Health Plan;
Anti-nuke groups; Friends of the Earth; Headwaters; S. O. ANSWER; etc. Coa-litions
are crucial.
• Encourage your church group to take public stands.
• Write letters to editors, bombard them; shame them; complain to the
network and local TV moguls: threaten to turn them off. Support the alternative
or progressive media.
• Communicate with your “representatives” con-stantly, as individuals
and as groups.
• Attend public forums and show you are involved and paying atention.
• Shake up the allegedly “progressive” groups.
• Give money to the groups you support—everything costs.
