Globilisation: Origins - History - Analysis - Resistance

published by the freedom shop, 2000. reviewed by fydd.

If you are looking for an introduction to just what globalisation is from a radical, anti-capitalist viewpoint, then this is the pamphlet for you. This is a superb pamphlet that offers a far deeper and more cutting analysis of globalisation than books like No Logo by Naomi Klein. This pamphlet is reprinted from an article which appeared in the excellent English eco-anarchist magazine Do or Die in 1999. It was written before the protests against globalisation had erupted onto the stage in the "developed" world after June 18 1999 in London and November 30 1999 in Seattle.

The pamphlet examines the background to globalisation, putting it in historical context as a reaction by capitalists to the resurgence of class struggle in the 1960s and 1970s. It examines the rise of the New Right, and the extensive opposition to it worldwide. Of particular importance is its lucid critique of some of the more reformist opponents of globalisation. It criticises left/liberal academics like David Korten "who use the same categories and assumptions as the capitalists from a negative perspective - they understand the world in the same way, merely believing it needs a bit of tinkering with to set it right". It effectively criticises ideologies that believe the state can roll back globalisation (it points out globalisation has been a state-led initiative, as in Aotearoa from 1984), and see multinational corporations, finance capital or big business as our only enemy. It notes that without a more radical theory and practice we will see the recuperation and neutralisation of the anti-globalisation movement. The problem isn't globalisation, but capitalism.

This pamphlet has been criticised on the Ending Corporate Governance Bulletin Board: "Actually, I often feel that correct, radical analyses are aptly critical, but don't sufficiently develop another positive perspective for the struggles we are in, and therefore lose some impact. A recent, rather extreme, example of this was the Fabel group in Holland, who so soundly criticised reformist conceptions of globalisation that they convinced themselves that there was nothing to be done on the subject and apparently withdrew from the struggle entirely!

unjustified criticism

I think this criticism is unjustified. After all, the pamphlet just aims to be an introductory analysis of capitalist globalisation, so it is a bit unfair to claim it does not really offer a positive alternative because that's not what it sets out to do. It does not suggest we should withdraw from the anti-globalisation struggle, but points out there has always been resistance to globalisation: it doesn't see us, as liberals like Jane Kelsey does in her New Zealand Experiment, as some sort of passive object which capitalists have experimented upon for the last 15 or so years, but points out there has been ongoing popular resistance to globalisation in the last 15-20 years, such as in Britain in 1984, France 1995 and South Korea in 1996-97. If this resistance broadens and deepens, it could become more radical and revolutionary, offering a viable positive alternative to capitalism.

However, the pamphlet offers only a tantalisingly brief glimpse of what a revolutionary anti-capitalist society could look like. "The abolition of capitalism does not mean taking money from the rich, nor revolutionaries distributing it to the poor, but the suppression of the totality of monetary relations." Here the pamphlet does lack a positive alternative; it would have been helpful to plot out a fairly rudimentary exposition of free, voluntary communism in a few paragraphs, and make it clear this does not mean a totalitarian state as in China but a genuinely classless, moneyless and stateless society run by direct democracy.

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