— Dipankar Bhattacharya
Key Features of the Present Round of Globalisation
Indeed it is capitalism’s inherent tendency to go global. The early mercantile expeditions and colonial conquests played a key role in the development of capitalism in the metropolitan countries, and in a different way, in the colonies as well. Marx and Engels were categorical in their recognition of the expansionary thrust of capital. In the classic words of the Manifesto, “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” “The historic task of bourgeois society”, wrote Marx a decade later, “is the establishment of the world market, at least in its basic outlines, and a mode of production that rests on its basis.”
Certain features that we currently associate with the drive towards globalisation have indeed been even more pronounced during certain previous phases of capitalist development.
Inter-country and even inter-continent migration of labour, if only in the form of indentured labour under colonial framework, was probably more widespread in the nineteenth century.
The trade-GDP ratio for many countries was also higher at the turn of the previous century than it is today. Indeed, it can be argued that the world economy was globalising at quite a high speed before the First World War intervened. Yet it will be stupid on our part to miss the enormously changed context and scale of contemporary international economic integration and cross-border production and circulation of commodities.
Let us first note the following major points.
1. The first thing that obviously strikes us is the tremendous advance in science and technology, particularly the remarkable shortening of distance through incredibly faster systems of communication and telecommunication. Ironically, true to the parasitic nature of capitalism, and despite all talks of a computerised ‘new economy’ this has revolutionised speculation much more than production.
2. The mind-boggling volume of finance capital that circulates around the global economy in unthinkable speed, the mysterious dynamics of share markets, bouts of drastic decline in currency values and share prices leading to overnight wiping out of enormous amounts of paper wealth, sudden flight of capital at the hint of a crisis — in short, the mad and mysterious world of speculative finance marks another distinguishing feature of present-day globalisation.
3. The all-pervading global reach of mega companies called MNCs/TNCs is another hallmark of contemporary capitalism. In the year 2000, out of world’s top 100 economies, 54 were corporations and 46 were countries. The corresponding figures in 1998 were 51 and 49. In the year 2000, the combined revenues of top 500 corporations ($ 140,64,960 million) were 170 per cent of the combined GDP of all but the top ten high-income countries. The MNCs are engaged in a mad scramble for merger and acquisition resulting in unprecedented levels of concentration and centralisation of capital. The trend toward the development of monopolies and formation of cartels discussed by Lenin in his classic work on imperialism continues unabated with a few oligopolies controlling huge chunks of market share in every major line of production of both goods and services.
4. The vice-like grip of the institutional network of IMF, World Bank and WTO on the economies of the developing countries is another central feature of globalisation. The first two organisations came up as part of the post-War drive for economic reorganisation while it took another fifty years for the WTO to take shape. A move to launch an International Trade Organisation (ITO) together with the IMF and WB (its actual name is the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development or IBRD) was aborted by the developed countries, the US in particular, which preferred protectionism to the so-called doctrine of free trade. Instead of a full-scale ITO they opted for a relatively piecemeal approach under the banner of GATT. The recent transformation of GATT into WTO reflects a more desperate attempt on the part of the powerful economies to control world trade, as much as a response to the success stories of export-led growth as an urge to establish early control over the rapidly burgeoning service sector and what has come to be known as the knowledge economy.
5. The ongoing globalisation of the world capitalist economy is happening in a largely post-colonial context. Formally speaking, the phase of national liberation struggles is more or less over, a few residual struggles for self-determination notwithstanding. Yet what we are witnessing everyday is a constant trivialisation of this formal independence, a growing mockery of national sovereignty, something which was brilliantly anticipated by Lenin in his classic “Imperialism”.
6. Finally, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and what was formerly known as the Soviet Bloc, the ground has been cleared for a single integrated world capitalist economy. Whatever resistance individual nation-states are extending does not amount to anything like a parallel bloc. Alongside this geo-political expansion of capitalism we also see an unprecedented intensification of commodity production reflected primarily in the burgeoning growth of the service sector.
Of Recurring Crises and Synchronised Recession
In spite of such massive sweep and power, globalisation is currently facing a whole lot of problems and threats. The wave of anti-globalisation protests we have been seeing from Seattle to Genoa may not yet have reached a level where we can talk about a serious political challenge to globalisation, but to be sure these protests have crossed the level of mere ethical dissent and academic questioning. They have acquired an unmistakable mass dimension and the increasing mass participation of the working class and the unemployed youth is rooted in the economic crisis and uncertainty enveloping the world.
Let us begin with the growing shadow of crisis enveloping the entire world economy. The rate of growth, the most favourite indicator of bourgeois economists, is languishing at a very low level in almost all developed countries. Japan is awaiting recovery from its stagnation for nearly a full decade. Europe has been experiencing low growth and a disturbingly high rate of unemployment for quite some time. And finally the US, which maintained impressive growth during almost the entire 1990s has also joined the downturn. In fact, the sudden outbreak of the crisis in the US has been described by some critical observers as the US economy “hitting the wall at 90 kmph.” This massive canvas of stagnation, with almost the entire developed world mired in a kind of synchronised recession, is indeed remarkable. In the US, parallels are being frequently drawn with the Great Depression of 1929-33.
The crisis has of course been most glaringly manifest in the financial sector. In the early 1990s we first had the Mexican meltdown followed by the East Asian turmoil which spread to other regions and described as the ‘Asian Flu’. In the words of the noted Canada-based analyst of speculative finance Michel Chossudovsky “This Worldwide crisis of the late twentieth century is more devastating than the Great Depression of the 1930s. It has far-reaching geo-political implications; economic dislocation has also been accompanied by the outbreak of regional conflicts, the fracturing of national societies and in some cases the destruction of entire countries. This is by far the most serious economic crisis in modern history.”
The driving force behind this crisis, according to him, is the worldwide scramble to appropriate wealth through “financial manipulation”, which he describes as “financial warfare”. In this war, the outright “conquest of nations” meaning the control over productive assets, labour, natural resources and institutions can be carried out in an impersonal fashion from the corporate boardroom: commands are dispatched from a computer terminal or a cell phone. The relevant data are instantly relayed to major financial markets — often resulting in immediate disruptions in the functioning of national economies.
In Korea, Indonesia and Thailand, the vaults of the central banks were pillaged by institutional speculators while the monetary authorities sought in vain to prop up their ailing currencies. In 1997, more than 100 billion dollars of Asia’s hard currency reserves had been confiscated and transferred (in a matter of months) into private financial hands. In the wake of the currency devaluations, real earnings and employment plummeted virtually overnight leading to mass poverty in countries which had in the post-War period registered significant economic and social progress. Russia has already suffered a similar fate since the first injection of IMF “shock therapy” in 1992. Some 500 billion dollars worth of Russian assets — including plants of the military industrial complex, infrastructure and natural resources — have been confiscated (through the privatisation programmes and forced bankruptcies) and transferred into the hands of Western capitalists. Now even in Japan — where the yen has tumbled to new lows — “the Korean scenario” is viewed (according to economist Michael Hudson), as a “dress rehearsal” for the take over of Japan’s financial sector by a handful of Western investment banks.
Interestingly, George Soros, the notorious Hungarian currency speculator who made news by raking in billions from the 1992 devaluation of the British Pound, has emerged as a key commentator on the global financial crisis. In 1998 he came up with a book entitled The Crisis of Global Capitalism. It may be recalled that he claims to have played his bit in engineering the Soviet collapse with his Open Society Fund, but in 1989 when he proposed a second edition of the post-WWII Marshall plan to enable post-Soviet Russia to reconstruct its economy he was greeted with derisive laughter. Now he argues that the global capitalist system is coming apart at the seams. The decline in the US stock market is only a belated symptom of the profound problems afflicting the world economy.
Financial markets, he tells us, are inherently unstable, whereas the global capitalist system is based on the belief that financial markets, left to their own devices, tend towards equilibrium. This belief, he insists, is false. Financial markets are given to excesses and if a boom/bust sequence progresses beyond a certain point it will never revert to where it came from. His chosen imagery for financial markets therefore is not a pendulum oscillating around and eventually returning to its equilibrium position, but a wrecking ball knocking over one economy after another.
While Soros deals primarily with financial markets, historian Robert Brenner in his much-acclaimed book-length essay “The Economics of Global turbulence” (New Left Review, May-June 1998) describes the crisis as a case of long downturn since 1965 and especially since 1973 (the oil shock), in contrast to the long post-war boom since 1945, caused by falling profitability of capital. This falling rate of profit is in turn attributed to over-investment and overproduction. The origins of over-capacity and overproduction are to be found in the profound intensification of international competition that took place in the later 1960s, as a consequence of the accelerated entry of German, and especially Japanese manufacturers, into world markets, which brought a reduction of US manufacturing profitability by more than 40% in the period between 1965 and 1973.
The profitability problem was not long confined to the United States, but quickly came to affect Japan, Germany, and most of the rest of the advanced capitalist world, when the dollar was radically devalued at the time of the world money crisis and collapse of Bretton Woods agreement in the early 1970s.
Paradoxically, moreover — and counter to standard economic expectations — manufacturing overcapacity and overproduction did not lead to the expected processes of adjustment, but has persisted right into the present… with the partial (and likely temporary) US profitability recovery of the 1990s more than counterbalanced by sharp profitability slumps in Germany and Japan. Heightened international competition leading to persistent overcapacity and overproduction and eventually resulting in falling aggregate profitability – this is the basic contention of Brenner, and in spite of debates on finer points, he is acclaimed by Marxist economists for having taken the discussion back into the realm of capitalist anarchy, the real economy of over-investment, over-production and the falling rate of profit.
Of the Hidden Hand and the Open Fist
What then continues to sustain the globalisation drive in the face of the growing financial crisis propelled by such a long economic downturn? Some commentators glibly talk of technology and especially the dramatic rise of what has come to be known as the new economy. But the euphoria seems to be evaporating faster than it grew. After all the information- and knowledge-based new economy, though it added a lot of gloss to the brick-and-mortar old economy and brought about dramatic changes in certain operational respects, could by no means replace the latter. We hear tall talks about e-commerce, but nobody has heard about e-production! The new economy people may talk about ICE (information-communication-entertainment) and the speculators may breathe FIRE (finance-insurance-real estates), but the growing economic crisis is once again tearing asunder the veil of appearance, the fetish of what Marx called ‘fictitious capital’, to reveal the disquiet in the backyard of manufacturing.
At the end of the day, the sustenance of globalisation depends on power and particularly on the military might of the world’s lone superpower or hyper-power, as the French call it, the United States. The noted American journalist and the celebrated author of the pro-globalisation bestseller, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman ends his book with “the unique role the United States plays, and needs to keep playing, in stabilizing” the new system of globalisation. Friedman is quite emphatic in his defence of the centrality of the US superpower to the gobalisation project. “Sustainable globalisation,” he tells us, “requires a stable power structure, and no country is more essential for this than the United States. All the Internet and other technologies that Silicon Valley is designing to carry digital voices, videos and data around the world, all the trade and financial integration it is promoting through its innovations, and all the wealth this is generating, are happening in a world stabilized by a benign superpower, with its capital in Washington, D.C. … The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.”
Friedman would of course like us to believe that “America truly is the ultimate benign hegemon and reluctant enforcer.” He is afraid that if the remains hidden for too long, if America takes this ‘reluctance’ too far, it would threaten the stability of the whole globalisation system. He therefore calls for more vigorous US intervention and quite naturally after the bombings began in Afghanistan, he exclaimed “Give war a chance”.
Even though the trajectory of events unfolding since September 11 does not quite coincide with the trajectory of the ongoing economic crisis and anti-globalisation protests, the hidden fist has nevertheless come out into the open and the link between Kabul and Doha, between the US-led bombing of Afghanistan and the bulldozing of the third world at the recent WTO ministerial summit is not difficult to understand. Crisis and war have once again come together, the recession-hit US economy and the Western world is once again seeking a way out of the crisis through war and destruction. We may recall Galbraith’s keen observation about the Great Depression: the depression had never really ended, it just merged into the war.
The unfolding turn of events has forced even the most ardent advocate of globalisation to talk about its uncertain future. More and more people are drawing rather alarmist parallels to how previous rounds of closer economic integration and capitalist expansion had produced sharp competition and ‘nationalist backlash’ leading to the eruption of inter-imperialist wars. In his famous book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Professor Paul M Kennedy of Yale University draws the picture of a US in decline. Like the earlier Spanish, French and British empires, the American empire is also slated to decline because of its own imperial overreaching, warns the professor. Soros says he doubts if the global capitalist economy would once again be plunged into another world war (while financial crises had caused severe economic dislocation and decline, the actual collapse of previous rounds of globalisation, he points out, was triggered by political and military developments), but nevertheless he sees intense instability ahead.
The Illusive Search for Global Society and Global Governance
How do we analyse the major contradictions in the era of globalisation? Those who believe that globalisation amounts to a qualitatively new system or order, locate the main contradiction between the global economy and nation-states. And they see the resolution of this contradiction in the development of a global society and a corresponding system of global governance to match the development of the global economy. For some, this entails a veritable world revolution, while many liberals believe this to be achievable through democratisation of the existing multilateral institutions and effective containment or engagement of US within an effective international framework. Friedman and Co. of course believe that such a global society must necessarily be led by the US and the US alone.
A significant and most sensational recent addition to this literature has been a book called “Empire”, which has been advertised as the new Communist Manifesto for the new millennium. Let us take a brief look at the basic ideas enunciated in this new book by American literary theorist Michel Hardt and Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri, who have been acclaimed as the Marx and Engels of the Internet age! They claim that imperialism is over and the era of Empire has dawned. They argue that while it is certainly true that, “in step with the processes of globalization, the sovereignty of nation-states, while still effective, has progressively declined, the decline in sovereignty of nation-states, however, does not mean that sovereignty as such has declined. Sovereignty, they say, has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what they call Empire.
They describe the emerging global capitalist economy as the economy of postmodernisation in which the role of industrial labour is getting minimised and production is tending ever more toward what they call bio-political production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another.
The Empire does wield enormous powers of oppression and destruction, but these, they insist, are radically different from the old forms of domination. The passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation. And hence the political task, they argue, is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect them toward new ends. The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges. Imperialism in the analysis of Hardt and Negri consists primarily in the act of colonial annexation and with the end of the era of colonial annexation in its direct form they therefore declare that imperialism is over. Lenin had rejected precisely this notion of imperialism-as-policy and established that imperialism was a special stage of capitalism, the stage of monopoly capitalism. The unevenness of capitalist development which both results from and culminates in periodic redivision of the world is substituted in their analysis by what they called spatial totality and interpenetration of First and Third Worlds. In spite of all talks of subversion the authors therefore fail to locate any weak links in the chain of that totality. And the vague concept of the multitude in place of the working class and the oppressed peoples matches perfectly with their decentered notion of Empire.
The best rejoinder to the absurdly Utopian and romantic notions of Empire has been provided by real life itself. The wishful nature of their talk of erosion of American sovereignty in relation to the abstract global sovereignty of capital has been mercilessly exposed in the wake of the unprecedented political and military offensive of US imperialism since the Gulf War, the growing shift of US policy towards unilateralism and the impotence of multilateral institutions and even the UN in the face of this heightened imperialist aggression.
The Rumoured Retreat of Nation-States
From the anarchist or petty-bourgeois romanticist Utopia of reorganisation of globalisation and smooth subversion of the capitalist empire to bring about a counter-empire of the multitude, let us turn to those Marxists who still talk about imperialism but are so worried about the decline of inter-imperialist rivalry and are seriously taken in by the mischievous rumour of retreat of the nation-state and erosion of sovereignty. We will see how the two streams once again converge in their helpless surrender to imperialism.
The talk of retreat of the nation-state has been premised primarily on three points, phenomenal growth of MNCs/TNCs, extreme cross-border volatility of speculative finance and the domineering discipline of multilateral institutions like the IMF, WB and WTO. But on all these scores there are enough evidences to suggest that what is happening is no generalised retreat of all nation-states, but the retreat of some which in turn means the advance of others. Moreover we will see that even where states are being said to be making a retreat, the states are actually playing a more vigorous role in shaping and implementing neo-liberal economic policies.
As for TNCs or MNCs they are still heavily rooted in their parent countries and there is intense competition among them. Moreover even though technically there are some 63,000 parent TNCs with over 8,00,000 foreign subsidiaries, wealth is highly concentrated among the top 500, and within the top 500 club among the elite top 100. According to the latest Fortune 500 list of the world’s biggest 500 corporations (in terms of total revenue), US accounted for 185 followed by Japan (104), together accounting for 58 per cent of the total. Among the top 100, the US accounts for 37, followed by Japan (22), Germany (10) and France (7).
A 1993 study of the world’s 100 largest companies showed that only 18 companies maintained the majority of assets abroad. The internationalisation of shares was even more restricted. 2.1 % of the board members of the top 500 US companies were foreign nationals with only 5 of the top 30 US companies listed having a foreigner on their boards. All the companies seemed to have benefited from industrial and trade policies of their own countries and at least 20 would not have survived if they had not been saved in some way by their governments (Financial Times 5 January 1996, The Economist 24 June 1995). UNCTAD’s own index of transnationality based on shares of foreign assets, foreign sales and foreign employment shows 40 of top 100 multinational companies in 1993 have more than half of their activities abroad, with the average for the whole group at 41 per cent, falling to 34 per cent for US Multinationals, which comprise nearly one-third of the total. Even these figures are misleading as Nestle, which tops the list with 92 per cent, limits non-Swiss voting rights to 3 per cent of the total. In addition most research and development (R&D) takes place in the home country. For US multinationals, the share of R&D performed by majority owned foreign affiliates was only 12 per cent in 1992. Another study by Hirst and Thompson (H&T), based on company data for 500 MNCs in 1987 and 5000 MNCs in 1992-3, assessed the relative importance for MNCs of home and foreign sales and assets of particular countries, mainly US, UK, Germany and Japan. They found that between 70 and 75 per cent of MNC value added was produced in the home nation. They therefore concluded that international businesses remained heavily ‘nationally embedded’.
The massive and mysterious cross-border flows of finance capital and the nation-state’s ‘inability’ to establish any kind of control on that is generally treated as technologically ordained. But this again is more a question of policy than technology. Technology in any case is a double-edged sword, the same technological revolution which enables finance capital to skip state control can also be used by the state to strengthen its control mechanism. If technology can be used to intensify control over labour and ordinary citizens, the same can also be used to control capital. The issue is ideology and not technology. Similarly, it is nation-states which are members of the multilateral institutions and of various regional trading blocs. Noted leftwing critic of globalisation James Petras quite rightly points out, “The scale and scope of nation-state activity has grown to such a point that one needs to refer to it as the “New Statism” rather than the free market. Globalisation is in the first instance a product of the New Statism and continues to be accompanied and sustained by direct state intervention.” (Petras and Veltmeyer, Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century)
Inter-Imperialist Rivalry and the Bogey of Ultra-Imperialism
The other point which continues to bother many an observer of imperialism is the so-called muted nature of inter-imperialist rivalry. This has in fact led several analysts to some sort of a Kautskian thesis of ultra-imperialism. In the midst of the First World War, Kautsky had wondered,”… Cannot the present imperialist policy be supplanted by a new, ultra-imperialist policy, which will introduce the joint exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital in place of the mutual rivalries of national finance capitals? Such a new phase of capitalism is at any rate conceivable. Can it be achieved? Sufficient premises are still lacking to enable us to answer this question.” “From the purely economic point of view”, wrote Kautsky, “it is not impossible that capitalism will yet go through a new phase, that of the extension of the policy of the cartels to foreign policy, the phase of ultra-imperialism.” Interestingly, Kautsky had reduced the question of imperialist annexations to a matter of mere ‘preferred policy’, thus detaching the politics of imperialism from its economics, or refusing to treat imperialism as a definite stage of imperialism, but he was quite prepared to treat ultra-imperialism, “the joint exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital” as a possible future phase of capitalism.
Lenin had vehemently condemned and discarded this Kautskian notion, not because he thought finance capital could never forge international unity, but because he considered it reactionary to treat any temporary international unity of finance capital as a separate phase, detached from the very basis of imperialist connections and relations within world economics and world politics. Let us follow carefully Lenin’s argument from the following extensive excerpt from his classic “Imperialism”.
“Let us consider India, Indo-China and China. It is known that these three colonial and semi-colonial countries, with a population of six to seven hundred million, are subjected to the exploitation of the finance capital of several imperialist powers : Great Britain, France, Japan, the U.S.A., etc. Let us assume that these imperialist countries form alliances against one another in order to protect or enlarge their possessions, their interests and their “spheres of influence” in these Asiatic states; these alliances will be “inter-imperialist,” or “ultra-imperialist” alliances. Let us assume that all the imperialist countries conclude an alliance for the “peaceful” division of these parts of Asia; this alliance would be an alliance of “internationally united finance capital.” There are actual examples of alliances of this kind in the history of the twentieth century, for instance, the attitude of the powers to China. We ask, is it “conceivable,” assuming that the capitalist system remains intact — and this is precisely the assumption that Kautsky does make — that such alliances would be more than temporary, that they would eliminate friction, conflicts and struggle in every possible form?
“It is sufficient to state this question clearly to make it impossible for any reply to be given other than in the negative, for any other basis under capitalism for the division of spheres of influence, of interests, of colonies, etc., than a calculation of the strength of the participants in the division, their general economic, financial, military strength, etc., is inconceivable. And the strength of these participants in the division does not change to an equal degree, for the even development of different undertakings, trusts, branches of industry, or countries is impossible under capitalism. Half a century ago Germany was a miserable, insignificant country, as far as her capitalist strength was concerned, compared with the strength of England at that time; Japan was the same compared with Russia. Is it “conceivable” that in ten or twenty years’ time the relative strength of the imperialist powers will have remained unchanged? Absolutely inconceivable.
“Therefore, in the realities of the capitalist system, and not in the banal philistine fantasies of English parsons, or of the German “Marxist,” Kautsky, “inter-imperialist” or “ultra-imperialist” alliances, no matter what form they may assume, whether of one imperialist coalition against another, or of a general alliance embracing all the imperialist powers, are inevitably than a “truce” in periods between wars. Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one conditions the other, giving rise to alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle out of one and the same basis of imperialist connections and relations within world economics and world politics. But in order to pacify the workers and to reconcile them with the social-chauvinists who have deserted to the side of the bourgeoisie, wise Kautsky separates one link of a single chain from the other, separates the present peaceful (and ultra-imperialist, nay, ultra-ultra-imperialist) alliance of all the powers for the pacification of China (remember the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion) from the non-peaceful conflict of tomorrow, which will prepare the ground for another “peaceful” general alliance for the partition, say, of Turkey, on the day after tomorrow, etc., etc. Instead of showing the living connection between periods of imperialist peace and periods of imperialist war, Kautsky presents the workers with a lifeless abstraction in order to reconcile them to their lifeless leaders.”
A world war or direct military conflicts cannot be the sole yardstick for measuring inter-imperialist rivalry. Local wars and civil wars too provide ample scope for imperialist intervention and there is no dearth of such wars in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The process of redivision of the world for securing greater control over economic resources continues unabated, and so does the strategic contention for enlarging spheres of imperialist influence. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc has re-opened huge territory and resources for the major imperialist powers. Witness the clamour for Eastward expansion of NATO and the major acts of imperialist intervention in former Yugoslavia. Look at the intense economic competition within the Triad – the US, Europe and Japan – and the shrill cries of trade war. And not the least, the fierce warfare raging on the battlefields of speculative finance. Imperialist countries will always have a common agenda against the third world, but that does not preclude their own uneven development and the resulting contention.
Indeed, American commentators are increasingly admitting that for all its military superiority, the US cannot really treat the world as a unipolar system. We quoted Huntington in the PB Statement on War where he has described the world as a uni-multipolar arrangement. “Global politics”, he says, “has now moved from a brief unipolar moment at the end of the Cold War into one or perhaps more uni-multipolar decades on its way towards a multipolar twenty-first century…. In this uni-multipolar world the central relationship is that between the superpower and the major regional powers…. The superpower would prefer a unipolar world and is continually tempted to act as if it were a unipolar world. The major powers would prefer a multipolar world and believe global politics is moving in that direction. A uni-multipolar world is stable only to the extent that these conflicting pulls can be balanced. In the longer term, they probably cannot be balanced, and, if as seems probable, the superpower cannot create a unipolar world, global politics will gradually evolve in the direction of a multipolar system.”
The Communist Sun and the Anti-Globalisation Rainbow
Finally let us take a look at the anti-globalisation protests. Domination of speculative finance has been a major feature of the present round of globalisation, and this has meant a massive depoliticisation of the economy. Stock exchanges do not produce trade union struggles and unless there are major upheavals or scams they generate little political heat either. Meanwhile nation-states are busy excusing themselves with this rumour of erosion of sovereignty and forced retreat of the state. With the economy getting depoliticised, ‘culture’ has become central to politics and all sorts of identities have sprung up. Huntington’s thesis of the clash of civilisations is premised on the centrality of culture to politics. Depoliticisation of the economy and centrality of culture to politics are two sides of the same coin.
Viewed against this backdrop, the anti-globalisation protests are serving to repoliticise the economy, bringing the economy back on top of the agenda. This despite the fact that the anti-globalisation protesters are drawn from all backgrounds including many who have come through the culture route in politics. And now since September 11, the question of imperialism has come up in a big way and the anti-war anti-imperialist agenda has been forced on the anti-globalisation movement. This transition would of course not be smooth, but if the massive anti-war protests are any indication, there has been no major depletion in the ranks of anti-globalisation protesters. The ongoing economic crisis and the massive job cuts announced since September 11 – half a million jobs have been cut in the US alone – have also fuelled enough resentment merging with the global outrage against imperialist war and doublespeak on terrorism.
We must remember that while imperialism generates popular protests and resistance, it also causes splits in the ranks of the working class movement. The edifice of international workers’ unity broke down in the face of the First World War. Lenin came down heavily on opportunism in the working class movement, his polemics with Kautsky was not confined to the economics of imperialism, and it was focussed sharply on the ideological-political debates of the day. While Kautsky defended his position in the name of broad working class unity, Lenin condemned him for toeing the opportunist line and siding with the opportunists who were busy siding with the bourgeoisie of their own respective countries. Lenin exposed the social roots of opportunism in the labour aristocracy and the economic basis of labour aristocracy in the spoils of imperialist super profits and called for ridding the working class movement of the culture of bourgeois respectability and what he called Lloyd-Georgism bred by bourgeois labour parties, an infection that the opportunists carried within the socialist-communist movement. In his.famous article “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism” (Vol. 23, Collected Works), Lenin enunciated the revolutionary Marxist tactics against imperialism in the following words :
“On the one hand, there is the tendency of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists to convert a handful of very rich and privileged nations into “eternal” parasites on the body of the rest of mankind, to “rest on the laurels” of the exploitation of Negroes, Indians, etc., keeping them in subjection with the aid of the excellent weapons of extermination provided by modern militarism. On the other hand, there is the tendency of the masses, who are more oppressed than before and who bear the whole brunt of imperialist wars, to cast off this yoke and to overthrow the bourgeoisie. It is in the struggle between these two tendencies that the history of the labour movement will now inevitably develop. …
“Engels draws a distinction between the “bourgeois labour party” of the old trade unions — the privileged minority — and the “lowest mass”, the real majority, and appeals to the latter, who are not infected by “bourgeois respectability”. This is the essence of Marxist tactics!
“Neither we nor anyone else can calculate, precisely what portion of the proletariat is following and will follow the social-chauvinists and opportunists. This will be revealed only by the struggle, it will be definitely decided only by the socialist revolution. But we know for certain that the “defenders of the fatherland” in the imperialist war represent only a minority. And it is therefore our duty, if we wish to remain socialists to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against opportunism. By exposing the fact that the opportunists and social-chauvinists are in reality betraying and selling the interests of the masses, that they are defending the temporary privileges of a minority of the workers, that they are the vehicles of bourgeois ideas and influences, that they are really allies and agents of the bourgeoisie, we teach the masses to appreciate their true political interests, to fight for socialism and for the revolution through all the long and painful vicissitudes of imperialist wars and imperialist armistices.
The only Marxist line in the world labour movement is to explain to the masses the inevitability and necessity of breaking with opportunism, to educate them for revolution by waging a relentless struggle against opportunism, to utilise the experience of the war to expose, not conceal, the utter vileness of national-liberal labour politics.”
Earlier, the First International had also collapsed in the wake of the Paris Commune following the rupture between Marxists and anarchists. Right now, anarchism seems to be the dominant trend in the anti-globalisation protests. The terrorist strikes and the legitimacy acquired by imperialist militarism in its wake are also bound to have opportunist echoes within the working class movement. Consequently, the ideological-political struggles waged during both First and Second Internationals will also have their echoes within the anti-globalisation, anti-imperialist movement. Of course no struggle repeats itself in history in exactly the same manner, but nevertheless communists once again will have to wage a determined ideological struggle against anarchism and opportunism.
