Defining globalisation
Globalisation has become a buzz-word, yet there are widely differing conceptions of what it means. Part of the problem is that those who use the word seldom bother to define it. Prima facie, it would appear that a globalised world is one in which there are no barriers (other than purely natural and technological ones) to the movement of people, products, money and ideas around the world. But globalisation in this very general sense pre-dates capitalism and the formation of nation-states. Clearly, this is not the subject of current debates about globalisation, although it is not irrelevant to them. It is presumably in order to clarify this point that various adjectives are used to qualify ‘globalisation’, such as ‘capitalist’, ‘imperialist’ and ‘neoliberal’. However this creates new problems, because these adjectives have their own meanings. When they are combined with ‘globalisation’, where do these meanings end and the meaning of globalisation begin?
That capitalism is inherently global is taken for granted by Marxism. In the graphic words of the Communist 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’.[1] Moreover, the very survival of capitalism depends on its extraction from wage-workers of more value (surplus value) than they are paid in the form of wages; thus exploitation of workers is part of the definition of capital. The expropriation of petty producers, ruin of small capitalists, and job losses – all seen as characteristics of globalisation by its critics – are inherent in capitalism.[2] The overlap between globalisation and capitalism seems to be complete.
However, the danger of defining globalisation as capitalism is the implication that the real enemy is international capitalism, while domestic capitalists and small producers are allies who should be protected against it. This has been the standpoint of fascist movements, going back to Hitler’s denunciations of international capital in Mein Kampf.[3] In India, this is the position taken by the Hindu nationalist Sangh Parivar, which has on various occasions protested against foreign investment, India’s accession to the WTO, and, more generally, liberalisation and globalisation.[4] At best, such a conception propagates the illusion that capitalism can solve problems of poverty and unemployment so long as it remains national. At worst, it condones and supports barbaric oppression and exploitation by indigenous capitalists. Globalisation may be a phase of capitalism, but anti-globalisation can never be anti-capitalist, because genuine opposition to capitalist oppression and exploitation does not distinguish between ‘national’ and ‘international’ capital, nor support the former against the latter.
Capitalist imperialism is characterised by state backing for capitalist expansion; this could mean overt colonisation, covert operations to instal ‘friendly’ governments in power, or other activities aimed at extending the military or political power of the state beyond its borders. At home, the imperialist state engages in protectionism, and contains class struggle either by extending welfare benefits to the working class, or by whipping up war fever and hatred of an external enemy. Globalisation, on the contrary, is marked by the emergence of advanced sectors of capital, both productive and financial, which rely on porous rather than impervious national borders, and do not need backing from a nation-state. This is not a matter of size: some of the biggest corporations in the world depend on support from the state, while much smaller firms may be linked into global networks which are not dependent on any nation-state.[5] The rapid spread of outsourcing - of manufacturing as well as services - is one form in which such networks have developed, and this highlights another defining characteristic of globalisation: its dependence on new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Finally, some of the former colonies have emerged as powerful players under globalisation. Both imperialism and globalisation result in global capitalist accumulation, but the mechanisms by which this is achieved are very different. Globalisation is different from imperialism; indeed, ‘imperialist globalisation’ is a contradiction in terms.
There is also an overlap between neoliberalism and globalisation, since both are concerned with removing barriers to the movement of goods and capital across national borders. But neoliberal policies also include privatisation of public services, slashing government spending on social security and welfare, and ‘deregulation’, a policy which in fact benefits the stronger party – capital – at the cost of the weaker one: labour.[6] These are not necessarily part of globalisation, although they are not incompatible with it. The distinction can perhaps be exemplified by the difference between the Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and World Bank) created in 1944, on one side, and the WTO, created in 1995, on the other. The former, which are headquartered in Washington – hence the description of their economic stabilisation and structural adjustment programmes as the ‘Washington consensus’ – have an inbuilt dominance of rich countries over policy-making, while the latter, which is headquartered in Geneva, is a one-country-one-vote institution. Although always lumped together by anti-globalisers, their foundation is separated by more than half a century, and they operate in very different ways.
IMF and World Bank policies imposed on Third World countries, against which there is no appeal, have usually resulted in economic decline and stagnation, leading to spectacular crises in some instances.[7] By contrast, Third World countries can, by engaging in collective bargaining, influence policy-making at the WTO in a way that is impossible in the IMF and World Bank. The WTO is the only global institution where the US has been taken on and defeated repeatedly. Its first major ruling upheld a complaint made by Venezuela and Brazil that US petrol norms discriminated against imports, and inspired this comment: ‘The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has teeth. And it is willing to use them, even against the mighty United States… The WTO corrects some of the power imbalance between the rich and poor countries that existed under GATT.’[8] Subsequently the US was hauled up repeatedly for violating WTO rules, losing case after case.[9]
Moreover, the remit of the WTO is not deregulation as such, but shifting regulation of trade and investment from the national to the global level. It is therefore possible for labour to influence its policies if a concerted effort is made to do so. This has not happened yet, thanks to divisions in the labour movement globally, but it can be done. The campaign against a patent regime protecting the monopoly of big pharmaceutical companies over the production of life-saving drugs showed that it is possible for oppressed groups to challenge powerful multinationals if they organise themselves effectively.[10]
I would therefore define globalisation as an emerging phase of capitalism, marked by (a) a capitalist world economy covering more or less the whole globe; (b) large-scale decolonisation, and the emergence of some Third World countries as powerful players in the world economy; (c) a changing relation between capital and the state such that the most advanced capitals do not need protection and support from a nation-state, but instead need porous national borders and global regulation; (d) the emergence of ICT, both as a new and increasingly dominant branch of production in itself, and as a factor affecting manufacturing, services and finance; and (e) the emergence and increasing importance of new institutional investors, including pension funds, whose assets amounted to 57.1 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the US and over 87 per cent of GDP in The Netherlands at the end of 1995[11]: a form of finance capital, consisting of the capitalised savings of wage earners, that Lenin and Hilferding could never have envisaged.[12]
The WTO is not the only institution of global regulation and governance. There are numerous UN organisations that perform a similar function, although they are much weaker. The International Labour Organisation (ILO), founded in 1919 to promote social justice and internationally recognised labour rights, became the first specialised agency of the UN in 1946, and the International Labour Code of the ILO is a large and growing document. The Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 1979, is often described as an international bill of rights for women. The most revolutionary development, perhaps, was the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which came into force in June 2002, with the mandate to prosecute perpetrators of four core crimes: war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and aggression.
Implications for sovereignty
Perhaps the most obvious effect of globalisation is to undermine national sovereignty. Policy decisions that were previously made by national states are now passed on to global institutions, which can interfere with national policies if these conflict with global regulations. The anti-globalisation movement sees this as a loss of democracy, but is it really so?
First and foremost, what is called ‘national sovereignty’ is really state sovereignty. In the constitution of a nation-state, ‘a two-fold process of interaction is at work: “internally” with regard to society and “externally” with regard to other states and actors’ (Clarke 1999: 57).[13] Conventionally, sovereignty is seen as the authority of the state over what occurs within its territorial space – its ‘entitlement to rule’[14] – and recognition of this authority in its external interaction with other states. Internationally, the system has never been able to prevent large-scale violence, despite the adoption of the Geneva Conventions to regulate the conduct of nations during war. The horrific carnage of World War II, including the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civilians by the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and conventional bombing elsewhere, led to the foundation in 1945 of the United Nations, whose foremost purpose, as proclaimed in its Charter, was ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,’ and for this purpose ‘to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security’. This could be seen as a pooling of sovereignty in order to regulate relations between sovereign states so as to prevent violent conflict between them, thus modifying the ‘external’ dimension of sovereignty. These ‘international…institutions have both linked sovereign states together and transformed sovereignty into the shared exercise of power. A body of…international law has developed which underpins an emerging system of global governance’.[15]
The horror of the Nazi Holocaust created a crisis for the ‘internal’ dimension of sovereignty too, leading to the Nuremburg trials which questioned the authority of a state to do as it pleased within its territorial space. The adoption of the Genocide Convention by the UN on 9 December 1948, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the following day, articulated the belief that the most basic rights of human beings cannot be different in different countries but have to be common for all peoples, and therefore the internal authority of a state could be questioned if it violated these rights. In subsequent decades, the UN would pass many covenants and conventions applying to the world as a whole; for example, in 1966 two covenants codifying the rights in the Universal Declaration were adopted by the General Assembly: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CPR Covenant) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR Covenant). However, the operation of international law has thus far been fairly arbitrary, with powerful states being able to violate it with impunity. The establishment of the ICC, whose scope encompasses both the internal and external dimensions of sovereignty, has the potential to change this situation, at least for the core crimes covered by it, but this process still has a long way to go.
As the example of the Holocaust and many other cases of internal genocide demonstrate, the loss of state sovereignty is not necessarily a loss of democracy; indeed, it could be the opposite. Anti-globalisers subscribe to the implicit assumption that the smaller the unit, the greater the potential for democracy, but this is not supported by experience. As advocates of women’s and children’s rights have known for a long time, the smallest unit in society - the family - can be the least democratic, with weaker members sometimes being imprisoned, tortured or killed in their own home. In such cases, the intervention of the broader community is necessary in order to protect human and democratic rights. By analogy, a global community governed by democratic norms can justifiably intervene to protect human and democratic rights that are being violated by a national state. It is significant that the BJP government complained of infringment on its sovereignty when questioned by other governments about the Gujarat genocide in 2002, and the US has objected to the monitoring regimes of the Comprehensive (nuclear) Test Ban Treaty and Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions on the grounds that they infringe on its sovereignty. Here ‘sovereignty’ is implicitly defined as the right of a state to commit genocide or develop weapons of mass destruction.
Those who argue for a defence of sovereignty would contend that theirs is a more democratic conception, which equates sovereignty with the rule of the people. However Negri and Hardt point out that ‘Democracy..can be conceived as the rule of the many or all, but only insofar as they are unified as “the people” or some such single subject. It should be clear, however, that this mandate of political thought that only the one can rule undermines and negates the concept of democracy’.[16] The population of a country is marked by diversity, and can never be a single subject; it is only by stifling or crushing the aspirations of some that others can project themselves as the representatives of all. If this argument is accepted, then sovereignty is not only not the same as democracy, but is incompatible with democracy.
It is undeniable that national sovereignty and globalisation stand in contradiction to each other, and if sovereignty is seen as the prime principle of governance, globalisation is an enemy to be opposed. But if we move from sovereignty to democracy as the prime principle of governance, then there is no contradiction between the national and global. For example, fighting for women’s rights to equality and freedom from violence at an international level through CEDAW and the ICC can only reinforce, never undermine, the struggle for women’s rights in any particular country. Nor can the winning of women’s rights to equality and freedom from violence in one country ever undermine women’s rights in another part of the world or the world as a whole. On the contrary, democracy at a global level complements democracy at a national level, and vice versa; neither is completely effective without the other. This has significant implications for all struggles for democracy, above all the struggle for workers’ rights.
Popular mobilisation, resistance and emancipation
It is fairly obvious that where policies affecting most countries of the world are made at an international level, attempting to influence or resist them at a purely national level will not be very effective; for example the policies of the WTO, although decided by governments collectively, impose themselves on each state as an external pressure. It is less obvious but equally true that in an interconnected world, decisions and events in one country can influence what happens in others; thus low labour standards and attacks on workers’ rights in one country can, through relocation of production to it and cheap imports from it, lead to unemployment and pressure to depress labour standards in other countries: the so-called ‘race to the bottom’.[17]
There have been two opposite reactions to this dilemma, conflated by uninformed mediapersons as ‘the anti-globalisation movement’. One reaction is genuinely opposed to globalisation, seeking to go back to a world of sovereign states which have complete control over what goes on inside their territory as well as the way they relate to others. This can be characterised as a reactionary response in two senses: firstly, in the purely descriptive sense that it tries to roll back the wheel of history, as the Communist Manifesto puts it,[18] going back to an earlier phase of capitalist development; and secondly, in the sense that it offers support to appeals for sovereignty made by oppressive states, including, ironically, the imperialist state in the US. The second reaction seeks to impose democratic norms on the emerging world system, both in terms of the way that states behave within the territory they govern, and in terms of the way that they interact with each other.
These two opposite reactions can clearly be distinguished at occasions and in movements that are inaccurately characterised as ‘anti-globalisation’. The demonstrations outside the WTO meeting at Seattle in 1999 are a good example. Some demonstrators demanded that the WTO be scrapped, and this demand is still being made, despite the fact that it is very clear that the alternative – bilateral or regional trade agreements where the stronger or strongest party can impose its will on weaker ones – is much worse for Third World countries. This is why, for example, the Hugo Chavez government in Venezuela opposed the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) tooth and nail, but engaged critically with the WTO process, putting forward proposals that would democratise the way it functioned by ensuring greater equality between developed and developing countries. Similarly, many trade unions and labour activists demonstrating in Seattle proposed a workers’ rights clause in WTO agreements that would protect the basic human rights of workers in all member states: a measure that, if crafted carefully, would democratise the WTO in a different way by ensuring that its policies did not undermine the human rights of workers.[19]
The World Social Forum, started as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum, also displays these opposite reactions to globalisation, which were evident in the banners put up when it was held in Bombay. While many of the slogans were the usual anti-globalisation ones, there were others which, on the contrary, were calls for globalisation: ‘Globalise Justice,’ by the campaign for the ICC, ‘Globalise Human Rights,’ by Amnesty International, and ‘Globalise Workers’ Rights’ by labour activists.
It is my view that the latter response is the more appropriate and effective one. If, as I believe, globalisation is a new and more advanced stage of capitalism, then the most that opposition can do is to delay it – and that, too, at the cost of supporting the most oppressive features of the old order and ignoring the potential for strengthening emancipatory movements in the new one. One consequence of globalisation has been the worldwide expansion of the proletariat, which has occurred much faster in the Third World, with more women than men joining the labour force. At the same time, there has been a convergence in conditions of employment, which came out very clearly in the project I was working on with Women Working Worldwide, an organisation involved with women workers in several countries. For example, we produced an educational booklet on Codes of Conduct, which was translated into various local languages. One of the examples was from a factory in El Salvador which was supplying garments to The Gap - a major US retailer - where the workers, mainly women, responded to oppressive conditions by forming a union. The employer retaliated by dismissing those involved; this was followed by an international campaign in support of the workers, as a result of which a Code of Conduct guaranteeing basic workers’ rights was introduced. The dismissed workers were reinstated, and the union was recognised.[20]
Women workers from the Free Trade Zones in Sri Lanka, some of them also working for companies supplying The Gap, read this story out loud in a workshop, and when asked what they had learned about codes, one woman said, in awe and wonder, ‘They too had problems getting permission to go to the toilet!’ Another added, ‘And they too were forced to do compulsory overtime.’ A third commented, ‘They were thrown out for forming a union, just as we were!’ There was an immediate sense of identification with women workers on the opposite side of the globe. In another example, women garment workers in Bombay doing outwork for a factory called Patel Hosiery received an appeal for information from UNITE, the union organising garment workers in the US. Workers in Brylane, a mail-order firm supplied by Patel Hosiery, were facing stiff opposition to their attempts to form a union, and were trying to collect information from suppliers around the world so as to put pressure on the parent firm to recognise their union. They sent us details of the health and safety hazards that the American workers, most of them women, were suffering, and my colleague Chanda Korgaokar translated these into Marathi for the women in Bombay, who listened with sympathy and readily agreed to supply information about their own abysmal employment conditions. When the union was finally established, UNITE wrote to thank all those who had helped them, and when Chanda translated this letter, some of the women broke into spontaneous applause, thrilled that they had helped workers in a distant country to organise, even though they themselves got nothing out of it.
The potential for this kind of identification, which I found very moving, has been created by globalisation. Along with the expansion of the proletariat, whom Marx and Engels saw as the ‘grave-diggers’[21] of capitalism, the convergence of employment conditions in different countries, with its potential for leading to solidarity and common strategies, would have been seen as a positive development by classical Marxism. If capital is inherently global, its grave-diggers too have to be global. The world has always been, and will always be, one, as the urgent issue of climate change demonstrates: there is no way that the effect of carbon emissions from one country can be confined to that country, no matter how impermeable national boundaries may be. Nationalist ideology treats the nation-state as a timeless and ahistorical category, whereas in actuality it arose at a certain point in history, and will also become obsolete at some point. The latter point may still be far in the future, but the world is moving towards it at a slow but steady pace.
The more integrated the world is, the more necessary it becomes to tackle the problems that face humankind together. Fortunately, globalisation has provided tools that make it more possible than ever before to do so. The new information and communication technologies can be used to convey information rapidly across national borders, to publicise problems and struggles on the Internet, and to debate and coordinate action. An important example is the debate over child labour, which not so long ago was so much taken for granted in India that many people who would have claimed to be progressive employed children to work in their homes. A dialectical process whereby publicity for the campaigns of child rights activists in India highlighted child labour as a global issue, which in turn reacted back to put pressure on the state in India to do something about the problem, has at least compelled acknowledgement of the issue and some attempts to address it.
Globalisation and militarism
Militarism played a positive role for capital during its imperialist phase, enabling it to expand geographically and accumulate rapidly. The destruction caused by war, like that caused by crises, could re-establish conditions for accumulation, although at the cost of the certainty that some capitals would perish. Luxemburg and other Marxists also suggested that the market for military production assured by the state could temporarily serve to boost employment, thus smoothing over business cycles.[22] Initially, there were also ‘spin-offs’ from Research & Development (R&D) in military production to civilian production, leading to major innovations which increased overall productivity, such as the use of computers.[23] And in an epoch when capital depended heavily on the state to secure or expand national borders, military spending could be seen as an asset even in Third World countries like India, which absorbed smaller South Asian countries like Sikkim, and waged border wars with Pakistan and China.
Yet there were inherent problems in militarism that came to the fore as imperialism matured. The channelling of taxes into military spending occurred at the expense of state expenditure on infrastructure, which is necessary for the smooth functioning of capital, and on the social sector – education, health, and social welfare – which is necessary for the smooth reproduction of labour power. The consequences were especially dire in Third World countries, but were not confined to it. As a placard held up in demonstrations against the nuclear tests in India and Pakistan in 1998 commented sarcastically: ‘NO FOOD, NO WATER, NO JOBS, NO PROBLEM: WE HAVE THE BOMB!’ Ten million dollars spent every day by India and Pakistan in patrolling the icy wastes of the Siachen glacier, where more soldiers died of exposure than in combat, would have gone a long way towards assuring food, water, health care and education to the people of these countries.[24] And millions of US refugees left stranded in the wake of hurricane Katrina in 2005, forced to depend on aid from other countries including much poorer ones, demonstrated that even in the richest country in the world, the government could not endlessly transfer funding from infrastructure and the social sector to military expenditure without having a disastrous impact on social reproduction (Lal 2005).[25]
As military production became more high-tech and specialised, the spin-offs declined,[26] and R&D in the military sector starved civilian R&D. Moreover, the ‘cost-plus’ pricing formula of industries producing for the military meant that there was no incentive to improve productivity, which therefore fell behind productivity in countries with less military spending. Seymour Melman has argued that the massively larger military spending by the US, in comparison with Germany and Japan, resulted in its lagging far behind these two countries in terms of productivity.[27] As in the USSR at an earlier stage, militarism in the US became a drag on the economy.
The result was enormous fiscal deficits that would have wrecked any other country’s economy. The only reason why they did not, was that US financial dominance of the world economy, underpinned by the role of the US dollar as the only world currency, ensured an equally huge inflow of capital to offset the deficits.[28] However, this system came under threat when the creation of the euro offered a potential alternative to the dollar as a world currency. Many countries, including China and Japan which had the most massive dollar reserves, started diversifying their foreign exchange assets.[29] In a significant move, George Soros pulled his assets out of dollars, and many US investors followed suit.[30] This does not mean that the dollar is liable to crash in the near future, since countries which have large dollar reserves and rely heavily on the US market will no doubt continue to prop it up. Yet in the long run, it means that the US economy is doomed unless the government changes its policy of military over-spending and tax cuts for the rich. In a globalised world, military power no longer ensures economic dominance.
For the first time under capitalism, globalisation makes it possible to dispense with militarism. With capitalism encompassing the whole earth geographically, there is no necessity to spread it by using guns, bombs and missiles; and with capitals depending on porous rather than impervious borders for their expansion, productivity rather than backing by the military might of a particular nation-state ensures victory in the competitive struggle. It does not follow that militarism will decline automatically, since the military-industrial complex is enormously strong, and would resist any diminution of its power. But the possibilities of successful opposition to militarism and war – for example between India and Pakistan – would be enhanced considerably by the fact that for many capitalists, too, militarism plays a negative role. Again, ICT can be and has been used by repressive states, including that of the US, to crush opposition through tighter surveillance. But it can also be used for the opposite purpose. ICT provides a means for debating issues in the anti-war movement as well as publicising and coordinating activities across national borders. It has enabled a worldwide anti-war movement to be organised far more rapidly after the occupation of Iraq than was possible in the case of the war on Vietnam. Moreover, globally coordinated demonstrations against the war have been organised using the Internet: something that never took place during the long years of the anti-Vietnam-war movement.
Thus globalisation provides new resources for the struggle against militarism and war. Marxists like Lenin and Luxemburg would have welcomed them, because in their time communists were unambiguously internationalist in their politics. Feminists too opposed nationalist wars, which destroyed in an instant the years of labour and love women had put into rearing their children. Clara Zetkin, founder of International Women’s Day and foremother of socialist feminism, ended her speech at a conference of the Socialist International in 1912 by declaring ‘war on war’ (‘Krieg dem Krieg’), and in another speech said that ‘When the men kill, it is up to us women to fight for the preservation of life. When the men are silent, it is our duty to raise our voices in behalf of our ideals.’ In 1915 she helped to organise the International Women’s Peace Conference in Switzerland, attended by around 1300 women from countries at war with each other as well as neutral ones. The conference set up the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the oldest peace organisation still in existence, which stands for total and universal disarmament.[31]
However, the strand of nationalism in the socialist movement that led to the split in the Second International at the time of World War I grew much stronger subsequently, not only in the imperialist countries but also in the emerging Third World nations. Nationalism must be distinguished from national liberation movements. Many distinct elements go into the making of a national liberation movement. For the majority of participants it simply expresses a desire for freedom from foreign rule and oppression, but it also usually includes an elite striving to gain control of political power which it can wield over the others. Nationalism is an expression of this struggle for power. This dual character of national liberation movements accounts for the tragic anomaly of what took place in India at the time of Independence: freedom from British rule as a result of a popular liberation struggle, but at the same time the enormous violence of partition, the direct result of a clash of nationalisms.
Nationalism is also different from love of one’s country. Tagore, who made no secret of his love for his country, was savagely critical of nationalism, writing that ‘the nation has thriven long upon mutilated humanity’.[32] One can love one’s country in the same way that we love our home, neighbourhood, city, town or village: because we have grown up in it or have lived in it for a long time, are familiar with it, and associate it with loved ones and pleasant memories. This does not imply any commitment to supporting the state; on the contrary, love of one’s country can in some circumstances – for example under a repressive or genocidal government – lead to opposition to the state. Nationalism, by contrast, demands allegiance to the state or would-be state which claims to speak and act in the name of the ‘nation’, and is obsessed with the definition of a national identity. But “The construction of a national self has always been only vis-Ã -vis “the other”’, hence ‘a nation can be defined as an unending process of othering’.[33]
The process of othering – on the grounds of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, caste, sexual orientation, nationality, and so on and so forth – has always preceded, and been used to justify, the use of lethal violence against those who are defined as ‘the other’. This is why nationalism always contains the seeds of war. Perhaps the most reactionary aspect of the nationalist opposition to globalisation is that its advocates lack the imagination to conceive of a world in which, in John Lennon’s words, there is ‘nothing to kill or die for’,[34] and consequently espouse an ideology which provides justification for the horrific violence of militarism and war.
Globalisation and citizenship
In principle, globalisation should also mean the permeability of national borders to the movement of people, but immigration barriers have been taken down only in a few instances, as within the European Union (EU) for EU citizens. Elsewhere, they remain as strong as ever, and in some cases are stronger than they were before. Thus a large proportion of the millions of migrant workers who seek employment outside their own country comprise the ‘undocumented’, or ‘illegal aliens’; in the US alone, this category numbers 12 million.[35] For migrants, the traditional notion of ‘citizenship as an idea and as an institution is not always emancipatory. In fact, it often works to exclude people from the enjoyment of rights and recognition’.[36] The assumption that only citizens have a right to rights means that migrants can be treated as ‘aliens’ and deprived of basic human rights, including labour rights; ‘oppositions between citizens and aliens pose obstacles for migrants’ claims to rights based on universal personhood, even within a state that formally supports international human rights norms’.[37]
There have been two types of proposals for dealing with the exclusion of non-citizens and denial of their human rights. ‘One political and scholarly response to migration’s challenges to the administration of rights has been to turn to international law to establish and protect a more equal and universal basis for rights than membership of the territorial nation-state’; this includes the enactment by the ILO and UN of conventions protecting the rights of migrant workers and their families.[38] One way of achieving a more equal and universal basis for rights is to make it mandatory that ‘rights and recognition should be based on an individual’s personhood or her social participation, rather than on citizenship’.[39] Alternatively, according to the cosmopolitan outlook, the locus of citizenship – which was originally attached to the city, not the nation-state – would be displaced once more, from the national to the global level, to make us all ‘citizens of the world’.[40]
Another response has been the proposal to abolish immigration controls. Contradicting fears that this would lead to a flood of Third World immigrants pouring into Europe and North America, it has been pointed out that before immigration controls for Commonwealth citizens were imposed in Britain, the tendency was for single young people to come, work for a while, and then return home, possibly to be replaced by another family member; whereas afterwards, the majority of immigrants were dependants coming to join working people, since there was no other way to ensure both family reunion and access to a job.[41] Similarly, immigration controls imposed on Mexicans coming to work in the US converted temporary migrants into longer-term settlers.[42]
Both these suggested changes would undermine the nation-state – the first by replacing national citizenship rights with universal human rights or global citizenship, the second by making national borders even more porous – and therefore could be seen as pushing forward the agenda of globalisation.
Globalisation and politics
The politics of globalisation are polarised sharply, but not on a simple axis between support and opposition. It is more like a three-way split, between those who support a neoliberal vision of globalisation, those who oppose it with an economic nationalist agenda, and those who seek to impose values of justice, equity and democracy on the new global order. Paradoxically, the first two camps, seemingly opposed to each other, often concur in their views. Both, for example, think it is inevitable that globalisation results in an attack on workers’ rights, and both are uneasy about the investment of pension funds in financial markets.[43]
If these are seen as the only options, the choice becomes an impossible one for those involved in emancipatory movements. The neoliberals support measures that inevitably result in impoverishment and weakened rights for the mass of working people. But the economic nationalists, concentrating all their fire on globalisation, refuse to confront the enemies under their noses, like informal labour, child labour, or caste and gender oppression, all of which existed long before globalisation. Even when enemies like imperialism and neoliberalism are correctly identified, the fact that they are incorrectly assumed to be inseparable from globalisation prevents a viable strategy for fighting them from emerging. Nationalism acts as an obstacle to solidarity and coordinated resistance to oppression, and provides a justification for militarism and war. The assumption that globalisation is in itself evil blinds nationalists to the possible advantages that might flow from it.
It is only the third option that can lead to any progress, although the advantages that might flow from globalisation would have to be fought for, and would not be won easily. Implementing such a programme would require building solidarity at all levels, from the local to the global, and a thoroughgoing debate on aims and strategies, with enough translation to enable people from different linguistic communities to communicate with one another. Fortunately, globalisation has provided some of the tools for carrying out this enormous task.
(This essay was published as Chapter 2 in Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Political Theory, ed. Mangesh Kulkarni (New Delhi: Sage Publications), 2011, pp. 37-56)
[1] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party,’ in Karl Marx, (ed) David Fernbach, The Revolutions of 1848, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1973, pp.67-98, quotation from p.71
[2] Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, (tr. Ben Fowkes), Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1976
[3] In Hitler’s words, ‘The development of Germany was much too clear in my eyes for me not to know that the hardest battle would have to be fought not against hostile nations but against international capital’ (Mein Kampf, tr. Ralph Manheim, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1943, p.213, quoted in Doug Henwood, Wall Street, Verso, London, 1993, p.303).
[4] See, for example, Business Standard, ‘RSS to continue attack on globalisation, MNCs’, 28 March 1995; Business Standard, ‘RSS plans stir against govt today’, 30 November 1998; Economic Times, ‘BMS joins Left in slamming govt’s economic policies’, 14 January 1999.
[5] See, for example, Subir Roy, ‘Quietly, backoffice outsourcing goes deeper, wider,’ Business Standard, 17-18 May 2003; Sunil Rajanala, ‘Outsourcing HR: The next big thing,’ Economic Times, 18 May 2003; J.Padmapriya and V.Balasubramanian, ‘Outsourcing of auto parts revs up Job St,’ Economic Times, 24 September 2004. Even within the Republican Party in the US, there was a division between Bill Thomas, who drafted a bill repealing tax concessions to exporters that the WTO had judged to be illegal, and Phil Crane, who opposed the bill. ‘The split between Mr Crane and Mr Thomas mirrors divisions among US corporations over the WTO ruling. A coalition of large electronics, oil, retail and consumer companies, including Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and General Motors, released on Friday a letter endorsing Mr Thomas’s bill, saying it would end what is, in effect, double taxation on the overseas operations of US companies,’ whereas ‘the big beneficiaries of the current..tax break are companies that manufacture in the US for export, including Boeing, Microsoft and Kodak’ (Edward Alden, ‘US divided on EU levy issue,’ Business Standard, 17 September 2002).
[6] This is pointed out by Jan Breman in his critique of the World Bank’s World Development Report 1995: Workers in an Integrating World: ‘Labour, get lost: A Late-Capitalist Manifesto,’ Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.30 No.37, 16 September 1995, pp.2294-2300
[7] See Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents, Penguin Books, London, 2002
[8] Neeta Ghei, ‘WTO ruling against US gives a ray of hope to Third World,’ Economic Times, 21 January 1996
[9] See, for example, Business Standard, ‘EU files formal complaint with WTO’, 8 March 2002, ‘Japan retaliates against US steel tariffs’, 18-19 May 2002, ‘US under fire at WTO over steel tariffs’, 9-10 March 2002; Richard Waddington, ‘EU gets WTO nod for $4bn sanctions on US’, Economic Times, 31 August 2002, ‘US loses battle in WTO court on cotton subsidies’, Economic Times, 3 March 2005; Ranvir Nayar, ‘WTO upholds EU, India case against US’, Economic Times, 16 January 2002, and many more.
[10] It was not an unqualified victory for health activists and Third World governments, because there was a great deal of red tape involved in the procedure which would allow countries like Brazil and India, which were producing cheap generic versions of patented drugs, to export them to poor countries suffering a health emergency, but it was certainly a defeat for the pharmaceutical companies. See Neeraj Kaushal, ‘A sugar-coated pill from WTO’, Economic Times, 2 September 2003.
[11] Koen De Ryck, ‘Asset Allocation, Financial Market Behaviour and Impact of EU Pension Funds on European Capital Markets', in Institutional Investors in the New Financial Landscape, OECD, Paris, 1998, pp.267-76
[12] Rudolph Hilferding’s Finance Capital - A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development, (tr. Morris Watnick and Sam Gordon, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1981), first published in 1910, was one of the earliest and most influential attempts at a Marxist analysis of the merging of bank capital and industrial capital to form ‘finance capital’, a new form at that time. V.I.Lenin drew heavily on it in his critique of imperialism written in 1916 and published in 1917, usually mistranslated as ‘Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism’, (Collected Works Volume 22, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964, pp. 185-304) although the editors of Monthly Review point out that the original title was ‘Imperialism, the Latest Stage of Capitalism,’ implying that although it was the latest stage at the time he was writing, it might not be the last. (See Monthly Review, 2004, ‘Notes from the editors,’ January, www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is_8_55/ai_112411334). Lenin remarked that although an excess of capital seeking profitable investment had arisen, the profits would never be used to improve the miserable living standards of the working class. The idea that one day workers’ savings would constitute an increasingly important form of finance capital would have seemed quite bizarre to him!
[13] Ian Clarke, Globalization and International Relations Theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, p.57
[14] David Held and Anthony McGrew (ed.), The Global Transformations Reader – An Introduction to the Globalization Debate, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2003, p.11
[15] David Held and Anthony McGrew, op. cit., p.11
[16] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, 2004, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Hamish Hamilton, London, p.328
[17] See, for example, Katherine van Wezel Stone, ‘Labour in the Global Economy: Four Approaches to Transnational Labour Regulation,’ in William Bratton et al. (ed), International Regulatory Competition and Coordination: Perspectives on Economic Regulation in Europe and the United States, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, pp.445-77
[18] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, op.cit., p.77
[19] There has been an extensive debate over this issue, which I have reviewed elsewhere. See Rohini Hensman, ‘Minimum Labour Standards and Trade Agreements: An Overview of the Debate,’ Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.XXXI Nos.16 and 17, 20 April 1996, pp.1030-34; ‘World Trade and Workers’ Rights: To Link or Not to Link?’ Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.XXXV No.15, 8 April 2000, pp.1247-54; ‘World Trade and Workers’ Rights: In Search of an Internationalist Position,’ in Peter Waterman and Jane Wills (ed.), Place, Space and the New Labour Internationalisms, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 2001, pp.123-46.
[20] Women Working Worldwide, Company Codes of Conduct: What are They? Can We Use Them? Manchester, 1998. This educational booklet was translated into several languages, including Sinhala and Marathi, and used in workshops to inform women workers about codes of conduct and consult them about their responses to the idea.
[21] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, op. cit. p.79
[22] Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, (tr. Agnes Schwarzschild), Routledge, London, 2003
[23] Michael Kidron, ‘A Permanent Arms Economy,’ International Socialism, Volume 1, no.28, Spring, www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/contemp/pampsetc/perm/perm/htm, 1967
[24] Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik, South Asia on a Short Fuse: Nuclear Politics and the Future of Global Disarmament, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999, pp.x-xi
[25] Vinay Lal, ‘New Orleans: The Big Easy and the Big Shame,’ Economic and Political Weekly, Vol XL No.38, 17 September 2005, pp.4099-4100
[26] Michael Kidron, Western Capitalism Since the War, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1970
[27] Seymour Melman, After Capitalism: From Managerialism to Workplace Democracy, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 2001, pp.110-14, 124-26
[28] William Clarke, ‘Revisited: The Real Reasons for the Upcoming War with Iraq: A Macroeconomic and Geostrategic Analysis of the Unspoken Truth,’ (a revised version of his January 2003 essay), www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RriraqWar.html January 2004
[29] Steve Johnson, ’Asian banks cut exposure to dollar,’ Economic Times, 11 March 2005
[30] Jennifer Hughes, ‘Dollar gets sinking feeling as investor confidence fades,’ Business Standard, 24-25 May 2003; Economic Times, ‘US appetite for foreign stock takes toll on $,’ 20 December 2004
[31] www.socintwomen.org.uk/ENGLISH/brief-history.html ; www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERzetkin.htm ; www.wilpf.int.ch/
[32] Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism, London, 1917, p.44, quoted by Sajal Nag, ‘Nationhood and displacement in Indian Subcontinent,’ Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.XXXVI No.51, 22 December 2001, pp.4753-60, quotation on p. 4753
[33] Sajal Nag, op.cit., pp.4753, 4754
[34] from John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’.
[35] ‘Number of Illegal Immigrants Hits 12M,’ Yahoo! News, 7 March 2006, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060307/ap_on_go_ot/illegal_immigration
[36] Linda Bosniak, ‘Critical Reflections on “Citizenship” as a Progressive Aspiration,’ in Joanne Conaghan, Richard, Michael Fischl and Karl Klare (ed.), Labour Law in an Era of Globalization: Transformative Practices and Possibilities, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002, pp.339-49. Quotation from p.343
[37] Kristen Hill Maher, ‘Who Has a Right to Rights? Citizenship’s Exclusions in an Age of Migration,’ in Alison Brysk (ed), Globalization and Human Rights, University of California Press, Berkeley, pp.19-43, quotation from p.21
[38] Kristen Hill Maher, op. cit., p.24
[39] Linda Bosniak, op.cit., p.343
[40] Linda Bosniak, op.cit., p.348
[41] Teresa Hayter, Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls, Pluto Press, London, 2000
[42] Nigel Harris, ‘Migration and Development,’ Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.XL No.43, 22 October 2005, pp.4591-95, see p.4593
[43] Thus the mainstream Left opposes globalisation because, they say, it undermines workers’ rights, while neo-liberals call for ‘flexibility’ of labour (which undermines workers’ rights), because they say that it is necessary for competitiveness in a globalised economy. The same Left opposes investment of pension funds in financial markets because they see it as an encroachment of the market into state-supported social security, while neo-liberals oppose investment of government- and union-controlled pension funds in financial markets because they see it as an encroachment of public control into the market, and thus the introduction of socialism through the back door!