MINUTES: Globalization Study Group
Meeting of March 14, 2005

PRESENT: BD (Barry Devine), CD (Cliff Durand), GD (Gregory Diamant), & AY (Arturo Yarish)

Topics of discussion:

• Globalization Panel presentation for the Snowbird Symposium,
• Border Social Forum and
• Alternatives to Economic Globalization.

Proposed Globalization Panel presentation for the Snowbird Symposium: We agreed that we would present a panel on 29 March at 10:30 at the Biblioteca Publica. The panel will consist of three or four parts as follows: State v. Nation, Solidarity Economy, the environ-mental impact of Corporate Globalization, and a review of the history of mega-world organizations from Bretton Woods to the WTO.

Border Social Forum: We should send someone to the forum planned from 01 to 07 May to help in Juarez City , Mexico . Who?

“Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World is Possible” is a Report of The International Forum on Globalization. Four copies of the report are available for $18 Usd at the Globalization meetings or may be reserved through a call or E-mail to the Center for Global Justice.

AY requested that the group focus their comments with reference to the challenging points made by GD at the 14 February meeting of the GSG, which centered on the idea that since the 1970’s capital’s adjustments made to changing world-wide, political-economic conditions that have become known as neoliberalism have been largely successful “in its own terms.” For a review of that fruitful topic see the summary of the February 14 th meeting now posted on the CGJ web site.

Facilitating our first discussion of the “Alternatives,” GD Presented us with his prepared notes on the Introduction and first chapter, which are presented immediately below.

NOTES TO INTRO & CHAP. 1 OF “ALTERNATIVES TO ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION”  

As much as I want to like this book I feel it has fatal weaknesses. Although there are many good descriptive parts detailing the destructive effects of globalization, the theoretical underpinnings are weak, contradictory and suffer from a fear of grand meta-narratives, excessive positivism, undue fetishism and a somewhat cavalier approach to history. So far, it seems to be a mélange of policy-wonkism and feel-goodisms.

The authors make assumptions that posit a somewhat idealistic recent past of democracy and local self-sufficiency (post-war Keynesianism and its social democratic components in the West) as if it existed in a historical/geographical vacuum. They seem afraid to name a system (though Forbes doesn’t suffer from that fear) and most egregiously repeatedly characterize globalization as an “experiment.” With that in mind I have decided to write a history of the world. Here it is in its totality: Chapter 1: Slave society; an experiment. Chapter 2: The Feudal world; an experiment. Chapter 3: Mercantilism; an experiment. Chapter 4: Capitalism; an experiment…and so on, you get the idea.

Here are a few points to discuss from our first readings of the text:

• p5: ‘the power to govern shifting away’….and 3 lines down ‘replacing self-organizing markets…’
• p8: first mention of ‘civil society’ in a fetishising way, many more to follow. Let’s define it.
• p8: last sentence, excellent
• p9: civil society again
• p10: ‘consensus tilt in favor of self-reliance’; first hidden mention of problem of uneven development under capitalism, never overtly addressed
• p13, Box A: ‘system of industrialism.’ What is it? Capitalism, Soviet “socialism.” Here we get to a nub of a problem: small is good for its own sake. Examine the paradigms: what do they mean under Capitalism? No mention of transforming ourselves and society…just a vague ‘moving toward’ the second paradigm of local self-sufficiency.
• p.18: Where’s the history? What happened around 1973 that allowed for the ascendancy of finance capital and the attendant theoretical under-pinning of neoliberalism?
• p.19: Economic globalization is not the same as neoliberalism! Again, a confusion of an expression of a system with its theoretical explanation.
• pp 19-20: Hypergrowth: how is this different from what Capitalism has always done? See the Communist Manifesto. Again: ‘the experiment.’
• p22. Again, let’s look at history. Capitalists first appropriated the commons as part of the period of primitive accumulation. What is going on now may be characterized as sophisticated accumulation.
• p.23: ‘the commodification of money itself.’ This is a real howler. Money under capitalism has always been a commodity. I understand he is speaking of the extreme trading going on now but this reveals a real theoretical and analytical weakness.
• pp 24 & 25: flabby analysis. Last paragraph of p.25: ‘Local and regional production, archenemy of globalization, …smaller scale… Small is good ideology. No discussion of internal dynamics.
• p.27: good description of forced urbanization but no discussion of why this happens.
• p.28: ‘Architects of this global experiment.’ Yes, people make it happen, but they are working on and with a system of relations known as capitalism.
• p.31: Uneven development.
• p.32: ‘…if we have a democracy.’ Can we understand capitalism?
• p.32: ‘At its root, economic globalization is really an experiment…’ This is real nonsense!
• p.36: ‘Like other aspects of globalization, the problem is systemic.’ Yes, and this contradicts much of what is written before.
• p.37: top of page, ‘economic ideology’; why not add ‘and system’?

There are many more such examples to discuss.

______________________________________End of GD´s direct review.

Indeed there are many more examples to discuss and the issues were immediately engaged and amplified by the participants. First, I present the broad points of the participants’ general agreements with GD’s critique without attribution. I will do my best to be concise. It will not be easy because the discussion was as rich as the presentation, but just think, this is our first attempt.

• Capitalism is a historically specific economic formation and economic “Globalization” emerged from a specific set of political/economic limiting conditions of capitalism’s development, which became increasingly evident during the series of crises that became clearer in the 1970’s.
• Adapting emerging technologies in communications and transportation capital, particularly US based capital, took initiatives in the area of finance and internationalized serial production methods launched by transnational and multinational corporations.
• Through its dominating influence in the Bretton Woods institutions of the IMF, World Bank and later the WTO, it pushed changes in trade relations and lending criteria that favor the industrialized nations.
• In order to accurately analyze the adjustments that Capital has made during the past thirty years, we must remind ourselves of its specific characteristics and examine its concrete process historically.
• Such a critical historical analysis requires the precise use of terms, a clear identification of capitalist ideology, principles and practices that can be redeveloped through a careful critical examination of Capital’s own strategies and tactics “in its own terms.” We must ask how successful is Capital in its own terms, in terms of its own measures of success. The analysis must begin at the highest stage of Capital’s present development, but the study must be made with reference to its historical process. For example, the Enclosure of the English Commons is manifest in the continuing attempts to privatize the world water supply. We should ask why and how has capital learned to squeeze additional “profit “ in new ways or ask, as David Harvey points out, are we witnessing intensified accumulation through disposses-sions? We might also ask if the policy prescriptions of the IMF-World Bank-WTO rule-making-circle of the financial capitalist disorder, as expressed as the ”Washington Consensus,” violate Capital’s principles and practices and perhaps attempt to conceal the persistent historically identified problems of capitalism’s tendency toward overproduction and its often felt consequences? Are the violation of principle and the attempt to conceal the consequences eviscerating the critical study of political economy “in its own terms” and reducing it to a level of public propaganda bordering on religious faith, a type of blind faith inherent in the term “There is no alternative”? As an example, one might listen more attentively to the scripted mantras of daily market reports. Is the process of capital accumulation reaching another of its historical noted crises from which it can emerge only through a heightened reification of its subsistence in the form of more sophisticated financial instruments, which rest on a narrowing basis of material production? This process of the reification of material wealth expressed in pyramided financial instruments becomes nothing more than a ponzy scheme, or pure speculative gamesmanship referred to in recent history as “the greater fools theory.” Is there analytical validity to the Falling Rate of Profit? What are its remedies? What are its consequences? Is Capital so successful in its own terms that it may destroy itself? What specific knowledge changes or physical technological innovations have influenced or facilitated the process of intensified accumulation and capital concentration over the past thirty-year period? Can capital continue to externalize its production costs without consequence? What are the consequences of the notion of external costs of capitalist production when in fact it functions in a finite material environment?

The many valuable points made by the participants alert us to the inherent weaknesses of the Report as clearly revealed in its introduction and its first chapter. Its combined weaknesses, the lack of precise theoretical grounding and absence of analytical rigor, immediately caution the critical reader to the potential problems of the policy suggestion that will follow. The writers’ reluctance to name the system, capitalism, their over-arching effort to use neutral, imprecise or accommodating and obfuscating phases such as “democracies of money,” p.5, their analytical errors such as the classic liberal myth of “self-organizing markets,” of fetishized nomenclature as in the casual use of “Civil Society,” are harbingers of seriously flawed analyses, which convey a predictable tendency toward inaccurate interpretations that result in faulty conclusions.

As I restrain myself from a more comprehensive review of the valuable discussion advanced by GD’s careful analytical presentation of the weakness of the “Alternatives Report” as clearly signaled in the Introduction and First Chapter, I note that we all agreed to continue a rigorous critical reading of the text to evaluate its contributions in terms of its assumed theoretical perspective and its proposed alternatives. It is our intention to search for the theory, subject it to a meticulous analysis and examine, meticulously, their proposals for alternative practices.

We should all thank GD for his valuable contributions to elevating the level of our discussion on to the analytical plane necessary to the continuing development of critical theory.

OUR NEXT MEETING is scheduled to be held at AY’s house on 31 March at 15:00 hours.

May I suggest that each of us take a turn at following GD’s example perhaps we should all make a review of each segment of our reading.

Arturo