GLOBALIZATION YESTERDAY AND TODAY
Csaba Deák
 
 

An exploration of its meaning and an assessment of such claims might follow three main steps. The first, a summing up the concrete processes which have been ascribed as leading to, or stemming from or yet making up globalization; then the second, to confront these with a historical perspective of contemporary capitalism; to then in the third step proceed to a qualification of the theoretical status of the concept of globalization. This is the plan of this paper, with an addition: in the end, it refers to the specificities of the meaning and the role of ‘globalization’ in peripheral countries, in the example of Brazil.
 

What globalization is

Let us sum up of what has been described as being the main elements of globalization in the overabundant literature on the latter (which frequently include some sort of criticism, even though mostly half-hearted). One good account of them comes from Stephen Gill (1993),⁽¹⁾ from which the data on world exports in the table below are taken.

These are portentous transformations; however to hail them as ‘unprecedented’ makes one wonder whether the Thirty Years’ War, for example, was not fought for too little. A striking feature of both quantitative and qualitative changes invoked above is their short-sightedness: their reference is in fact a relatively short period of growth (which appeared to many at the centre of world capitalism as prosperity and stability) allowed by post-war reconstruction. Putting them into a broader historical perspective should allow a reassessment of such transformations.
 

Before globalization, or: what is really new

To start with, this is perhaps the place to recall that in the view of Samir Aminglobalization started in earnest by 1492 and became rapidly dominated and later associated for good with capitalism as such – although I would not imply as he seems to do, that either of the two gave birth to the other:

As for financial expansion, it became so important already after the restructuring of capitals during the Great Depression of 1875-95 that Engels, having sensed it, thought it worth providing a supplement to his edition (1895) of the third volume of Capital entitled "The stock exchange" (the word ‘finance capital’ was to be coined later for the same thing). Then in a rapid succession, Hobson produced Imperialism (1902), Hilferding Finance capital (1910) and Bukharin Imperialism and world economy (1915). By the same time arose also the controversy over ultra-imperialism or inter-imperialist rivalry. At issue was the question whether there could be a ‘peaceful capitalism’, as sustained by Kaustky and his social democrats. Lenin summed it up in his "Introduction"to Bukharin's Imperialism and world economy with his usual verve:

What globalization means

One of the great events of ‘globalization’ was the signing of a new GATT after the ‘Uruguay round’ of negotiations or eight years of haggling, on 15 December 1993. It gave good examples of the elementary fact that its meaning depends on who is looking at or speaking of it. In particular, the meaning of GATT was anything but ‘global’. Thus, the central countries' representative commemorated:

The name of such produce, ideas which promote inaction, offer an apology of the existing order, and thereby promote the maintenance of the status quo, is ideology. Any contribution to ideology is of course a precious reinforcement to the edifice of contemporary society, the ‘governability’ of which became a concern since the exhaustion of the post war boom by the late 1960s.
 

Globalization, in the centre and the periphery

In this light ‘globalisation’ appears as an ideological product which along with its companion pseudo-concepts litters much of the academic and intellectual production in social science. Somewhat surprisingly, it performs the same role –that is, reproduction of the status quo-- at both ends of world capitalism: at the centre of world accumulation or at its periphery. The difference is in what is being justified/reproduced: bourgeois society with its intensive accumulation there, elite society with its hindered accumulation⁽⁴⁾ here.

At this point the advantage of a meaningless word (a pseudo-concept) comes into full light. Globalisation can be invoked to justify financial deregulation in central countries as easily as fixed exchange rates coupled to central bank administered 25%-plus interest rate in the periphery; it can prompt heavy government spending in R&D and in physical infrastructure (liberalism notwithstanding) there and squander public assets by ‘selling’ them out to private capitals, home based or foreign, here. In the urban agglomerations, it can justify massive investment in infrastructure for high finance and big capital headquarters, preparing competitive ‘world cities’ in the core of world capitalism, whereas it can also vindicate the lack of the most elementary investment in the name of depleted resources of a nation in view of the requirements of global integration, at the periphery. While it argues for increase in productivity of labour without a corresponding rise of the subsistence level at the core, it can be invoked just as easily in favour of the reproduction of the hindrances to the development of the productive forces in the periphery. Only in one thing it is the same anywhere: in being an excuse for policies aimed at the reproduction of the status quo, and in trying to make people believe that those policies are unavoidable.
 
 

Notes

⁽¹⁾  A short list chosen among those taking a more critical stance could include Samir Amin (1992, among the most clearly critical), Les Budd (1998, which includes implications on urbanism) or Henk Overbeek’s anthology (1993, which includes Gill just referred to)  but the literature on globalization is really extensive.

⁽²⁾  Irrespective of such close analytical association of  Europeans and capitalism (could there be such thing as a European ideology?), it is worth remembering that whatever is happening nowadays, it happens in and to capitalism.

⁽³⁾Gazeta Mercantil, 93.12.16:1 "Diminui o protecionismo". GATT: General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, renamed shortly after WTO: World Trade Organization

⁽⁴⁾  An elite society, of colonial extraction, must perpetuate the pattern of colonial production (in which a good part of the surplus is constantly creamed off by the metropole), by submitting the imperative of accumulation in capitalist production to the principle of surplus expatriation (whereby accumulation becomes permanently hindered, whence its name) or else lose the material basis of its reproduction and face its own transformation into bourgeois society (see Deák, 1988).
 

References

Government spending as percentage of GNP/GDP,1880-1985 Selected countries Year Britain Germany  France Japan Sweden  US 1880 10 10 15 11 6 8 1929 24 31 19 19 8 10 1960 32 32 35 18 31 28 1985 48 47 52 33 65 37 World Bank, World Development Report 1991, Washington