Page 1 of
5 Excerpt from Pepe
Escobar's Globalistan The following
is an excerpt from Globalistan: How the
Globalized World Is Dissolving into Liquid War
by Asia Times Online's Pepe Escobar. For a review
of the book, click here.
GLOBALISTAN
Visit the market and see the
world. - Western African popular
saying
A tawdry cheapness shall reign
throughout our days. - Ezra Pound
Globalization is like Poe's maelstrom. A
black void, rather. No one can escape it. And we
don't know how it ends.
What we do know is
that it has nothing to do with an "invisible
hand." It has to do with maximization of profit; a
huge
concentration of capital; and
the unrestricted power of monopolies. German
cross-cultural scholar Horst Kurnitzky tells us
globalization has configured "a new world, in
which wealth and poverty, with no control by
markets or the flux of cash, coexist with no form
of social equality." So it's not globalization per
se, but greed (that classic Christian sin ...) and
high concentration of capital that are
responsible, in Kurnitzky's formulation, for "the
uniformization and cultural and real
impoverishment of the world."
Globalization has been with us for quite
some time - in business, finance, culture, drugs,
music, pornography. What is relatively "new" is
the concept. Now let's summon our good ol' friend
Baudelaire, and he'll pop up the question:
Hypocrite reader, my equal, my brother (sister),
are you sure that technological, capitalistic
globalization is a heavenly invention devised for
the greater good of Mankind by Adam Smith and
Thomas L. Friedman? Are you sure it's inevitable,
and that the best that we (and Clyde Prestowitz's
Three Billion New Capitalists) can do is
manage the necessary adjustments to it? Let's take
a closer - global - look from a broader, and more
questioning, perspective.
The invaluable
Immanuel Wallerstein defines our reality (our
Plato's cave?), also known as the capitalist world
economy, as "a historic system which has combined
an axial division of labor integrated by means of
a world market less than perfect in its autonomy,
combined with an interstate system composed of
presumed sovereign States, a geoculture that has
legimitized a scientific ethos as the basis of
economic transformations and the extraction of
profit, and liberal reformism as the way to
contain popular discontent with the continuous
socioeconomic polarization caused by capitalist
development."
This system, as we all know,
was born in Western Europe and then took over the
whole world. Now fast forward to the mid-2000s.
Wallerstein's judgment is like Zeus throwing his
lightning bolt: "The capitalist world economy is
in crisis as a historic social system." The world
we live in, the way this system we take as a
natural fact is articulated and produces
"reality," is in "a transition phase towards a new
historic system whose contours we don't know."
What we can do at best is to contribute to conform
the new structure: "The world we 'know' (in the
sense of cognoscere) is the capitalist world
economy and it is beset by structural faults it
cannot control anymore." Gramsci would have framed
it as the Old Order has fallen but the New Order
has still not been born.
Inevitably, the
stage is set for conflict if not mayhem.
Wallerstein identifies for the next decades three
geopolitical faults we will have to confront.
1) "The struggle among the Triad - U.S.,
E.U. and Japan - over which will be the main stage
of accumulation of capital in the next decades."
The third pole of the Triad - Japan, for
Wallerstein - should rather be considered as "East
Asia," with an emphasis on China.
2) The
struggle between North and South, "or between the
central zones and the other zones of the world
economy, given the continual polarization -
economic, social and demographic - of the world
system."
3) Wallerstein defines it as "the
struggle between the spirit of Davos and the
spirit of Porto Alegre over the type of world
system we want to build collectively." That is,
the system preaching TINA ("there is no
alternative") against anybody believing "another
world is possible."
Wallerstein reminds us
that the concept of Triad became popular in the
1970s - with its first institutional expression
via the Trilateral Commission, which was "a
political effort to reduce the emerging tensions
between the three members of the Triad" (Chinese
gangs happened to become globally popular at the
same time). has happened after what Wallerstein
describes as "a phase A of the Kondratiev cycle
from 1940-1945 to 1967-1973": euphoria over the
fabulous expansion of the world economy, Baby Boom
heaven, Elvis, the Beatles, a beautiful house, a
beautiful kitchen full of appliances and a red
convertible. The next 30 years were "a phase B in
the Kondratiev cycle," where speculation became
the name of the game, unemployment exploded and
there was "an acute acceleration of economic
polarization at the global level as well as inside
States."
In the early 1920s Nikolai
Dmitrievich Kondratiev was the very talented
director of the Moscow Institute of Economic
Investigations. In 1922 he coined his legendary
theory of the "long waves" which not only explains
but also previews the sweeping flow of History.
Kondratiev ended his days in misery in a Stalinist
gulag in Siberia. But his reputation as an
economic guru survived him. Nowadays everyone from
right to left to all points center invoke
Kondratiev to justify the capitalism system
forever surfing History in a succession of "long
waves."
Trotsky was one who didn't fall
for it - as Alan Woods impeccably summarized in a
post on www.trotsky.net. Trotsky always mocked
robotic Marxists who rhapsodized about "the final
crisis of capitalism." But he also could not agree
with the Kondratiev assumption that the "unseen
hand of the market" would always intervene to
restore the equilibrium of capitalism between one
wave and the next. Trotsky accepted there were
economic oscillations. But he denied they were
cyclical. Trotsky did see History as a series of
phases; but all of these phases had different
booms and busts, related to different, specific
causes. In a famous speech at the Third Congress
of the Comintern in 1922, Trotsky stressed how
"capitalism establishes [an] equilibrium, disturbs
it, then re-establishes it only to break it again,
at the same time as it extends the limits of its
dominion … Capitalism possesses a dynamic
equilibrium which is always in a process of
breakdown and recovery." It's as if Kondratiev had
seen capitalism as a pendulum. It's not:
capitalism is in fact anarchy, chaos, no
"equilibrium" but a succession of crises,
revolutions and even wars which no one can
reasonably predict (who predicted The Triumph of
Capitalism/The Fall of the Berlin Wall double
bill?) Woods prefers to quote George Soros - a man
"who knows quite a lot about how markets move":
for Soros "the market is not like a pendulum
striving for a definite point of equilibrium, but
more like a smashing ball." Capitalism as we know
it is an unpredictable wrecker's ball. The way
Wallerstein himself examines what's been happening
inside the Triad seems to privilege Trotsky's
intuition over Kondratiev's. Wallerstein's point
is that for the members of the Triad, roughly
Europe got the better out of the 1970s, Japan out
of the 1980s and the U.S. out of the 1990s. "Under
the supposition that this long phase B of the
Kondratiev cycle will reach its end," Wallerstein
wonders which pole of the Triad will jump ahead.
That is, which will better survive the current
wrecker's ball. The winning player will be the one
who sets his priorities in terms of investment in
research and development, and thus on innovation;
and who best organizes "the ability of the
superior strata to control the access to
consumable wealth." Les jeux sont faits. If
this was Vegas, one might suspect that the house
was betting on East Asia.
Yet in this
chaotic wrecker's ball who's actually fighting
whom, with what weapons, and what for? Trompe
l'oeil is the name of the game. Polish sociologist
Zygmunt Bauman has explained how Michel Foucault
defined Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon as the
"arch-metaphor of modern power." Bentham was an
English jurist who published his Panopticon at the
end of the 18th Century: an exercise on ubiquitous
power surveilling society. Foucault examined in
detail Bentham's description of a "visibility
totally organized around a dominating and vigilant
eye" and defined it as the "project of a universal
visibility, acting to the benefit of a rigorous
and meticulous power." Technically, humankind had
finally acceded to the idea of an
"omni-contemplative power."
Bauman for his
part describes how "the domination of time was the
secret of the power of managers - and immobilizing
the subordinates in space, preventing their right
to movement and routinizing the rhythm to which
they should obey was the main strategy in their
exercise of power. The pyramid of power was made
of speed, access to transportation and the
resulting freedom of movement."
There was
one problem though: the Panopticon was too
expensive. Capitalism needed something more
cost-effective. So when power started to move,
says Bauman, "with the speed of an electronic
signal" it became, in practical terms, "truly
extraterritorial, no more limited, or even
desaccelerated, by resistance in space." This gave
the rulers of the world "an unprecedented
opportunity" to get rid of the old-fashioned
Panopticon. Bauman tells us that the history of
modernity, right now, is in its post-Panopticon
stage. In essence: those who operate power now are
virtually inaccessible. Welcome to German
sociologist Ulrich Beck's society of "the second
modernity," or Bauman's "liquid modernity."
The consequences, Bauman tells us, spell
no more relation "between capital and labor,
leaders and followers, armies at war. The main
techniques of power now are flight, cunning,
deviation and dodging, the effective rejection of
any territorial confinement, with the complicated
corollaries of construction and maintenance of
order and with the responsibility for the
consequences as well as the necessity to pay for
the costs." Capital is free - thus the daily,
trillion-dollar global Russian roulette of
speculation.
"Capital," says Bauman,
"travels hopeful, counting on fleeting and
profitable adventures," just with "hand luggage -
toothpaste, laptop computer and cell phone." It's
like the delightfully quirky Richard Quest
announcing to his multinational corporate audience
on CNN: "Whatever you're up to today, I hope it's
profit- able." Soft capitalism may be very sexy,
but only if you're a player. Bauman adds: "Capital
may travel fast and light, and its lightness and
mobility become the most important sources of
uncertainty for everything else. Today this is the
main base of domination and the main factor of
social divisions."
We all know how the
process is also leading to a control freak horror
story. Bauman contraposes the visionary dystopia
of Huxley's Brave New World to Orwell's 1984, the
"misery, destitution, scarcity and necessity" of
Orwell's world to the "land of opulence and
debauchery, abundance and fulfillment" of Huxley:
"What they shared was the feeling of a world
strictly controlled.." Orwell and Huxley
essentially saw us going to the same place, but
taking different paths, "if we continued to be
sufficiently ignorant, obtuse, placid or indolent"
to allow it to happen.
Just like "Plato
and Aristotle could not imagine a good or bad
society without slaves," Bauman tells us, "Huxley
and Orwell could not conceive of a society, be it
happy or unhappy, without managers, planners and
supervisors which in group would write the script
that others should follow ... they could not
imagine a world without towers and control rooms."
We're already there - perhaps one step beyond. The
post-Panopticon society is actually Sinopticon,
where many observe just a few, everyone is
disciplined and regimented by spectacle and
discipline works by temptation and seduction, not
by coercion.
Bauman resorts to Claude
Lévi-Strauss, "the greatest social anthropologist
of our time," who determined that whenever human
history had to deal with the necessity of facing
The Other, it came out with only two strategies:
"The first consists in 'vomiting', throwing the
others out as they're seen as incurably strange
and alien: preventing physical contact, dialogue,
interaction and all the varieties of commercium
and connubium." Bauman lists as the extreme
varieties of this strategy "incarceration,
deportation and assassination," and "refined
forms" as "spatial separation, urban ghettos and
selective access to spaces." That's how the
Sinopticon society deals with the vast masses of
the urban poor, or with its own Islamophobia. The
second strategy "consists in a soi-disant
"desalienation" - that means "ingesting, devouring
alien bodies and spirit as to make them, by
metabolism, identical to
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