Globalization As Capitalism in the Age of Electronics Issues of Popular Power, Culture, Revolution, and Globalization from Below by Hilbourne A
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LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES 10.1177/009458202237775Watson / GLOBALIZATION IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE Globalization as Capitalism in the Age of Electronics Issues of Popular Power, Culture, Revolution, and Globalization from Below by Hilbourne A. Watson In the Communist Manifesto, Marx (1977) anticipated the deepening of capitalist globalization in a discussion of the cosmopolitanism being fostered by the bourgeoisie through African slavery, the internationalization of capi- tal, production, and consumption via the world market, and industrial restructuring. He observed that internationalization was undermining “national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness.” The internationalization of capitalist property, property rights, and bourgeois law, the spread of Chris- tianity and of European languages and state bureaucratic procedures, migra- tion and the territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization associated with colonialism, imperialism, and war gave cosmopolitanism the mark of inequality and injustice. Contemporary globalization differs from earlier forms. Specifically, the collapse of communism, altering the geopolitical configuration of the world order, also favors the global reach of capital. The globalization of capital reflects the growth of a transnational capitalist class with surrogates such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council facilitating its rule, mediated by U.S.-led post-Keynesian militarism (Gilmore, 1998–1999). The computer revolution aids the spread of capitalist values and ideology and intensifies capitalist globalization with manifestations in such areas as stocks, bonds, currency flows, speculation, international credit, private and public debt, futures markets, and options. States contribute to globalization by shifting upward and outward to the world-level aspects of national decision making. Central banks have become sentinels of global finance. Capitalism in the electronics age does not signal the end of the laws of motion of capital such as competition and market Hilbourne A. Watson is a professor of international relations at Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, and a participating editor of Latin American Perspectives. LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 127, Vol. 29 No. 6, November 2002 32-43 DOI: 10.1177/009458202237775 © 2002 Latin American Perspectives 32 Watson / GLOBALIZATION IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE 33 anarchy; rather, contemporary globalization reflects the changing character of imperialism and the rules of competition. To discuss alternatives to contemporary globalization, we must be clear about what capitalism in the age of electronics is about. The electronics revo- lution and the communications and telecommunications technology it fosters contribute to removing the main legal, ideological, and social obstacles to the harmonization of the world market, world standards, property rights, and other factors. We look to the scientific and technological revolution of which the computer revolution is a part for an understanding of electronics, biotech- nology, bioengineering, nanotechnology, and the production of “smart materials.” The microprocessor compares with critical breakthroughs in fields such as biology, materials science, and electronics that have transformed our understanding of how the universe works. The expansion of the production of goods and services by intensifying the integration of human skills and intelli- gence with intelligent machines without direct human labor inputs is the most revolutionary aspect of this breakthrough (Davis, 1998–1999). The micro- processor brings capital closer to conquering space with time and makes it easier to increase the rate of exploitation. Thanks to the electronics revolu- tion, money now expresses the social power of capital and the abstract iden- tity of labor in more complex ways. The new information and communica- tions technology, through which money dominates the global arena and flattens world historical time into “a physical-logical time,” also deepens the autonomization of money from society and the economic process, giving social relations a more pronounced alienated character (Altvater and Mahnkopf, 1997). Computers make it easier to manage a variety of complex financial activities and information flows around fluctuating currencies and interest rates, voluminous transactions on the global stock markets, and many other activities that reflect the restructuring of business activity as we have known it. With the aid of the new information technology, predatory money has become the dominant form of capital, skeptical of bricks and mortar, swarming like bees when there is an “insufficiency of honey” in their hive, and sucking the life from whatever it encounters (Holloway, 1995). A transition is under way from silicon-based technology to nano- technology, which is capital’s latest invention for wringing the last drop of surplus labor from workers. Nanotechnology promises to intensify the scale and scope of miniaturization, accelerate computing speed, increase storage capacity, facilitate laborless production (Voss, 1999), and produce unprece- dented forms of technological redundancy via human dumping, societal decomposition, and global disembedding. The new technology reveals its contradictory social nature in its own premature depreciation in conjunction 34 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES with the growing complexity, rising productivity, insecurity, and alienation of living labor. The onslaught of money and new technology aggravates national decomposition as part of restructuring. This is evident in conflicts between workers and between capital and labor, family crises and commu- nity disintegration, migration problems, ecological degradation, the growth of right-wing xenophobic movements, the deepening of the commodification and marketization of life around various forms of neoliberal privatization, and the growth of the coercive and surveillance functions of states (Davis, 1998–1999). The great swarms of speculative money also engender arrogance toward national states, labor unions, workers, and society. Mobilizations and demon- strations against the WTO policies and the World Bank and the IMF in Seat- tle, Washington, DC, Prague, and Rome and the success of labor, NGOs, and other social movements in forcing the Organization for Economic Coopera- tion and Development (OECD) and the European Union (EU) to shelve the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) suggest that the new technol- ogy can be used effectively to connect local and global struggles to build new transnational anti-imperialist alliances, but it is not clear that anticapitalist momentum is strong today. Finance and the digital sector dominate the growth poles of the global economy. Both sectors are shifting increasingly to laborless productive regimes that favor capital’s search for a work environment free of the worker fatigue, strikes, lunch breaks, promotions, vacations, workers’ compensa- tion, health benefits, and worker influence over the rules of production that typified social democracy (Rifkin, 1995). The capitalist state plays a key role in promoting conditions that advance corporate capital’s interests. As the growth of laborless production intensifies competition for jobs among work- ers worldwide, it also fuels nationalist hostility against foreigners, immi- grants, and refugees. As worker insecurity deepens, many people are digging in behind the bulwarks of nation, culture, and citizenship, but none of these cherished markers of national identity seems to offer protection from the rav- ages of capital unbound (Fekette, 1998–1999). Corporate capital is using the new technology to integrate global markets for finance, technology, and skilled and professional labor but becoming increasingly indifferent to unemployment, rural and urban blight, and racial and gender problems (Harris, 1998–1999). Financial interests eagerly moni- tor and rank states on their fiscal and monetary discipline, readily broadcast- ing to the world what money deems unacceptable about a country’s currency or economic policy and meting out “appropriate” punishment with reckless abandon. There are few serious differences between national states and glob- alization where sovereignty is concerned. States have been shifting key areas Watson / GLOBALIZATION IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE 35 of national decision-making authority to the world level in ways that reflect the reality of class relations beyond the nation-state (Holloway, 1995). States also help to strengthen private markets in which capital’s power is heavily concentrated and show capital that their behavior can be made compatible with its global accumulation imperatives. The World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO also employ political leverage and market discipline to induce states to remove the remaining barriers to the “free” flow of capital. GLOBALIZATION,RACE,AND THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX Corporate capital insists that it is irrational to locate production and jobs in economically depressed areas because it dilutes corporate and community wealth. It adopts policies that compound problems such as structural unem- ployment and rural and urban decomposition. Treating black and brown peo- ple as natural criminals reinforces the ideological conditions that mask the connections between structural racism and globalization. The restructuring of the U.S. prison industrial complex is an aspect of global restructuring.