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LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES 10.1177/009458202237775Watson / IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE Globalization as in the Age of Electronics Issues of Popular Power, , 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 being fostered by the bourgeoisie through African slavery, the of capi- tal, , and consumption via the , and industrial restructuring. He observed that internationalization was undermining “national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness.” The internationalization of capitalist , property rights, and bourgeois law, the spread of Chris- tianity and of European and bureaucratic procedures, migra- tion and the territorialization, , and reterritorialization associated with , , and gave cosmopolitanism the mark of inequality and injustice. Contemporary globalization differs from earlier forms. Specifically, the collapse of , altering the geopolitical configuration of the world order, also favors the global reach of . The globalization of capital reflects the growth of a transnational capitalist class with surrogates such as the World Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the , and the permanent members of the 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 and intensifies capitalist globalization with manifestations in such areas as , bonds, currency flows, , 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 and market

Hilbourne A. Watson is a professor of 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 and telecommunications 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 and services by intensifying the integration of 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, 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 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 markets, and many other activities that reflect the restructuring of 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 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 , 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 of life around various forms of neoliberal , 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, , 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 (EU) to shelve the Multilateral Agreement on (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 . 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 (Rifkin, 1995). The 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 . As worker insecurity deepens, many people are digging in behind the bulwarks of nation, culture, and , but none of these cherished markers of 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 , 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 -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 . 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. Pri- vate such as the Corrections of America and the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation run prisons in North America, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom, and with nonunion labor. The expan- sion of the complex mirrors an aspect of state restructuring—the search for solutions to problems associated with attracting and keeping capital within national . The U.S. prison industrial complex is a very profitable source of surplus for corporate capital, which reaps profits from float- ing bonds for prison construction, supplying materials, building prisons, and/ or producing and supplying the products and that inmates consume. It is also a vital source of for households and U.S. government agencies (Gilmore, 1998–1999). A portion of the absolute and relative surplus popula- tion is reproduced for prison “ with fences.” Prison labor competes with labor in many international assembly sites and produces a variety of for companies such as McDonalds, Starbucks, IBM, Motorola, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Microsoft, and Boeing (Schlosser, 1998). Repression and repressive tolerance are always more or less explicit in bourgeois legal, political, and civil processes. The civil law, through which the public personality of society and individuals takes shape in , legitimates the domination of labor in the process of structuring the property rights of capital and protecting the propertied strata from the as the precondition for the reproduction of both. 36 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

GLOBALIZATION,,CULTURE, AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION

Article 13 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of (UNUDHR) of 1948 made mobility an alienable human right, but the intensi- fication of postwar globalization curbed that right. The UN model of sover- eign autonomy, which deepened the separation between national autonomy (political independence) and economics () (Rosenberg, 1994), could not guarantee the rights that were declared under the UNUDHR because it presupposed that inequality was natural and made the right to accumulate capital ontologically prior to human rights such as the right to a secure and decent . Neoliberal globalization brings citizenship into much closer conformity with market norms. For example, the North American Agreement liberates the movement of capital but places restrictions on labor mobility. While European Union (EU)-based capital, labor, and commodities are free to cross national borders to facilitate production, exchange, and capital accu- mulation, several million resident aliens and guest workers in the EU may not cross borders to search for work. The power of the state to regulate the move- ment of people highlights the connection between capitalism, nationalism, and racism. Contemporary globalization engenders forms of citizenship that undermine the growth of meaningful cosmopolitanism. Culture and biology loom large in Western discourses on immigration. The politics of cultural (racial) determinism overshadows the political con- tract based on Enlightenment universality. The formal equality of states, as expressed in state sovereignty, has been at variance with the social equality of all nations and . The growth of xenophobic movements is not limited to anti-immigrant tendencies. Skinheads are as prevalent in France and Ger- many as in the and . The right-wing opposition to does not extend to an attack on capitalism. Some of ’s far-right populist movements are active in the wealthiest and most prosperous parts of the continent, and some of them advocate independence for the rich high-tech regions to free them from subsidizing depressed areas (Fekette, 1998–1999). In the United States, right-wing forces blame the government, globalization, and immigrants for their economic marginalization. In fact, racism, , and worker insecurity are traceable to the crisis that is rooted in the capital relation itself. Capitalists and workers tend to see the issues differently. For example, agricultural capitalists in the U.S. sugar, fruit, and vegetable industries rely on cheap labor from and the Caribbean to keep costs down and profits up. But labor-price competitiveness does not Watson / GLOBALIZATION IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE 37 imply high labor productivity. The mechanization of the Florida sugar indus- try has cut off most Caribbean cane cutters from the United States but has resulted in higher productivity and higher wages for the much smaller labor force. Capitalists innovate not to raise wages but to increase the rate of . The contradictions of technological in that were reflected in rising productivity and competitiveness are evident in increasing worker insecurity as laborless production expands. Workers with jobs may benefit if prices fall, but all workers are potential victims of a system that raises the productivity of some workers to intensify the reproduction of the owners of capital first and foremost, a process that anticipates the margin- alization and/or redundancy of other workers. Liberal democratic states and incubate racial nationalism, and liberal democracy is constructed on exclusions: national states forged national identity and citizenship by excluding others as alien. Liberal capital- ist states promote conditions in which racism becomes a response to eco- nomic crisis, worker insecurity, and national decline, while neoliberalism fosters the economic conditions that accentuate xenophobia. Revolutionary workers have an ethical obligation to wage transnational struggle against all forms of nationalism to overthrow the cultural principle that makes national identity incompatible with decent forms of cosmopolitanism.

MARXISM: A TIME AND PLACE FOR REVOLUTION VERSUS NEW LEFT CONCEPTIONS OF CHANGE

Classes, class struggle, labor, and social relations are central to . Marx argues that labor is creative rather than productive or unproductive but human labor acquires a historical productive existence under capitalism. When we consider productive labor and living labor in relation to the subjec- tive power of labor, we should be aware that living labor is an ontological cat- egory and productive labor pertains to the discourse of . Marx notes that what all commodities have in common is objectified labor: labor’s ontological priority over capital derives from the fact that all produc- tion is dependent on the expenditure of labor power (see Gulli, 2000). The question of socialist revolution begins with the ethical basis and objective grounds for labor to transcend its own objectification by abolishing capital, whose reproduction depends on surplus labor. In effect, resistance to capital must come from productive labor through a conscious proletarian political opposition that grows out of the structural antagonism in the capital-wage 38 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES labor relation, in which capital transforms the worker’s subjective power into an exchange value. Labor can exist independently of capital, but capital can- not exist without transforming creative labor into productive labor: the neoliberal claim that there is no alternative to capitalism is false. Marx did not autonomize politics and ideology from material and social relations by externalizing the social relations of production or class struggles. This cannot be said for social democrats, Maoists, Eurocommunists, and post-Marxists. Social democrats reduce the state to an autonomous adminis- trative unit that functions independently of class relations; delayed subver- siveness is the centerpiece of their social transformation strategy. Maoism and Eurocommunism separate Marxism from revolutionary mass practice and drive a wedge between revolutionary theory and political practice. Mao- ism appealed to many Western left-wing intellectuals, given the seductive ways in which it autonomized revolution from class struggle, replaced classes with masses, separated ideology, culture, and political action from the social relations of production, and fetishized the “Cultural Revolution.” Eurocommunists envisage a classless socialist society through cross-class alliances against state monopoly capitalism that stretch bourgeois demo- cratic political norms into . They have given up all hope of a working- class socialist revolution and abandoned class struggle in the emancipation of society from bourgeois rule. Post-Marxist theories make political and ideo- logical determination primary and economic relations secondary in the deter- mination of classes, a tendency that converges with the parliamentarist orien- tation of Eurocommunism (Wood, 1995). To remove class analysis and class struggle from Marxism is to decouple Marxist theory from exploitation and revolution. The deontological (juridi- cal) freedom that mediates the capital wage-labor relation in liberal demo- cratic thought derives from the “free” exchange that characterizes the buying and selling of labor power. A structural inequality characterizes the political and economic necessity for one class (labor) to reproduce the other class (capital) as the precondition of its own social reproduction. Liberal discourse abstracts capitalism and exploitation from social relations and creates “sov- ereign” subjects with liberal democratic rights that derive from supposedly neutral and autonomous states. This eclectic soup of liberal, social demo- cratic, and post-Marxist ideas provides a context for the discourse of global- ization from below. Watson / GLOBALIZATION IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE 39

GLOBALIZATION FROM BELOW?

The discourse of globalization from below (upward leveling) draws much of its strength from social-movements discourses that privilege dialogic plu- ralism, which in an unequal society cannot make all discourses equal (Ebert, 1996). Proponents of upward leveling want to replace the global “corporate agenda” that induces “the ” with a human-centered agenda that emphasizes labor, the environment, human rights, and other social issues (Korten, 1995). Problems such as rampant child labor; merciless competition among many workers in all countries for low-wage jobs; unprecedented growth in corporate wealth, assets, and power; closer cooperation between states and corporate capital; ecological degradation; and widespread dis- crimination against women and girls have led social activists to argue for a twenty-first century that would put human interests ahead of corporate “greed” and indifference. Upward levelers also stress economic justice, cultural and biological diversity, civil subsidiarity, and a common global heritage, with responsibil- ity flowing upward from the bottom and encompassing households, commu- nities, nations, and the world. They argue that since states, corporate capital, the UN, and the leading international financial and regulatory institutions do not adequately represent common interests, a dialogue among social move- ments to fight for justice would be appropriate. They locate sovereignty in people, not in governments or corporate entities, and reject the idea that cor- porations have inalienable rights (Korten, 1995). If we take to be natural, it is impossible to have a concept of justice that is not premised on the rights of capitalists’ being ontologically prior to those of labor. It is important to know where upward levelers stand on the nature and origins of inequality. The “people’s agenda” proposes to reclaim political space by creating localized stakeholder capitalism to make socially responsible and accountable public bodies with limited rights and no power to use money to buy politicians or otherwise exploit the for corporate gain. Elections would be protected from corporate sponsorship and purchase, and schools and education would be off-limits to corporate manipulation. Upward levelers cite the growth of nonprofits, credit unions, and co-ops in utilities, banking, cable, insurance, housing, and other areas as evidence of public support for an alternative to corporate rule. Substantively, their agenda substitutes localized business and markets for global corporate ones, indicat- ing that they are neither antibusiness nor antimarket. They seem to want utopia—capitalism without the laws and contradictions of capitalist develop- ment. Although social movements would have a place in a popular 40 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES democratic process, to imagine the possibility of globalization from below via a social dialogue and cooperation beyond class relations of production is romantic. Neoliberal capitalism is hostile to universal human goals that coin- cide with cosmopolitan interests. Every move to strengthen private markets, large or small, means a deepening of the alienation of power and the domi- nance of private interests over the collective good. The prevailing idea of globalization from below seems to make politics and ideology prior to mate- rial and social interests (Wood, 1995). Clearly, if we accept that material and social interests exist independently of politics and ideology we must connect classes and class struggle to material economic and social conditions of life. There is no way of getting to globalization from below without a working- class politics of organization, mobilization, and education that keeps revolu- tionary class politics and practices in perspective. It is necessary to resist all forms of nationalism and cultural chauvinism. Workers, who have an objec- tive reason for abolishing capital to end their own objectification and alien- ation, are also strategically positioned to combat chauvinism and xenophobia. Upward levelers address issues about the redistribution of power that are relevant to popular power or substantive democracy. They want to include marginalized states and societies and would give the UN greater authority to make this happen, but they fail to see that the UN model is based on the same of inequality and alienation of power that we witness in the separation of politics from economics in the international system. They abstract the UN model from the global social relations of capitalism when they draw a line between it and institutions such as the IMF and the WTO. The idea of making states more accountable locally and giving minorities, immigrants, and women a voice through self-organization to protect human rights and basic freedoms such as expression, assembly, participation, and unionization is laudable but makes no provision for ending the alienation of power. The divisions and contradictions along lines of race, ethnicity, and gender that bourgeois reality engenders among the working class and the division of labor within the movements that connect the working class to civil processes are inimical to the cause of popular power. Struggles for ecological protec- tion and human rights, gender equality, redistribution of wealth, peace, and indigenous peoples’interests may not be organized along class lines and may not even express a specific working-class interest, but they are not beyond class politics, no matter how defined. The dominant tendency among the post-Marxists is to argue for reforming the democratic parliamentary road to make feasible the implementation of a “new socialism” that is compatible with globalization from below. This view fails to appreciate that Watson / GLOBALIZATION IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE 41 representative political institutions based on universal suffrage are grounded in the alienation of power. It is necessary to do more than extend rights in a system that has come up against its own internal limits. Universal suffrage in capitalist societies masks the alienation of power in ways that protect bour- geois . The issue is revolutionary restructuring and transcendence; this is where Marx’s argument about abolishing capital by ceasing to repro- duce capital remains strategic. Capitalism is still the issue. The new political majority calls for restructuring parliamentarism beyond the organization of formal political procedure and control of state power and making it accountable to effective popular power. This calls for the “dis- alienation” of power—restricting the freedom of the state and ending class rule. Only then can our constructs of justice and freedom overcome the meth- odological and political constraints of a disembodied politics that is sepa- rated from an autonomous economic sphere. The anarchy of the market and capitalist class power are inappropriate for determining the allocation of social labor that comes with the disalienation of labor and power (Wood, 1998). The alienation of power under liberal democracy and capitalism is evident in the elevation of and private interests above social and collec- tive ones. This is the Hobbesian war of one against all and all against all par excellence and the notion of a neutral and universal state in an unequal class society is ludicrous, but social democrats, Eurocommunists, and the New Left have embraced it. A rational ethic that can capture the imagination of the working class cannot be produced through a discursive logic of a cultural rev- olution via an independent intellectual project that is rooted in irrationalist social criticism. If globalization from below is to be more than the extension and continuation of bourgeois rule, the contradictions must be heightened, economic relations must be treated as social relations, and there must be pub- lic power to control and plan the economic and political forms and direction of socio-historical processes. Historically, initiatives for democratic civic humanism have originated among peasants and workers, hence the link between and proletarianization. The construction of a general interest presupposes a com- munity of interest, which has to be struggled for as part of the class struggle. Social-movements discourses are trapped by liberal pluralism, which privi- leges complacency, “comfortable dissent,” and repressive tolerance. The struggle for globalization from below must anticipate the irreducibility of class struggle and contemplate the variability of states and societies—the political and ideological conditions and class configurations and political forms of the various countries. When class struggle is located at the center of Marxism, there is little difficulty in remembering that it is in its own practices 42 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES that the working class discovers its “dialectical truths.” Clearly, the struggle for globalization from below does not mean that we have to succumb to the idealized abstract, indeterminate, contingent, discursive, liberal impulse to fashion our concept of democracy.

REFERENCES

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