We can’t escape globalization. We own cell phones, made in Korea or Japan, iPods, also made overseas, as well as a host of other products produced in foreign lands: VCRs, televisions, everything—even the shirt on our backs. It is becoming more and more impossible to put your hand on anything that wasn’t, in some way or another, put together in another country.
We also enjoy going on the internet, talking to our friends, who, nowadays, could be anywhere in the world. Perhaps we use instant message programs to talk to a friend visiting China, or MySpace to talk to a new online friend in the Philippines.
Globalization seems to have brought about a whole new world.
But, really, it hasn’t. It simply has opened the doors to a world that has already existed, bringing people closer together than ever before. No one can dispute these great advantages we have over past generations. But, there is a downside.
Most of us also know someone who has immigrated to the United States in search of work. While we welcome the immigrant friend with open arms, we can’t help but feel bad that they were forced out of their homeland by poverty. Most of us also know someone who was laid off from a job due to outsourcing. Actually, this dark side of globalization seems pretty bad, having brought about these and countless other problems in the world.
For those who’ve read Marx and Lenin, it might be easy to say that globalization is nothing new. From its very beginnings, capitalism has been a global system, which is why Karl Marx’s 1848 description is still so accurate. Yet no one can deny that the past thirty years of globalization have drastically changed living and working conditions for the majority of the population in several ways:
Objective economic processes drive the development of capitalism and integration of markets, and this has been the case since the birth of capitalism. But, aided by technological developments and other factors over the past 30 years, the quantitative change has become qualitative. Lenin wrote that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism—this is still true, but globalization represents a change in imperialism.
Globalization’s down side has brought people into action. Eight years ago, tens of thousands of labor and other activists gathered for the historic “Battle in Seattle” protests against the World Trade Organization, representing a turning point in struggle, the birth of a new “anti-globalization” movement.
But, as we said earlier, the trends are both positive and negative. Are we really “anti-globalization”? For a Marxist, the answer has to be “definitely not.” Simply being “anti-globalization,” throwing rocks at McDonald’s restaurants, isn’t going to provide real solutions to the big challenges facing the working class and its allies around the globe. In fact, parts of the so-called anti-globalization movement are downright reactionary.
Remember back to Marx’s writing about capitalism in general. He took a nuanced approach, noting that, while capitalism was born in blood, tearing peasants from the land (England’s enclosure laws, for example), and enslaving people within factories with miserable working conditions, the new system was also revolutionary, something to be fought for over the antiquated feudal society. Marx clearly sympathized with the peasant thrown off his land, and, obviously, the worker toiling in the factory, but he never once called for a return to feudalism. Instead, he called for a fight, first to establish capitalism and bourgeois democracy, as that paved the way for a better future.
Lenin had similar thoughts on imperialism. In 1913, Lenin wrote in Pravda:
…Only reactionaries can shut their eyes to the progressive significance of this modern migration of nations. Emancipation from the yoke of capital is impossible without the further development of capitalism, and without the class struggle that is based on it. And it is into this struggle that capitalism is drawing the masses of the working people of the whole world, breaking down the musty, fusty habits of local life, breaking down national barriers and prejudices, uniting workers from all countries in huge factories and mines in America, Germany, and so forth.
In the same article, he added:
The bourgeoisie incites the workers of one nation against those of another in the endeavor to keep them disunited. Class-conscious workers, realizing that the break-down of all the national barriers by capitalism is inevitable and progressive, are trying to help to enlighten and organize their fellow-workers from the backward countries.
We have to recognize the progressive features as well as the negative features of globalization. Many countries in the developing world, including the People’s Republic of China and socialist Viet Nam, are working within a globalized world, and benefiting from it. Marx and Lenin always said that for socialism to work, it has to be brought about on a strong technological basis; a country has to be developed. China and Viet Nam are building socialism, and that means they have to develop themselves. Both countries are indeed courting foreign direct investment, or FDI, as a way to buildup their productive forces. Pepsi in Viet Nam, Wal-Mart in China: Both these companies are adding to the material base of those societies, and thus playing a progressive role—whether they like it or not.
From the above writings, we can take from Marx and Lenin, and interpret them for today: The problem is not the breakdown of national barriers that globalization brings about—we are for that. The problem is that globalization is happening in a capitalist context. The problem isn’t globalization, but capitalist globalization.
The problematic part of capitalist globalization is that it is based on free trade, otherwise known as neoliberalism, not on fair trade. This means nothing more than the free flow of capital (investments, factories, and services) across borders to benefit the owners of capital. International trade deals are embedded in unequal relationships of power and dependence among nations that grew out of centuries of European colonialism. It’s no coincidence that the debt-ridden countries of Africa, Latin America, and most of Asia are locked into the terms set by the ruling classes of the United States and Europe. Also, workers in the developed capitalist countries lose out, too, because they are faced with major deindustrialization and “outsourcing.”
But do we want to just put a stop to world trade? Do we want to throw the developing countries out of the world market? Will that help them? The Communist Parties of China and Viet Nam obviously don’t think so. Even the non-socialist oriented countries: Won’t the development of major factories there bring about a stronger working class, as the same process did in the western world?
Free trade and free market economics have failed to deliver on their promises to the working class and poor. The growing number of countries—China, Vietnam, Venezuela, and Brazil among others—that are pursuing socialist development reflects that neoliberalism has lost some credibility in the world, but these positive trends can easily be reversed without a sustained and broader fight.
China, Viet Nam, Venezuela: these countries aren’t capitalist, and they don’t kowtow to the capitalist system. They operate within the globalized world, realizing the double-edged sword of globalized commerce, and fight for the important reforms that are necessary to turn “free trade” into fair trade. Indeed, while China has brought Wal-Mart in, it has become the first nation in the world to require that that retailing behemoth unionize. And Wal-Mart was forced to listen.
We can learn something from the socialist countries, from Marx and from Lenin. We need to fight not to reverse the clock back to some non-existent “golden age” of capitalism. We need to fight for progressive demands. This means that, while the capitalist class is globalizing, the working class must do so, too. All of the struggles in the world, now more than ever, take on an international dimension. People are beginning to realize this: A recent delegation of trade union leaders, including Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters, visited China, meeting with the leadership of the All China Federation of Trade Unions, which, as we said above, is currently the only union federation successful so far at taming Wal-Mart. They exchanged ideas, and discussed how to best work together. Another promising example is the recent merger of several U.S./Canada unions with unions in Britain: This truly is a fight against capitalist globalization, with a progressive character.
As Communists we recognize that it’s not globalization in general that causes war, misery, and the race to the bottom, it’s the continuing globalization of capitalism. Globalizing the struggle for democracy, peace, and socialism is exactly what we need. Broader sections of the labor and people’s movements are realizing the need to organize on a global level in order to secure union rights, living wage, health care, and environmental protection. This is a tremendous task that will require new approaches to organizing, and there are many examples of this already happening. In May of this year, union leaders from all over the world and environmentalists gathered at the North American Assembly on Climate Crisis to strategize global solutions for clean energy. Students who walked out of school during the May 1, 2006 immigrant rights demonstrations used text-messaging and MySpace to spread the word and get organized. And more unions and peace organizations are following MoveOn.org’s example of using the internet to do grassroots fundraising, mobilization, and volunteer recruitment. As young people, we need to find new ways of talking about globalization in a way that makes sense to our generation and take action that builds broader unity and international solidarity. We can be the generation that leads the struggle to organize Wal-Mart, turns back the clock on global warming, or stops the global AIDS crisis. Only working-class “globalization” has the power to challenge transnational capital and redistribute the world’s resources for the benefit of all.
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