REVIEW BY EVA CHENG
Globalization: Neoliberal Challenge, Radical Responses
By Robert Went
Translated by Peter Drucker
Pluto Press
170 pp, $42.80
With Ernest Mandel, the respected Marxist economist, as one of its founders, the Amsterdam-based International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE) has over the years published a solid series of studies ("notebooks") providing useful Marxist analysis on a range of anti-capitalist themes. But its latest joint publication with Pluto Press — Robert Went's Globalization: Neoliberal Challenge, Radical Responses — is a disappointment.
Not that it hasn't provided useful facts and figures on some aspects of the debate on globalisation. It certainly has — the league table of the top 100 national economies and multinational companies; the historical comparison on the degree of trade openness of the major economies; the long expansive and recessive waves of the world economy since the 18th century are just some examples.
However, in the context of the capitalist rulers' severe neo-liberal attacks on working people's wages, working conditions and social welfare rights over the last 20 years and their not insignificant success in confusing and disarming ideologically a substantial sections of the left and the trade union movement (propagating the idea that these attacks were irresistible, being an unavoidable result of fierce competitive pressure due to the "globalisation" of the national economies), one would expect from a book-length Marxist study on the subject a sharper and clearer analysis than the one currently offered by Went.
As Went acknowledges, the globalisation debate didn't start only yesterday. The left isn't just starting to grapple with this phenomenon and quite some ground has already been covered in reasonably well teased-out arguments by those left analysts who argue that "globalisation" is the capitalist ruling class's fig-leaf to justify its neo-liberal drive to accelerate the rate of accumulation of capital in the wake of the post-1973 long wave of sluggish economic growth.
These critical analysts had tackled the globalisation enthusiasts' (whom some have called "globaloneys") key claims, such as that capital has become footloose, production is now conducted on a truly global basis and that the nation-state has become powerless in the face of giant multinational corporations, concluding on this basis that working class resistance is useless (and proclaiming: "There is no alternative"). They have been able to argue against these claims and expose the globaloneys' exaggerations as contrary to world economic reality. The US-based left journal Monthly
Review
While recognising there have been significant systemic changes to the world economy in recent decades, such as the much increased mobility of money capital and a much wider extension of capitalist (generalised commodity) production to semi-colonial countries (which has exacerbated existing overcapacity), these anti-globalisation left analysts point out that they haven't been able to identify any qualitative transformation in the basic laws of motion of 20th century capitalism that can justify the globalisation thesis.
Whether a qualitative change has occurred in the economic logic of capitalism since the late 1970s is crucial to the whole debate on globalisation, a question that additional left contributions to the debate can't ignore. Went has not ignored it. He does note the two contending views (calling them "extremes") but he devotes just a few lines to the critical camp's arguments, giving a somewhat caricatured summary.
On this basis, Went quickly identifies himself as a member of a "third camp" whose position he summarises as "globalisation is an exaggeration" (Went's emphasis). He says adherents of this position "acknowledge that there are significant changes under way with important implications for the organisation and functioning of the world economy" but believe "we are (still?) far from a truly globalised economy, that there are no linear developments and that many of the claims of globalization ideologues are untenable".
Went stresses we mustn't "close our eyes to real, qualitative changes in the functioning and organisation of the world economy". But he doesn't inform us what these "real, qualitative changes" are. Many pages later, he asserts that although the extent and effects have been exaggerated, "the process of globalisation means a qualitatively new phase in the internationalisation of capitalism". Again, Went fails to inform us how the present phase of the internationalisation of capitalism is qualitatively, and not just quantitatively, different from the previous phase.
I can't find a clear answer to these crucial questions anywhere in the book, not even in the section under the heading "What's new".
In the summary of that section, Went says that "capitalism is expanding and causing major changes in the structure, cohesion and functioning of the world economy". Again without spelling out the exact changes, he goes on immediately to observe that "these changes are leading to a more intense interweaving of economies, with increased interdependence as the result. National economies are more closely linked to one another, which leads, among other things, to a greater synchronisation or coordination of economic ebbs and flows. The world's production and consumption patterns are becoming mutually interdependent. In general, markets for goods, services, capital and financial instruments and, to a lesser extent, labour are more integrated worldwide."
But what is so new about these tendencies? Hasn't capitalism, from its very origins in the 16th century, had the economic integration of the entire world as its dynamic?
Certainly, this dynamic has taken qualitatively different forms in the era of monopoly capitalism (the era of the domination of world economy by finance capital that began at the end of the 19th century) than it did in the era of commercial capitalism (the 16th through to the end of 18th century), or than it did in the era of freely competitive industrial capitalism (the 19th century).
But what Went singularly fails to demonstrate is that neo-liberal globalisation represents such a qualitatively different form of this dynamic, rather than being a change in finance capital's economic and social policy away from the Keynesian "welfare state" policy that suited its needs during the Cold War and the 1948-73 "long boom".
Went describes this change, but he implies that the adoption by the capitalist ruling class around the world of neo-liberal policies is the result of a qualitatively new phase in the internationalisation of capitalism ("economic globalisation").
One can't help getting the impression from Went's rather loose formulations about the growing economic integration of the world's nations that national economies are dependent on or penetrate one another on a more or less equal footing, "integrated" horizontally, rather than vertically, with the imperialist core countries directing from the top.
Went does mention Third World "dependency", partly in the context of an "international division of labour" (hardly a voluntary division of roles, more an imposition which is an integral part of capitalist development so far). But he steers so far clear of any reference to imperialism (monopoly capitalism) that much-needed clarity on the inherently unjust nature of the global order is lost.
This is reinforced by his repeated references to institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation as "international organisations", giving barely a hint of their critical role as weapons of the imperialist nation-states against the underdeveloped nations.
We have to break from the existing "economic logic", Went proclaims, but he fails to deal with the crucial issue of whether this can be done under the existing political order. This does not seem to be an accidental omission.
He makes many references earlier in the book to the changed (at times he says "weakened"), but definite, role that is still played by nation-states in serving their own national capitalists. But in his list of changes required in order to break from the capitalist economic logic, the question as to whether this can be done without the working class conquering state power is noticeably absent.
Of the three key "dimensions" that Went highlights as encapsulating the central spirit of his list of demands, one of these is the need to "pressure" governments to reinstate their recently junked functions in regulating capital flows. As a second dimension, those "from below ... must reclaim their right to intervene" and "exert pressure on other economic and political players". The third dimension is the need to place "restrictions on capital flows and on those that control them, the holders of capital".
The closest he comes to indicating how the second and third of these "dimensions" can be realised is his call for a "fundamental change from the current, management-dominated labour processes" to ones "controlled and initiated by the working people".
But how can working people take control of labour processes? Went doesn't say.
With the need for control of the labour process in the fifth spot, Went's other demands are, in order: re-regulation of the financial sector, cancellation of Third World debt, a break with export-led growth, sustainable production, redistribution of work, redistribution of income, and democracy and planning. He then concludes his book with an appeal for the "internationalisation of trade union work".
Anti-globalisation activists must be clear that the capitalist economic logic can't be broken without ending capital's political domination over working people. Any anti-capitalist analysis, let alone Marxist analysis, that fudges on this critical point won't help to take the anti-globalisation movement forward.
Went describes himself as a student of Ernest Mandel for 20 years. But Mandel's numerous critiques and analyses of capitalism were typically sharp and effective as well as uncompromising, especially on such crucial points. That is a good tradition that all Marxists should aspire to maintain and emulate. Regrettably, Robert Went's new book fails to do this.