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November 25, 2003
In my search for material on the negative impact that globalization is having on local/regional communities in Australia I came across Craig Bellamy's milkbar.com.au
Let us say that by globalization we understand the process in which national economies throughout the world are becoming globally interdependent. This push to interdependency, currently through Free Trade Agreements, is introducing a new form of relationship between economy, state, and society has been called the information economy or the networked society. This period of transformation that we are living through is a period of dramatic social change that is as great a transformation as the earlier period of industrialization.
So how does it affect local communites that we live in? We know the impact it has on regional Australia and the political expression of this negativity with Pauline Hanson, One Nation populism and the constraints on social democracy. What has been the impact of local communities in our cities? that is where most of us live. Can we distinquish between the steady gentrification of the inner city suburbs and the effects of globalization?
Milkbar.com.au explores the impact of globalization of the inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy. Craig says:
"If there is such as thing as globalisation then it has developed as the direct result of strategic choices by governments and corporations in the past thirty years. In Australia, our engagement with the dominant form of globalisation was exacerbated by the Hawke/Keating Labor governments (1984-1996) who deregulated large portions of the economy, floated our currency and embraced the all-trade-is-good mantra of global economic policy."
The mantra from the reformers in both the Labor and Liberal Government's in the 1980s and 1990's was that globalization was irreversible and that it was good for all Australians. Those who disagreed with globalization being a positive force wanted to economicially and socially isolate Australia from international trade and the international community. They offered a bleak future. Economic liberalism offered the only true path to the future.
So how does a local community fit into this big picture? Since the 1980s inner city Australian communities have experienced rapid gentrification, closing factories, rising rents and property values, and the appropriation of the working class culture that originally defined the suburbs. This is forcing out many of the long-term residents in favour of an eclectic mix of wealth distribution, lifestyles, and cultures. Fitzroy Melbourne is a good example of this change. Craig says:
"The suburb of Fitzroy may not be one of the most significant nodes in the globalised world but in a similar way to other inner city districts of Melbourne and elsewhere it does have significant symbolic engagements with the world...."
Fitzroy fits into the globalized world in terms of post industrialism. Craig says:
"Post-Industrialism has emerged in the past three decades and is understood as a decline of labour-intensive manufacturing operations that has altered the workforce demography and re-shaped communities, families and individuals everywhere. Popularly it is branded the ‘information economy’ or even the ‘new economy’ and is typified by a prevailing service sector and an expansion of industries that employ most citizens in knowledge production and consumption."
This is what happened to Fitzroy. It de-industrialized. Craig say:
"Fitzroy suggests a post-industrial landscape partly because (quite visibly) nearly all the manufacturing industries in the district have disappeared. The local labour intensive textile industries have been replaced by a strip of factory outlets that sell clothes manufactured in China and Indonesia. The warehouses where confectionary and garments used to be made are now the apartments of the new middle classes. For many of Fitzroy’s newest residents, Fitzroy is arguably a brand name with a purchasable lifestyle; for many of its older residents, it has developed into an expensive and less interesting place to live."
It was not just those in the country regions who were left behind by progress measured in terms of the embrace of globalization. Those in the inner suburbs found themselves being displaced. Graig says:
The inner cities are for better or worse the post-industrial frontiers of our country; a country that is fragmenting along lines of income distribution, employment, and lifestyle. Australia, like most Western countries, has moved from protecting the national industries of the ‘old economy’ to the ‘competitive’ economies of the post-industrial world."
The old categories of globaphiles and globaphones used by the Howard Government is too crude: it misses the transformations that have taken place in the inner city localities and suburbs. It is what is missed by the categories of the economic enlightenment that is crucial.
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It could be argued that the shift in the production of textiles and other "labour intensive manufacturing operations" to "more competitive" labour forces in places like Indonesia and China, may not only signal a transition to a "new information economy" in the old industrial centers; it may also become a model for the "new" service industries, in which case these jobs would relocate just as the old manufacturing jobs did. The problem is that capital is mobilized in the name of free trade, but (labouring) populations are immobilized in the name of security. The global work force cannot get an edge over the machinations of global capital.