"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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the decay of globalisation
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February 21, 2004
I was reading Friday's Australian Financial Review today, whilst the rain fell softly breaking the long heatwave that has baked Adelaide for over two weeks. I came across this article on globalization by John Rolston Saul.
My take on this article was different to that of Chris over at Backpages. My attention was caught by this passage:
"Grand economic theories rarely last more than a few decades. Some, if they are particularly in tune with technological or political events, may make it to half a century.....Our own Globalisation, with its technocratic and technological determinism and market idolatry, had 30 years. And now it, too, is dead."
That judgement sure resonates in Australia. The state's head was cut off and the market was put on a pedestal. Saul continues to build his case:
"... the signs of decline are clear, and since 1995 those signs have multiplied, building on one another, turning a confused situation into a collapse. We have scarcely noticed this collapse, however, because Globalisation has been asserted by its believers to be inevitable... a holy trinity of burgeoning markets, unsleeping technology and borderless managers. Opposition or criticism has been treated as little more than romantic paganism."
Romantic paganism? In Australia the critics were deemed to express irrationality and embrace an evil nationalism. Instrumental reason was identified withreason.
What then did globalization stand for? Saul continues:
"That the power of the nation state was on its way out, to be replaced by that of global markets. That in the future, economics, not politics or arms, would determine the course of human events. That freed markets would quickly establish natural international balances, impervious to the old boom-and-bust cycles. That the growth in international trade, as a result of lowering barriers, would unleash an economic-social tide that would raise all ships, whether of our Western poor or of the developing world in general. That prosperous markets would turn dictatorships into democracies. That all of this would discourage irresponsible nationalism, racism and political violence. That global economics would produce stability through the creation of ever larger corporations impervious to bankruptcy. That these transnational corporations would provide a new kind of international leadership, free of local political prejudices.
That the rise of global marketplace leadership and the decline of national politics, with its tendency to deform healthy economic processes, would force the emergence of debt-free governments. By then wedding our governments to a permanent state of deficit-free public accounting, our societies would be stabilised."
This has been hurled at us citizens for thirty years as thunderbolts from on high by the economic and political elite. We were the sludge. They were the movers and the shakers. We had to be blasted out of our habits, traditions adn old ways of doing things.
Behind the new stood something old. Saul describes it thus:
"In summary, global economic forces, if left unfettered by wilful man, would protect us against the errors of local self-pride, while allowing individual self-interest to lead each individual to a better life. Together these forces and self-interest would produce prosperity and general happiness. In a society where Christian dogma had been so dominant until so recently, how could people of goodwill not be attracted by this good news - by these promises of personal redemption? And if you add to all of this a multitude of new, technocratic market methods - well, then, the cycles of history would be broken, setting us on a permanent, inevitable course."
Yep, it was the return of the old nineteenth century laissez-faire economics wearing the positivist mask of social science. l
One of the consequences of the new economic/business language was the decay of public language that Don Watson describes.
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It's sobering to recall all that stuff. I like the history of Davos, which seems so telling.