Judy,
I liked your citations very much even though I'm somewhat unsure of the way
the notion of "texts" is used. It sounds like texts communicating with texts
but not connected to concrete forms of human activity.
I also think you have identified the problem that has beset "class
analysis" in general when you refuse to accept to accept "an either-or
battle between globalization and non-globalization". You don't see too many
"turning arounds" in human histories unless some disaster happens but
usually it's just the disappearance of the civilization. So its hard to see
what can be done. What are the consequences of the creation of an
international body of capitalists who have the power to force member
countries to follow practices that the residents of those countries deem
contrary to the way they live with each other and their surrounding
environment as governed by their local, state, and national laws ? World
government? Heaven forbid!! That sounds communist.
Isn't exploitation at root the subordination of the will of one to the will
of another? And so perhaps some aspects of "globalization" should be
totally rejected simply out of refusal to be subordinated to a decision
making process over which one has no control input. Which of course just
fine in theories for which cognition is somehow separated from living
individuals who experience it. It usually isn't experienced at such a
level of abstraction by those who are actually subordinated.
On the other hand I totally support regional specialization of production
and international trade. I like bananas, coffee, and I think Japanese cars
are better than American ones. It just gets really weird when some areas
specialize in unskilled labor but that is and always has been one of the
geographical consequences of capitalism; eg, the slave system in the U.S
Chinese factories today. I see the structure of the global international
division of labor as consequence of the now supreme dominance of the
capitalist system at the world level--it transcends national and cultural
boundaries and is increasingly exempt from public control anywhere. The
history of the corporation in American Law is a powerful tale of the
alienation of public goods (the raison d'etre of corporations) from public
control. Once the public goods were out of the public control through the
mediation of the State and into the hands of private capitalist institutions
(corporations) it's almost natural that they would transcend the power of
the individual States that authored their existence and establish their own
global position of political power. I think Edward Bellamy even foretold of
something like this in "Looking Backwards" but he also had a much more
halcyon vision of the outcome than I can manage to muster.
My opposition to "globalization" is grounded in a marxist analysis of
capitalism. Globalization, the total separation of capitalist power from
the control of the nation state together with the international division of
productive labor, constitutes a new stage of the historical development of
capitalism. You're right: old analyses aren't adequate but this says nothing
about the method of analysis and on the issue of globalization I find the
marxist analysis of the relations between labor and capital to be very
consistent.
I'd like to hear from anyone what position on "globalization" follows from
the other theoretical orientations, e.g. performance theory, or how those
orientations can feed back into informing their socio-political practice in
relationship to globalization. If this seem unfair since, after all,
marxist theory includes a developed economic theory while the other
theoretical orientations don't address that specifically, then I'd like to
hear how globalization affects the object domain of their theory and how
their theory interprets those effects.
Paul H. Dillon
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