BobW --- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 20, 2007, at 5:17 PM, MICHAEL YATES wrote:
>
> > BTW, I have come to hate the word "globalization."
> What does it mean?
>
> Excellent question, and one I've been asking for
> more than 10 years.
> Quoting myself from After the New Economy:
>
>
> "Globalization" has been on so many lips over the
> last few years
> that it's easy to forget how recently it entered
> daily speech. Shown
> on page 146 is a graph of the word's appearances in
> the New York
> Times and Washington Post since 1980. While not as
> instant a star as
> the phrase "New Economy" (graphed on page 4), its
> trajectory is
> remarkably similar, flatlining its way through the
> 1980s and early
> 1990s, then showing a near-vertical ascent in the
> late 1990s—though
> "globalization" saw its point of inflection around
> 1995, three years
> before the New Economy, and it's shown more staying
> power.
>
> "Globalization," both in elite and common speech, is
> a pretty spongy
> concept. Like many deeply ideological words, it's
> rarely defined
> explicitly; everyone is expected to know what it
> means. Elites mean
> something like the internationalization of economic,
> political, and
> cultural life, as if these haven't long been
> internationalized.
> Nonelites, including quite a few antiglobalization
> activists, seem to
> mean everything bad that's happened over the last
> decade or two.
> That's hardly an exaggeration; writing in The
> American Prospect, Mark
> Greif (2001) reported on a focus group, held for
> corporate clients
> worried about the antiglobalization backlash. Thirty
> ordinary
> Americans were gathered together in a hotel in the
> rather unglamorous
> locale of Secaucus, New Jersey, by a Jungian market
> researcher with
> the Pynchonesque name G. Clothaire Rapaille, and
> asked what
> globalization meant to them. After a slow start, the
> answers started
> coming: "Nothing's personal." "No more privacy."
> "It's all machines."
> "The world is getting too small. There's no more
> mystery anymore...."
> Pressed for more detail, respondents complained
> about speedup, the
> "fight for the dollar," atomization, alienation,
> powerlessness,
> growing gaps between haves and have-nots and workers
> and bosses, the
> deterioration in health care. An impressive array of
> complaints, but
> it's not clear how "globalization" is their cause.
> They sound more
> like venerable complaints about capitalism in
> general—surprising in
> their breadth and intensity in these supposedly
> conservative times—
> and not particularly its internationalizing aspects.
> The shrinkage of
> space and the acceleration of time, which seem like
> particularly
> modern or even postmodern concerns, actually entered
> Western thought
> in the sixteenth century (Douglas 1997). But that's
> the problem with
> the word—it serves as a kind of wastebasket taxon, a
> term biologists
> use to describe a catch-all category, a repository
> for critters you
> don't really know how to classify. Let's look at a
> couple more
> attempts from the experts. The French international
> relations analyst
> Dominique Moïsi (2001) defined globalization as
> "complexity,
> interaction and simultunaneity," a phrase that could
> also describe a
> crowd of tipsy customers chatting flirtatiously at a
> bar.
>
> The British sociologist Bob Jessop (2001), for
> another example, avers
> that "'globalization'" (quotes in the original) "is
> best used to
> denote a multicentric, multiscalar, multitemporal,
> multiform, and
> multicausal process"—one of scales "no longer...in a
> neat hierarchy
> but as co-existing and interpenetrating in a tangled
> and confused
> manner," one that is "multicausal because it results
> from the
> complex, contingent interaction of many different
> causal
> processes...the complex, emergent product of many
> different forces
> operating on many scales." Isn't that clarifying?
> Jessop further
> avers that the globalized economy is the "fast
> economy," and that the
> fast economy requires fast policy, which "privileges
> the executive
> over the legislature and the judiciary, finance over
> industrial
> capital, consumption over long-term investment." But
> consideration of
> how the U.S. Congress denied President Clinton
> fast-track trade
> negotiating authority, how the U.S. Supreme Court
> chose the winner of
> the 2000 election, how multinational corporations
> (largely
> industrial, not financial, entities) and their
> long-term investments
> play a starring role in "globalization," you have to
> wonder exactly
> what Jessop is looking at.
>
> Closely related to the confused attempts to define
> globalization are
> the sentimental evocations of "place" that often
> serve as
> globalization's opposite. Not surprisingly, given
> his propensity for
> important-sounding but empty turns of phrase, Manuel
> Castells (1996,
> p. 423) declares that "A place is a locale whose
> form, function and
> meaning are self-contained within the boundaries of
> physical
> contiguity" (boldface in original). As an example of
> place, he cited
> the Belleville neighborhood of Paris. In 1962, as a
> political exile
> from Spain, Castells was given shelter there by an
> exiled Spanish
> construction worker and anarchist union leader.
> Exile, anarchism, and
> organized labor are hardly meanings self-contained
> within Belleville,
> and no doubt a ruralist would find the urban
> neighborhood itself
> hopelessly fallen from nonalienated grace.
>
> Whatever place is, we're told that it matters less
> in these
> globalized days. But is it true? So-called
> industrial districts still
> matter a great deal, from Silicon Valley to the
> Silicon Alley to
> Bangalore. In fact, greater regional inequalities in
> attracting
> desirable "knowledge" work suggests that "location
> has actually
> become more rather than less important" (Huws 1999).
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