Question: What is globalization?
There is immense confusion around the concept of "globalization".
Globalization of what is the question not asked. The reason
it is not asked is that the answer reveals what is kept hidden in
official culture — that "globalization" means dominant
banks and corporations moving across the world's borders in rising
tides of short-term speculative capital flows and floods of junk,
luxury and armament commodities with no accountability beyond themselves.
The promised "increase in prosperity" means more privatization
of public goods, more exotic commodities for those who can afford
to pay for them, and an ever larger share of the profits of this "global
trade" going to the borderless banks and corporations commanding
the agenda.
In other words, "globalization" is a masking term for oligopolist
corporate globalization. This meaning is very different from what
people think of when they think of the word "globalization".
They think it means world interconnection by trade when, in fact,
it means the subordination or ruin of whatever public or private enterprise
does not fit the demands of the imposed system.
Question: Do you think there is nothing good about globalization,
then?
Globalization in a life-connective sense is very important, and needed.
But its meaning is the opposite of what the media and politicians
are selling. The deep irony is that those who are being labelled as
"anti-globalizers" are really those working hardest for
global co-operation — people connecting across borders and cultures
to stand up for the integrity and protection of the world's ecosystems,
for human and labour rights enshrined in international trade agreements,
for security of first peoples against genocidal invasions of oil,
mining and other environmentally destructive corporate practices,
for the end of war criminal invasions by the U.S. of resource-rich
countries, for the democratic sovereignty of the world's peoples,
and so on. What the new opposition stands against is a transnational
cabal of big business and state machineries orchestrating a global
crusade for their control of the world's resources and governance
with no electoral or constitutional responsibilities.
These are complex matters that I explain in my work. The truth on
the ground is that countless millions of people are joining in a real
global movement against a multinational corporate coup d'état of accountable
government — which is not really "globalization" at
all, but a special interest absolutism with no limit to its demands.
What I think unifies the world struggle unfolding against this agenda
is a true global vision — that is, a recognized interrelationship,
a bonding around ultimate concerns about what I call "the life-ground"
and "the civil commons" expressing it.
Question: How do you define the difference, then, between 'true'
and 'false' globalization?
Something is true globalization insofar as its connective project
is to protect and enable ecological and civil life systems across
divisions of borders and cultures. Corporate market globalization
does neither. It is effectively lawless. It has no life-protective
standards governing or inhibiting it, and state leaderships now behave
as its servo-mechanisms.
Question: What are the effects of corporate market globalization?
Unlike an armed invasion, the effects are not visible in the short
term. But the long-term effects may be more disastrous than an armed
invasion. The occupation is not announced by armies marching in and
killing people so that they resist. As a famous U.S. Secretary of
State, John Foster Dulles, said long ago: "There are two ways
of conquering a foreign nation. One is to gain control its people
by force of arms. The other is to gain control of its economy by financial
means".
Dulles puts the matter clearly. A lot of my work has been to uncover
the inner logic of this "conquest by financial means". I
won't try to explain that here, but it is borne by an incremental
process - big banks centring in Wall Street lending money to governments
at compound interest, multinational corporations buying up resources
and private and public infrastructures of production aided by IMF
demands, and so on. I look for the underlying pattern that connects
the dots and the crises.
Question: What is the overall pattern?
It is an unseen pattern — to restructure the identity of entire
societies from self-determining sovereignty to instrumental functions
of a new kind of imperial subject — the transnational joint-stock
corporation, whose sole goal is to turn money into more money for
private stockholders.
Question: Isn't this a bit dark?
Well, look for the evidence to disconfirm it. As for the imperial
intent, it is acknowledged by U.S. leaders themselves. After Canada's
Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, signed the Free Trade Agreement in
1988 with a majority of the voters opposing it, the U.S. chief Trade
Representative, Clayton Yeutter, said to Congress: "The Canadians
don't know what they signed. They'll be sucked into the American economy
within 20 years". Canadians as a whole still don't know what
they signed. The corporate media do not report any of the articles
of these binding regulatory apparatuses, nor their organising meaning.
- - The same goes, by the way, for the FTAA and the WTO (the World
Trade Organization).
Question: Other than the consequences of foreign control of
economies, are there other effects that we should be concerned about?
The main consequences follow from the wholly new conditions of trade
and investment. The major multinationals have pressured political
parties which depend on their financial and media support into these
"trade agreements", which might as well be the rules of
an occupation. Corporate trade lawyers in and out of government have
written their articles so as to protect only the rights of corporations,
and to prohibit governments from doing anything which would not obey
the new rules. But no peoples are protected by the treaties. Only
corporations gain rights by them, while elected governments increasingly
lose rights and acquire liabilities.
Question: What rights do governments lose and corporations
gain?
Well, already societies cannot protect their natural resources for
their own peoples' use. Under the new transnational rules, such policies
are illegal because they infringe the "national treatment"
rights of foreign corporations. According to these undebated rules,
even the most popular governments cannot legislate anything that might
diminish the "expected profits" of foreign corporations
- including by environmental laws. Governments cannot stop or impede
foreign goods made with slave labour or ecocidal processes of production
from free or "most favoured nation" entry across their borders.
They cannot subsidize local enterprise in their poorer regions without
hand-outs to foreign corporations complaining against "discrimination".
It goes on and on. Elected governments are losing the right to serve
their peoples and their economies by a straitjacket of invisible threads
- these regulatory apparatuses are thousands of pages long of articles
of binding prescription, one size fits all. This is what I mean by
restructuring of societies' sovereign identities into instrumental
functions of transnational money-sequences.
Question: Can you give our readers a local example?
Consider Ontario Hydro. The Harris-Eves government sold it off, just
before Eves got a million-dollar-a-year job in a Boston firm specializing
in privatization deals. This was called "privatizing for efficiency"
and "an opportunity of free trade". Professor Myron Gordon,
an eminent economist from U of T, estimates that over $40 billion
of generating value, a staggering figure, was effectively given away
by the privatization. Even now, Ontarians do not know they are soon
going to pay New York rates for electricity — because the private
firm which has bought Hydro's generating capacities at a fraction
of its worth now has the right to export as much of our Ontario-generated
electricity out of province as it pleases for higher prices.
Now suppose that citizens wake up and understand they have been effectively
robbed of their electricity infrastructure and natural resource of
water power as well as their stable electricity rates — which
have gone through the roof in California and Alberta where privatization
schemes were also imposed. Suppose they vote in a government to pay
back the money with interest to foreign owners to regain their greatest
public asset. They are forbidden under trade law to do it. NAFTA rules
it out, and it is the model of corporate globalization now being instituted
at the WTO level. Right now the GATS negotiations (the General Agreement
on Trade in Services) are putting more and more of our public resources
and services on the table for privatization and foreign corporate
ownership.
Question: Could you distinguish the short-term from the long-term
effects of this process?
The short-term effect of privatizing Hydro is hardly visible, nor
is its connection to "free trade" and "globalization".
But the long-term effect is not much different than if a foreign power
was encouraged to march in and take over all our electricity-generating
capacities. The same will apply to our public health-care budgets,
our fresh water, and everything else as these unknown rules are spread,
as they are being now, more widely and deeply. Our society and others
have almost lost the ability to govern ourselves and to protect the
life-ground of our peoples.
Question: So who are the biggest victims of this process?
Just about everybody — except transnational corporate operations,
their dominant stockholders and their collaborators who are rewarded
with directorships, consultant fees and media plaudits. The young
and next generations lose most of all, because their country and its
assets have been sold or given away by those gaining from this process.
So have Canadians' and others' future livelihoods and well-being by
"the race to the bottom" of wages, public service jobs,
environmental regulations and social security to achieve "competitive
costs in the global market". The poor and marginalized suffer
most of all without private means. In a deep sense, corporate globalization
is a liquidation of the infrastructure of civilization.
Question: How could this have happened with so many people,
including in the university, applauding globalization as good and
inevitable?
Ultimately, I think it is an issue of cultural insanity - a deranged
value system presupposed as given. Unthinking people are its vehicles.
What drives their acquiescence is a sort of group-mind, a superstitious
mind-set whose god is "the Invisible Hand of the Global Market".
Almost all our international problems relate back to the mindless
assumptions of this model. It is life- blind. As a philosopher, I
try to lay the dogmas bare, to show "the invisible prison".
That is what my new book is about.
John McMurtry PhD, F.R.S.C. is Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Guelph. His recently released book, Value Wars: The Global Market
Versus the Life Economy, is published by Pluto Press, London, GB.