In 1969, Charles Kindleberger presciently observed the rise of corporate power relative to the government within the context of international trade, predicting, “the nation state is just about through as an economic unit.”
More recently Wolfgang Reinicke went further, concluding: “Global corporate networks challenge a state’s internal sovereignty by altering the relationship between the private and public sectors. By inducing corporations to fuse national markets, globalization creates an economic geography that subsumes multiple political geographies. A government no longer has a monopoly of the legitimate power over the territory within which corporations operate, as the rising incidence of regulatory and tax arbitrage attests.”
Reinicke even suggested that this globalization was trending toward a form of anarchy. If anarchy constitutes the absence of government, this aspect of globalization might seem to be a move toward a special kind of anarchy what may be called anarchism for the rich and powerful.
In his “Politics as a Vocation,” Max Weber suggested a broader interpretation of this seeming anarchism. After citing Trotsky saying, “Every state is founded on force,” he went on to note, “The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence.” From Weber’s perspective, globalization is actually empowering the state.
The same progress in information technologies that that created a utopian belief in the possibility of worldwide democracy, facilitated the growth of globalization that made the new anarchy possible is also being used around the world to rapidly increase authoritarian powers, which now have the capacity to monitor virtually everything that ordinary people do. So, while one part of society enjoys the privacy that this new regime of secrecy provides, the rest of society has been rapidly losing what little remains of its privacy.
In effect, alongside the global redistribution of wealth and income, globalization also seems to be redistributing people’s rights. So far, I have been unable to detect any effective response to this troubling trend.…Oligarchic anarchism.
Naked Capitalism
Globalization, “Free Trade,” and Food as a Strategic Weapon
Michael Perelman | Professor of Economics at California State University, Chico
4 comments:
I currently reading Perelman's "The Invention of Capitalism." His wordy writing style leaves a bit to be desired but the main message is quite enlightening -- that our economy is not a natural order of things or even an accident, rather it was deliberately designed to create a pool of desperate workers for the benefit of the business class. It meshes well with Kalecki.
Getting back to food, while some people say our suburbs are not sustainable and that everyone should move to the city so they don't have to commute, I wonder if the opposite is not true -- that the suburban dweller has the potential to become self-sustaining (if local ordinances allow it) with rooftop solar, a backyard vegetable garden, and backyard chickens. If you can grow your own food and produce your own power, that's empowering.
Perelman is Marxian but not Marxist.
See The Theory of Primitive Accumulation
Like Michael Hudson, who rejects neoclassical economics as "junk economics," Perelman looks to classical economics, especially Marx, for insights relevant today in clarifying contemporary issues neoclassically oriented economists ignore, misrepresent or obfuscate.
A key assumption of economic liberalism is that owing to the operation of natural laws based on human rationality and market forces, free market competition results is a spontaneous ordering that produces social, political, and economical optimality as an equilibrium state.
Other social, political and economic views reject this as itself based on untenable assumptions. Marx in particular showed how asymmetrical class structure, power, status and privilege lead to social, political, and economic imbalance and disharmony.
However, Marx thought that if the asymmetry, which he saw as based on private ownership of the means of production, was removed, then a spontaneous ordering would naturally occur. That, too, is an unfounded assumption.
So heterodox social, political and economic thinkers that reject the assumption that "freedom" leads to spontaneous ordering of society and its institutions are challenged with coming up with competing explanations that are better founded than the liberal view, whether classical or Marxist.
At present, liberalism is in vogue and no other viewpoint is a serious challenger to it in the West. Moreover, emerging nations are moving in the direction of incorporating liberalism and recognizing it as the basis of the world order. Consequently globalization is advancing on the liberal path, which is evidenced by growing asymmetry of class, status, power, wealth and privilege.
People like Perelman are warning that this is a serious mistake, and it will result in a return to the old order characterized by asymmetry based on exploitation of the masses and the environment.
That is a pretty easy case to make. Coming up with a convincing alternative is more difficult.
I think TPP is about forcing Europe as well as the Chinese to fall into line and adopt freedom restricting measures.
Trade shouldn't be a bad thing, it should be a huge benefit to everyone involved. And within democracy where people could force governments to fix negative impacts from trade, it should be a huge boon.
I think it is the process that ruined trade. The secret negotiations, inclusive only of political donors that have caused a good part of the negative economic impacts of trade and lack of benefits to most people. Sorry if I'm supposed to be impressed with Costco and Walmart! I just expect more.
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