Faced with this Challenge, Are the Peoples' Responses Effective? Under Which Conditions?
The people, those from the centres (the triad) and those from the peripheries (emerging or not) are not confronted by the ‘challenge of globalisation’ but by the spread of the collective imperialism of the powers (plural) of the triad.
Proper analysis of this challenge requires us to go upstream of ‘globalisation’ in order to examine the major transformations of capitalism that control it.Here I intend to describe these transformations by connecting the various aspects of their existence into what I have labelled ‘widespread monopoly capitalism’. What I mean by this is a new stage of the capitalism of the monopoly-holders which is characterised by the submission of the set of national production systems that is concerned with the domination of these monopolies, which, by the way, suck up much of the surplus value produced in the dominant sectors. I refer the reader to my book on ‘The Crisis’ again. This virtually complete (and new) domination has inspired within me the idea of moving towards the domination of abstract capital, based on the dispossession of the historical bourgeoisies for their own good. The expression for it is ‘financialisation’.
In his work on the emergence of a ‘transnational bourgeoisie’ (transatlantic in fact), Carroll does not rely solely on the argument (which is both limited and fragile in my opinion) regarding the exchanged representations between various boards of directors; he strengthens his argument by highlighting the institutionalised political instruments that this newly forming class have given themselves. His analyses of the functions carried out by nine of these institutions are worth recalling:
1. While the International Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1919, its role has become new and considerably more decisive since the recent creation of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
2. The Bilderberg Conference in 1952 (Society of Mount Pelerin), led by Hayek -; the mentor of liberalism without borders or boundaries—managed to popularise discourse on neoliberalism amongst politicians, media heavyweights and the high-grade militaries of the countries within the triad.
The Trilateral Commission, established in 1973, gave the discourse a quasi-official tone, to which governments and major political parties in the triad—from the right and the left—have joined. The World Economic Forum (Davos) then took over by continuing to promote the discourse from 1982 onwards.3. More recently the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, created in 1995, aimed ‘to dress in green’ the strategies for expansion of capitalist monopolies in order to rally together high-riding environmental opinions.
4. On the European level, from 1984 the European Round Table of Industrialists took on an important role, becoming the major source of influence for decisions made in Brussels concerning the European Union.
5. Parallel to this, in 1995 the partners of the triad put in place two instruments to facilitate their long-term dialogues; the Transatlantic Business Dialogue and the European UnionZJapan Round Table; meanwhile in 2006, NAFTA established the North American Competitiveness Council.
Although the discourses developed within such institutions are well known and banal to the extreme—simply rather conservative—it is necessary to voice them and to repeat them because these ‘think tanks ‘benefit from an honourable reputation in terms of bringing into their folds those who ‘know best’ how to tackle certain issues. The Citizen—Spectator base today is largely convinced that no one can understand the economic problems better than the entrepreneurs. We have forgotten that the sole concern of these entrepreneurs is to ensure that their profits are maximised as far as possible; unemployment, for example, is not their problem. As such, economic issues are being studied through a distorted lens.
From these observations, Carroll draws all too easily the conclusion that there is an emerging ‘transatlantic bourgeoisie’. I will not say much more about this, except that the convergence of representation styles is not sufficient evidence of the above.
The European royal courts of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries were equally populated by characters that shared the same ways of thinking, and this did not preclude any conflict. Today, in the same vein, I claim that the bourgeoisie of the triad share the same way of thinking, yet this does not mean that they are any less ‘national’—even in Europe. Moreover, they are simply aware that it is necessary for them to put on a united front in the face of their common enemy— the global South and more particularly China. Therefore, they constitute the foundations of what I have labelled the collective imperialism of the Triad.Are we soon to witness the deepening crisis adding to the development of conflicting interests between the collective imperialism’s national partners? It seems that this will likely be the case. It will put to question the already-damaged forms of globalisation that currently exist.
However, faced with this new challenge, Carroll’s proposed new counter-strategies seem to me to be inadequate. The reason for this is due to the fact that Carroll is still caught up in the globalisation bubble; he believes it is possible to build a ‘better globalisation’ than that which exists already and does not see that prior to this what actually needs to be addressed is its deconstruction, in order to reconstruct it later on, on other possible foundations.
Faced with the institutions created by the transnational bourgeoisie, Carroll proposes a counter-strategy, in which four promising new institutions emerge. These are: (1) the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC); (2) the Transnational Institute Amsterdam, itself a branch of the Institute for Policy Studies based in Washington; (3) Friends of the Earth International (FoEI); and (iv) the World Social Forum (WSF), which was first held in Porto Alegre in 2001.
Beyond the differing nuances and concerns specific to each of these institutions, a single common denominator unifies them as a coherent group.
First, these institutions are largely ‘reformist’, sometimes to the extreme, like the ITUC, who no longer even defends the ‘old-style’ social democratic programmes—a compromise between capital and labour worthy of the name—and is satisfied with minor proposals aimed at alleviating the most dramatic social consequences of the policies dictated by the monopolies. The FoEI is not interested in examining the fundamental relationship between capitalist logic and ecological disaster and as such is able to act as a viable interlocutor for the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). The WSF charter forbids the research of credible alternative policies and is satisfied with simply recording the spontaneous societal changes that are produced by the ‘resistance’.In a relentless critical analysis of the practices of a number of institutions labelled as, among other things, ‘anti-systemic’ or ‘non-profit’, Michel Chossudovsky describes the inconsistencies demonstrated by these ‘manufactured’ institutions; he claims that they are in fact destined to serve the system and that they also generously finance these self-described ‘anti-systemic’ finance programmes (‘Manufacturing Dissent’, website Chossudovsky 2010).
Without necessarily going as far as Chossudovsky, I would say that the general strategy employed by these institutions—and others of a similar nature—is based on the search for a ‘new consensus’ able to effectuate ‘another globalisation’— better than that which has been shaped by the elite. This strategy is, in my opinion, condemned to failure, because it ignores the lessons of history. I have pointed out that the first long and systemic crisis of the capitalism only found its ‘solution’ after 30 years of wars and revolutions. It was these power struggles, both social and newly international, that gave rise to the ‘three golden decades’ (1945-1975). According to my analysis, it was during this period that three families of ‘development models’ (arising from the compromise between social democracy, Sovietism and popular national development) comfortably coexisted with a parallel ‘pluri- centric globalisation’.
There is absolutely no reason to think things will be any different in the future. We must question the construction of globalisation and deconstruct it before ‘another globalisation’ becomes possible. This is true for globalisation today (that is to say, the global domination of the collective imperialist triad); it’s also true for Europe.
Alternative strategies can only be effective if they are radical. In other words, both by working on the deconstruction of the existing system and by initiating progress towards building an alternative system which, in my opinion, should be socialist-driven, in the sense that it must consciously shake itself free from the shackles of capitalist logic.