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2000-10-11
A global cry against "globalization"!
Alberto Acosta
"Globalization", in quotation marks, is not a new phenomenon. Neither is it a strategy in itself. It is a process which is part of the globalization of capitalism. And as a consequence, the current phase of this process, when one looks at the results, turns out to be fragmented and fragmenting. Thus, globalization as a goal, if we extrapolate from this process as it presents itself today, is impossible: from an ecological standpoint alone, it is impossible to duplicate the standard of living of the wealthiest on a global scale; nor, in the logic of the system, is there productive employment for all the planet's inhabitants.
Nevertheless, through the massive diffusion of elite consumerism - assisted by the media -, and in a pirouette of absolute perversity, its values have infiltrated even those groups without any access to this consumption, those excluded from equity, from clean air and water, from peace, from employment, from rights, from land, from their future, from the media themselves... Nearly all of society has been inoculated by a kind a of global illusion; a phantasm that creates and recreates exclusion, which feeds competition by destroying solidarity, that rewards inhuman wealth. If employment increases - seen as a premonition of inflation - the stock market falls and financial performance suffers, as is happening now in the United States.
If we naively take the perspective that everything is being globalized and that all that remains is for us to globalize ourselves, we fall into a trap. We have known for a while that the world is round, but it seems we don't grasp that its capitalist roundness is exclusionary. Capitalism, which has made possible the most monumental production of material goods and the greatest technological advances in history, has polarized their distribution in an equally monumental way: the three richest people on the planet, all men and all North Americans (really, it couldn't be otherwise), have a combined fortune greater than the GDP of the world's 42 poorest countries, home to 600 million people. The resources which the Europeans and the gringos use every year to feed their pets would be sufficient to rid the world of hunger; for what they spend on perfumes, every woman in the world could be assured of reproductive health care.
We are faced with "a value system, a model for existence, a civilization: the civilization of inequality", as Joseph Schumpeter put it. An inequality exacerbated by the neoliberal religion of the market, which undermines even further the two basic sources of all wealth: nature (the ozone layer is deteriorating and the temperature of the atmosphere increasing, causing ever more complex global climactic problems) and work (which is structurally scarcer and more precarious, with a growing number of excluded, even disposable, people, who lack even the privilege of being exploited.)
A doubly perverse reality, whose results are insupportable, and which is totalitarian in closing the door to alternatives. A reality which needs to change by reducing the role of competitiveness to its proper dimensions and reinforcing the role of solidarity, thus permitting the generation of employment and an urgently necessary redistribution of income, without waiting for the indirect effect of economic growth, and subordinating economics to nature. A reality which calls for a cry of indignation and at the same time hope from the excluded, as a starting point for constructing a globalization without exclusion.
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