Globalization and Social Change

Johannes Dragsbaek Schmidt, Jacques Hersh

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134578658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Globalization and Social Change challenges conventional thinking regarding the inevitability of globalization. Rather than seeing globalization as 'the end station of capitalism', it presents the development of this phenomenon as a disruptive and conflicting process.

Part I
The intellectual challenge: discourse, ideology, and reality

1 Globalization in question

David Harvey

Since the early 1980s, “globalization” has become a key word for organizing our thoughts as to how the world works. How and why it moved to such a central position in our vocabulary is an interesting tale. I want here, however, to focus on the theoretical and political implications of the rise of such a mode of thought To that end, I begin with two general sets of questions in order to highlight what appear to be important political changes in Western discourses (though not necessarily in realities), including that of much of the socialist movement.

1. Why is it that the word “globalization” has recently entered into our discourses in the way it has? Who put it there and why? And what significance is to be attached to the fact that even among many “progressives” and “leftists” in the advanced capitalist world, words like “imperialism,” “colonialism,” and “neocolonialism” have increasingly taken a back seat to “globalization” as a way to organize thoughts and to chart political possibilities?
2. How has the conception of globalization been used politically? Has adoption of the term signaled a confession of powerlessness on the part of national, regional, and local working-class movements? Has belief in the term operated as a powerful deterrent to localized and even national political action? Are local and national working-class movements such insignificant cogs in the vast infernal global machine of international capitalism that there is no room for political manoeuvre anywhere?

Viewed from this perspective, the term globalization and all its associated baggage exact a severe political price. But before we reject it or abandon it entirely, it is useful to take a good hard look at what it incorporates and what we can learn, theoretically and politically, from the brief history of its use.

Let me begin with a suggestion: That we view “globalization” as a process rather than as a political-economic condition that has recently come into being. To view it this way is not to presume that the process is constant; nor does it preclude saying that the process has, for example, entered into a radically new stage or worked itself out to a particular or even “final” state. But a processbased definition makes us concentrate on how globalization has occurred and is occurring.

Certainly from 1492 onwards, and even before, the globalization process of capitalism was well under way. And it has never ceased to be of profound importance to capitalism’s dynamic. Globalization has, therefore, been integral to capitalist development since its very inception. It is important to understand why.

The accumulation of capital has always been a profoundly geographical and spatial affair. Without the possibilities inherent in geographical expansion, spatial reorganization, and uneven geographical development, capitalism would long ago have ceased to function as a political-economic system. This perpetual turning to what I call “a spatial fix” to capitalism’s contradictions has created a global historical geography of capital accumulation whose character needs to be well understood.

Marx and Engels emphasized the point in the Communist Manifesto. Modern industry not only creates the world market, they wrote, but the need for a constantly expanding market “chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe” so that it “must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” They continue:

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country… All old established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

(Marx and Engels 1952:72)

If this is not a compelling description of globalization, then it is hard to imagine what would be. And it was, of course, precisely by way of this analysis that Marx and Engels derived the global imperative “working men of all countries unite” as a necessary condition for an anti-capitalist and pro-socialist revolution.

Since Marx and Engels, a variety of accounts has been offered of how capitalism has structured its geography (such as Lenin’s theory of imperialism, Luxemburg’s positioning of imperialism as the savior of capitalist accumulation, and Mao’s depiction of primary and secondary contradictions in class struggle). These have subsequently been supplemented by more synthetic accounts of accumulation on a world scale (Amin), the production of a capitalist world system (Wallerstein), the development of underdevelopment (Frank and Rodney), unequal exchange (Emmanuel), and dependency theory (Cardoso). As Marxist ideas and political practices have spread throughout the globe (in a parallel process of globalization of class struggle), so innumerable local/national accounts of resistance to the invasions, disruptions, and imperialist designs of capitalism have been generated. And a widespread but less visible group of thinkers and practitioners has paid much closer attention to local/regional differences and the role of urbanization as part of a process of uneven geographical development of capitalism (both of its productive forces and social relations) in space and the uneven geographical and social forms of anti-capitalist struggle.

The effect is tacitly to recognize that the grounding for class struggle is often specific to places and that the universalism to which socialism aspires has to be built by negotiation among different place-specific demands, concerns, and aspirations. As Raymond Williams (1989:242) suggested, the grounding of socialist politics always lies in what he called a “militant particularism” embedded in “ways of life” and “structures of feeling” peculiar to place. By this he meant, in the first instance:

The unique and extraordinary character of working-class self-organization …to connect particular struggles to a general struggle in one quite special way. It has set out, as a movement, to make real what is at first sight the extraordinary claim that the defence and advancement of certain particular interests, properly brought together, are in fact the general interest.

(Williams 1989:249; my emphasis)

The further implication, which many socialists may be loath to accept, is that:

A new theory of socialism must now centrally involve place. Remember the argument was that the proletariat had no country, the factor which differentiated it from the property owning classes. But place has been shown to be a crucial element in the bonding process—more so perhaps for the working class than the capital-owning classes—by the explosion of the international economy and the destructive effects of deindustrialization upon old communities. When capital has moved on, the importance of place is more clearly revealed.

(Williams 1989:242)

It is not my intention to review the vast literature that deals with the spatial and geographical aspects of capitalist development and class straggle (even if such a task were feasible). But I do think it important to recognize a series of tensions and often uncomfortable compromises within the Marxist tradition over how to understand, theoretically and politically, the geographical dynamics of capital accumulation and class struggle. When, for example, Lenin and Luxembourg clashed on the national question, as the vast controversy on the possibility of socialism within one country (or even within one city) unfolded, as the Second International compromised with nationalism in World War I, and as the Comintern subsequently swayed back and forth on how to interpret its own internationalism, so the socialist/communist movement never managed to evolve, politically or theoretically, a proper or satisfactory understanding of the geographical dynamics of capital accumulation and the geopolitics of class struggle.

A careful scrutiny of the rhetoric in the Communist Manifesto indicates a key source of the dilemma. For while it is clear from the passages cited that the bourgeoisie’s quest for class domination was (and is) a very geographical affair, the almost immediate reversion in the text to a purely temporal and diachronic account is very striking. It is hard, it seems, to be dialectical about space, leaving many Marxists in practice to follow Feuerbach in thinking that time is “the privileged category of the dialectician, because it excludes and subordinates where space tolerates and coordinates” (Ross 1988:8). Even the term “historical materialism,” I note, erases the significance of geography, and if I have struggled these last few years to try to implant the idea of “historical-geographical materialism” it is because the very shift in that terminology prepares us to look more flexibly and, I hope, more cogently at the class significance of processes like globalization and uneven geographical development. And if I am now struggling in my work (Harvey 1996) with how to be dialectical about spatiotemporality (and the fusion of those terms is itself, I believe, highly significant), then it is because I feel we need far better ways to understand if not resolve politically the underlying tension within Marxist accounts between what often degenerates into either a temporal teleology of class triumphalism (now largely negated by the equally teleological class triumphalism of the bourgeoisie declaring the end of history) or a seemingly incoherent and uncontrollable geographical fragmentation of class and other forms of social struggle in every nook and cranny of the capitalist world.

In practice, even diachronic class struggle accounts are for the most part territorially bounded without much concern being shown to justify the geographical divisions upon which such accounts are based. We then have innumerable accounts of the making of the English, Welsh, French, German, Italian, Catalan, South African, South Korean, and so on working classes, as if these are natural geographical entities. Attention focuses on class development within some circumscribed space which when scrutinized more closely, turns out to be a space within an international space of flows of capital, labor, information, and so on, in turn comprised of innumerable smaller spaces each with its own characteristics. When we look closely at the action described in Edward Thompson’s classic account of The Making of the English Working Class, for example, it turns out to be a series of highly localized events often loosely conjoined in space. Foster may have rendered the differences somewhat too mechanical in his own account of Class Struggle in the Industrial Revolution, but it is, I think, undeniable that class structure, class consciousness, and class politics in Oldham, Northampton, and South Shields (read Colmar, Lille, and St. Etienne or Minneapolis, Mobile, and Lowell) were quite differently constructed and worked out, making geographical difference within the nation-state rather more important than most would want to concede. This mode of thinking uncritically about supposedly “natural” geographical entities is now most familiarly perpetuated in neoMarxist accounts of capital (particularly those inspired by “regulation theory”) that make it seem as if there are distinctive German, British, Japanese, American, Swedish, Singaporean, Brazilian, and so on versions of capitalism (sometimes broken down into more regionalized orderings, such as North versus South in Italy, Brazil, Britain…all in competition with each other within a global space economy.

So there is a clear line of tension within the Marxist tradition. On the one hand, we have spaceless and geographically undifferentiated accounts (mainly theoretical these days, though polemical and political versions can still be found) which understand capitalist development as a purely temporal process. Class struggle is primarily depicted as a matter of exploitation of one class by another and history is seen as an outcome of that struggle. On the other hand, we have geographical accounts in which class alliances (and this often includes a working class characterized by what Lenin condemned as a limiting trade-union consciousness) form within places to exploit class alliances in other places (with, perhaps, a comprador bourgeoisie as agent). The theoretical justification for viewing the exploitation of one class by another as homologous with the exploitation of one place by another has never been strong. And the assumption that struggles to liberate spaces (struggles for national liberation, for example) are progressive in the class-struggle sense and vice versa cannot stand up to very strong scrutiny. There are, in fact, numerous examples of each kind of struggle confounding the other. How, then, can we unconfound this problem?

One of the things that adoption of the term “globalization” now signals, I believe, is a profound geographical reorganization of capitalism, making many of the presumptions about the “natural” geographical units within which capitalism’s historical trajectory develops less and less meaningful (if they ever were). We are therefore faced with a historic opportunity to seize the nettle of capitalism’s geography, to see the production of space as a constitutive moment within (as opposed to something derivatively constructed by) the dynamics of capital accumulation and class struggle. In a sense, this is an opportunity for Marxism to emancipate itself from imprisonment within a hidden spatiality that has had the opaque power to dominate (and sometimes to confound) the logic of both our thinking and our politics. It also permits us to understand better exactly how class and inter-place struggles can confound each other and to confront the capacity of capitalism to constrain class struggle through a geographical divide and rule of that struggle. We are in a position, furthermore, to understand the spatio-temporal contradictions inherent in capitalism and, through that understanding, better position ourselves to exploit the weakest link and so explode the worst horrors of capitalism’s penchant for violent though “creative” destruction.

How, then, can we dance to this agenda, both theoretically and politically? There are, of course, innumerable signs of a willingness to take on the theoretical implications of changing spatialities and reterritorializations. It was, I believe, one of the main virtues of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, for example, to point out that the territorialization and reterritorialization of capitalism is an ongoing process. But here, as in many other accounts, the virtue of a respatialization of social thought has been bought at the cost of partial and sometimes radical breaks with Marxist formulations (both theoretical and political). In my own work, I have sought to show that there are ways to integrate spatialities into Marxist theory and practice without necessarily disrupting central propositions, though in the course of such an integration all sorts of modifications to both theory and practice do arise. So let me summarize some of the main features of this argument.

I begin with the simplest propositions I can find. There are dual tensions deeply embedded within any materialist accounting of the circulation process of capital. These periodically and inescapably erupt as powerful moments of historicalgeographical contradiction.

First, capitalism is under the impulsion to accelerate turnover time, to speed up the circulation of capital and, consequently, to revolutionize the time horizons of development. But it can do so only through long-term investments (in, for example, the built environment as well as in elaborate and stable infrastructures for production, consumption, exchange, communication, and the like). A major stratagem of crisis avoidance, furthermore, lies in absorbing overaccumulated capital in long-term projects (the famous “public works” launched by the state in times of depression, for example) and this slows down the turnover time of capital. There is, consequently, an extraordinary array of contradictions that collect around the issue of the time-horizon within which different capitals function. Historically, and now is no exception, this tension has primarily been registered through the contradictions between money and finance capital (where turnover is now almost instantaneous), on the one hand, and merchant, manufacturing, agrarian, information, construction, service, and state capitals on the other. But contradictions can be found within factions (between currency and bond markets, for example, or between land developers and speculators). All sorts of mechanisms exist, of course, for coordinating among capital dynamics working on different temporal scales and rhythms. But uneven development of turnover times and temporalities, of the sort produced by the recent implosion of time-horizons in a very powerful financial sector, can create an unwelcome temporal compression that is deeply stressful to other factions of capital, including, of course, that embodied in the capitalist state. The time-horizon set by Wall Street simply cannot accommodate to the temporalities of social and ecological reproduction systems in a responsive way. And it goes without saying that the rapid turnover time set in financial markets is even more stressful for workers (their job security, their skills, etc.) and for the lifeworld of socio-ecological reproduction. This stress-point is one of the crucial features of political economy these last twenty years.

Second, capitalism is under the impulsion to eliminate all spatial barriers, to “annihilate space through time” as Marx puts it, but it can do so only through the production of a fixed space. Capitalism thereby produces a geographical landscape (of space relations, of territorial organization, and of systems of places linked in a “global” division of labor and of functions) appropriate to its own dynamic of accumulation at a particular moment of its history, only to have to destroy and rebuild that geographical landscape to accommodate accumulation at a later date. There are a number of distinct aspects to this process:

1. Reductions in the cost and time of movement over space have been a continuing focus of technological innovation. Turnpikes, canals, railroads, electric power, the automobile, air and jet transport have progressively liberated the movements of commodities and people from the constraints of the friction of distance. Parallel innovations in the postal system, the telegraph, the radio, telecommunications, and the worldwide web have now pushed the cost of transfer of information close to zero.
2. The building of fixed physical infrastructures to facilitate this movement as well as to support the activities of production, exchange, distribution, and consumption exercises a quite different force upon the geographical landscape. More and more capital is embedded in space as landed capital, as capital fixed in the land, creating a “second nature” and a geographically organized resource structure that more and more inhibits the trajectory of capitalist development. The idea of somehow dismantling the urban infrastructures of Tokyo-Yokohama or New York City overnight and starting all over again is simply ludicrous. The effect is to make the geographical landscape of capitalism more and more sclerotic with time, thus creating a major contradiction with the increasing liberty of movement. That tendency is made even more emphatic to the degree that the institutions of place become strongly articulated and loyalties to places (and their specific qualities) become a significant factor in political action.
3. The third element is the construction of territorial organization, primarily (though not solely) state powers to regulate money, law, politics and to monopolize the means of coercion and violence according to a sovereign territorial (and sometime extraterritorial) will. There are, of course, innumerable Marxist theories of the state, many of which engage in an unhealthy degree of abstract...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Globalization or the coming-of-age of capitalism
• Part I: The intellectual challenge: discourse, ideology, and reality
• Part II: Critical perspectives on the role of politics
• Part III: East Asia: the last bastion of dirigisme
• Part IV: Geopolitics and intersocietal conflicts
• Part V: Globalization and forms of resistances
• Notes