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Date Published: 22/01/2001
Author: Jeremy Seabrook Critics of globalisation, says Jeremy Seabrook, should focus on rebutting it, not finding alternative theories. |
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The ultimate response of the apologists for globalisation to their critics is: ‘You always say what you are against, but what are you for; what would you put in its place?’ This defiant question is not really an attempt to elicit a response. It is a triumphal conclusion, designed to demonstrate the futility of alternatives. It hangs in the air, mocking, rhetorical, and unanswerable.
This final flourish has the effect of confounding critics, making them fall silent; or, in some cases, increasing the rage with which they attack the bearers of globalisation. Like so many contemptuous dismissals of criticism of ‘the inevitable’, the pseudo-question, ‘What would you put in its place?’ is itself a defensive reaction. Usually, however, the anti-globalisers stumble, hesitate. The argument appears lost.
The rejoinder they should take up, in fact, is, ‘What do you, the eager globalisers, the apostles of integration, the beneficiaries of ever greater concentrations of wealth and power, intend to put in the place of the disturbed life-ways and destroyed cultures, the ruined resources and damaged relationships with which you have strewn the world?’ And the answer to that is everywhere apparent.
For these are the destroyers of all existing human arrangements, the busy replacers of all alternative ways of answering human need. These are, literally, the movers and shakers of a world, the initiators of the upheavals, the tearing up of humanity by the roots, the pluckers-out of ancient and sustainable societies and the substituters of market-relationships for all others. It is to them that the challenge they hurl at their critics should be thrown.
So it is with all their prophetic visionary fervours for change. Just as they have detached people from symbiotic relationships with the Earth, they have torn meaning from language; so that while they talk of environment, prudence, poverty-abatement, future generations and, above all, ‘sustainability’, they also advocate compulsory driven change, the vast migrations, evictions and disturbances which turn all of us into economic migrants, compelled to seek livelihood in the great monocultural plantations which produce nothing but money.
All human life is characterised by a mixture of continuity and change. But it is time to ask more searching questions about what, precisely, is being conserved, and what is being changed, by the apparently unappeasable force that is globalisation; and who are its owners and beneficiaries.
It is clear that security, stability, the easy answering of need in sustainable and traditional ways must all be swept away by the imperious necessities of the global market. Not the global free market, but a rigged version, which favours the already rich and powerful, and is policed by their institutions, on their terms. The fatalism with which this is promoted by the globalisers seeks to assimilate these processes to the natural order; as though the world economy were not a carefully wrought artefact, but a force of nature.
Of course this fatalism does have another purpose. It ensures continuity – the sustainability, not of the resource-base of the Earth, not of human well-being and security, but of wealth and power where these are already concentrated. It serves the conservation of
privilege and the maintenance of inequality. Let it not be said that globalisation is not about conservation.
To those who would unmask these ugly processes, reverse or curtail them, the upholders of this diseased dualism, those bogus progressives, say: ‘Oh you want to go back to the past.’ This echoes the intolerance of an earlier generation of supporters of the status quo, who used to say to their critics: ‘Go and live in Russia.’ Now that Russia has embraced the same abrasive system, they are compelled to dismiss critics to an utterly inaccessible country – that of the distant past; and describe them as being in the grip of an incurable nostalgia.
Once more, the supporters of globalisation – that euphemism for world-wide capitalism – project onto their opponents their own failings. For their disregard of the ruinous and destructive consequences of a hyperindustrialism without end, is itself a form of aggravated nostalgia. They seem bent on taking the world back to an even more remote past, to when chaos lay on the face of the Earth; a time recorded in the Book of Genesis. Nostalgia indeed.
The Left had a theory. It believed that history was on its side; and in the certainty of such a mighty ally, grew somnolent and complacent. Today’s dissenters have no such support. History, it is clear, has changed sides; if indeed it had ever deserted the side of the powerful. It is not necessary to smash whichever city the World Bank and WTO or IMF are having their sinister and conspiratorial conferences in. Rather, our case requires not a watertight, consistent overarching theory, in imitation of our enemies, but a creative and imaginative rebuttal of the fundamental weaknesses of a system which defends the privilege of a small minority against the majority of humankind.
The arguments are all ours, if only we know how to deploy them with clarity, passion and imagination.
Jeremy Seabrook is a writer and journalist.
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