Conor here: Polychroniou claims that “the radical left critique of globalization [lost] its appeal for the working class and huge chunks of youth.” Did it though? He later admits that the “the shift to global neoliberalism was not countered by the parties of the reformist left that came to power.” And so voters naturally went looking for someone else to do the job.
Having failed to deliver before, the left is now supposed accept globalization and embark on an even more ambitious project to build a better version of it. How would they find success there where they failed before? A “new globalization that is democratic and free from the destructive tendencies of capitalist accumulation” might sound great, but there’s not much of a reckoning with past failures or a roadmap here, and the clock is ticking — although Polychroniou also doesn’t mention how this new globalization would approach climate change.
By C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His latest books are The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (A collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky; Haymarket Books, 2021), and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (Verso, 2021). Cross posted from Common Dreams.
The left is in shambles everywhere while hard-right and far-right parties are riding high in polls across the world. I contend that globalization is at the heart of these developments, and thus it is critical that the left comes to terms with what has gone wrong with its approach to neoliberal globalization and develops in turn an alternative vision of world order.
Globalization came to be a dominant force in our lives sometime around the 1980s. It coincided with the rise of neoliberalism, although globalization is not a 20th-century phenomenon. The 19th century contained a huge burst of globalization. In fact, between 1850 and 1913, the world economy was probably as open as it became in the late 20th century. Tariffs fell, free trade agreements proliferated, trade flows skyrocketed, information flows accelerated, and migrants flowed to all corners of the globe. Neither Europe nor the U.S. had any restrictions on migration. In the U.S., no visas or passports were even needed to enter the country.
That wave of globalization was interrupted because of World War I, and the next wave of globalization did not occur until the early 1980s. In many ways, the new wave of capitalist globalization was more intense than the one that had preceded it as it was characterized by massive financial deregulation and the acceleration of capital flows while trade integration became more rapid than ever. By the 1990s, the new wave of globalization had reached such heights that the world was increasingly becoming a global village. Let’s call it the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave.
However, there was one huge qualitative difference between the 19th-century and the late 20th-century waves of globalization. While capital movements exploded during the late 20th-century wave of globalization and multinationals moved across the world in search of cheaper labor, labor migration was severely restricted. In contrast, migration became truly globalized in the late 19th century. And the late 20th-century wave of globalization, which was supposed to produce unrivaled benefits for all, also had another dark side: While it was not openly imperialistic as the 19th-century wave of globalization, it was based nonetheless on highly exploitative structures that were not much different from those of colonialism. After all, capitalism has always nurtured dependence, inequality, and exploitation.
Under the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave, the Global North took advantage of the weakness of the Global South by trapping millions of its workers in a relentless cycle of exploitation while offshoring had dramatic impacts on the standard of living of average citizens back in the Global North as well-paid industrial jobs became few and far in between, wages stagnated, and the social safety net was torn apart, partly because of less government revenues due to neoliberal tax cuts for corporations and the rich and partly on account of simple ideological reasoning. Austerity for the masses but subsidies, tax breaks, and bailouts for industry and the financial sector is a central aspect of the ideological agenda of neoliberalism. And while some developing nations did benefit from the great connectivity in the global economy that has been unleashed since the early 1980s, it is primarily the elites in the Global South, as much as it is in the Global North, that gained the most from the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave.
Enter politics.
By the late 1990s, grievances over the direction of the capitalist world economy united people to demand change and an anti-globalization movement surfaced across the globe, protesting specifically against the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave. Protests and demonstrations against the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund became a common feature of the anti-globalization movement across a large number of countries from 1995 to 2018. The anti-globalization movement was inspired by left-wing ideologies and was impressively transnational. Latin America’s anti-globalization movement was especially successful, resulting in support and eventually electoral victory for left-wing parties in scores of countries in the region. Indeed, a database on political institutions reveals that in the early 1990s, 64% of Latin American presidents came from a right-wing party. But a decade later, that number had shrunk to half.
The anti-globalization and anti-capitalist movement was no less prominent in Europe. In the summer of 2001, more than 300,000 people from all over Europe gathered in Genoa, Italy to voice their opposition to the G8 Group, while the Italian police unleashed violence of a dimension unknown up to that point in postwar Western Europe. In the spring of 2002, more than half a million people in Barcelona mobilized against the European Union Heads of State and Government under the banner against Capital and War.
The anti-globalization movement had come of age. The prospects for radical change had never looked more promising than they did during the first decade of the new millennium. The winds of change were still in the air in the second decade of the new millennium as the rise to power of the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) party in Greece brought hope to leftist movements worldwide, although it was abundantly clear to anyone willing to pay close attention to Greek politics at the time that the leadership of the party had made a decision to switch its ideological profile from radicalism to pragmatism in anticipation of its coming to power.
There is indeed one impressive thing about the rapid and sweeping changes brought about by the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave, and that is none other than the fact that the world now spins faster. Extraordinary social, political, and ideological changes can happen from one decade to the next. And, lo and behold, by the end of the second decade of the new millennium, not only did the radical left critique of globalization lose its appeal for the working class and huge chunks of youth, but anti-globalism emerged as a major ideological tenet of the extreme right.
However, the backlash against globalism by hard-right and far-right parties was not based on a scathing critique of neoliberal capitalism but was seen instead as a political project advanced by Marxism and the radical left with the double aim of destroying national culture and replacing the nation-state with institutions of global governance. This is of course an evasion of what capitalist globalization is all about, but it would be naïve to think that the backlash against globalism by the far-right does not have socioeconomic roots. The anti-globalist sentiment that brought President Donald Trump to power in the United States and scores of other authoritarian political figures across the world is driven by both cultural and socioeconomic factors and is nurtured by the “us versus them” mentality. The far-right of course is not anti-systemic and in fact enjoys the support of digital moguls like Elon Musk. As such, it is fooling voters on the economy with promises of a new order. The far-right’s anti-globalism stance begins and ends with the imposition of draconian measures against immigration and the creation of a culture of cruelty.
The anti-globalism of the far-right is perverse and irrational, and thus it may speak volumes of the need of a widely and publicly educated citizenry to sustain democracy, but it also calls attention to the gross political failures of the reformist left parties that came to power during the height of the anti-globalization period. Indeed, while the contradictions of neoliberal globalization led to electoral victories of left parties in scores of countries across the world during the last couple of decades, the shift to global neoliberalism was not countered by the parties of the reformist left that came to power. They may have criticized neoliberal hyper-globalization while they were in opposition, but they did very little once they came to power to combat its destructive effects. At the very best, they increased spending on social programs but did not try to diminish the spread of globalization on their economies and societies. Subsequently, by failing to tame, let alone shrink, capitalist globalization, they quickly saw their political fortunes decline and found citizens changing sides. This is the principal factor that has activated a turn to the far-right across the globe, including the United States, although Trumpism also needs to be considered in light of the peculiar social, cultural, and ideological features of the country.
The problem with the reformist left vis-à-vis neoliberal globalization remains. That is, it advances a critique of the consequences of capitalist globalization but seems to accept the phenomenon as inevitable and unalterable. In doing so, it leaves the field open for far-right populists to make inroads with disgruntled voters by appealing to their worst instincts as in the case of immigration.
We also know that pressure “from below” to tame or even reverse neoliberal globalization, a view that was held by the main body of the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s and 2000s, is a flawed strategy. The way out of neoliberal globalization is by developing a new globalization that is free from the destructive tendencies of capitalist accumulation and operates through political processes in which democracy and globalization are in a symbiotic relationship and thus support and reinforce each other.
The left is historically obligated to advance an alternative vision of a world order beyond capitalism. A world order where the rights of labor are at the pinnacle of human society and thus the means of production are collectively owned by workers while the exploitation of nature is seen as injustice.
In sum, systemic change for ending neoliberal hyper-globalization is a prerequisite but such a project mandates anti-systemic consciousness and a comprehensive political program for a new world order. If the left fails to develop the courage to engage itself economically, politically, ideologically, and culturally in the making of an alternative world order, capitalist globalization will continue to reign supreme, and the far-right will be its main political beneficiary.
The use of the term globalization for both an era of a more free movement of people (labor) in the 19th century and its restriction in the later 20th century is problematic in my mind. In the former the inflow brought workers in to be exploited here. With the advances in global communications of the 1970s allowing middle and upper managers to oversee their productions remotely, they could leave labor for exploitation in place. I don’t know what term to replace globalization with for the earlier era, but I think the finer distinction should be made. And today capital moves around the world instantaneously.
Alice X. Agreed. The term globalization in this piece is covering a multitude of sins.
Till they finally get to: “The left is historically obligated to advance an alternative vision of a world order beyond capitalism. A world order where the rights of labor are at the pinnacle of human society and thus the means of production are collectively owned by workers while the exploitation of nature is seen as injustice.”
Along with the “right to remain in place,” as Johnny GL notes below, as well as the Calabrian essayist and teacher, Vito Teti, who has been writing for years and years about those who stay.
Some threads have to be pulled apart here:
–Free movement of labor? Given documentation and recognized rights with regard to wages, hours, workplace safety?
–Free movement of labor? Or a bunch of people imported to do the “work no one else wants to do” (a dubious proposition) and remain underpaid in a kind of gray economy?
–Free movement of capital? Why? Because the Channel Islands have to be tax havens?
–I notice that people like Hillary Clinton always want to eliminate borders. Cheap nannies? And what about many countries in Latin America who don’t want to end up with scads of silly gringos? Think of Mexico…
–Free trade? Tariffs? Why should the EU import foodstuffs from the U.S. of A. that don’t accord with best practices and safety. In Italy, I note the use of olive oil, safflower oil, some palm oil. Am I supposed to look forward to importation from the U S of A of hydrolyzed cottonseed oil, soy oil, or corn oil? And all the high-fructose corn syrup?
–And why should bourgeois ideas of free movement and free trade govern what others are allowed to do and allowed to have? The U S of A suffers from a notoriously detached and cruel bourgeoisie (Thiel, the Clintons, Trump, Saint Madeleine Albright). Should they go worldwide?
–The authors make a mistake in acting as if human events have no moral value: The transatlantic slave trade sure was great as a movement of labor and capital. Are we supposed to bring back the Middle Passage?
Right there at the end.
I have wondered the same.
After all, human trafficking is still big business.
Low wages are exalted and the lowest are zero wages.
And looking at the global leadership, I don’t see any “good guys”. I’m less impressed from sea to shining sea with each day.
DJG, Reality Czar:
Duuuuuude … seriously … can I come over to Chocolate City one time, so I can plot global-revolution-on-a-floppy-disk with you?!
😁
#SameSame #NoCenterPeriphery #NoHavesAndHaveNots #EquipotentialSurfaces
ChrisRUEcon. I’m waiting.
I’m not sure about floppy disks. But yesterday, I had local “ravioles” — which are dumpling like gnocchi here — with nettles. Metaphorical? Revolutionary? You’ll have to assess the situation from the ground level.
You know, Dred Scott was supposed to enshrine free movement of (unfree) labor. Look what it did to enable the far right fringe to come to power in reaction and the unprovoked full scale war of aggression that they launched! (Sort of sarcasm, but not really, but definitely with a big /i).
I wonder how this new globalization can be created. Take what’s going on in the US as an example. I live in Maryland, a reliably blue state. But the response of the majority Democratic politicians at both local and federal levels has been pretty weak. They have held job fairs for fired federal employees and have touted the law suits that have been filed. One of the county council members of my county is currently proposing a mortgage moratorium for fired federal employees. I doubt that will go far but it’s indicative of the sort of thing these politicians are doing.
The job fairs drew big crowds initially but they didn’t really have any effect on employment. The state is having big budget problems and those will only increase as the federal budget bill becomes a reality. Wes Moore, our current governor, is a big dream type of politician who talks a lot about opportunity and education etc etc but has no deep insight into the class and culture problems of this country. He’s not unique in that, of course.
I just can’t quite see how this current batch of Democrats–who are by default in a position of being reformers–will be able to rise to the potential in the situation. They don’t identify themselves as reformers. They seem stuck in a defense of some status quo they imagine was better than reality.
> Democrats–who are by default in a position of being reformers
The Democratic Party is the light that guides us in these dark times.
James Carville’s plan is to do nothing and wait until Trump implodes. Let’s not confuse a guiding light with stumbling aimlessly in the darkness.
Yup, sounds like the response here in true blue MA, too. Governor is shutting down the weird, failed experiment of housing huge numbers of migrants in hotels.
But, honestly, there’s not much in the way of ideas or passion or vision.
The party that spent 4 years lying and covering for biden’s failing health has no other sense of direction, other than trying to protect its leadership.
Virginia already has casinos in its old one industry towns. The government jobs that make up so much of Eastern Maryland and Northern Virginia don’t need to be done there. The Maryland side has more to offer, but Northern Virginia would have been devastated by any kind of change to government spending. It was a mess created via the shuttering of government offices around the country.
Instead of trying to promote a dynamic economy, they were focused on making sure nothing changed hence their support for loathsome politicians who would keep the status quo. See Gerry Connolly.
The solutions are things like beefing up ss, making college free, and actual healthcare (many people would live more simply if the threat of losing Healthcare wasn’t an issue).
I would also note that the federal spending in long term, safe Team Blue seats was heavily shaped by Shrub buying votes to avoid opposition for things like the Patriot Act. Republican congress critters in less safe seats griped about this.
The heavy Federal workforce areas of Virginia and Maryland are going to be screwed as the script flips when the spigot is open. Democrats around the country aren’t going to want a return to normalcy either.
Buckley vs Valeo to Citizens United, SCOTUS has extra legislatively converted a Republic to a Market: politics as a market is definitionally and universally corrupt.
The legacy Parties exist as gatekeepers to the ballot, who by selecting whom is on the ballot continue to try to maintain the narrative of Republic without allowing any of its politics to be functionally expressed.
The “solutions” you list, in the market that has become of our erstwhile politics, constitute diversions of cash flows from Corporations or Oligarchs who have paid handsomely to have those cash flows guaranteed by the Fed Gov and who will pay whatever they have to and can pay to preserve those flows under whatever perverse rubric their paid agents in the legislature must craft to maintain the narrative of Republic without actually changing any market arrangements.
“Normal” has made every election cycle since Buckley another turn of the neoliberal ratchet up to now, where unless you’re a secure bureaucrat in service to the Oligarchs, the Republican narrative is in tatters. Unfortunately, most of those who still vote still impose their Republican vision on the tattered narrative waived in their faces every two years (use of “Republican” & “Republic” designate a type of system in this comment, not the fossil fuel wing of the Oligarchs Uniparty).
Historically, the US has always been an oligarchic republic (Roman empire was built mostly while Rome was a Republic), and had only a short intermission in the 1945-1975ish period with some scraps to hoi polloi. The “free land” given to setlers in 1800s was actually stolen from the natives.
Heck, the first president of US made his fortune with land stolen from the natives. Heck, the main cause of the revolution was the anger of the colonists for not being allowed to get more land and that the Metropolitan power refused to do it for them. This is why the fury that their taxes were not spent on the right place. The “indians” burning the ship with tea wasn’t done as a cover up story but to provide facts to push the Metropol to go to war against the natives.
History would have been different if the English were to immediately start a war against the tribes…
The US is in fact Oligarchy Inc. and this is why it is never difficult to find compradror elites all over the world, including in Russia and China. It fulfills the same function the Czarist Empire had for Europe, helping Monarchies and conservatives there maintain their power in the face of rising populs or upstarts.
Agreed.
There remains, however, “brand fumes” from The New Deal, and I suspect we’re approaching something like a nailing of the 99 theses to the cathedral door moment for information technology.
And the oligarchs are soiling themselves spectacularly, so if some good ideas are lying around when power briefly falls in the street, who knows what might happen!
As it’s been said: there’s globalization and there’s global trade. Doesn’t mean the same thing.
And…
The majority of people live and work in the same country that they are born. They want to stay. There’s power in place and community and there are people are fighting for their right to stay in place.
I just felt that needed to be emphasized.
Agreed, you don’t fight neoliberalism with ‘freedom of movement’. You fight it with the ‘right to stay in place’.
“There’s power in place and community and there are people are fighting for their right to stay in place.”
If you go to upstate New York, you can drive around and see cities and towns that are dying because there is nothing to do there job-wise. The Democrat solution has been “move to where the jobs are.” In practice, this means finding the money to move someplace where you have no connections and housing is unaffordable. If you do not want to do this, then it means you are racist because you don’t want to live around “diverse” people. That “diverse” people can no longer live in the city because their neighborhoods were destroyed by upper middle class midwits gentrifying the place is not to be mentioned.
The populist right has seized on this disconnect to appeal to voters. As for the left, it’s too small and powerless to accomplish much. Meanwhile, the progressives have nothing better to do then call everything they don’t like “racist.”
Here here. I was just listening to the latest episode of the Macrodose podcast which was a live interview, and one of the guests (I think Geoff Mann) took a moment to poop all over euro MAGAs and their mass freakout over the fifteen minute cities initiative. To be clear, I live in the most walkable neighborhood of PDX, with a ten minute walk along tree covered, low traffic volume streets to Powells Books, Forest Park, half a dozen grocery stores, and countless other attractions. I love it and wouldn’t trade it for anything.
That all said, in the yes-it’s-still-churning wake of the ’08 crash and foreclosure crisis, you really have to be a special kind of stupid to not appreciate how something like fifteen minute cities might be implemented in a coercive, dystopian manner. And in London especially, where the interview was recorded, you really have to be an egregiously special kind of stupid to not appreciate it. Might it be the 21st century Enclosure Movement? Signs point to yes!
Something published already in 1848, and yet somehow seems very current today. I’m not saying Marx is a solution to everything, but trying to point out that this is not a new problem for “the Left”. And that some rather smart people have been thinking about this for 180 years.
Maybe start by dusting off the concept of “class” and move on from there?
There used to be this thing called “The International”, that was a global movement for democracy. That could be revived and strengthened with its own parties in every country. These could be working class, internationalist parties. Just spitballing.
Stay Classy, NC:
Classunity.org
“The anti-globalism of the far-right is perverse and irrational, and thus it may speak volumes of the need of a widely and publicly educated citizenry to sustain democracy, but it also calls attention to the gross political failures of the reformist left parties that came to power during the height of the anti-globalization period.”
A: The anti-globalism of the far-right is not irrational and certainly less perverse than the current neoliberal regimes.
B: Where is this mythical land where an actual leftist party came to power? Greece, perhaps. Podemos in Spain maybe, but not a single major country has elected an actual leftwing party in over a generation.
Good question. But consider the fate of the actual leftist party in power in Chile in 1973, or more recently the failures of Sanders in the US and Corbyn in the UK. Leftists and their efforts, such as OWS, and now even liberal policies, have been destroyed by US forces and foreign supporters at least since the 1940’s. As retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, said on Glenn Diesen’s youtube:
“…we orchestrated these campaigns to get what I call tyrannies of the minority. We found the political minority, not the majority, that wanted NATO membership… and we backed it to the hilt. We bought articles. We bought newspapers. We bought magazines. Same thing we did in Italy in 1948 when we didn’t want the communists to be elected. We bought the Italian government.”
The Left needs good programs, but even more, strategies to avoid destruction.
Great political theorists of the 19th Century:
Marx: Class relations explain the political antagonisms of Capitalist society.
Jay Gould: “I can pay half the working class to kill the other half.”
OSS into CIA in 47 institutionalized in the US empire what various Gentlemen’s Clubs and Govt Agencies in the UK had done to operationalize Goulds counter vision to Marx, here we are: real change will be dangerous, but the longer it waits the worse the outcome for the working class.
Don’t forget the corollary to Gould’s saying: “One half of the ruling class will always hire us to kill the other half.”
There is little joy in being part of an oligarchy–it’s a lifetime of factionalism and fear. Membership comes with a Darwin Award.
The oligarchic class is stable, but its composition is not. The rate of turn-over can be quite impressive. Oligarchs spend most of their time and energy fending off their fellows, and they inevitably find that attack is the best form of defense.
Intra-class struggle takes place in all classes. There is no limit to the differences that can be found between people, or that can be made between people. Much unites all people, but people need to be reminded of it.
yes…no limit to the differences…..that can be made between people
a musical refrain comes to mind…British group…Pink Floyd
”you have to be trusted by the people that you lie to”
“In sum, systemic change for ending neoliberal hyper-globalization is a prerequisite but such a project mandates anti-systemic consciousness and a comprehensive political program for a new world order.”
Another “new world order.”? Bush Sr’s. phrase? Really?
Philip Pilkington wrote a book about reforming economics theory and education. That would be a good place to start, imo. Actual leftists, (as opposed to liberals), were largely driven out of academic economics departments 50 years ago. What is happening in economics departments these days? What are students being taught? I think that’s the place to start. Skip the new world order stuff. How about new economics theory in academia?
Book review of Pilkington’s book in American Affairs Journal, 2020.
The Reformation in Economics: Back to the Future
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/02/the-reformation-in-economics-back-to-the-future/
Great idea!
25 years of identity politics destroyed any/all pan-identity, intra-class solidarity—then spread salt on the embers
Heck of a jobs SJWs, and the elites who wrote the checks (to sincerely, unironically spread the gospel)
Not to put on a foil hat or anything, but it almost seems like someone wanted that to happen.
In the past it was called “divide and conquer”. Now it’s called: black/white; right wing/leftwing; immigrant/citizen; high tech/Luddite; Russian/Ukrainian ……….
Yesterday’s tinfoil is today’s objective reality. Idpol is the handmaiden of globalism. Identity politcians are hucksters, and their followers are the useful idiots of the system.
At this point, the only thing the left could do that would be more idiotic than pushing any sort of globalism would be to continue to march under the banner of gender dysphoria and state-sanctioned child abuse.
Unfortunately, the illogic of millenial social justice had made the trans fad a tar baby for the poor Br’er Rabbits of progressivism.
Definitely one of the popular tunes on Frank Wisner’s “Mighty Wurlitzer”.
A few modest proposals.
Prepare for and insist on radical transparency. That goes for all elected officials and their auditable departments. And at the ballot box. Paper ballots counted in public on election day, as other countries have managed to do.
No Congressional self-dealing, no insider trading. If they want to invest, do it like the public does, only in a blind trust with available options like ETFs, funds, bills, bonds and similar. They can have their own personal lockboxes, to be opened when they leave government.
No phony NGO grifts where some of the money gets kicked back to the big guy or anyone! Serve the people who need help, not just those with lobbyists having their hands out.
Enough with the purity tests! The circular firing squads of the IdPol era should demonstrate for about the millionth time that they are counterproductive. A prior example was the environmental movement that could’ve been so much more after a good start 50ish years ago.
The above items looked pretty good during my parents’ generation. Not perfect by any means, but a more solid basis than is evident now,.
Start there and keep preparing, thinking through and aiming at representative government that really does serve the people.
The problems go much deeper than the social movements and economic systems of the last few centuries.
The human mind evolved to solve current problems it is presented with. The effect of which is patches over the tears in the previous patches, going back to the dawn of civilization.
This might take some context to develop, so keeping it brief as possible;
Consider democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. To the Ancients, gods were metaphors. The Christian Trinity goes back to fertility rites. The young god, born in the spring to the old sky god and earth mother. Though by the age of the Olympians, Zeus didn’t give way to Dionysus. Tradition prevailed over renewal. Which left fertile ground for the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus to take root, as metaphor for rebirth and renewal. Also seeing beyond the confines of the tribal order. Jesus would have been a liberal.
At this stage of intellectual evolution, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. Basically an enumeration of the tribal societies that defined society, up until several thousand years ago.
Which might seem like a long time, but in evolutionary terms, is an eye blink.
Ancient Israel was a monarchy. The Big Guy Rules. Like the religion.
By the time Constantine co-opted Christianity as the state religion of Rome, it too had started to calcify, so it was the monotheism that was emphasized, to validate the Empire and bury any reminders of the Republic. While the implications of the Trinity where shrouded in the Holy Ghost. Making Christianity conservative, as the cultural totem.
So then the Catholic Church served as the eschatological basis for European monarchy. Divine right of kings, as opposed to consent of the governed. When the West went back to popular forms of government, it required separation of church and state, culture and civics, morality and law.
The logical flaw in modern monotheism, the Catholic “all-knowing absolute,” is what is proposed are ideals and ideals are not absolutes. Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The core codes, creeds, heroes, narratives at the center of every culture are ideals. The totem at the center of the village. The grain of sand at the center of the pearl.
The universal, on the other hand, is the elemental. So a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which life rises, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The light shining through the film, than the stories playing out on it.
While many profess to be atheists these days, the fact is that Western Civilization has been defined by monotheism. Consequently everything is defined in monolithic terms, from atoms to individuals, when the reality is best understood dualistically. The node is one. The network is oneness. “Entangled particles”
There is no more conservative without liberal, than there is up without down, good without bad, positive without negative, etc. It also injects a messianic impulse into this monolithic focus. Which polarizes the polarities. When the liberals run amok, puberty becomes a fascist plot. When the conservatives run amok, we are off Holy Warring the Infidels again.
Liberal and conservative are two sides of the social dynamic, of expansion and consolidation. As Robert Frost put it, “If you are not liberal when you are young, you have no heart. If you are not conservative when you are old, you have no head.” The anarchies of desire versus the tyrannies of judgement. Motor and steering.
One way to frame this is the relationship between energy and form. Energy expands, structure coalesces. Like galaxies. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. Which creates the effect of time. As presence, the energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated go future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
It is only because this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, that we experience time as this flow from past to future.
Consciousness goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Suggesting consciousness manifests as energy. As the digestive system processes the energy, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise, there is this intellectual prioritization of the patterns. The models take precedence over what is being modeled. Maps over territory. Math over physical. “It from bit.” As with religion, when theory becomes doctrine, it can only be patched, never falsified. What if you could just write in a figure and call it Dark Money, when the books don’t add up?
Which gets back to that relationship between nodes and networks. The node is synchronization. Everything, everyone on the same wavelength, functioning as one. That centripetal coalescing around the core focus. Eye of the storm.
While the essence of the network, all that energy being traded around, is harmonization.
As individual organisms, we have the nervous system to harmonize all our bodily functions as one entity. While we have blood and the circulation system to network all the cells, organisms,, muscles, etc. in overall harmony.
As states function as social super organisms, they develop governments as a form of nervous system, executive and regulatory, to get the society functioning as one. Which is backed up by culture/religions, as core principles, but Western Civ currently has that schizophrenic divide between moral and law..
Along with forms of money and banking as the blood and circulation system.
While we have evolved enough to understand the function of government has to be the health of the entire community, not just accumulation of power by those at the top, it has to be a public utility. We yet to understand the same principle applies to banking. Partly because its networking function makes it more diffuse and harder to objectify. When the medium enabling markets is a player and not a utility, the rest are tenant farmers to the banks.
I could continue, but I’m sure this is the limits of most patience. Yet the fact is the West has far greater problems than finding an antidote to Trumpism. It is losing all moral legitimacy in Gaza and all political integrity in Ukraine, as well as the bond markets starting to look down the road toward that eventual cliff. So just trying to dig a little deeper on a Sunday morning.
Interesting thoughts. Have you read any of Iain McGilchrist’s works, such as The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World?
A lot I agree with in here. But as I’m wont, I’ll bring up a couple of quibbles about what you’ve written.
I don’t associate democracy or republicanism with pantheism but with polytheism, though there are some folks around here who can suggest other religions and philosophies that were around at the time. Pantheism and animism go back to the days when we humans were in greater harmony with Nature, although we have some beloved examples here at NC.
I agree completely that the gods in a polytheistic system serve as metaphors for the forces encountered by the believers in the myth. In the Ba’al cycle of Ugarit, that was quite explicit. Two of the major players were named Yam (sea) and Mot (death and the blistering east wind). The hero, Ba’al is a “rider on the clouds” that brings the life giving rains on the Levant.
The ancient Near East was henotheistic. As you say, one people, one rule, one god. But there was no assertion that there was only one god. Instead, when one nation defeated another, the victor’s god defeated the loser’s god. This was driven home by the neo-Babylonians when they destroyed YHWH’s house in Jerusalem before taking Judah’s political and religious elites into exile in Babylon. Amazingly, some of these exiles, like Second Isaiah, did the opposite of what might be expected. Instead of giving up on the defeated YHWH, these originators of a new religion claimed that YHWH was the ONLY God, and they took as his model an ancient Near Eastern tyrant.
Appreciate your offering. We need to be digging a little deeper these days.
The focus here is on the wrong causal force. Globalism is not the real problem and, in a good or bad manner, is inevitable due to the current and future state of the technology. Globalism is a smoke screen narrative/ideology, like the smoke screen narrative/ideology of capitalism, that obscures the real structural forces. The true answer can be found in this article and everywhere else that you look. The quasi-capitalist forces we refer to as rightist are more willing to use and significantly more capable of using force, cruelty, and violence to crush its progressive and other opposition. Scan quickly the history of the Jim Crow era, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and others in the USA. When the Soviet Union fell in the 1990s, it was only about 10 years before the quasi-capitalist USA elites invaded Iraq. After the collapse of the balancing competition from the communists, the quasi-capitalists saw the opportunity to begin to conquer violently and blatantly. Piketty’s book reveals the real challenge. The only hope is to address the threat of the elites with persistent force. The wealth and influence accumulated by the quasi-capitalists must be redistributed to those who actually did most to produce it, on an ongoing basis. This can only be done through politically forceful resistance. Our only real hope may be in China, and maybe Europe. The USA appears to be now owned by quasi-capitalist kleptocrats.
I’m sorry but the EU is no longer the answer for you/us.It is now led by unelected individuals who are concerned to achieve total power over European subjects. The will to power indicated by the drive to create a military economy and the deliberate denial of a proto/neo-nazi drive is aimed at dismantling nationalities and subjecting Europe’s people to increasing poverty and social insecurity.
I don’t know, “leadership” on both banks of the Atlanticist pond are making epic efforts to destroy their own legitimacy.
At various local levels, again on both sides of the pond, popular legitimacy persists in the massive inertia of millions going about their business.
As hubris and incompetence on the EU/US level disintegrates current institutional lines of command, new possibilities can arise from lower, still functioning political tiers. Crisis/oportunity.
At the risk of becoming a Johnny one note on this issue, I’m once again posting a link to the following article previously linked here at NC.
It raises for me the question as to what incentive workers of the Global North have to more equitably address the inequality described. It would seem to my admittedly inexpert eye that the impetus for change lies pretty much solely with workers and political leaders of the Global South. Labor movement economism in the North, to some not insignificant degree, can be characterized as demanding a larger slice of stolen pie.
Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy
In response to the above some of us would drop the needle on a broken record and say it’s not about ideology at all but about power. What has happened in the last few decades is the phenomenon of oligarchy reasserting itself against equality, after first corrupting the political system to give them the power to do so. Neoliberalism–voodoo economics–is just a mask to make this seem somehow respectable. After all the left had an “ideology” and so they needed one too.
And the reason that these spasms of oligarchy come in waves is that the urge toward hierarchy–power–corrupts and creates social failures that can’t sustain themselves. The imperialism of the 19th century produced the World Wars of the 20th. For awhile the powers that be learn their lesson from all the mayhem and then forget because the urge toward hierarchy is baked in the cake. The founders understood this this and tried to make our society all about “freedom”–at least in theory. They also said “if you can keep it” because as students of history they knew that other forces than the intellectual are in play.
The reason the left has failed is their illusion that ideas or education will conquer the world. What they really need is power. And the peaceful route to power is to bring back democracy, little mentioned in the above.
The bull is power. The matador is art.
We need to reconcile our top down models of reality with the bottom up dynamics driving it.
Maps and territory.
Yet it will take far more mental boxes being smashed to reach that stage.
The mother of all reality checks is in the mail.
We were talking here the other day about the creation of the map/territory issue coinciding with the creation of language. And further, that foray into language constituting “the apple” rather than agriculture. For example, once we name the animal a tiger, we begin to lose the notion that it’s a being with a spirit like the one we believe we have.
Does the use of ‘globalism’ in this case ignore the syndicalist, confederationist, internationalist aspects of various left movements? Among communists and anarchist groups the idea always was a worldwide integration of federations, labor and economies.
To me, capitalist globalism is a setting up the infrastructure, the framework or apparatus, by which this would be achieved. The stepping stone needed to get us from capitalism to alternatives. Once capitalism fails, and Trump sure seems to be speeding up that process, what is left are economies which, if they must revert to worker owned and operated means of production, would nevetheless need to exchange resources across global geopolitical boundaries.
And geopolitical boundaries are imaginary faith-based intersubjective constructs anyway, which melt away when, say, Canadian workers, are in solidarity and fraternity with those in Peru, or Germany, or Brazil. When everyone is on the same team and not trying to destroy each other, those boundaries become more quaint and symbolic than real. And thus internationalism is achieved. True globalism?
All this global trade requires complex financial and legal systems that will be part of any failure of capitalism. Isn’t it highly unlikely that the Internet is unlikely to survive such a failure either. I think of Kevin Costner riding from town to town with a bag of letters.
Localization is the future not by choice but by necessity. And after some adjustment, its value will become more apparent.
I am increasingly persuaded that any call for a “global” or universal human response to the poisons of neocolonialism and neoliberalism are doomed fantasy substitutions for the necessary work of local and national recognition of the need to acknowledge that such a thing as “public purpose” exists (no small feat against powerfully atomizing ideology and the paymasters who fund its propagation and sustainment) along with a program identifying its priorities and a process for its implementation. This means engaging in political struggle which acknowledges and identifies enemies of the project and is serious about the struggle to wrest the levers of state power away from them. And this cannot simply be an intellectual project — in order to mobilize the numbers necessary to win and sustain control over the levers of state power, the whole spectrum of human motivations and engagement have to be leveraged: cultural, spiritual, dare I say even tribal (which needn’t necessarily imply racial).
To be clear I am not accusing this author nor all others who make the global or universal proposals of intentionally distracting from the sort of project I am imagining — I just think they are trying swallow more than can immediately be managed without first doing the hard yards closer to home.
Seizing the levers of power may be a project that must be undertaken in short order, or it won’t be worth the trouble.
We in the west have weak governments dominated by corporations. Globalism encourages this. If there is a leftist solution it isn’t global, but national. Concentrate on a political project in the nation state. Aim for autonomy and autarky. Leftist governments have been elected in Nicaragua and Venezuela with these goals. Unable to defeat them via war and sanctions, the west calls them authoritarian dictatorships. But they are still there!
I suppose the “left” has to understand how to talk about production. After all, production is in the hand of capåitalists, or rather rentiers who treat it as a tollbooth as Michael Hudson has said.
While the “West” has lost much of its productive power because of that, and with that a lot of jobs, East Asia has gained enormously with its version of state-directed capitalism. That is, capitalism can’t deliver unless it is ruled with politics aimed at providing the country, instead of a market aimed at providing the rentiers.
So far, I can’t see any political faction that talks about that in a way that seems trustworthy.
This seems relevant–Trump playbook for crushing the “left.”
https://scheerpost.com/2025/05/25/project-esther-is-a-mccarthy-era-blueprint-for-crushing-the-american-left/
One might almost assert that the Progressives Except for Palestine have brought it on themselves.
“First they came for the Palestinians, and I said nothing.”
Thank you!
The modern version might go like this:
First, they came for Palestinians, and we cheered because we ain’t them.
….
When they came for us, no one did anything because they ain’t us.
Idpol creates this mentality, in its perverse extension: every tribe is separate–other tribes ain’t us.
Interesting article, and the funders listed in the article linked therein: Kochs, Bradleys; Scaifes; (Mellons). For decades, these people have plagued us with their funding climate denial and even church schisms. Inherited wealth is a curse on the society that allows it at such scales. When the family business is a restaurant or a family farm, fine. But when it’s billions, you’re creating people who are a threat to all of us.
The People’s Republic of China defines ‘globalization’ completely differently from the capitalist, neoliberal West. For China, globalization is the mere existence of coordinated supply chains. For the West, it is financial control of production and trade. What the Left needs is a definite analysis of this kind of perverse neoliberal finance capitalism, a method to defeat it, and a means to create a world in conformity with systems like China’s.
The Left (not the reform Left) tends to always start its analysis from a stance of epistemic closure.
It believes that its fundamental assumptions about how the world works contain all the necessary answers and would be successful today if not for repressive capitalist oligarchs and sophisticated propaganda.
How about starting with or experimenting with a premise of incompleteness and at least assuming a partially unknown character operating as part of objective reality
Is it at least possible that building the salient points of one’s conclusions into one’s premises is a sly but necessary philosophical move that provisionally fills an objective-knowledge gap but that ends up accepting circularity as a largely fact of logical life.
Three cheers for skepticism across the board.
Would be nice to see more conversation about worker-cooperatives as a post capitalist solution that can appeal to both the right and left. With Labor renting capital, rather than people being rented, the means of production become controlled by workers. Workers owning their labor appeals to individual liberty as well as collective justice. Would love to see a political party place this in the center of their platform.
Z Magazine and Democracy Now! had coverage of liberal protests against globalization in the late 1990s. I remember it vividly. Seattle and Genoa in particular, protesting the World Bank and IMF.
Being “anti-globalist” now belongs to conservatives. What happened? Why didn’t the Left and Right meet up on the bridge?
Because the Left was co-opted by climate change. And climate change—or “sustainable development”—is the New Left’s plan for globalization. If you can’t see that you are blind. The WEF’s “own nothing and be happy” is a direct decendant of “Limits To Growth” and “The First Global Revolution.”
So the Left now cheers for what it claims to be fighting against.
Are your complaints about the solutions to climate change from the WEF or EU? If so, I’m with you. They’re not real and shift the burden from the people who caused this mess–2/3 of global warming since 1990 is attributable to the world’s wealthiest 10%–to the people whose carbon footprints are minuscule in the Global South.
But if you’re denying the reality of climate change at this point, you’ll have to resort soon to claiming WEF weather machines are making the weather more dangerous to fool us into believing in climate change so they can take away all our Stuff.
And before dissing Limits to Growth again, you might want to check out this recent article checking on just how those 50+ year-old projections are doing. Spoiler alert:
Oh for Pete’s sake, no recognition that the Democratic party has crushed, absolutely crushed any populist attempts for change away from centrist neoliberalism/globalism which wrecks the lower and middle class?
But yeah, sure, a new vision will fix that.
Author misses the difference between globalism and internationalism.
Internationalism respects sovereignty and nationality. Those things are highly problematic, but an internationalist wants to deal with those problems. For that matter, interpersonal relations are problematic, but those who respect persons want to deal with the problems which arise from personality.
The globalist, on the other hand, doesn’t want to deal with those problems. The globalist wants to impose their own sovereignty over all else–a sovereignty just for the globalists to enjoy. One Ring to rule them all.
The Left, therefore, should have no truck with globalism.
As for the developing countries, what they need are strong states, because that’s how countries develop. All the developed countries developed, because they developed strong states.
A stable world order demands a world full of strong states. The Left wants all people, and all peoples, to be strong.
The chrysales of statehood are to be sloughed off, but only in the very long run, and with scarce note. If it takes conscious act, then it’s premature.
Hard to understand this Left/Right story. In the day, you had an international communist movement which backstopped a “radical left”–that is off the radar with the collapse of the Soviet Union. You had serious Social Democratic parties and movements, at least in Europe and American conquests like Japan, with the Jakarta solution if they cropped up anywhere else. Its very hard to find any real social democracy in Europe these days. The economic left has been supplanted by identity politics and cultural issues. While there is less Jakarta solution internationally, what is left is primarily pro-corporate center right or center left.
It is fine if people want to talk left/right, but there real question is there anything like a movement to support the interests of workers (what might be called the dictatorship of the proletariat) in contrast to the dictatorship of capitalist interests. It is really hard to see anything like that. The globalist left story is just the globalist right political program with some empathetic speeches and maybe extended unemployment benefits in times of financial crisis. Further, as far as ecological questions go, capitalists are going to keep exploiting resources, energy use will only increase with population and production gains, so you may have some “green businesses” that get government subsidies but nothing substantive to change anything, whether you call it left or right.
I suspect one reason the left is in disarray while the right gains speed is that capitalists put many resources into stymieing the left while supporting the right. And with that support they are able to steer the conversation away from uncomfortable truths and towards blaming Marxists or whatever.