Hillary wants to surrender America to globalism. She wants a country without borders. She wants trade deals written for the benefit of foreign corporations. She wants a government that ignores the will of the people. She wants to sell out American security to the Clinton Foundation for a pile of cash. It is hard to tell where the Clinton Foundation ends and the State Department begins. ... Hillary Clinton has betrayed her duty to the people. ~Donald TrumpIt has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the laws of gravity. ~Kofi AnnanToday, no country can ever truly cut itself off from the global media or from external sources of information; trends that start in one corner of the world are rapidly replicated thousands of miles away... A country trying to opt out of the global economy by cutting itself off from external trade and capital flows will still have to deal with the fact that the expectations of its population are shaped by their awareness of living standards and cultural products emerging from the outside world. ~Francis FukuyamaOur aim should be from time to time to take such steps as may be possible toward creating something like an organization of the civilized nations, because as the world becomes more highly organized the need for navies and armies will diminish. ~Theodore Roosevelt
Globalization, orglobalisation, is the process ofinteraction and integration among people, companies, and governments worldwide. As a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, globalization is considered by some as a form ofcapitalist expansion which entails the integration of local and national economies into a global, unregulated market economy. Globalization has grown due to advances intransportation andcommunication technology. With the increased global interactions comes the growth of internationaltrade,ideas, andculture. Globalization is primarily an economic process of interaction and integration that's associated with social and cultural aspects. However, conflicts anddiplomacy are also large parts of thehistory of globalization, and modern globalization.
Let's discuss the world. To answer the question, "is globalisation possible withoutGod", the simple answer is "yes". Globalisation is after all itself a code word, a mask, for not using the C-word,capitalism. Globalisation is basically the latest phase of expanding capitalism. This not something which is neutral, this is a capitalism that has its rules: it has its economic rules, it has its political rules, it has its cultural rules and it has its military rules. It is asystem. At the heart of this system is theUnited States of America, the world's only existingempire today. The first time in thehistory ofhumanity that you have just had a single empire, so dominant, whose militarybudget is higher than the military budgets of the next 15 countries put together, and whosemilitary-industrial complex itself is the eleventh largest economic entity in the world. This is the reality we live in, and this is the reality whichconfronts us in different ways.
On globalization’s parallel track, demarcated bymarkets rather than territorial boundaries,corporations and firms have displacednation-states as the key players on the international scene. They more often use thepolitical institutions created bynation-states to work their will than they are used by thosestates to enactsovereign political objectives. Evenphilanthropies such as theClinton Foundation, theGates Foundation, and theFord Foundation have become weighty actors in the international marketplace, boasting an economic clout that many nation-states cannot begin to exercise.
In order to work,free-trade systems must be frictionless and immune to interruption, forever. This means a program ofintellectual property protection, zero tariffs, and cross-border traffic in everything, includingmigrants. This can be assured only in a system that is veto-proof and non-consultative—in short, undemocratic. That is why it is those who have benefited most from globalization who have been leading the counterattack against thedemocracy movements arising all over the West.
Stuart Chase, quoted inPennsylvania Technology, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1990, p. 11
The dominantpropaganda systems have appropriated the term "globalization" to refer to the specific version of internationaleconomic integration that they favor, which privileges the rights ofinvestors and lenders, those of people being incidental. In accord with this usage, those who favor a different form of international integration, which privileges the rights of human beings, become "anti-globalist." ... Take theWorld Social Forum, called "anti-globalization" in thepropaganda system—which happens to include themedia, the educated classes, etc., with rare exceptions. The WSF is a paradigm example of globalization. It is a gathering of huge numbers of people from all over the world, from just about every corner of life one can think of, apart from the extremely narrow, highly privilegedelites who meet at the competingWorld Economic Forum, and are called "pro-globalization" by thepropaganda system. An observer watching this farce fromMars would collapse in hysterical laughter at the antics of the educated classes.
Noam Chomsky, Interview by Sniježana Matejčić, June 2005
Globalization makes it impossible formodernsocieties to collapse inisolation, as didEaster Island and theGreenland Norse in the past. Any society in turmoil today, no matter how remote...can cause trouble for prosperous societies on other continents, and is also subject to their influence (whether helpful or destabilizing). For the first time in history, we face the risk of a global decline. But we also are the first to enjoy the opportunity of learning quickly from developments in societies anywhere else in the world today, and from what has unfolded in societies at any time in the past.
Jared Diamond,Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), (Prologue)
Recruits who sign up to die [in theRusso-Ukrainian war] shootingSoviet-era rifles atRussianbattle tanks are not defending “world peace” ordemocracy orfreedom or anything like that. They are sacrificing themselves to convenience some peripheral interests of western globalism, which is responsible for all manner of armed conflict around the world, and which could not be less interested in these quaint liberal abstractions. We are in the end stage ofliberalism now, an end stage in which most liberal political forms have been set aside in favour of a naked if distributedautocracy.
If you think in terms of people divided up intocountries, you won't follow me. The idea of countries is going by the boards. Young people are getting wonderfully uprooted and they're too strong to get sucked into this 'country' crap.
Is that never before in the history of the world have so many people been able to learn about so many other people’slives,products andideas.
Thomas L. Friedman, explains about internet. Cited inAwake! 2002, 5/22; article:Globalization—The Hopes and the Fears.
Today, no country can ever truly cut itself off from the globalmedia or from external sources ofinformation; trends that start in one corner of the world are rapidly replicated thousands of miles away... A country trying to opt out of theglobal economy by cutting itself off from external trade andcapital flows will still have to deal with the fact that the expectations of its population are shaped by their awareness of living standards and cultural products emerging from the outside world.
Francis Fukuyama, cited in: Thomas L. Friedman (2000).The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. p. 67
What thecorporations fear most is that grassroots activists and independentjournalists will utilize the same model that companies have used to grab power: globalization. Grassroots globalization.
Amy Goodman The Exception to the Rulers written with David Goodman (2004)
Thanks to the advances inmass media and means oftransportation, the world seems to have become more visible and tangible. International communication has become easier than ever before. Today, the preservation of any kind of ″closed″ society is hardly possible. This calls for a radical review of approaches to the totality of the problems of international cooperation as a major element of universal security. Theworld economy is becoming a singleorganism, and nostate, whatever itssocial system or economic status, can normally develop outside it. This places on the agenda the need to devise a fundamentally new machinery for the functioning of the world economy, a new structure of the internationaldivision of labor. At the same time, the growth of the world economy reveals the contradictions and limits inherent in traditional-typeindustrialization. Its further extension and intensification spellenvironmental catastrophe. But there are still many countries without sufficiently developed industries, and some have not yet moved beyond the pre-industrial stage. One of the major problems is whether the process of theireconomic growth will follow the oldtechnological patterns or they can join in the search for environmentally clean production. And there is another problem: instead of diminishing, the gap between the developed and most of the developing countries is increasingly growing into a serious global threat. Hence the need to begin a search for a fundamentally new type of industrial progress - one that would meet the interests of all peoples and states.
Projects to stop the spread ofAIDS have tried to establish protective boundaries … by requiring HIV tests in order to cross national boundaries. The boundaries of nation-states, however, are increasingly permeable by all kinds of flows. Nothing can bring back the hygienic shields ofcolonial boundaries. The age of globalization is the age ofuniversal contagion.
Simplifying a great deal, one could argue thatpostmodernist discourses appeal primarily to the winners in the processes of globalization andfundamentalist discourses to the losers.
The problems and possibilities associated with the emergence of a global consumerist ethos is one with which scholars have only just begun to come to grips. For much of the past century, beginning withThorstein Veblen’s investigation ofconspicuous consumption in 1899, anxieties about commodity culture were treated as national orWestern rather than global concerns. They have been explored in articles and books on a dizzying array of themes and topics, and from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Attempts to make analytic sense of the impact and significance ofconsumerism on modern cultures have been complicated from the outset by normative considerations – either of a moralizing character or by concerns about consumerism as a form of social control – as well as by the role played by consumerism in the rise of ‘mass’ societies. When these long-standing anxieties aboutconsumption and consumerism are set against the space of the entire globe, coming to clear conclusions about its impact on global and local social relations is made even more difficult. The idea of consumerism as a form of social control, for example, blends easily into existing discourses of economic and cultural imperialism; what is described as ‘Americanism’ is often the threat of a consumer culture associated with US society. 7 Expressed more structurally, the addition of new global communication technologies and the increasing role of techno-scientific inquiry (labelled R&D) in the production of goods, have intersected with and altered practices of production and exchange, further multiplying the difficulties of accounting for consumption and consumerism in the world today.
The processes associated with globalization have created hitherto unimaginable opportunities for cultural forms and practices to travel far beyond the indigenous sites and spaces in which they were first conceived and produced. While there have always been cultural movements and flows from one space to another, the intensity and extensity of contemporary intersections of the global and the local have forced scholars to look closely at the myriad ways in which culture is consumed – used up, made sense of, embraced, and explored. Examining this first sense of cultural ‘consumption’ takes up the difficult questions of cultural diversity and authenticity that have shaped much of the discussion around culture in/and globalization. For example, by looking at implications of the transformation of older cultural forms and the creation of new forms of global-local culture such as globalliteratures and worldmusic, we can see the meaning and effects of social change on people’s identity and subjectivity.
Ibid, xi
Nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism (rather thanimperialism) framed another discourse on global culture and cultural consumption.Johann W. Von Goethe’s (1749–1832) discussion in the late 1820s on Weltliteratur or ‘world literature’(reproduced in this volume) 10 has become an important point of reference in many discussions of ‘world’ or ‘global culture’. His brief comments on world literature draw attention to the substantial literary and cultural interchanges already taking place inEurope at the beginning of the nineteenth century. These include translations of significant works, includingGoethe’s own writings, into majorEuropean languages, and the existence of journals across the continent devoted to reviewing foreign works of literature. For Goethe, these literary exchanges do not bring about a homogenization of culture – a consistent worry whenever ‘culture’and the ‘global’ are placed in relation to one another. On the contrary, for him, Weltliteratur promises to create greater opportunities for mutual understanding and tolerance, with both spiritual and material benefits for all. Goethe points, ,to the importance of cultural borrowing and interchange to the vitality of cultural life – a point stressed by many theorists of globalization and culture today. The differences, however, are stark. The world literature that Goethe envisions remained tied to a system of nations, each of which expressed its specific national characteristics through its literature. He also expresses anxiety about the emergenceof a mass culture – the culture of the ‘crowd’ – which must be contained by the activity of ‘serious’ and ‘intellectual’ individuals around the world. In the concept of Weltliteratur are framed many of the problems and challenges in conceptualizing global culture: the role of national culture and its relationship to a universal, ‘world’ Introduction xiii Intro-Vol-3 culture; the status of elite versus mass cultures; and even the relationship of culture to economic and social institutions and structures.
Ibid, xii-xiii.
David Rowe argues that, contrary to what might have been expected, international sport does not contribute to a process of ‘comprehensive globalization’– by which he understands a process through which global forces dissipate local differences until the latter are all but lost. Widely-watched televised mega-sporting events, such as theFIFA World Cup or theOlympics, which are sponsored by global consumer brands (Adidas,Nike,McDonalds,Budweiser, etc.), might suggest that sport is ‘globalization’s most attentive handmaiden’. Rowe notes, however, that in these cases, the local cannot be so easily written out of the picture. In the case of sports, the nation remains an essential touchstone and symbolic register: even if everyone is watching the World Cup, they are usually cheering for their own national team. ‘Sport’s dependency on the nation’, Rowe argues, ‘always reinserts the restrictive framework of modernity into the fluid workings of post modernity. In doing so – in a highly emotional manner – sport operates as a perpetual reminder of the social limits to the reconfiguration of endlessly mutable identities and identifications’..
Ibid, xvii-xviii.
However, it is not just ideas, representations, ideologies, and styles that are globalized: in other words, it is not just content that is globalized. The globalization of content is the obvious part of the process. It is easy to see when an element of content comes from elsewhere across the globe (cultural consumption in the first sense of the concept as discussed above). By comparison, except when there are obvious border-crossing clashes, it is strangely much harder to see when literary, artistic, and musical forms are globalized. Usually they emerge slowly, subtly and hegemonically. The literary form of the novel, for example – an extended prose fictional narrative, printed and bound, to be read privately – can now be found everywhere in the world, with its greatest moment of globalization coming in thenineteenth century. This was linked to a slow world-historical change in the dominant mode of communication as script gave way toprint, and print-capitalism generalized the reach of the novel as a consumerable commodity. The same can be said for novel genres:romance,comedy,detective-fiction,magical realism, and so on. As content, magical realism, for example, was used as a means of resistance to globalization andimperialism; by contrast, as form the genre was itself part of a globalizing counter-response to realism inLatin America andSoutheast Asia linked back to amagical realist visual art movement inWeimar German. More generally again, it was part of the globalized spread of a literary form called ‘thenovel’. Music went through the same process, though later and more unevenly. At the level of musical form, different notation systems were slowly globalized across the world with thefive-line staff system rising to partial dominance in the nineteenth century. In 1939, and then confirmed by theInternational Organization for Standardization in 1955, an international conference recommended a global standardization of pitch with the note A to be tuned to 440 Hz. This had parallels to the earlier process of globalizing time through agreement on the prime meridian,but it remains more contentious because of issues as basic as local histories of use and questions about what temperature at which the standard should be measured. The establishment of globalized genres of music –classical,rock-and-roll,jazz, samba, and so on – developed in thetwentieth century, and music was distributed on changing media ofrecording that waxed and waned in their dominance. At the leading edge, commercially-produced tapes, records andcompact discs as albums, gave way to self-burned CD compilations, and, most recently, to web-based music management programmes such asiTunes. Linked back to content, we are now long past the point where the simple fact of cultural influence or borrowing raises eyebrows. We are used to living in a world where ‘hip hop is mixed up with samba’, as the Los Angeles’ group theBlack Eyed Peas sing in ‘Mas Que Nada’, their update of the song by Brazilian pianistSergio Mendes. More than that, fashion in the forms of distribution has entered the global scene.Will-i-am, leader of theBlack-Eyed Peas, has said that the group’s latest studio release on iTunes, The END (2009), is more a continuing ‘diary’ of music rather than an album of music. ‘There is no album any more.’ This is hyperbole for effect of course, just as it was for writers such asJohn Barth andWalter Benjamin in saying that ‘the novel is dead’, orRoland Barthes in analytically describing "the death of the author." The difference now is that those phrases are globally accessible at the touch of button throughinternetsearch engines such asgoogle.com.
The international system of thetwenty-first century will be marked by a seeming contradiction: on the one hand, fragmentation; on the other, growing globalization. On the level of therelations among states, the new order will be more like theEuropean state system of the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries than the rigid patterns of theCold War. It will contain at least six major powers—theUnited States,Europe,China,Japan,Russia, and probablyIndia—as well as a multiplicity of medium-sized and smaller countries. At the same time, international relations have become truly global for the first time.Communications are instantaneous; theworld economy operates on all continents simultaneously. A whole set of issues has surfaced that can only be dealt with on a worldwide basis, such asnuclear proliferation, theenvironment, thepopulation explosion, and economic interdependence. For America, reconciling differing values and very different historical experiences among countries of comparable significance will be a novel experience and a major departure from either the isolation ofthe last century or thede facto hegemony of theCold War, in ways which this book seeks to illuminate. Equally, the other major players are facing difficulties in adjusting to the emerging world order.
Thebourgeoisie has through its exploitation of theworld market given a cosmopolitan character toproduction andconsumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet ofindustry the national ground on which it stood. 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 civilised 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, universalinter-dependence 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.
Thebourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means ofcommunication, draws all, even the mostbarbarian,nations intocivilisation. The cheapprices ofcommodities are the heavyartillery with which it batters down allChinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain ofextinction, to adopt the bourgeoismode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
Questioning global stereotypes on economic responses to globalisation, I argue that labour becomes actively involved in the veryprocess of globalisation and theexpansion of capital. [...] Although it would seem a simple proposition to suggest that working class people and their organisations affect the ways in which the landscapes of capitalism are made, until recently, there has been little work, even within economic geography, addressing this issue.
Low labour cost, along with flexibility in labour use, has become a key source of competitive advantage for firms. As external competition intensifies, the domestic industry has come under great pressure to restructure itself, to become more competitive and to adopt flexible policies with regard to production andlabour. With a view to increasing global competitiveness, investors are moving more towards countries that either have low labour costs, or are shifting to informal employment arrangements. These changes create an entirely different political-economic environment for workers around the world. Greater international mobility ofcapital relative to labour puts workers from a given location at an immediate disadvantage, both in terms of bargaining power with the owners of capital (whose threat to move gains greater credibility) and with respect to the State. Thus the removal of domestic entry barriers and movement of capital to areas of cheap labour have caused intensification of domestic competition in manydeveloping countries— especially those with surplus labour supply and those where labour is a major factor of production. This has been accentuated by potential investors citing the lack of flexibility in hiring and laying off workers as a concern, while targeting a developing country in which to invest. [...] Optimism with regard to labour as an agency of social progress has been replaced by pessimism that sees little prospect of workers acting on their own behalf.
These were the years of theClinton boom and the gradual recovery of economic dynamism inEurope. They were the heyday of economic globalization and the weightlessconsumerism it afforded the Western middle classes in particular. The implications of this proved significant in the forging of at least three basic elements of thepost-Cold War order: first, regarding the manner in which theworld economy was “constructed” (primarily around international finance), the variant of financialized globalization it led to, and the leverage that affordedmarkets overstates; secondly, regarding the timing and significance of theCold War’s end, the lessons of which pushed the decade’s critical actors,social democrats, into a generational turn towards these newly liberalized markets as a less costly tool of distributional fairness; and thirdly, in terms of very real social tensions that reappeared across the Western democracies during the immediate post-Cold War years. With the world seeming to pick up speed all around, much of this went unnoticed—or at least it was not acted upon—at the time. For this was when thetwo Germanies were learning how to live as one nation again, and when theEuropean Union was born atMaastricht. It was when thetwentieth century seemed to deliver on so many of its technological promises—home computing and theInternet,GM food andcable television—and when it was possible to look at the world at large and, for the first time in people’s memory, not need to interpret events in terms of the struggle betweencommunism andcapitalism. It was the self-proclaimed era of being “post-” everything. And yet there was much that persisted too.Yugoslavia broke apart amid theviolence inBosnia;Eastern Europe struggled under the burden of its rapid conversion to a capitalist economy.International law took great strides forward but was written mostly by—and for—the powerful. Meanwhile, an oversized and underregulatedfinancial market thrived beyond the oversight ofnational states, as did the black market and theoligarchs who profited from this.
Simon Reid-Henry,Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West Since the Cold War, 1971-2017 (2019), pp. 6-7
Consider thedeath of Princess Diana. This accident involved anEnglish citizen, with anEgyptian boyfriend, crashed in aFrench tunnel, driving aGerman car with aDutch engine, driven by aBelgian, who was drunk onScotchwhiskey, followed closely byItalian paparazzi, onJapanese motorcycles, and finally treated withBrazilian medicines by anAmerican doctor. In this case, even leaving aside the fame of the victims, a mere neighborhood canvass would hardly have completed the forensic picture, as it might have a generation before.
Mark Riebling, "The New Paradigm: Merging Law Enforcement and Intelligence Strategies," Center for Policing Terrorism (2006)Full text online
"Duringthe last century there has been a distinct diminution in the number of wars between the most civilized nations.International relations have become closer and the development of The Hague tribunal is not only a symptom of this growing closeness of relationship, but is a means by which the growth can be furthered. Our aim should be from time to time to take such steps as may be possible toward creating something like an organization of the civilized nations, because as the world becomes more highly organized the need fornavies andarmies will diminish. "
To whom, other than its shareholders, is an international corporation answerable? Often they don't anymore employ workers. They outsource manufacturing to places far away. If wages rise in one place, they can almost instantly transfer production to somewhere else. If the tax regime in one country becomes burdensome, they can relocate to another. To whom, then, are they accountable? By whom are they controllable? For whom are they responsible? The extreme mobility of capital, and also of manufacturing and servicing, is in danger of creating institutions that have power without responsibility, as well as a social class, the global elite, that has no organic connection with any other group except itself.
Globalization is not in itself a folly: It has enriched the world scientifically and culturally and benefited many people economically as well.
Amartya Sen, "Ten theses on globalization."New Perspectives Quarterly 18.4 (2001): 9-9.
We, the people of theEarth, are one large family. The new epoch offers new challenges and new global problems, such as environmental catastrophes, exhaustion of resources, bloodyconflicts andpoverty.
Globalization has its advantages. To be translated and read in several countries is immensely satisfying; after all a writer - this writer at least - is driven by the impulse to communicate. Conversely, globalization exposes one to wonderful writers from diverse cultures.
For much of the world, globalization as it has been managed seems like a pact with the devil. A few people in the country become wealthier;GDP statistics, for what they are worth, look better, but ways of life and basic values are threatened. For some parts of the world the gains are even more tenuous, the costs more palpable. Closer integration into the global economy has brought greater volatility and insecurity, and more inequality. It has even threatened fundamental values. This is not how it has to be. We can make globalization work, not just for the rich and powerful but for all people, including those in the poorest countries. The task will be long and arduous, We have already waited far too long. the time to begin is now.
As recently as 2005, Britain’scentrist prime ministerTony Blair could declare that to argue about globalization made as much sense as arguing about whetherautumn should followsummer. By 2020, both globalization and the seasons were very much in question. The economy had morphed from being the answer to being the question. The obvious retort to “It’s the economy, stupid,” was “Whose economy?” or “Which economy?” or even “What’s the economy?” A series of deep crises beginning inAsia in the late 1990s andmoving to the Atlantic financial system in 2008, theeurozone in 2010, and globalcommodity producers in 2014 had shaken confidence inmarket economics. All those crises had been overcome, but bygovernment spending and central bank interventions that drove a coach and horses through firmly held precepts about “small government” and “independent” central banks. And who benefited? Whereas profits were private, losses were socialized. The crises had been brought on by speculation. The scale of the interventions necessary to stabilize them had been historic. Yet the wealth of the global elite continued to expand. Who could be surprised, it was now commonplace to ask, if surginginequality led topopulist disruption? What manyBrexit andTrump voters wanted was “their” national economy back.
Adam ToozeShutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy (2021)
Hillary wants to surrender America to globalism. She wants a country without borders. She wants trade deals written for the benefit offoreign corporations. She wants a government that ignores the will of the people. She wants to sell out American security to the Clinton Foundation for a pile of cash. It is hard to tell where the Clinton Foundation ends and theState Department begins. ... Hillary Clinton has betrayed her duty to the people.
The truth is plain to see - if you wantfreedom, take pride in your country; if you wantdemocracy, hold onto yoursovereignty, and if you wantpeace, love your nation. Wise leaders always put the good of their own people and their own country first. The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs topatriots. The future belongs tosovereign andindependent nations who protect their citizens, respect their neighbours, and honour the differences that make each country special and unique.
Globalization is part of modern reality. How you define it is where the conflict is. Some of us think that it's civilized to provide people with water by putting up public drinking fountains. Other people think that drinking fountains need to be eliminated so as not to undercut the market for $2.00 bottled water.
Let's take the case of slavery. While capitalism legitimizes itself as the economic system that implies and furthers personal freedom (as a condition of market exchange), it generated slavery on its own, as part of its own dynamics: althoughslavery became almost extinct at the end of the Middle Ages, it re-emerged incolonies fromearly modernity till theAmerican Civil War. And one can risk the hypothesis that today, with the new epoch of global capitalism, a new era of slavery is also arising. Although there is no longer a direct legal category of enslaved persons, slavery acquires a multitude of new forms: millions ofmigrant workers in theSaudi peninsula (UAE,Qatar, etc.), who are deprived of elementarycivil rights and freedoms and subjected to restricted mobility; the total control of millions of workers in Asiansweatshops, often consciously organized asconcentration camps; the massive use of forced labor in the exploitation of natural resources in manyCentral African states (Congo, etc.). This newde factoapartheid, this systematic explosion of a number of different forms of contemporary slavery, is not a deplorable accident but a structural necessity of today's global capitalism.
Slavoj Žižek,The Courage of Hopelessness: A Year of Acting Dangerously (2018), p. 29
Although "globalism" is a term often used to describe a coming golden age of economic and cultural borderlessness, persistent economic disparities as well as recent ethnic conflicts and other examples of extreme parochialism such as widespread anti-immigration rhetoric and legislation, all of which evince an astonishing resistance to changes in the traditional methods of societal organization, suggest that the modern world may face great upheaval and loss on its way to globalism. Nevertheless, other developments such as the movement toward the "Open Republic" are more encouraging. As people, businesses, and ideas become increasingly dispersed, the world's nations may come to better understand one another, and therefore be better able to coexist. At a minimum this commingling will profoundly affect the character of modern nations.
Modernglobalism is the highest form ofimperialism. The onslaught ofcapital on workers’ rights is mounting fast. Imperialism is becoming more aggressive in the world and the threat ofa new large-scale war is growing. The financial and economic crisis is worsening with each new wave being more grievous and painful. One side effect of the crisis is the groundswell of nationalist and separatist sentiments in contemporaryEurope.
In this struggle we are inspired by the example of those countries where staunch supporters of thesocialist option are in power. They areChina which has the world in awe of its spectacular successes in theeconomy and the social sphere.Cuba, which theUS imperialismhas vainly tried to strangle for six decades. The dynamically developingVietnam. These countries challenge capitalist globalization, refuse to submit to their diktat and score successes on the socialist path. The experience of fraternalByelorussia is highly instructive.
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