Globalism and the Left

Abstract

If imperialism is the latest stage of capitalism, globalism is the latest stage of imperialism – and, yet, nowhere in the whole literature of the Left is there any evidence of a systematic attempt to understand, let alone combat, the havoc being wreaked on Third World countries by capital in its latest avatar. Instead, the Left has either sought refuge from the storms of change in the Orthodox Marxist Church, intoning capitalism is capitalism is capitalism and rubbishing the disbelievers, or, while accepting the epochal shift in capitalism, continued to resort to the particular (Marxist) analysis of a particular (industrial) period to envisage capitalism’s early demise, hopefully at its own hands. The first lot and the more important maintain that the universalisation of capitalism is no new thing – that it was always global (in intent, presumably, if not in deed), only now it is more so. And the opposition to capitalism is still in place. The nation state has not been overrun by global capital, there’s still room for manoeuvre there; the polity still allows of enough democracy for us to take advantage of it in our fight against capital; the working class (in the developed capitalist countries) is still the agent of change and working-class organisation the vehicle of change. To depart from any of these eternal verities and assert that there is an epochal change in capitalism – at least as significant as the transition from mercantile capitalism to industrial capitalism – which requires us to rethink our strategies and realign our forces, is to succumb to the disease of ‘the post-modern Left’ and all those others who declare, with Thatcher, that there is no alternative (TINA) to capitalism. Merely to utter the word globalisation, which, according to this ‘school’, is a right-wing shibboleth deriving from neo-liberal ideology, is to sing hosannas to capitalism while laying premature wreaths on a living, breathing socialism. Hence, its followers reject the term Globalism and the Left