Globalization and the Pathway to Sociomaterial Betterment

Abstract

Although it has been the focus of a burgeoning literature, the world economic phenomenon of globalization continues to confound analysis as to its ultimate contours and the implications it carries for progressive future directed social action. Because of the hypertrophied role of the state in supporting capital accumulation in the early postwar period, what Brown and Lauder conceptualize as the doctrine of “economic nationalism” (2001: 16), the debate over globalization has largely unfolded over the relative force and potency of the state and world “market” in shaping the economic future. Using as a touchstone the demarcation of positions by Held et al. (1999), there exist three “camps” in the globalization debate: the hyperglobalist position that in neoliberal and neo-Marxist incarnations views the increasing eclipse of the state in the face of a “perfectly” competitive world market or homogenizing global capitalism, respectively; the skeptics, who place emphasis on the vast world economic asymmetries (Weeks 2001) and tendencies toward “regionalization” (Hirst and Thompson 1996; Mittelman 2000), the persistence of discrete “models” of capitalism