Personally I have always seen it very differently. The creation of a global society, a global economy and the recognition that we live inside a global ecology are all fundamentally very good things. I don’t want to live in a bubble of isolation only aware of and interacting with small parts of a complex planet. I like the idea of exploring everything I possibly can, knowing more and more about what happens around the corner in someone else’s patch and getting to understand how other creatures live and what they need to prosper. Indeed I count those things as amongst the best bits of living.
Anything which opens up individuals to an awareness of the full richness and complexity of other societies, other ecologies and other ways of living I think is very positive. Anything that makes us scared and fearful of others or of other ways of doing things is limiting and negative. I don’t like fear of difference or fear of change. I want to see possibilities and understandings increasing not being closed down and rejected.
There is, however, a big difference between liking globalisation in all its richness and naively accepting that utterly uncontrolled free markets are a positive way of achieving it. Unlike many people on the left I have a natural trust in the value of markets to do a lot of very useful things and like leaving them alone to create healthy and unpredictable change whenever possible. I just don’t happen to believe that they work always and everywhere to do everything. Indeed I think that globalisation needs mechanisms to manage and control free markets and until we get them we’ll be in trouble.
Global markets are largely out of control and are certainly not being managed in the kind of way that national economies were for the 30 years after the end of the Second World War. This has produced some very big positive changes and a lot of very risky and dangerous ones. The biggest positive has been that there has been a significant levelling up of living standards between countries. The standard of living of a Chinese worker in 1970 bore no resemblance to that of a US worker. Nowadays the comparison is massively more equal.
This really is a genuine improvement in overall global wellbeing but it comes at a high price for some. It is hard for trade unions in wealthy countries to defend conditions of work and pay when companies can threaten to take the factory abroad if workers don’t accept cuts. Which means that it is small wonder that some of the redundant factory workers in the richer countries want to build walls and raise tariff barriers to try and shut out competition.
That is, however, a very weak and temporary cure that creates far more problems than it solves. Historically any country that tries to isolate itself shows a very strong tendency to enter a long period of decline. For example, Spain went from being the richest country in the world during the discovery of the Americas to something of a backwater by the early twentieth century. I think you can put that down to the reaction against change that went along with the Spanish Inquisition.
But there is a world of difference between trying to shut out pesky foreign competition with tariff walls and taking some sensible steps to try and protect hard won gains. You either accept a race to the bottom or you insist on goods and services that are competing with local ones must be produced to certain standards. It makes huge sense to insist that everything sold in a wealthy country has been made in safe conditions, with little pollution and with decent workers rights and to put high tariffs on anything that doesn’t comply.
A chaotic out of control global market risks putting us back into a world that Karl Marx described. Unfettered competition drives down standards and concentrates the wealth in the hands of a very few. Which is why we had filthy rivers, child labour, horrible accidents and black smog in the air during the British industrial revolution.
What Marx and Lenin never expected is that intelligent management of national and local government would combine with pressure from powerful trade unions to drive up wages and conditions in affluent Western countries. They also never thought for a moment that when that happened overall profits of companies would rise as a result because well off workers buy more products and services than the poor. Nationally we learned to moderate markets and get the benefits from a mixed economy and a welfare state during an era when most trade happened within the nation.
That era lasted from 1945 to 1970 and began to unravel as soon as globalisation started to bring back unfettered markets. But that lack of control is not an inevitable feature of a global economy. It is a product of the failure to create strong enough international organisations to deal with the power of globalised markets.
We can have global rules that penalise the use of energy which damages the one planet that we all live on. We can also have global incentives to move to alternatives. We can have global rules on tax avoidance and heavy penalties for people and organisations that take their money across borders to escape rules. We can even have measures in place to damp down global economic booms and even out global economic slumps in much the same way as Keynes helped national governments to do.
The problem is not the impossibility of imagining how to draw up rules for international management of a global economy, global ecology and global society. The problem is the extent of the competing national, religious and short term economic self-interests which make the necessary next step so hard to achieve.
In a logical world the way forward would be for more and more people to pressure their governments to move beyond the narrow limits of national economic and ecological management and to work together. We need to build strong international economic collaborative blocks whilst working steadily to strengthen and international organisations. This would require a lot of work on improving the democratic accountability of bodies like the IMF and the European Union whilst building on voluntary agreements like the Paris Climate Change accords to create strong enforceable international laws. Easy to say and hard to do but necessary if humanity is going to stand any chance of preventing the planet being destroyed by short term fast money capitalists as opposed to wise long term investors or politicians working to provide services people need collectively but markets don’t reward individuals to provide.
Fortunately we do not live in an all or nothing world. Every year that we fail to achieve this adds to the risk of narrow nationalists trying to turn back the clock. But every small step in the right direction proves that we can make progress. A globalised world can be a very good thing. It just needs a lot of determination to engage in a very hard and long struggle against some very powerful forces to make it so.