CCDS FORUM & DISCUSSION BOARD

NAME: Mark Solomon
EMAIL: Solomonm@aol.com
DATE: 05/24/2007
TITLE: Is Globalization Killing the State?

Is Globalization Killing the State? (Part One)
(Revised text of talk delivered at the Deerfield Progressive Forum (Deerfield Beach, Florida) February 17, 2007)

Mark Solomon

Globalization – the global integration of capital – has constituted a central aspect of world economic and political organization in recent years. It has become so powerful and pervasive that many observers, on the left and on the right, now claim that it has largely superseded, and in some instances, displaced the national state.

Powerful transnational industrial and financial corporations presently do forcefully operate on a global stage, often possessing wealth greater than most national states. Globalization is characterized by the lightening movement of capital from country to country, abetted by great technological advances through computerization, fiber optics, etc., in search of speculative mergers, attacking vulnerable currencies, seeking sources of investment in the cheapest labor, the laxest social standards and the easiest access to markets and raw materials. Global capital has little or no regard for the negative consequences for states being ground down to penury. Transnational corporations pursue maximum profits without concern for populations stripped of natural resources, reduced to the lowest wages, forced to forego trade unions and locked into perpetual poverty.

Powerful corporations have jettisoned social benefits that had been won through decades of struggle when in the past those very corporations had acceded to those benefits because they needed social peace within their national borders -benefits that they now believe they no longer need. Today, there is a frenzy of “privatization” of hard won services with a near-systematic dismantling of traditional government functions (In Iraq that includes a vast and underreported privatization of warfare through the expenditure of billions for private mercenaries like the Blackwater operatives.) Today’s transnational corporations appear to have little or no use for stable, socially coherent national states, even their own states of origin, because they operate on a global stage. Indeed, their insatiable drive for maximum profits drives them to insist that countries within their sphere dismantle social payments and service crippling in order to meet the demands of global financial institutions – such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, various regional trade blocs and the World Bank – that serve as expediters and enforcers for corporate globalization.

Regional economic arrangements like the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) and its Central American clone, CAFTA serve as essential tools for uncontrolled markets where the economically strong can overwhelm the weak with duty-free industrial and agricultural products that undermine indigenous economies while also investing in light industries based upon rock bottom wage labor under the rubric of “free trade.”

All of that is the essence of neo-liberalism – the ideological underpinning of globalization – the ideology (borrowed from 19th century capitalism) of uncontrolled “free” markets, liberated from state control and from social concerns, free to pursue maximum profits. Under the false claim the vastly uneven and unequal accumulation of wealth will eventually lead to better lives for masses in both the technologically advanced and developing societies.

Finally, there is the emergence of a “transnational capitalist class” – a globally grounded social class that runs roughshod over national borders to conduct its powerful financial and industrial activities on a global scale; a class that leverages powerful global tools of capital movement like the IMF, and gathers in places like Davos, Doha, and Bohemian Grove to coordinate their policies. That class is defined by ownership of worldwide means of production as embodied principally in the transnational corporations and private financial institutions. Sociologists William Robinson and Jerry Harris write: “What distinguishes the TCC from national or local capitalists is that it is involved in globalized production and manages globalized circuits of accumulation that places it above national and local capital as well as local territories and polities.” (Robinson and Harris also note, importantly, that transnational capital is engaged in a battle for supremacy with domestic capital which stands to suffer from a diminishing of government programs that ease the burdens of poverty.)

All of these seismic changes strongly suggested that the national state has been significantly diminished as a protector and proponent of native capital. The changes also suggested that the national state had largely been supplanted by stateless transnational capital and was no longer central to the pursuit of economic, strategic and military power – both on a global scale and even within its own borders.

However, how do we explain the self-defined role of the United States as “the world’s sole remaining superpower” adopted with ultra nationalistic arrogance after the collapse of the Soviet Union and associated states of Eastern Europe? In 1992, in the wake of the collapse of the USSR and the Gulf War, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol and others who were destined to become the principal theorists of the calamitous Iraq invasion of 2003 prepared the infamous “Defense Planning Guidance” of the Defense Department for the outgoing George H.W. Bush administration. That document posed the question: “what is our new strategic mission in the world now that there is no more Soviet Union.” The answer was loud, clear and ominous: “Our number one mission in the world, now that we are the sole superpower is to make sure we stay that way.”

Wolfowitz and company went on to declare that the United States would pursue its world dominating objectives with the help of allies. But if those allies did not go along, the US was fully able and willing to go it alone.

That policy hardly represented the withering away of the state, especially the US, under globalization. After the fall of the socialist bloc, the great “peace dividend” to redirect massive military spending for human needs never materialized. Military expenditures continued to rise, even breaking free from the earth’s boundaries through the Pentagon’s drive to monopolistically “weaponize” space. Washington actually expanded its efforts to control much of the world through military interventions to achieve US economic, strategic and political objectives.

Actually, this process had been going on – and accelerating – since the end of the Vietnam War. In the seventies, as the old “rust bowl” industries went into a steep decline and the first clear signs of a major structural shift in capitalist production to computers and associated technologies appeared. At the same time, the Carter administration embraced “human rights” as a fundamental foreign policy objective. But that was aimed at eliminating the bitter taste left with world public opinion after Vietnam and actually facilitated an interventionist foreign policy that included the “Carter Doctrine” that the US would unilaterally go to war in the Persian Gulf if necessary to defend its economic and strategic interests. It was under Carter that Washington became an active and key player in seeking to overthrow a progressive government in Afghanistan (and cultivating Osama Bin Laden along the way) and in fomenting confrontation with Iran. The Reagan years were marked by an unprecedented two trillion dollar buildup of US military forces (many times greater than all the military expenditures in all preceding US history – including two world wars), by armed interventions in Central America and Grenada, as well as cultivation of Saddam Hussein that contributed to a prolonged and disastrous Iraq-Iran war. By the presidency of George H.W. Bush, Washington’s tactics in the Middle East changed. Saddam was now an archenemy and his effort to reclaim Kuwaiti territory for Iraq triggered a massive military intervention, led by the US.

A transforming shift in US military objectives was taking place. The end of the socialist states and the US “triumph” in the cold war brought profound changes in global power relations. From Afghanistan to the Middle to Eastern and central Europe progressive, secular movements were weakened and into a vacuum an emerging anti-modern fundamentalism arose – a fundamentalism that masked powerful social and political antagonisms. A new “enemy” was born from the very same elements heretofore nurtured by western powers in their battles against the socialist states; an enemy, it turned out, with intense grievances against late capitalism and globalization for looting of its resources, for its corrupting culture and its violence against Islamic populations, an enemy whose ideological outlook was fueled by intense religious and cultural beliefs. A “war on terror” (especially after September 11, 2001) became the mantra of militarized capital enabling the military-industrial-government complex to continue to thrive and to threaten all forms of opposition to globalization.

The Clinton presidency was marked by more sophisticated approaches to extending US military power, economic advantage and political influence. The Dayton Accords and the extensive bombing of Serbia effectively fragmented Yugoslavia into weak states. That led to NATO’s deepest penetration into the Balkans – with a military force now at the edge of the massive untapped oil reserves under the Caspian Sea. Additionally, the Balkan conflict brought US power closer to the resource-rich former Central Asian states of the USSR and kindled successful efforts to establish US military bases around Russia and nearly to the doorstep of China.

George W. Bush’s catastrophic invasion of Iraq was in crucial ways a continuation of the fabric of world domination by the “sole remaining super power” declared in Wolfowitz’s Defense Guidance document of 1992. It was also the fulfillment of the neoconservative appeal to Clinton in 1998 (in an infamous letter signed by Eliot Abrams, William Bennett, John Bolton, Richard Perle, William Kristol, James Woolsey, Wolfowitz, etc.) calling for an invasion of Iraq. The rationale was the fabrication that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction and that “our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard. As you have rightly declared, Mr. President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat.”

There is no need here to belabor the magnitude of the Iraq disaster built upon falsehoods far more worthy, to say the least, of impeachment of the sitting President and Vice-President than Bill Clinton’s sexual dalliances. At this moment, the ruling circles in this country are deeply divided over the war and its further prosecution. As for George W. Bush and his neocon gurus, he cannot let go of a growing catastrophe as long as the prospect for passage in the Iraqi parliament of new oil legislation granting huge wealth to the oil multinationals is still in play and as long as a flickering hope remains of transforming the political and cultural face of the entire region.

The US thirst for empire is now increasingly focused on Africa, especially the strategically sensitive Horn of Africa where US money, logistical support and military infiltrators abetted an Ethiopian intervention in Somalia that overthrew a respected Islamic governing authority. The US military presence in the Horn facilitates the deployment of two aircraft carriers replete with airborne strike forces in the Persian Gulf as well as cruisers manned with anti-ballistic missiles to pressure Iran and prepare for air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities as well as a possible ground invasion. The Pentagon has now begun to establish a new “Central Command” for Africa, reflecting growing administration anxiety over significant Chinese advances in economic and political relations in Africa as well as Washington’s increasing interest in extending access to Africa’s vast mineral resources (especially oil).

Powerful ruling segments (represented by the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group) would partially disengage from Iraq. It has significant concerns about issues like a possible environmental catastrophe, global poverty, etc., that could undermine an acceptable world order. That is significant. However, the long-term perspective held by virtually every segment of a ruling class is to restructure US military forces to fight guerrilla insurrections and insurgencies wherever they threaten US “national security.” That would entail new expenditures of hundreds of billions of dollars to expand the armed forces and to equip it with lighter, flexible, rapid response weapons and equipment to supposedly win the kinds of wars now being lost in Iraq. On this long-term outlook, those who hold power (or influence that power) from the Joint Chiefs to Nancy Pelosi to the New York Times are all in agreement.

Mark Solomon

Part Two

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