Are you [ we ]
being raped by globalization or by
nationalism?
http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/
Lobster
has already placed much of its Winter issue online,
including this observation from editor Robin
Ramsey: If globalisation has
failed, then we return to the nation state. Do you see anyone on the left
thinking about this? I donÕt. And no wonder: nation segues into nationalism,
and this is the territory of the right and far right. So thereÕs the big
necessary project: how to detoxify the notion of the nation state and make it
acceptable to the left. Ramsey is
quoting himself here. The words I've presented above originally appeared in an
excellent interview he gave in 2012.
Let's give a little
more thought to the problem of whether globalization stands outside the
traditional concepts of right and left. I'm old enough to recall a time when
terms like "global" and "international" had Marxist
overtones. Marx was among the 19th century radicals who favored a world bereft
of national boundaries. That was yesterday's utopia. We now live in a world in which boundaries decay. Yet the
people who stride across those boundaries are hardly Marxists, are they?
As Ramsay noted in
the above-referenced interview: ItÕs
clear that all over Europe (i.e. EU Europe), bar the Czech Republic, the
ideology of pre-WW2 classical liberalism is the prevailing view; and quite a
few ex-members of Goldman Sachs have been parachuted into positions at or close
to the top of EU members governments – Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Italy,
France and Greece – to make sure there is no default on Goldman Sachs
loans. So we now have an
international economic elite which salutes no flag and which operates high
above the concept of the nation-state. But this elite is not an entity that
Marx would have cared for. No lefty on earth thinks of Lloyd Blankfein as
"our guy."
(Granted, there are
some far-right savants who would argue that Goldman Sachs -- and everything it
represents -- should be
categorized as a left-wing phenomenon. The
Wall Streeters are actually bolshies: This was the position of Cleon
Skousen, the kook who inspired Glenn Beck. The folks who think this way are
impossible to take seriously, yet their weird ideas retain a certain popular
appeal.)
So the question
stands. If you are a liberal, and you don't like what globalization has
wrought, are you now a flag-waving nationalist? Let's make the argument a little more specific. Let's talk
about China. When we mention
globalization, most of us immediately think of China. We think of the
manufacturing jobs we've lost to cheap Chinese imports. But the problem of China may be also be
construed as a problem of nationalism.
Not globalization. Yesterday, I
heard a National Public Radio interview with Beth Macy,
author of Factory Man, a book about globalization and its impact on the
American furniture trade. Although I've not yet read the book, the story that
Macy tells in that interview is lot more riveting than you might think. (This reviewer wittily calls her work "A
Game of Chairs.")
From a piece by Macy
which recently appeared in The New
Yorker:
In the mid-twentieth century, Bassett Furniture Industries, in
Bassett, Virginia, was one of the largest wood-furniture makers in the world.
Its name was the one often inscribed on the back of the bedroom suites behind
Door Number Three on ÒLetÕs Make a Deal.Ó The Baby
Boom was on, and people needed to furnish the homes they were buying in the
suburbs. Then, in recent decades,
came a familiar challenge: Bassett was undercut by imports from Asia and under
pressure from shareholders to improve its profit margins. By 2007, it had closed
all the plants in Bassett and decided to focus on importing wood products from
lower-wage factories in China, Vietnam, and Indonesia. An American company that once employed
ten thousand people has reduced its workforce by 90 percent. Question: Were the
displaced workers victims of globalization -- or of nationalism? Most people would say:
"Globalization. It's obvious." But look closer.
One spin-off of the
former Bassett furniture empire was the Vaughan-Bassett factory, run by John
Bassett III. (The family dynamics are interesting but have no bearing on our
present argument.) In her interview, Macy tells an important story about the
Bassett scion, who was particularly perturbed by a Chinese copy of one of his
own pieces -- a bedroom set, if I recall correctly. How (he asked himself) could the Chinese sell the thing for
such a ludicrously low price?
Most people would immediately say "low wages," but even taking
that factor into account did not suffice to explain the mystery. Bassett investigated.
He sent people into China to look into the situation. Turns out the Chinese government has been subsidizing the factory -- taking a loss on each item sold
in order to destroy the American competition. At this point, you may now want to fire up Ebay. The
ultra-low prices on many of those goods suddenly look rather suspicious, don't
they? This revelation forces us to
confront some key questions:
1. Should we continue
to use the term "globalization" to describe what China has been
getting up to? Maybe it would be better to see their strategy as a form of
economic warfare. Nation against nation. Nationalism.
2. As Robin Ramsay
says, "the ideology of pre-WW2 classical
liberalism is the prevailing view." Neo-liberal ideology assures us that
laissez-faire will always win; that capitalism will always make a bedroom set
much more efficiently than a state-run enterprise ever could. All right. If
that's the case, then why are we being
clobbered by state-subsidized Chinese enterprises? China is still
officially communist. And they're killing us.
3. How can American
industry be protected if not by state action -- by import tarriffs, by
investment in domestic industry? (That's more or less how things worked
throughout those prosperous few decades after World War II.) The right would
decry such a system as "socialism," while the left would decry it as
"crony capitalism."
4. If you are a
liberal who thinks that state action is preferable to letting China rape us,
aren't you now a nationalist? (This question brings us back to the point Ramsay
made at the beginning of our essay.)
5. Since this
conundrum does not easily rest on the traditional left-right ideological
spectrum, the time has come to ask: Has that spectrum failed us? Have the very
labels "left" and "right" prevented us from seeing what is
really going on in the world?
Surely bolshies, or State Capitalists
in Orwell's words, are really wallstreeters, given the time Trotsky spent as a
catamite of capitalism, as memorably recounted in Mitchell-Hedges'
"Danger, My Ally". And, I suppose, Wall Street and the Bolshevik
Revolution. On the
fascinating subject of the manufacturing of office furnitures, most American office furniture, if memory serves, is made by inmates
of prisons. American prisons. Slave labour harms the paid workforce by
undercutting their labour. Of course they also get government subsidised
housing and food, the scrounging scum.
The problem isn't the Chinese nationalism, it's
the American globalism. If America put tariffs on subsidised goods this
wouldn't happen.
American use of the
terms "left and right" has been neutered for years. Hence the use of left for the likes of Clinton and company.
What do they want to nationalise?
Stephen Morgan : Slightly OT, but
Bassett, Virginia, is not very far from my hometown. Danville is a textbook
example of, well, a number of things. For over a century, the city was
dominated by what came to be known as Dan River Mills, at one point the largest
textile company in the South.
In the 1920s (as Riverside Cotton Mills), it was a leader in the
experiment known as "Industrial Democracy," in which a workers' House of Representatives passed legislation to
address grievances. When the rubber hit the road, though, after the Stock
Market Crash, Industrial Democracy was abandoned, and Riverside became better
known as place where labor lost a significant battle following the collapse of
the 1930 United Textile Workers strike. Next, the mill almost
became a textbook example of A Company Shuttered by the Great Depression, but
managed to stagger on long enough to become an example of A Company That
Flourished Thanks to World War II. A similar stumble during the Recession of
1949 was followed by a similar recovery fueled by the Korean War.
The Baby Boom years
were, understandably, a good time for manufacturers of household textiles. Dan
River Mills became a textbook example of the country's post-war industrial
success. It expanded both horizontally and vertically, buying out other mills
across the South; moving into such complimentary lines of production as
carpeting, lingerie, and hosiery; and expanding its chemical division in step
with its increasing involvement in synthetic fibers and permanent-press cloth.
The company wasn't just buying out the
competition, though; it was also expanding and upgrading what it owned. Between
1966 and 1980, Dan River invested over $300 million in new machinery. It did so
wisely, it seemed: Exports rose 40%, and in 1980 the company reported earning
of $19.6 million on sales of $607 million. Dividends were increased the fifth
year in a row...
...very little
of which remained locally. One thing lost during the years of growth and
expansion was some of the company's regional focus and identity. At the end of
the War, nearly 90% of Dan River stock was locally held; in 1979, less than 19%
was, while nearly half was owned by investors and
institutions out of New York. This helped make the company a prime
candidate for its next exemplary appearance: As a textbook example of the havoc
and destruction wrought by the corporate raids of the 1970s and '80s.
In this case, the raider was Carl
Icahn, who began buying up Dan River shares in 1982, eventually owning 29% of
its common stock. The company fought back in court, claiming violations of the
RICO act, saying Icahn had acquired its stock with "proceeds derived
through prior acts of extortion, mail fraud and securities fraud." After
the courts refused to allow the use of RICO, the company went for the nuclear
option, creating a separate, employee-owned corporation to purchase the
outstanding shares. To fund the deal, Dan River tapped the employee pension
plan, sold off corporate assets, and, using the remaining assets as collateral,
borrowed $150 million. This put the company's debt-to-equity ratio at 125% --
effectively ending its ability to do much more than survive. In the end, Icahn
earned some bad press -- and $8.5 million -- while two out of three Dan River
employees managed to hang onto their jobs at least a little while longer.
The particularly
fortunate ones still had them in 1989, when, after seven years of crawling
along beneath its crushing load of debt, the company was
purchased by a trio of businessmen with experience in textiles. While
I'm not certain if Dan River was a textbook case of anything at the time, by
1996 it had been named a "model mill" by Textile World magazine.
Under the "visionary leadership" of the new owners, the company had
modernized, investing heavily in capital, acquiring other milling companies,
and branching out into new lines. With annual revenue again topping a
half-billion dollars, in late 1997 Dan River re-listed on the New York Stock
Exchange.
---just in time
for the collapse of the U.S. textile industry. In 1994, the U.S. signed both the
Agreement on Textiles and Clothing and NAFTA. The former phased out most import
restrictions on fabric and clothing over a ten-year period beginning in 1995.
The domestic textile industry was already beginning to feel the impact of
increased competition from foreign manufacturers when the dot-com collapse and
early-2000s recession pounded the final nails into the coffin. Dan River's largest customer, K-Mart, filed for bankruptcy
protection in January 2002, leaving them with $5 million in bad debt.
Two years later, Dan River stock was delisted from the NYSE; two months later,
Dan River itself filed for Chapter 11. After several more years of plant
closures and sell-offs, in January 2006 what remained of Dan River was
purchased by India's Gujarat Heavy Chemicals Limited for $93 million -- $17
million in cash plus assumption of $76 million in debt. At the end of the year,
Dan River existed as a brand name only: a textbook example of a company -- and
an industry -- that fell victim to globalization. The huge red-brick mills that once loomed [no pun
intended] over Schoolfield, Dan River's wholly-owned company town (annexed by
Danville in 1951) loom no more, taken apart brick-by-brick to feed the monied
class's appetite for antique building materials and old-growth timber.
Meanwhile, Mill No. 8, the iconic 'White Mill' built in 1921 on the banks of
the Dan, now stands as a textbook example of what as far as I can tell is the
only industry still thriving in the city: Spending Other People's Money on
hapless, ill-considered projects based on the insincere claim doing so will
lure modern industry to the region.
Or maybe it's not
insincere; perhaps it's just misguided. While the White Mill still stands
empty, five years after the project was announced to much fanfare, perhaps the
biggest surprise is how little OPM was spent -- perhaps due to the grantors'
having taken the unusual step of tying payout to performance. Of course, the
developers were able to purchase the massive, 650,000-square-foot plant
-- shown here on a vintage souvenir postcard -- for
around the same amount as the most recent selling price of the house where I
first lived after moving to San Francisco. And the market for antique brick is
far from saturated....
To get back to furniture, though, one
company that didn't have any problem accepting incentives was Ikea, who opened
their first U.S. factory in Danville. It got off to a rocky start, with
complaints of unfair practices and discrimination; when employees started
organizing for union representation, the company added 'union-busting' to the
list of complaints. One of its biggest problems, though, is that Ikea employees
elsewhere see the Danville plant as an example of outsourcing production to a
country that lower wages, fewer benefits, and lax worker protections makes
unfairly competitive. According to a 2011 L.A. Times article, Ikea's European
employees enjoyed a minimum wage of around $19 an hour, with a
government-mandated five weeks of paid vacation. In comparison, full-time
employees in Danville started at $8 an hour, with twelve vacation days -- eight
of which were on dates set by the company. And that only applied to the
full-time work force; the one-third of employees hired through
temporary-staffing agencies were paid even less and
received no benefits.
Late last year, two Chinese-based
furniture manufacturers also announced plans to open manufacturing centers in
Danville, for a total of 400 jobs within three years. Danville is also home to
a call center operated by Telvista, a Texas-based company that got its start by
routing customer service calls to lower-paid representatives working in Mexico. I'm working on suggestions for new
slogans for the Danville Chamber of Commerce. What do you think? Outsourcingª: Buy American
Artisanal outsourcing
from local providers
Is this, perhaps, an
example of The Horseshoe Theory (I see it more as a complete circle myself)
Wiki: The horseshoe theory in political science asserts that rather than the
far left and the far right being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear
political continuum, they in fact closely resemble one another, much like the
ends of a horseshoe. The theory is attributed to French writer Jean-Pierre
Faye.
In University of Reading academic Peter Barker's book, GDR and Its
History, Peter Thompson of the University of Sheffield observes that the theory
is "increasingly orthodox," and describes the theory as seeing
"left and right-wing parties being closer to each other than the
centre."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
Twilight Great post. There
are no meaningful differences between the two major parties anymore--both have been infiltrated by the poison of neoliberalism.
Obama's election was proof of that. He has been a disaster of monumental
proportions, with his education policies the worst of all. They are right out
of the neoliberal playbook. He is literally bought and paid for by the
despicable Bill Gates and his mob. Gates is arguably more dangerous than even
the Kochs, but the billionaire or near-billionaire class is pretty much all the
same. There are no
"left-right" divisions, no "Democratic-Republican"
divisions, no "conservative-liberal"
divisions anymore. It's the tiny handful of filthy rich who
have waged an unrelenting class war on everybody else. They have done this
through literally buying off politicians to do their bidding. People have been
duped to think somebody with a "D" after his or her name means they
care about them. They don't.
The purpose of this
piece was announced in its opening. What IS globalization? From China's
perspective, what we call globalization is really nationalism, since they are
using governmental power to put their country ahead of us. It used to be that
"global" was a word associated with the left -- as in "Think
globally; act locally." The far right routinely accused guys like me of
being "globalists."
Yet the truth is, I always thought of myself as an American. No more, no
less, for good or for ill.
So now the left has decided that globalization is dangerous. Are we now
nationalists? Do we feel comfortable embracing that label? The sad fact is,
we simply don't have any philosophical writings to function as a guideline.
Everyone like to point to this or that political
philosopher of the 19th century. But nothing written then quite prepares us for
where we are now. THAT is
what I was trying to get across.
This is important,
Joseph, and you are correct; our terminology is obsolete and no longer fits. When
bankers take control of the "governments" of several countries, what
kind of governments are they, and whom do they serve? Corporatism might be a
useful term, although Mussolini defined fascism as corporatism, but let's skip
that. When billionaire
oligarchs move their industrial operations from the US to Bangladesh or Vietnam
in a quest for the lowest possible wages with the least possible benefits, are
they being globalists, or are they just driven by boundless greed with no
social conscience whatsoever? When a country like the US blows up the
infrastructure of other countries in order to loot their resources, install a
new "government", sell them new weapons systems, and have the
infrastructure rebuilt by US corporations, and have it all done on credit
issued by international banks centered in New York, is that globalism or
nationalism? I'm not sure if either term applies. Perhaps
"parasitism" fits better. We seem to have entered a world
consisting of the 1% and those who serve them and everyone else, and we have no
terminology for this transition. The parasites seem intent on
either destroying, eating or controlling everything on the planet while
leaving nothing for the other 99%.
