The Question of Resistance and Alternatives

excerpted from the book

Globalization
and the Decline of Social Reform

by Gary Teeple

Garamond Press / Humanity Books, 2000, paper

p195

The Question of Resistance and Alternatives

There are many who still agree with the position argued 150 years ago' that the struggle against capital is at first national. The idea remains current in many circles, and some theorists argue that the national state is a possible instrument for confronting the processes of globalization. Such positions usually rest on the persistence of Keynesian beliefs about the interventionist state, without an understanding of the economic rationale of the state or without perceiving that such a model has lost its foundation with the demise of Fordism. We have entered the era of global capitalism, and attempts to employ the chief instrument of what was national capital against now-global capital are not likely to succeed.

The struggle to change oppressive conditions can no longer be framed in strictly national terms because the nation-state is more or less rapidly losing its integrity as a system. With globalization, national forms of struggle are increasingly less effective against global corporate demands. In the present early stages of the global era, the decline of national sovereignty, powers, and laws all go hand-in-hand with the demise of a national bourgeoisie. The state as a meaningful national political institution begins to slip into history, just as precapitalist political forms did with the coming of the bourgeois revolutions.

Most of the movements, political parties, and organizations that represent property forms other than corporate capital were and remain defined in national or local terms, and their perspectives persist within a national framework. Here lies one of the greatest weaknesses of the opposition and a key reason for much of the disarray and division amongst many of the counterforces to global capitalism. The continuing national definition of subordinate classes and groups creates barriers to their thinking about the "new reality"; and the limited development of united or organized global counterforces allows capital to expand without much restraint or significant opposition at the global level.

Continuous developments in global governance and new instruments of production have made a singular, unified global market not only possible but also a growing reality, implying the ultimate subordination of all national economies. On the one hand, national labour markets progressively succumb to global changes. The structure of working classes is transformed; union rights and employment standards are undermined;S more or less rapid proletarianization of the Third World takes place; child labour grows enormously;' and there are new extensions of the economic oppression of women. On the other hand, orchestrating these changes are transnational classes and strata that own, manage, and administer global corporate interests and that oversee the supranational "enabling framework."

Given these developments, globalization can be seen as the triumph of capitalism,(that is, as)the ascendancy of economics over politics, of corporate demands over public policy, of the private over the public interest, of the transnational corporation and its global framework over
the national state. It represents the approaching completion of the capitalization of the world. The triumph is embodied in and affirmed by global agencies whose sole function is the facilitation of global conditions for capital accumulation, without formal political access and only limited representation by certain interests. It is not the occlusion of national politics but the subordination of national interests and sovereignty to those of the transnational corporation and its supranational framework.

This rise of the transnational economy, misunderstood by those preferring to argue for an international version, points to a significant change in the relation between civil society and the state: the rise of the polarity of civil society and state at the global level. This development makes for two such separations, the first at the national level and the other now unfolding and clarifying at the global level. To understand the new possibilities and problems of resistance to the many aspects of globalization, we need to grasp what is taking place from the perspective of the concept of civil society and the state.

What many attempts to define the concept of civil society miss is that it does not stand alone. The concept, like its empirical referent, the sphere of private interests, appears only as one side in a relation to the state, the sphere of "the general." The two comprise the "resolved" components of society: the private and the public, the particular and the general, the parts and the whole. They represent the chief distinguishing characteristic of society become political as in the modern liberal-democratic nation-state.

In national political systems, the state possesses a monopoly over the general affairs, albeit in the form of law, administrative apparatus, the military, state corporations, and so on. Its polar opposite is civil society, the sphere of particular interests. Here individuals, groups, trade unions, churches, and, importantly, private corporations, among others, pursue their specific interests and advantages, while the formal relation of civil society to the state is limited to the political rights accorded to individuals. This divide between general and particular affairs allows prevailing property relations to be maintained while certain organized parts of civil society (such as trade unions) can exact concessions from the state in the form of countervailing property relations (such as trade union rights, employment standards, and social rights). Political reforms or concessions are all that can be hoped for within this system.

Globalization opens a new transnational divide between general and particular affairs; but at this level the state and civil society have a different content. On the one side, supranational quasi-governmental organizations (and the U.S. state) codify, oversee, and enforce the corporate property relations that define the global economy. On the other side, global civil society is composed mainly of TNCs and national states and, to a lesser extent, international NGOs, including certain religious and environmental organizations; but it does not include the world's subordinate classes, which are restricted to national civil societies. We are faced, then, with the development of a two-tiered contradiction between the state and civil society.

At the national level, the subordinate classes have some, albeit limited, access to and influence over the state by means of the vote, political parties, trade unions, consumer groups, and in general, the mechanisms of liberal democracy. At the global level, however, there are no such representative mechanisms; there the subordinate classes have little institutional presence. Only national states, representing declining national interests (that is, corporate interests), and TNCs have any significant relation to power in this growing global matrix of governing structures. In effect, the world's peoples are disenfranchised in the global arena; there is no formal, institutional, legitimate mechanism for their representation.

The current two-tiered divide between civil society and state has created a series of new contradictions. Among these are the contradictions between the world's subordinate classes, progressive groups and individuals, and the global governance framework for capital, and their now compromised national states, and the TNCs. Others have arisen between national states and the agencies of the global regulatory framework, and the TNCs. And yet others now exist between the world's peoples and TNC environmental destruction; between the subordinate classes of the rich and poor nations; and between the organized working classes of the industrial nations and the largely unorganized in the Third World. There is, moreover, the contradiction between political rights at the national level and economic rights at the global. The world is far from what it was prior to the early 1970s.

All this has to be taken into account in the consideration of contemporary resistance and the question of alternatives. When the main object of resistance is no longer only a national state and bourgeoisie, but increasingly the TNC and the global "state," strictly national strategies contain an implicit defect: they are the application of, or search for, old solutions to qualitatively new problems. To fight for the restoration of the sovereignty of a nation-state makes little sense given that the nation-state was the political shell and economic market for national capital. To try to reassert or rebuild the Keynesian welfare state at the national level, furthermore, has to address the problem of a growing global labour market, declining incomes and increasing economic disparities, a dissolving national framework, and TNC pressure to privatize and deregulate. To fight for socialism in this context, moreover, means to fight for it in one country; and the theoretical and practical arguments against this are well known and more pertinent than ever today. As long as the proposed alternatives are steeped in the conceptual frameworks and solutions belonging to previous eras, there can be no successful counterforce, organizational or ideational, to the present conditions.

None of this is in any way an argument against resistance or the development of alternatives. The fact of the "new reality" does not imply that there must be compliance or subordination to its demands. Numerous labour strikes, demonstrations, armed resistance, environmental protests, and many other actions around the world (even the Internet-based resistance to the Multilateral Agreement on Investment)" aimed at TNCs and their policies in national guise are all cases in point. The coming of globalization points to the need to reassess the nature of countervailing demands and the means to achieve them in a world that bears little resemblance to what existed even before 1970. New corporate forms, profound changes in class structure accompanying the new technology, and the new global enabling framework means that resistance of all sorts needs to be rethought and reorganized.

It can no longer be assumed that the national, regional, or local state can act independently of global capital, that the state can stand on its own in the face of TNCs or continue to represent national or local capital. The state can be a "site of resistance," but its intrinsic relation to capital cannot be overlooked. Where national resistance, alternatives, or threats have arisen they have met certain similar fates: for example, in Chile, Nicaragua, Libya, Iraq, Yugoslavia, and East Timor. The differences between these cases are not the issue; the point is that each in its own way constituted a national threat to the operations of global capital.

The challenge for subordinate interests and progressive organizations and individuals is, first, to understand the nature of contemporary exploitation and the new contradictions entailed. Second, they must build global mechanisms for representation and expression to overcome their national definition and restriction. It follows that they must also clarify the global demands they are making and will make, and demand a voice in global governance while critically analysing its limits and those of national government.

All the struggles that face the subordinate classes and peoples of the world increasingly find their origins in a system of production and distribution that is global, more and more dependent on science and technology, and situated within the complexity of new emerging contradictions. Effective resistance can only be mounted on the basis of an understanding of these current global changes. There can be no answers to problems that are not properly posed or comprehended.

Globalization and the Decline of Social Reform

Index of Website

Home Page