Globalization, the Hegemony of Capital

By: Vahid Niamadpour

Chamran University, Ahwaz, Iran

Introduction

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed -- a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.¹

 Globalization has been used widely since two decades ago, as  Marshal McLuhan wrote his novel entitled "war and peace in the global village", but the concept has been with man since the religions of the world predicted a global society and applied with the navigations of Spanish and Portuguese adventurers to explore and exploit a new world. Since then, the powers tried to colonize poor nations and exploit them. That time a concrete exploitation could bring them a lot, but nowadays abstract exploitation that is the hegemony of culture, economy and politics i.e., liberal democracy is used by the Imperialism as Lenin puts it. Zhedanov in 1950 declared that the world was divided between two camps of Socialism and Capitalism. The cold war began but the winner was the capitalism after the collapse of the Soviet Union and consequently the Berlin wall.

Globalization is closely linked to the ideology of neo-liberalism. The two concepts share a sort of division of labor. While globalization asserts the inevitable victory of market forces over everything that stands in their way, neo-liberalism tells us this is all to the good.

Globalization

Many people may see globalization as an economic project including free trade, import and export of commodities among multinational corporations.

One can also point to a rapid increase in cross-border social, cultural and technological exchange as part of the phenomenon of globalization.

The sociologist, Anthony Giddens, defines globalization as a: "decoupling of space and time, emphasizing that with instantaneous communications, knowledge and culture can be shared around the world simultaneously.^"2

Globalization is an undeniably capitalist process. It has taken off as a concept in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and of socialism as a viable alternate form of economic organization. But let's have a more comprehensive definition of the term: Globalization is the rapid increase in cross-border economic, social, technological exchange under conditions of capitalism.

Poulantzas defines it as:" the intensification of time and place."³ 

            I think we should refer to globalization as a system in which the power of nation states is diminished by ultranational corporations.

Globalization and Capitalism

But original sin is at work everywhere. As capitalist production, accumulation, and wealth, became developed, the capitalist ceases to be the mere incarnation of capital. He has a fellow-feeling for his own Adam, and his education gradually enables him to smile at the rage for asceticism, as a mere prejudice of the old fashioned miser! While the capitalist of the classical type brands individual consumption as a sin against his function, and as 'abstinence' from accumulation, the modernized capitalist is capable of looking upon accumulation as abstinence from pleasure. ⁴

Marx here explains the capitalists’ ‘avarice’ for consumption as the accumulation, production and surplus value go on increasing. Marx says, "Luxury enters into capital’s expenses of representation .Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!…. Therefore, save, save, i.e. reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus value or surplus-product into capital!”⁵ Capitalists accumulate not for accumulation’s sake but to convert it into capital and to generate more surplus value. But what for this surplus value? Marx explains, “At the historical dawn of capitalist production - and every capitalist upstart has personally to go through this historical stage, avarice, and desire to get rich are the ruling passions.”⁶

But where does this ‘ruling passion’ “to get rich” lead the capitalist system to? For constantly increasing production, the capitalists need expansion of their markets. So Marx already explained it in the Communist Manifesto: ”The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connection everywhere.”⁷

Here is the key to the present phase of capitalist globalization which has now assumed the fiercest form. Capitalist globalization assumed a new dimension of transnationalisation of production, capital flow and consumer tests engulfing the entire world.

The bourgeois erudite who describe modern capitalism as a casino economy, of course, do not acknowledge that this is the end result of the very laws of development of capitalism that Marx discovered. Instead, they attribute it to the changes in communications

Globalization and culture

Definition of culture

Culture was originally used in words such as agriculture, horticulture to indicate cultivating. It was first used for human society in Germany in1750 meaning progress and promotion. The first scientific definition of culture was posed by the American anthropologist, Edward Taylor. In 1871 in the first sentence of his book, Primitive culture, he says: " Culture or civilization is an intermingled wholeness including, knowledge, religion, art, law, moralities, customs of humans in a society."⁹ 

Schumpter defines culture as: "a process through which certain attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, and language can be inherited and passed on to the next generation.^"10

As noted above some important components of culture are language, norms, and values which are inherited and as a result hard to lose, for they are intermingled with the soul and the person inborn.

Globalized economy and culture

A challenge the culture of poorer countries face, is the relation of economy and culture; as the superpowers has the power to prevail other cultures, known as cultural attack, or western cultural imperialism. The culture of those poor countries is liable to diminish as in the face of cultural products such as: Hollywood movies, McDonald products, etc. Beside economical privilege there is a technological privilege to capture the world, such as satellites, newspapers, magazines, and internet. These imported products or services can themselves represent, or be associated with, certain values.

Cultural imperialism

'Cultural imperialism' can refer to either the forced acculturation of a subject population, or to the voluntary embracing of a foreign culture by individuals who do so of their own free will. Since these are two very different referents, the validity of the term has

been called into question. The term cultural imperialism is understood differently in particular discourses e.g. as "media imperialism" or as "discourse of nationality". It is the will to homogenize cultures, and since the only culture exported to most countries is American, the ultimate culture to exist would be The American one, with English as the Lingua Franca. Movies contain lifestyle, values and norms of America exported to other countries and along with commodities try to permeate consumerism. Along with cultural consumerism people would be incited to consume more than their actual need to stabilize capitalism. Consuming too much of western cultural products such as Coca, McDonald, movies, and satellite channels has instilled a kind of lifestyle rather than culture making people of culturally exploited countries forget about their own identity and originality. This globalization would turn everything into a capital, every quality to quantity so that cultures would be easily at markets. Some of the changes as a result of these factors visible in society are people's clothes, their language, eating habits, names, and attitude towards religion.    

The United States dominates this global traffic in information and ideas. American music, American movies, American television, and American software are so dominant, so sought after, and so visible that they are now available literally everywhere on the Earth. They influence the tastes, lives, and aspirations of virtually every nation. In some, they are viewed as corrupting. France and Canada have both passed laws to prohibit the satellite dissemination of foreign - meaning American - content across their borders and into the homes of their citizens. Not surprisingly, in many other countries, fundamentalist Iran, communist China, and the closely managed society of Singapore - central governments have aggressively sought to restrict the software and programming that reach their citizens. Their explicit objective is to keep out American and other alien political views, mores, and, as it is called in some parts of the Middle East, "news pollution." In these countries, the control of new media that give previously closed or controlled societies virtually unlimited access to the outside world is a high priority. Singapore has sought to filter out certain things that are available over the Internet - essentially processing all information to eliminate pornography. China has set up a "Central Leading Group" under the State Planning Commission and the direct supervision of a vice premier to establish a similar system that will exclude more than just what might be considered obscene.

Globalization and economy

Utilizing Marx's theory of capitalist development, Lenin concluded 85 years ago that all the features which Marx had forecast in 1865 as characteristic of capitalist production in its highest development had become dominant in Western Europe, North America, Japan and in his native Russia.

On the basis of economic data compiled by bourgeois economists in the early years of the 20th century, Lenin argued in December 1915 that "at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, commodity exchange had created such an internationalisation of economic relations, and such an internationalisation of capital, accompanied by such a vast increase in large-scale production, that free competition began to be replaced by monopoly."¹¹

The dominant type of capitalist businesses were, no longer enterprises freely competing inside the country and through intercourse between countries, but monopoly alliances of entrepreneurs , trusts which were carving up the world market between themselves.

The typical ruler of the world became finance capital, a power that is peculiarly mobile and flexible, peculiarly intertwined at home and internationally, peculiarly devoid of individuality and divorced from the immediate processes of production, peculiarly easy to concentrate, a power that has already made peculiarly large strides on the road to concentration, so that literally several hundred billionaires and millionaires hold in their hands the fate of the whole world.¹²

Lenin further concluded that the domination of the economic and political life of the advanced capitalist countries by these financial oligarchies had given rise to a new epoch in the history of the world which had superseded the epoch of the comparatively peaceful extension of the domination of capitalist production across the entire globe, marked approximately by the years 1871 and 1914. Of course, he noted that:

even this epoch of peaceful expansion of capitalism had created conditions of life that were very far from being really peaceful both in the military and in a general class sense". He pointed out that: "For nine-tenths of the population of the advanced

countries, for hundreds of millions of peoples in the colonies and in the backward countries this epoch was not one of `peace' but of oppression, tortures, horrors that seemed the more terrifying since they appeared to be without end.¹³

"This epoch has gone forever", Lenin said. "It has been followed by a new epoch, comparatively more impetuous, full of abrupt changes, catastrophes, conflicts, an epoch that no longer appears to the toiling masses as horror without end but is an end full of horrors."¹⁴ This new epoch, Lenin explained in his 1916 book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, would be marked above all by the drive by each of the financial oligarchies of the advanced capitalist countries to use the coercive power and organized violence of the state machines they commanded to maintain their imperial domination over the economic and political life of the backward countries and to increase their wealth at the expense not only of working people at home and abroad but also in competition with the financial oligarchies that dominated the other advanced countries. Consequently, the new imperialist epoch of capitalism would be marked by repeated colonial wars, uprisings by imperialist-dominated peoples and inter-imperialist military conflicts that would create the political conditions for abolishing capitalism through successful working-class revolutions

Globalization and nation-states

There are two strands to the argument that globalization is undermining nation states. First, it is that it is empowering corporations at the expense of the nation state, and secondly, that the international institutions such as the WTO and World Bank are not democratic. There is an issue of sheer size. It is noted that many corporations are larger than nation states – more than half the 100 largest economies in the world are corporations. The sales of Ford and General Motors combined are greater than the combined GDP of sub-Saharan Africa while those of the six largest Japanese trading companies are almost as big as all the nations of Latin America combined. The problem starts with laws of the early 19th century, which meant individual managers, and directors could not be held liable for the actions of the corporation. It is argued that globalization was not a democrat choice but was pursued by corporations to suit their own ends of maximizing profit by playing one nation off against another.

The policies of national governments in capitalist countries are mainly determined by two important dynamics: the first is the state of the national process of capital accumulation and its relative international strength; the second is the balance of class forces both nationally and internationally. Globalization changes the nature of the nation state as power becomes more diffuse and borders more porous. Technological change is reducing the power and capacity of government to control its domestic economy free from external influence. This is the market and corporations controlling the government.

Living in a country where knowledge, culture and politics are dominated by the concerns and prejudices of middle class people; in which the poor and oppressed working class are  outside the political process and ignored by the official labor movement; and where social relations seem frozen,  repetitive  and unchanging,  it could appear that an epochal shift has  occurred  in  capitalism  and that  the  socialist  project, at  least as  it is  traditionally understood, has to be buried. We should note the warning not to underestimate the dangers posed by the so-called `culture of postmodernism', in a society where knowledge workers who run the Information Society, who are in the engine room of power, have become collaborators in power'. But let's respond as materialists. History has not ended. And globalization, if it is anything, is a sign of the crisis of capitalism, of increasing instability, of rapidly changing circumstances in a world of obscene and growing inequality. Social relations are not fixed. The conditions which spawned a new middle class and turned it into a bedrock of social stability in the imperialist nations after the war have ended. Today it is those privileged conditions which are being threatened.

Notes

¹Karl Marx. Communist Manifesto( Moscow: Moscow University Pub., 1977)19.

²Anthony Giddens. Capitalism and Modern Social Theory(Cambridge:Cambridge University 1971)43.

³ Poulantzas. State, Power, Socialism(London: Georgo Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1976)38.

⁴ Karl Marx, 12.

⁵ Karl Marx. Capital( Moscow: Moscow University Pub., 1954)128.

⁶ Marx and Engels. Collected Works( London: Polity Press, 1976)98.

⁷ Karl Marx. Communist Manifesto, 9.

⁸ Anthony Giddens,87.

⁹Edward Taylor. Primitive Culture (London: Polity Press, 1871)45.

¹⁰Joseph Schumpter. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy( London: Georgo Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1976)77.

¹¹Miliband.Marxism and Politics( Oxford: OUP,1978)114.

^12. Miliband,116.

¹³ Miliband,92.

¹⁴ Miliband,213.

Works Cited

Edward Taylor. (London: Polity Press, 1871)45. Primitive Culture. London: Polity Press, 1871.

Giddens, A. Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge, 1971.

Marx, K. and Engels, F. Collected Works. London: Polity Press, 1976.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Moscow: Moscow University Pub., 1954.

—. Communist Manifesto. Moscow: Moscow University Pub., 1977.

Miliband. Marxism and Politics. Oxford: OUP, 1978.

Poulantzas, N. State, Power, Socialism. London: Greenwood Brothers, 1973.

Schumpter, Joseph. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London: Georgo Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1976.