Page 15 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

seem to lead nowhere, or apathy, or even explicit support for the Right
which – whatever may be said in criticism of right-wing views – has a
program, however tendentious (law and order, immigration control, free
markets combined with cultural conservatism and religiosity), which seeks
to address the issues of everyday political concern.
Perhaps the most striking feature of this bracketing of production rela-
tions is its effect on those who oppose globalization. It is increasingly
clear that there is a crisis here. Those who oppose globalization remain
permanently locked into oppositional mode, increasingly driven to acts of
anarchist rage, partly because of their inability to propose convincing
alternative reforms in the sphere of the economy. Especially since the
widespread failure of standard socialist and social democratic economic
solutions (nationalization, central planning, price controls, the welfare
state), the issue of workable economic alternatives is more important
than ever. In their own way, anarchist groups seem to implicitly concede
the failure of traditional socialism and simply revert to the primitive idea
of ‘smashing the system’. But window-smashing – which will hardly
‘smash’ capitalism (whatever that could mean) – is not a political or eco-
nomic program. This failure means that the anti-globalization movement,
while able to rally hundreds of thousands, even millions of people in its
support, is unable to enter the mainstream of political life since it is unable
to connect the movement to the solution of the everyday economic, social
and political problems facing ordinary people.
Yet this may soon change. With concern growing for the increasing
export of high-paying, high-skilled jobs to Asia, the anti-globalization
movement may have new, but quite different recruits from suburbia and
Middle America. This makes it all the more urgent for social and cultural
theory to articulate a convincing and workable critique of the current
form of globalization, but on the basis of the extension of global economic
and social relations. Otherwise these groups are likely to revert to a nar-
rowly nationalistic rejection of increased global integration.
However, it is one thing to criticize globalization in the sense of free
trade, environmental abuse and other inequities – as a distorted and
unregulated form of internationalization and sociality – and a totally dif-
ferent matter to reject it in its entirety on principle, with a view to some
kind of romantic ‘return’. For some time it has been clear that global-
ization in its current form of unregulated free trade is undesirable and
unviable – economically, environmentally, socially and politically. When
the negative effects of the current approach were confined to developing
countries or to displaced blue-collar groups in the developed countries,
this discomfited the powers that be but did not become a central policy

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