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EIGHT Alternatives

A Global Approach to Anti-Globalization

This analysis appears to leave us with a dismal set of conclusions. The
globalizers seem to be right: there is no credible alternative to globaliza-
tion. Weber was not pessimistic enough. But do such conclusions follow?
What these problems emphasize is the urgent need for greater
economic knowledge within social and cultural theory and a bringing
together of the large literature analyzing socialist alternatives to capital-
ism with the anti-globalization critiques. There is today, partly as a result
of revulsion at neo-liberalism and capitalist globalization and the persis-
tent culturalism criticized in this book, a profound lack of appreciation of
market mechanisms on the left of the political spectrum. Here, it is often
taken for granted that the market is simply a capitalist institution and that
‘commodification’ will have no role in a socialist economy. Sloganeering
against ‘commodification’ abounds. Yet all the experience of socialist
economic reforms in the twentieth century, whether it be the Soviet Union,
Hungary, Yugoslavia, China or the Mondragon cooperative in Spain, con-
clusively establishes that the market – both national and international –
must play an essential role in any realistic alternative to capitalism. What
1
is more, following on from the very conception of universality first devel-
oped by Hegel and adapted to materialism by Marx, the inter-dependence
created by a global division of labor is the necessary foundation for the
realization of the possibilities of the individual on the broadest possible
scale. Current attempts to revive ‘historical materialism’ which inveigh
2
mindlessly against ‘economism’ weaken social and cultural theory further. 3
We need more ‘economism’, not less.
The difficulties of developing a feasible and viable alternative to
monopoly capitalism should not be under-estimated. It is by no means
a simple task, as the innumerable analyses of the failure of socialist