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FOUR Globalization and Risks

The failure to theorize monopoly capital and imperialism (in relation to
race) which characterizes Gilroy’s work is also a critical weakness of the
work of other important scholars, such as Giddens, Lash and Urry and
Castells. In the work of these scholars, notions of ‘risk’, technology and
globalization play a critical role but they do not connect globalization
to any of the theories of imperialism (Hobson, Hilferding, Kautsky,
Luxemburg, Bukharin, Lenin, Harvey). Although they point to the severe
inequalities of the global economy (see Giddens, Runaway World), they do
not characterize globalization as a return to a further and more intense
phase of imperialism, especially consequent on the collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1989. I shall discuss the work of Giddens first.
The strength of the sociological theory of Giddens derives from his
recognition that the liberalization and deregulation of capital and cur-
rency markets, combined with the large-scale deployment of information
technology, have ushered in a new phase of capitalism. Although not
characterized as such, this is, indeed, a restoration of an era of Free Trade
but under infinitely more monopolistic and globally competitive condi-
tions. It is precisely this gigantic concentration of monopoly capital and
its unification with immense pools of finance capital – all privately held
and driven by market forces – that account for the ferocity of global com-
petition. Giddens understands that these changes in the global economy
deeply affect even the most intimate areas of everyday life everywhere in
the world. There is therefore a certain inescapable uniformity in the con-
sequences which globalization has for the entire world. The key point for
him is that these are forces which not only affect developing countries,
as the older analyses tended to argue. Globalization also contains very
serious ‘risks’ for developed societies as well. In other words, there is a
sense of foreboding in Giddens’s work as to what this new era actually