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Ian
Linden The
glue of the crimp-seal around the dog Gordon Burn, Fullalove, Minerva 1996, 128. The time of advanced capitalism in which we live is one of striking contradictions. On the one hand, it is spawning ethnic nationalisms, forms of religious fundamentalism and exclusive identities that create and consolidate boundaries. On the other, it is characterised by an information and communications revolution, the unregulated flow of capital, globalised forms of production, and the pursuit of free trade, each of which challenge and break down boundaries. A movement towards universalism and globalisation contends with a movement towards plurality and particularism. Moreover, in the complex layering of our world the prevailing currents appear to move in different directions. The political and social is played out increasingly as a clash of particularisms, interest groups and ethnic nationalisms one against the other, whilst it is now commonplace to say that the terrain of the economic is global. Focus on the concept of globalisation, - the term is confusingly used with a variety of contemporary meanings - weights analysis against a full understanding of particularism, and fragmentation, and suggests that these forces are of little significance. So, in many ways, as the dominant idea of our time "globalisation", with its resonant suggestions of interdependence and world community, has an ideological feel to it, obscuring as much as it reveals. Globalisation: ideology or reality? "We will do our best", the 1989 Toyota Annual Report proclaims, "to bring the world together by building up the global auto-industry". That is what we are supposed to believe. Many people do believe that globalisation is a description of a quantum jump in international trade and that it is self-evidently a good thing. International trade has, of course, changed over the years, from large standardised products like sugar, wheat, wool and textiles moved by shipping in the 1920's, to the vast array and much greater volume of goods and services of the 1990's. However, the percentage contribution of international trade in merchandise to countries' overall productive wealth, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is today much the same as it was before the First World War. And while in the industrialised countries trade is playing a growing part in economic growth, the share of trade of the world's 48 least developed countries (LDCs) has dropped by one half since the 1980's to only 0.4 per cent. It is not trade in merchandise that has undergone a quantum jump in the last two decades but the movement of money, or, at least, the movement of what money signifies in the hyperspace of communications technology. The daily turnover of currency transactions in the money markets during the 1970's was about $1 billion. It is now well above $1 trillion, 100 times more than Governments' currency reserves. Unlike the 1970's when only 10 per cent of these flows represented currency speculation, today this forms some 90 per cent of currency movements. Since the 1980's the flow of the remaining 10 per cent has had a fast growing component of foreign direct investment (FDI), - exported capital moving across nation-State boundaries not as loans or investment in company shares but as direct ownership. It has risen four times to reach $220 billion in 1994, while exported goods and services have increased by only one half. This might, at first glance, represent an effective means of redistribution from capital-rich to capital-poor countries, but this is far from reality. Flows to the least developed countries - and these would include most of sub-Saharan Africa - are negligible. Not suprisingly 90 per cent moves between the richer industrialised countries or to and from the Asian Tigers and Southern China. Up to half of this is mergers and acquisitions of already existing factories and companies not new investment in productive assets. So the unique feature of globalisation is a further major step in distancing money from production and exchange and turning it into a fetish. Money has moved a stage further away from its instrumental purpose to facilitate market exchange to become an idol inhabiting hyperspace, a tawdry one at that, incarnate as the chips in an international currency casino employing hundreds of thousands of people. One of the principal reasons that Britain will probably be forced to join any European Monetary Union, is that the failure to do so may cost thousands of jobs in the City. Britain's economic development, skewed by empire and dominions into the overdevelopment of financial "services", is particularly vulnerable to challenges from rival financial centres like Frankfurt. Thus while globalisation has taken on the aura of a modern, secular version of the Victorian theme of Christianity and Commerce - read free trade and good governance - it is characterised in reality by a perennial feature of the dynamics of capitalism: the creation of wealth in association with the generation of poverty, suffering, and inequality. The recent Uruguay round of the GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs), for example, will supposedly create $213 billion in new wealth around the world from trade liberalisation. But of this, $142 billion will go to the rich North, $58 billion to China and "upper income" Asia, with only $13 billion for the rest. Most of the rest will go to Latin America with Africa lucky to see $2 billion. In the last 30 years the gap between the richest 20 per cent of the world and the poorest 20 per cent has doubled. So from the perspective of the poor, globalisation represents the acceleration of the destructive features of advanced capitalism. The second diagnostic feature of this system is the degree to which production has become international. From cars to dresses the productive process is spread across several nation-State boundaries and, in the main, controlled by 100 or so vast transnational corporations (TNCs). The trading network of the TNCs is normally thought and spoken of as global though increasingly, in order to deal with freight costs, and ensure that chains of suppliers are advantageously placed, regional, or even local. The "outsourcing" of production to local suppliers has perhaps gone the furthest in companies like Toyota which undertakes only 15% of production, the rest being placed with suppliers locked in to the vast parent company. Even a company like Shell has 80 per cent of its operations in the European Union. The famous Ford Mondeo "world car", in fact, is made and marketed in the USA and Europe. The service sector that relies on the - easier - transfer of information technology is less constrained in this way. Since the movement of labour is limited by a variety of factors, often political, and that of footloose capital is not, the TNCs have a growing power as global employers to select sites of production to minimise environmental, social and labour costs, but most particularly to get the best inducements from Governments. This is not unlimited power as nation-State Governments can legislate to limit it, and the supply of skilled labour for the more advanced productive processes has proved a "natural" brake. Unfortunately, in practice, nation-State Governments compete with each other to offer ever larger incentives for new transnational FDI, thereby throwing away their negotiating power and beggaring their neighbour. The control of 70 per cent of world trade and much production within the large transnationals and their "outsourced" suppliers, with "transfer pricing" to low taxation countries, makes the term "free trade" another of the great obfuscations of our time. This state of economic affairs is presented by many Governments as outside their control, somehow beyond human agency, while in reality it has been created by decisions to deregulate currency markets, place no brake on incentives, back away from controls on transnationals, and constrain labour movement through immigration and other indirect controls. Regulation of currency markets, for example, in the form of taxes on currency transactions, the Tobin Tax, would be difficult to implement but far from impossible. Likewise for regulation of de facto regional and international cartels and monopolies. De-regulation is taken as a lynchpin of neo-liberalism and presented as though it were, in economic terms, equivalent to a return to the precepts of natural law with "market distortion" the equivalent of original sin. De-regulation is seen as a natural consequence of a belief in freedom, and freedom and choice as the dominant value of the system. Fukuyama even claims that history has ended with the universal victory of today's political economy, liberal capitalism, as if the contradictions within it were of no consequence. They are, of course, more relevant than appears at first sight. As Fukuyama implies, advanced capitalism is a political economy, in other words it operates best within particular social and political conditions and parameters. Democracy, an independent judiciary, an entrepreneurial class, good governance, all are seen to be integral to the system by those who promote liberal capitalism globally as a political and economic project. But these systemic features of advanced capitalism are absent in much of the world, where the social and political vary in relation to the economic from the dysfunctional to the disastrous. The Janus Face As a system, therefore, advanced capitalism defines what it means to be a human being in contradictory ways. On the one hand, people in liberal democracies are citizens with universal human rights. Indeed, the struggle for a universal franchise made the marking of a ballot paper into a symbol of an universal humanity. Elections may be, or may become, a purely formal process, but it need not be so, as anyone who watched Black South Africans vote for the first time in 1994 can affirm. Those who vote illustrate how, in this instance, the system requires free subjects, both in the philosophical sense of rational decision-makers rather than robots, and in the constitutional sense, and thereby acknowledges that we are men and women with inalienable political rights. Black people in Britain, for example, however discriminated against in economic and social life, will not be noted down as they vote so that piles of their ballots may be placed separately and discounted by presiding officers, or, as in the imperfect capitalism of apartheid South Africa, not permitted to vote at all. Formal democracy under a universal franchise is premised on citizens as adult, autonomous subjects who are not differentiated. This, it hardly needs saying, is not the premise behind the marketing of goods. Likewise the law courts of advanced capitalist States require free subjects sharing universalised - or universalisable - norms and rules. The legal system in Britain depends on citizens performing jury service - at least until now - and for their verdicts not to be determined by arbitrary and particular likes and dislikes, or by anything other than their rational judgement and the evidence. Judges and magistrates are challenged when their verdicts are egregiously prejudiced. This is not to say that in practice both juries, magistrates and judges sometimes fail miserably to be the "rational man and woman" that they are required to be for the law. And that these failures will not be particularly likely in cases in which some form of particularism, ethnicity or nationalism, is involved. After all, the gross miscarriages of justice of the 1970's in the UK were characterised by obvious prejudice against Irish people. The point is not that advanced capitalism ensures that genuine justice and democracy prevail - it clearly does not - but that certain of its key institutions work on the premise that they should. These institutions require human beings to behave in a rational - post-enlightenment - way as moral beings. So, in important instances, and as part of a broad framework for economic exchanges, advanced capitalism supports the market with key institutions based on universal values. It is vitally concerned with rule-based frameworks for the smooth conduct of the market. Indeed, investment capital will not flow into countries that lack them, unless, as in China, corruption is matched by quick profits and access to a significant domestic market. Marx never underestimated the advance that the capitalist system represented over pre-capitalist formations and their despotic, arbitrary power relations, just as he never underestimated the exploitation and human misery it entailed. However, at this stage of capitalist production the market does not, in other key respects, require free subjects capable of rational decisions, i.e. universal, post-enlightenment men and women. It needs a plethora of differentiated consumers. Moreover the triumph of modern capitalism has hinged precisely on being able to segment and differentiate groups of consumers and then to supply them at a profit: babywear, records and CDs for adolescents, clothes for the older woman, "lefty" films for "lefty" filmgoers, designer drugs, slimming diets, then health foods, ethnic foods, package holidays, eco-tourism, the capacity of the system to differentiate human tastes, desires, likes and dislikes, seems almost limitless. Look at the "interest groups" represented by the different magazines on sale, the different types of bread on sale in a German bakery, the recent expansion of sport, sportswear and shoes. Market response to consumer preference is virtually instant in supermarket chains as information from the checkout is processed. But the market is increasingly "sensitive". If Adam Smith's hidden hand does not reach for certain types of merchandise, it is removed from the high street shop. If the price of tin falls like a stone in Bolivia people start growing coca. If people buy "Green" products, the supermarkets will stock them. The consumer is not defined as rational man and woman. Indeed consumer behaviour is studied with the intensity of zoologists watching the world's last apes. Behaviourists watch, study and then plan how stores are designed. Men rush in and out of stores feeling uncomfortable about shopping for clothes, so ties are placed on shirts for them to "impulse" buy. Sweets and items attractive to children are placed at a low-level near check-outs, but women learn to avoid aisles with this hazard. Advertisements play on fantasies and insecurities. Heinz trades on nostalgia for the organic family and retains its market share despite selling beans at higher prices than its rivals. This is a world where human beings are defined as empty vessels bearing an intermittent and shifting spectrum of desires and appetites. The only universals of relevance are a tiny cluster of brand names. As Terry Eagleton says: "In these sectors, plurality, desire, fragmentation and the rest are as native to the way we live as coal was to Newcastle before Margaret Thatcher got her hands on it". Indeed, the market might function perfectly well with mindless, but suggestible, robots provided they represented a vast and evolving range of particular appetites and desires, and bought what they were told by the advertisers, and thereby made profits for companies and their shareholders. Eagleton in his recent Illusions of Post-Modernism brilliantly describes the fit between the philosophy that permeates this world and the political economy of liberal capitalism today. He illustrates in post-modernist theory the echoes of the disappearance of the universal, autonomous subject in favour of the ephemeral bearer of consumer desires, and the fragmentation of the cultural, social and political world. Ironically it is only the 20 per cent of society in the developed nations who, through poverty, are obliged to buy the cheapest food and goods who have to be rational consumers, taking decisions purely on price. Resistance and Mission Work for justice and peace has to take account of these contradictions in the contemporary economic system, and play on them, if it is not to miss the available points of leverage. It has to share some of Marx's clarity - though not necessarily his judgements - about what needs to be left behind and what cherished in the inevitable process of change. So a basic task of the Church's mission is to develop in people their capacity to name, denounce and resist the multiple losses entailed in the processes that dehumanise in advanced capitalism, while nurturing those that open up genuine human choices. None of this is possible without some shared sense of the values and the virtues that will be required to follow this prophetic path. But shared values are exactly what post-modernism calls in question with its emphasis on how different cultures cannot communicate between themselves. Advanced capitalism is in the business of differentiating people as consumers in every way possible, and is more than happy with competing sub-cultures. In the process values become re-imagined as "styles". Thus people do not live virtuous or wicked lives, are not destructively selfish or live a lifetime of solidarity - such language is "judgemental". They have "life-styles". What is meant by "life-style" now encompasses what otherwise would be called moral choices. Today these choices are increasingly described in relative terms of appropriateness or inappropriateness. What exactly is meant though? The problem with this use of words is that kicking beggars to death, sexual harassment and wearing a Celtic scarf in a group of Rangers supporters might all be described as "inappropriate behaviour". It is as if the idea of "bad manners" of Victorian society had moved on from its class-dominated world into the fragmented groupings of post-modern society, losing on the way a Victorian sense of the virtues. The system is comfortable with value-systems being reduced to "styles", fragmented and unable to communicate successfully about ethical concerns provided "business ethics" - or the firing squad - sustains enough of a rule-based framework for trade and investment. That is why the so-called transition in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union initially presented a central moral issue for the Churches, not the sudden and appalling immiseration of the poor, or even crime, but "business ethics". Against this background, the most obvious avenue of resistance has been to concentrate on the redefinition of the consumer and of business ethics. The transformation of the consumer into a free moral subject, in other words the rehumanisation and liberation of the consumer, creates a systemic problem for advanced capitalism. Ethical investment, pensions, purchasing and trade, shareholder action, lobbying for monitored codes of conduct, touch the system at its most market sensitive, and widen the concept of business ethics. If enough people make ethical demands, the market will respond first by differentiating them into "ethical life-style" consumers - the process has already begun - and then corporate behaviour will be modified in the social and environmental spheres to incorporate the new consumer "desires". CIIR, the British TUC and the World Development Movement have been negotiating with the big transnational toy buyers about a code of conduct for Asian toy factories and how to monitor it. The impact of public campaigns on marketing is evident with some of the big oil companies. Already Tradecraft and the Fairtrade mark have managed to get several products into supermarkets, and the Body Shop, Premier Beveridges and the Co-op Bank have moved commercially into the ethical market niche. More difficult to date has been resistance at the other end of the contradiction, dealing with globalisation by promoting the re-localisation of economies and community control of capital. Credit unions, co-operatives, small scale income generating projects all face daunting problems in the context of concentrated economic power in the "globalised" economy. For, of course, it was the corporate world that acted locally and thought globally long before development and Church agencies and thus has a headstart. But there is much potential for creative action here, and the development agencies have built up their expertise in this area over the years. The problem is that the marketing manager has staked out the terrain before the Church worker and can call on far greater resources. So today's liberation struggle on a global canvas is not so much a question of making gains but of stopping losses. Among the irreversible losses attendant on "globalisation" that must be fought before it is too late are the loss of language, art and music, song and poetry, the social and spiritual meanings that have sustained people, let alone their capacity to control their lives in a community and to make a living. Some of these goals have been amongst the pre-occupations of Churches and Non-Governmental Development Agencies fighting a rearguard action on the margins. They are the substance of cultures that can be open to the future and to others, the contents of a healthy pluralism, but they can also be manipulated to sustain imagined, exclusive and violent forms of particularism. To describe the formation and sustaining of such inclusive cultures as involving a liberation struggle is to suggest a critique of globalisation in the context of liberation theology. Indeed, taking on these contradictions in advanced capitalism is a necessary new dimension in the evolution of liberation theology's thinking and practice. The Vatican believes, of course, that it has slain the dragon of liberation theology and has now moved on to the next - Asian - dragon, "cultural relativism". It has not, of course; liberation theology has permeated the spiritual bloodstream of the Churches. It may be that only a more thoroughgoing analysis of advanced capitalism coupled with the vision of a renewed liberation theology will show how, when it comes to culture, the Vatican yet again may be missing the mark. Today's cultural relativism is a derivative of advanced capitalism and post-modernist philosophy, a symptom as much as a cause, and needs to be seen in this context. It may be in need of the Church's reflection and wisdom, but this is hardly a first priority. Cultural relativism is an understandable, but wrong, response to the pathology of particularism that thrives on exclusive identities and incommensurable cultures. But there is a difference between cultural relativism and a healthy pluralism, just as there is a difference between an arrogant imperialism and a discriminating and understanding appraisal of cultures, including those of the rich industrialised North and of the Churches, in the light of the Gospel. The new problem for faith today is not cultural relativism but the corrosive dynamics within advanced capitalism ready to relativise and instrumentalise values in order to sell beans, hamburgers and Coca-Cola, and to marginalise and exclude millions of the world's population from participation in a global economy, as profits perenially come before people. The problem is not that the divinity of Jesus Christ is being denied in a reaching out to others' religions, but that the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth is being denied by the worship of the money-idol in hyperspace and through the countless sacrifices that are made on its behalf. People around the world need both a meaningful life and enough to eat. Our time of advanced capitalism is offering one billion of them neither, treating them as part of the collateral damage of global economic growth. A faith that is not pre-occupied with this fundamental question of people made disposable, above all other priorities, deserves to be relegated to the margins as a "religious life-style".
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