MORTARLESS BRICKS: THE WAVERING WALLS OF GLOBALIZATION
In troubled times voices against the mainstream are in short supply. Newtopiamagazine is a gret and laudable venture to give the new mainstream voice, offer ideas and views and perhaps a solution or two, maybe three you will neer find on TV and rarely read in a for-profit newspaper. The issue VOL. II, ISSUE 5 - NOV/DEC 2003 on Globalization provides just the right mix and dose of insight that we all need during a season commonly said to be a time for reflexion. Reflect and think and act ! Hope you enjoy my own contribution, reposted here. ================================
Just as revolution theory got bogged down between "socialism in one country" and "permanent revolution", globalization today is at a loss to reach any clear verdict on the conditions necessary for sustainable social and economic progress. In a few privileged core capitalist countries and some secondary states, globalization manifests itself as an accelerated mode of capitalism, capable of generating distributable surpluses, albeit increasingly in an highly imbalanced manner.
Elsewhere, at the fringes and the frontier zones, the imposition of globalizations' structures, processes and social relationships results into the reproduction of socio-economic systems that are alien and hostile to traditional, indigenous forms of social organization. The conditions for social reproduction amongst traditional societies are increasingly compromised and reduced, as a growing series of impediments hinder and retard sustainable development. There are few if any societies left that are able to exist without external inputs as rising populations, increased material expectations especially among youths and pressures from environmental degradation and rising resource scarcity or depletion lead to developmental standstill or decline.
Confronted with an "outside world" that is by and large determined by the cold logic of capitalist globalization, states, regions, societies and sub-cultures have little choice but to engage. In which way they do so is of great importance with regard to maintaining local identities as well as for securing sufficient and moreover, suitable, locally adapted inputs to locally determined development priorities. In the "Age of Access" such priorities rely upon information and knowledge management, as tools and resources for sustainable development. Precisely these tools are lacking and out of reach for most people on earth, for those living outside of the electronic gates":
Information (i.e. economic or political) and knowledge management skills are essential tools for embarking on and staying on board a course of sustainable development. Today these tools are controlled politically and used strategically by those who have the means and access to the mateial fruits of globalization. Fruits that fall disproportionably into the laps of the ruling classes in the already comparatively rich countries. As they set out to spread the gospel of free trade, be it by reason or force, the masters of the globalization project piously guard the institutions and mechanisms that allow for globally unrestrained capitalism to extract surpluses form abroad, often from desperately poor countries. Within the core countries of globalization, social exclusion and impoverishment of the wage-labour dependent classes is increasingly difficult to conceal or ignore. Neither the era of the prison system nor the distractions of mass culture have fully succeeded in neutralizing this internal challenge to the rule of globalizations' gladiators.
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