From server@prairienet.org Sun Jun 18 02:07:37 1995
	id CAA06963; Sun, 18 Jun 1995 02:07:30 +0200
	id AA15014; Sat, 17 Jun 95 19:07:22 CDT
Subject: Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 5 Num. 24
X-Comment:  Conspiracy Nation



              Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 5  Num. 24
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                    ("Quid coniuratio est?")


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THE GLOBALIZATION OF CAPITALIST PRODUCTION
[From *The International Workers Bulletin*, 10/25/93]
[Excerpts]

(1.1) World capitalism is undergoing the most far-reaching 
changes in technological innovation and forms of production since 
the beginning of the twentieth century. In the course of the last 
15 years, the rapid development of the transnational corporation 
and the global integration of production with which it is 
associated have profoundly changed the way commodities are 
produced and distributed, undermined the political structures 
that stabilized relations between states and classes for nearly a 
half-century, and laid the basis for a new era of protracted 
revolutionary upheavals.

(1.2) The United States stands at the very center of this global 
economic and social maelstrom. Over the past decade, the changes 
in the structure of world capitalism have had a far-ranging 
impact on both the international position of American capitalism 
and social conditions within the United States. The steady 
deterioration in the competitive position of the United States 
throughout the 1980s has now led to direct challenges on the part 
of America's Cold War allies to the hegemonic role the U.S. 
played in the affairs of international capitalism since the end 
of World War II. Moreover, the loss of its economic position 
finds visible expression in the shocking growth of poverty within 
the United States and the general decay of its social 
infrastructure.

(1.4) ...the Pollyannas who proclaimed a "new world order" have 
been replaced by legions of nervous Cassandras who see potential 
disasters lurking everywhere: economic rivalries spinning out of 
control and leading to war; worsening poverty in the third world 
leading to social upheavals of an apocalyptic character; the 
blind utilization of technology in the pursuit of profit creating 
ecological catastrophes. The more thoughtful and socially 
concerned among these worried commentators appeal to the 
"enlightened self interest" of the capitalist class and urge that 
it chart a more rational and humane course before it is too late. 
In vain! The ruling class and its political representatives are 
not able to control the forces unleashed by the developments in 
the world economy...

(2.1) The International Committee of the Fourth International has 
placed at the center of its analysis of the world capitalist 
crisis the global integration of production, which has raised to 
historically unprecedented intensity the fundamental conflict 
between world economy and the nation-state system within which 
capitalism developed and to which it is wedded...

(2.2) The activities of the TNCs [Trans-National Corporations] 
now dominate the world economy. The number of TNCs based in 14 
major developed countries has increased from 7,000 in 1970 to 
24,000 at the beginning of the 1990s. Approximately one-third of 
the productive assets of the world's private sector are 
controlled by TNCs...

(2.3) ... we are not only seeing a process of 
internationalization of the economy, but a process of 
globalization -- that is, the interpenetration of economic 
activities and national economies at the global level...

(2.4) The globalization of production has far-reaching 
implications for relations between the imperialist nations and 
for class relations on a world scale. Transnational corporations 
compete for control of markets, raw materials and sources of 
cheap labor. They must undercut one another for the domination of 
emerging areas of renewed capitalist exploitation in the former 
Soviet Union, eastern Europe, Vietnam and China and ruthlessly 
fight for the extension of their sway over the backward countries 
of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

(2.5) ...despite the globalization of production, the world 
market is fracturing into rival trade blocs. Wall Street is 
moving to establish a U.S.-dominated trade bloc in the Americas, 
initially in the form of the North American Free Trade Agreement 
[NAFTA]... The drive toward the establishment of these massive 
trading blocs by no means signifies a lessening of the 
antagonisms within Europe or between the U.S. and Canada. On the 
contrary, all of the old conflicts between the European "great 
powers" that led to two world wars in this century are once again 
emerging, and the old battlefields of imperialist manipulation 
and intervention in eastern Europe, northern Africa and elsewhere 
are once again aflame.

(2.6) In the drive to conquer new markets and new sources of 
cheap labor, imperialism encourages the eruption of ethnic and 
communal antagonisms in many parts of the world. This serves two 
basic purposes. First, it helps split the working class. Second, 
it facilitates the breakup of old state structures into impotent 
statelets which are to be little more than cheap labor enterprise 
zones for transnational corporations. The economic side of this 
policy is expressed in the demand of the World Bank and the 
International Monetary Fund for backward countries from India to 
Argentina to dismantle all remnants of their previous nationalist 
policy of import substitution and state planning and permit the 
unfettered penetration of imperialist banks and corporations. The 
political side is the promotion of ethnic and religious-based 
communalism, aimed at weakening or smashing up existing national 
state structures.

(2.8) The globalization of production has produced a global labor 
market. Transnational corporations are systematically shifting 
the most labor intensive aspects of production to impoverished 
regions, where wages are a fraction of the existing levels in the 
advanced capitalist countries... The inexorable result is a 
downward leveling of wages and living standards and a relentless 
assault on past social reforms and legal limitations on the 
exploitation of labor by capital in the imperialist centers. {1}. 
The basic orientation of the old labor organizations -- the 
protection of national industry and the national labor market -- 
is undermined by globally integrated production and the 
unprecedented mobility of capital. The role of these bureaucratic 
apparatuses in every country has been transformed from pressuring 
the employers and the state for concessions to the workers, to 
pressuring the workers for concessions to the employers so as to 
attract capital.

(2.9) The current economic malaise is not simply a conjunctural 
downturn, or "recession," to be followed by an "upturn," as these 
terms came to be used during the period of the postwar boom. The 
massive destruction of jobs in all of the old industrial centers 
-- the U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia -- and the 
relentless assault on working class living standards are part of 
a fundamental restructuring of capitalism arising from a historic 
crisis of the profit system. This crisis drives the imperialist 
bourgeoisie inexorably toward a third world war and at the same 
time compels it to undertake a class war against the workers of 
every country...

(3.1) The question facing mankind is: what class will control and 
develop these global productive forces. Capitalism is incapable 
of developing the planning principle as a means of increasing the 
wealth of mankind. To the extent that it is employed by 
transnational production on a capitalist basis, it is an 
instrument for the impoverishment of workers across the globe and 
leads to the resurgence of colonial plunder and the danger of 
war.

(4.3) ...the demise of the USSR is a grim warning to the working 
class in the U.S. and internationally. The continued domination 
of the political life of the workers movement by sclerotic 
bureaucracies, based on different forms of nationalist policies, 
can only produce further catastrophes. The protracted 
degeneration of all the old labor bureaucracies, including the 
social democracy and the AFL-CIO, has reached a new stage. Their 
impotence and open transformation into appendages of big business 
and the capitalist state are the historical demonstration of 
[their] bankruptcy...

(4.9) The past period has provided a sobering experience for the 
working class in every country. Previous conquests have been 
surrendered by the official labor leaderships. The essential 
principles and theoretical gains of the Marxist movement have 
been renounced by all manner of Stalinists and revisionists... 
Firm adherence to revolutionary principle and defense of the 
movement's heritage and theoretical conquests, however, have 
nothing in common with a ritualistic invocation of "time-honored" 
tactics and formulae whose objective content has been transformed 
by changed conditions. The practice of revolutionary politics 
would be very simple if it required no more than the ability to 
memorize the policies and tactics of the past, and to deal with 
them as if they were applicable for all periods and conditions. 
The clinging to slogans and tactics which were formulated under 
different political conditions, but which have long since lost 
their relevance, is merely the opposite side of the coin of the 
renunciationists' open flight from principle. These different 
forms of opportunism express essentially the same thing -- a fear 
of the convulsive changes in class relations and the tasks which 
they pose to the proletarian vanguard...

                   [...to be continued...]

---------------------------<< Notes >>---------------------------
{1} Wages are also kept low by continuing to wink at illegal 
immigration, thereby flooding the pool of available labor here in 
the U.S. 

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Aperi os tuum muto, et causis omnium filiorum qui pertranseunt.
Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et 
  pauperem.                    -- Liber Proverbiorum  XXXI: 8-9 

 Brian Francis Redman    bigxc@prairienet.org    "The Big C"
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    Coming to you from Illinois -- "The Land of Skolnick"        
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