The polarised world of globalisation
28/05/2005
- Opinión
A response to Friedman's Flat earth hypothesis
The project of corporate Globalisation is a project for polarising and
dividing people - along axis of class and economic inequality, axis of
religion and culture, axis of gender, axis of geographies and regions.
Never before in human history has the gap between those who labour and
those who accumulate wealth without labour been greater. Never before has
hate between cultures been so global. Never before has there been a global
convergence of three violent trends - the violence of primitive
accumulation for wealth creation, the violence of "culture wars", and the
violence of militarized warfare.
Yet Thomas Friedman, describes this deeply divided world created by
Globalisation and its multiple offspring's of insecurity and polarization
as a "flat" world. In his book "The world is Flat" Friedman tries
desperately to argue that Globalisation is a leveller of inequalities in
societies. But when you only look at the worldwide Web of information
technology, and refuse to look at the web of life, the food web, the web of
community, the web of local economies and local cultures which
Globalisation is destroying, it is easy to make false and fallacious
arguments that the world is flat.
When you look at the world perched on heights of arrogant, blind power,
separated and disconnected from those who have lost their livelihoods,
lifestyles, and lives - farmers and workers everywhere - it is easy to be
blind both to the valleys of poverty and the mountains of affluence. Flat
vision is a disease. But Friedman would like us to see his diseased,
perverse flat view of globalisations polarisations as a revolution that
aims to reverse the revolutions that allowed us to see that the world is
round and the earth goes round the sun, not the other way around.
Friedman has reduced the world to the friends he visits, the CEO's he
knows, and the golf courses he plays at. From this microcosm of privilege,
exclusion, blindness, he shuts out both the beauty of diversity and the
brutality of exploitation and inequality, he shuts out the social and
ecological externalities of economic globalisation and free trade, he shuts
out the walls that globalisation is building -- walls of insecurity and
hatred and fear -- walls of "intellectual property", walls of
privatization.
He focuses only on laws, regulations and policies which were the
protections of the weak and the vulnerable, on barriers necessary as
boundary conditions for the exercise of freedom and democracy, rights and
justice, peace and security, sustainability and sharing of the earth's
precious and vital resources. And he sees the dismantling of these
ecological and social protections for deregulated commerce as a
"flattening".
But this flattening is like the flattening of cities with bombs, the
flattening of Asia's coasts by the tsunami, the flattening of forests and
tribal homelands to build dams and mine minerals. Friedman's
conceptualization of the world as flat is accurate only as a description of
the social and ecological destruction caused by deregulated commerce or
"free - trade". On every other count it is inaccurate and false.
Take Friedman's description of their waves of globalisation. According to
him, globalization 1.0 which lasted from 1492 when Columbus set sail to
1800 and shrank the world from a size large to a size medium, with
countries and governments breaking down walls and knitting the world
together. Globalisation 2.0 which lasted from 1800 to 2000, which shrank
the world from a size medium to a size small, and the key agent of change
was multinational companies. Globalisation 3.0 started in 2000, is
shrinking the size small to size tiny, and it is being driven by
individuals.
This is a totally false view of history. From one perspective in the south,
the three waves of globalisation have been based on the use of force, they
have been driven by greed, and they have resulted in dispossession and
displacement. For native Americans or globalisation 1.0 started from 1492
and has still not ended.
For us in India the first wave of globalisation was driven by the first
global corporation, the East India Company, working closely with the
British team, and did not end till 1947 when we got Independence. We view
the current phase as a recolonisation, with a similar partnership between
multinational corporations and powerful governments. It is corporate led,
not people led. And the current phase did not begin in 2000 as Friedman
would have us believe. It began in the 1980's with the structural
adjustment programmes of World Bank and IMF imposing trade liberalisation
and privatization, and was accelerated since 1995 with the establishment of
World Trade Organisation at the end of the Uruguay Round of the General
Agreement of Trade and Tariffs.
Friedman's false flat earth history then enables him ake two big leaps -
results of coercive, undemocratic "free trade" treaties are reduced to
achievements of information technology and corporate globalisation and
corporate control is presented as the collaborations and competition
between individuals. The WTO, World Bank and IMF disappear, and the
multinational corporations disappear. Globalisation is then about
technological inevitability and individual innovativeness, not a project
of powerful corporations aided by powerful institutions and powerful
governments.
Neither e-commerce not walmartisation of the economy could take place
without the dismantling of trade protections, workers protections,
environmental protections. Technology of communication do not make long
distance supply of goods, including food products cheaper than local
supply. Low wages, subsidies, externalisation of costs make Walnut cheap,
not its information technology based supply chain management.
In 1988, I was in Berlin before the Berlin wall fell. We were part of the
biggest ever mobilisation against the World Bank. Addressing a rally of
nearly 100,000 people at the Berlin wall I had said that the Berlin wall
should be dismantled as should the wall between rich and poor the World
Bank creates by locking the Third world into debt, privatising our
resources, and transforming our economies into markets for multinational
corporations. I spoke about how the alliance between the World Bank and
global corporations was establishing a centrally controlled, authoritarian
rule like communism in its control, but different in the objective of
profits as the only end of power. As movements we sought and fought for
bringing down all walls of power and inequality.
Friedman's flat vision makes him blind to the emergence of corporate rule
through the rules of corporate globalisation as the establishment of
authoritarian rule and centrally controlled economies. He presents the
collapse of the Berlin wall as having "tipped the balance of power across
the world toward those advocating democratic, consensual, free-market-
oriented governance, and away from those advocating authoritarian rule with
centrally planned economies."
Citizens' movements fighting globalisation advocate democratic, consensual
governance and fight W.T.O, the World Bank and global corporations
precisely because they are undemocratic and dictatorial; they are
authoritarian and centralized. The W.T.O agreement on Agriculture was
drafted by Amstutz, a Cargill official, who led the U.S negotiations on
agriculture during the Urguay Round and is now in-charge of Food and
Agriculture in the Iraqi Constitution. This is a centrally planned
authoritarian rule over food and farming.
That is why the democratic and consensual response of citizens' movements
and Third world governments in Cancun led to the collapse of the W.T.O.
Ministerial. And it was the so called "flatteners" who were erecting walls
- the barricades at which the Korean farmer Lee took his life, the walls
that the U.S Trade Representative Robert Zoellick tried to create between
"Can do" and "Can't do" countries. What Zoellick and Friedman fail to see
is that what they call "can't do" is the "Can do" for the defense of
farmers in the face of dumping and unfair trade. Their world is shaped by
and focussed in Cargill - our world is shaped by and focussed on 300
million species and 6 billion people.
The biggest wall created by W.T.O is the wall of the trade related
Intellectual Property Rights Agreement. (TRIPS). This too is part of a
centrally planned authoritarian rule. As Monsanto admitted, in drafting the
agreement, the corporations organised as the Intellectual Property
Committee were the "patients, diagnosticians and physicians all in one."
Instead of telling the story of TRIPS and how corporate and WTO led
globalisation is forcing India to dismantle its democratically designed
patent laws, creating monopolies on seeds and medicines, pushing farmers to
suicide and denying victims of AIDS, Cancer, TB, and Malaria access to life
saving drugs, Friedman engages in another dishonest step to create a flat
world.
He presents the open source Software Movement initiated by Richard
Stallman, as a flattening trend of corporate globalisation when Stallman is
a leading critic of intellectual property and corporate monopolies, and a
fighter against the walls corporations are creating to prevent farmers from
saving seeds, researchers from doing research, and software developers from
creating new software. By presenting open sourcing in the same category as
outsourcing and off shore production, Friedman hides corporate greed,
corporate monopolies and corporate power, and presents corporate
globalisation as human creativity and freedom.
This is deliberate dishonesty, not just result of flat vision. That is why
in his stories from India he does not talk Dr. Hamid of CIPLA who provided
AIDS medicine to Africa for $ 200 when U.S. corporations wanted to sell
them for $ 20,000 and who has called W.T.O's patent laws "genocidal". And
inspite of Friedman's research team having fixed an appointment with me to
fly down to Bangalore to talk about farmers' suicides for the documentary
Friedman refers to. Friedman cancelled the appointment at the last minute.
Telling a one sided story for a one sided interest seems to be Friedman's
fate. That is why he talks of 550 million Indian youth overtaking Americans
in a flat world. When the entire information Technology/outsourcing sector
in India employs only a million out of a 1.2 billion people. Food and
farming, textiles and clothing, health and education are nowhere in
Friedman's monoculture of mind locked into IT.
Friedman presents a 0.1% picture and hides 99.9%. And in the 99.9% are
Monsanto's seed monopolies and the suicides of thousands of wars. In the
eclipsed 99.9% are the 25 million women who disappeared in high growth
areas of India because a commodified world has rendered women a dispensable
sex. In the hidden 99.9% economy are thousands of tribal children in
Orissa, Maharashtra, Rajasthan who died of hunger because the public
distribution system for food has been dismantled to create markets for
agribusiness. The world of the 99.9% has grown poorer because of the
economic globalisation.
And it is their rights we fight for. We work to build alternatives for a
just, sustainable, peaceful world - a shared and common world - in which
our common humanity and universal responsibility links us in earth
democracy. The walls of exclusion and discrimination that globalisation has
strengthened are made by men in power. Like the Berlin wall, they too must
dissolve, because authoritarian rule is inconsistent with free societies,
and corporate globalisation is a form of authoritarianism and dictatorship
which is robbing us of our fundamental freedoms and our full human
potentials.
And the world we are reclaiming and rejuvenating is not flat. It is diverse
democratic and decentralised, it is sustainable and secure for all, based
on cooperation and sharing of the earth's resources and our skills and
creativity. The freedom we seek is freedom for all, not freedom for a few.
Free-trade is about corporate freedom and citizen disenfranchisement.
What Friedman is presenting as a new "flatness" is in fact a new caste
system, a new Brahminism, locked in hierarchies of exclusion. In Friedman's
caste system, the "Shudras", are all whose livelihoods are being robbed to
expand the markets and increase the profits of global corporations. They
are shut out by invisible social and economic walls created by
globalisation while it dismantles walls for protection of people's
livelihoods and jobs.
The Indians being drawn into the U.S economy through outsourcing are not
the new Brahmins. They must be satisfied with one-fifth to one-eighth of
the salaries of their U.S counterparts, and what is outsourced is "grunt
work" "number crunching", standardized, mechanical operations. Outsourcing
is Taylorism of the information age. The control is in the hands of the
corporations in U.S. They are the Brahmins who monopolise knowledge through
intellectual property. Outsourcing and off-shoring is like the "putting
out" work in the industrial revolution. These are old tools for maintaining
exploitative hierarchies - not new flat earth linkages between equals,
equal in creativity and equal in rights.
Free trade freedom is flat earth freedom. Earth democracy is full earth
freedom and round earth freedom - freedom for all beings to live their
lives within the abundant, renewable but limited bounds of the earth. We do
not inhabit a world without limits where unbounded corporate greed can be
unleashed and allowed to destroy the earth and rob people of their
security, their livelihoods, their resources. Full earth freedom is born in
free societies, shaped by free people recognizing the freedom of all.
Diversity is an expression of full earth freedom. "Flatness" is a symptom
of the absence of real freedom. Facism seeks flatness.
This message has been brought to you by ZNet (http://www.zmag.org).
https://www.alainet.org/es/node/112048
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