Globalisation

At the end of January, the world’s elite met in the exclusive Swiss ski resort of Davos to discuss how to maintain and improve their position in the economy. Both the setting and the speeches were utopian, as the politicians and bankers professed the virtues of neoliberalism. While millions were spent on round-the-clock security and caviar, we were told of the dangers of largesse spending by the state and the need to slash public services. Life is tough at the top. There is growing discontent with capitalism around the world and it is being expressed in several different ways. It has...

"Expectations were low as the meeting began in the Argentine capital", or so the Economist magazine reported on the latest World Trade Organisation meeting of trade ministers, in Buenos Aires on 10-13 December. "They sank even lower as it progressed. Delegates failed to agree on a joint statement, let alone on any new trade deals". Eighteen years ago, at a similar meeting in Seattle in November 1999, the WTO appeared as a manifestation of the chiefs of global capital triumphantly carving up the world. Tens of thousands of anti-capitalist protesters, trade-unionists, students, and others...

Perhaps it’s foolish to take anything Donald Trump says as an articulation of core principles or beliefs. But this passage from his inaugural address hit many like a bolt of lightning: From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this moment on, it’s going to be America First. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great...

Organise, on the streets and in the labour movement! Argue for socialist, democratic, internationalist ideas which offer a real answer both to Trump’s rancid, right-wing, regression, and to the discredited status quo. That is how we can block Trump.

"The RWG [container] terminal [in Rotterdam, 2.35m teu capacity], with its fully automated cranes, is operated by a team of no more than 10 to 15 people on a day-to-day basis. Most of its 180 employees aren’t longshoremen, but IT specialists” (Journal of Commerce, 4 Feburary 2016). The managing director says: “We are in fact, an IT company that handles containers”. Compare: in 1900 the Port of London was the busiest port in the world. It had 50,000 workers shifting cargo mostly by hand, as they had done for thousands of years. It handled 7 million tons of cargo. “Teu” means “twenty-foot...

The international gathering of capitalist magnates and rulers in Davos on 20-23 January worried about “global risks”. Among those it noted “elevated protest activity” in comparison to the previous “two decades of relatively reduced protest action”. Since 2010, “protest intensity has reached a new and higher plateau... We are again approaching 1980s protest levels, when causes of social turmoil ranged from cold war tensions and anti-apartheid sentiment to the Tiananmen Square protests”. Maps of protest, collated from media reports, show the biggest concentrations in Europe, the eastern United...

Until reading Guy Standing’s book A Precariat Charter I had not come across the term “precariat” although I understand that it has been in circulation for some time, as early as the 1950s. So what is it? According to Standing, the precariat is “an emerging class characterised by chronic insecurity, detached from old norms of labour and the working class”. The precariat has few of the democratic rights associated with citizens and are, in fact, denizens — another word that had me reaching for the dictionary. A denizen is an outsider, someone who is frequently denied many of the political rights...

The main theses of Leo Panitch’s and Sam Gindin’s book The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire, an important new book which Paul Hampton reviewed recently in Solidarity , are restatements of what the authors have argued in many articles. They are, I think, plain fact and important fact. The forty-odd years of turbulence since the end in the early 1970s of the 1950s-60s “golden age” of West European, Japanese, and American capitalism have not brought a relative decline of the USA and a rise of inter-imperialist rivalries. They have brought the extension of...

The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin is one of the best Marxist analyses of the modern epoch published in a long time. The book (Panitch and Gindin 2012: vii) is devoted to understanding “how it came to be that the American state developed the interest and capacity to superintend the making of global capitalism”. It deserves to be widely read and discussed on the international left both for the coherence of its arguments and because it challenges a series of shibboleths – particularly on imperialism – that have hampered the...