Towards a Next New World

07, Aug 2000
IN discussing "globalisation" over the past two weeks the point was made consistently that capitalism was always from inception a global system; that the joint-stock companies, which brought slaves from Africa to the Caribbean to work the sugar plantations and were part of the process that fuelled the industrialisation of Britain, were in fact forerunners of the multinational corporations that became the major vehicle or conduit devised to manage this global system.

It was also stated that the strategy of the multinational corporations to accomplish this task was to create everywhere a critical mass of truly international professional middle-class elements skilled and capable enough, and of "like mind", to wield capital purely for the sake of profit accumulation. That was described as being akin to "riding a tiger".

Not surprisingly, therefore, world wars were fought in the course of extending this globalisation process of capitalism, and that what the wars failed to accomplish, the multinational corporations are now confident they can achieve given the present technological development, particularly in regard to information-packaging and telecommunications, and given the fact that the professional managerial class, created by them, now straddles the Earth, and as they say "ideology" is dead since the fall of both the Iron and Bamboo Curtains and now everybody thinks alike.

However, it must be noted that globalisation brought intense division and polarisation of the known world into impoverished areas of primary production and enriched metropolitan epicentres of modern manufacturing and refining, and that there was always an unwillingness to allow smooth and unlimited transfer of technologies between the two distinct poles as well as an in-built structural imbalance and an inequality of trading relations that altogether served to lead to all kinds of attempted military solutions, ie "revolutions" and "wars of liberation".

Are they any wiser today? That's the key question. Will the major players now readily allow for the natural transfer of technologies to the impoverished areas of the world that are at present much worse off in relative terms than ever before? This time the answer is "yes", not because of any sudden greater goodness among mankind or any lessening of evil intent and greed, but simply because of the very nature of the new technology itself.

For the first time both the end-of-the-line product and the technology to facilitate it revolves around the "packaging, disseminating and retrieving" of information itself. That is what shall make the big difference this time around. There can be very few barriers, artificial or otherwise, out in cyberspace.

The fact that the PC (personal computer) and the Internet is readily available to almost every village if not every household throughout the world makes a huge difference. Literally anyone, anywhere, can "log on", transact business and/or gain access to whatever is deemed essential to building a new life.

Gregory Simpkins, a journalist and specialist in African policy development and Senior Associate for Africa at International Decision Strategies (IDS), speaking at the business luncheon hosted by the Emancipation Support Committee, postulated that, despite being a continent richer than most in mineral wealth, there are countries in Africa "three centuries behind the rest of the world."

That is true largely because of the international division of labour in the globalisation process of yesteryear that served to keep the undeveloped, undeveloped, and pigeon-holed to only producing cheap raw materials and primary products, while the greater added value accrued to the metropolitan, industrialised areas of the world where the cheap raw materials were utilised in advanced manufacturing and refining to produce high-priced consumer durables.

Today the digital divide of cyberspace can be much easily harnessed by the poor parts of the world once the telecommunications exist and the mindset is there to catch up with the rest of the world in the blink of an eye.

The three centuries of backwardness can be removed literally overnight and "silicon valleys" can and shall be duplicated all over, thereby serving to level the playing fields of commerce and equalising trade relations. The world is poised now to remove the distinction between "developed" and "under-developed". But there is a logic to all this.

Capitalism by necessity has to continuously find new markets or deepen old markets in order to survive as a mode or form of production. In the previous pieces, the expansion outward of Europe, the search of Columbus et al, the colonisation of the "New World", the eventual dominance of Adam Smith's practical concepts of free trade, etc were all viewed as part of the globalisation process.

The logic is this: after every single nook and cranny of the world are drawn into capitalism's globalised ambit, and every nook and cranny have been brought up to the level of modern existence, and there are no old markets to deepen since there is no longer any undeveloped areas or "bush", so to speak, what next shall be done when capitalism's structural and cyclical crises of overproduction, gluts, sustained recession, etc catch up with it?

Where shall it find new markets to reinvigorate itself, if there are none to found on Earth? Shall capital then seek to colonise and globalise another planet? And is this the context in which we are to comprehend the undue haste and huge budgets of billions of dollars being consumed to find ways to Mars and now even Pluto at the farthest end of the galaxy?

NASA is at present being lobbied by certain interest groups in the USA to finalise the "Pluto-Kupier Express" for launching in year 2004. This time there will not be sail-ships like the Nina and Pinta across uncharted seas but spacecraft with nuclear power. And if not the colonisation and militarisation of outer-space, ie a fourth phase of globalisation, then the logic says that instead a new mode of producing commodities will have to be found.