"Socialism or barbarism" were the only possible political alternatives for Rosa Luxemburg in 1916, in the middle of the First World War. In her writing on the crisis of social democracy, she dealt with the perspectives of capitalist development and found that the revolutionary workers' movement had to prevent the path of bourgeois society into barbarism.
Thus, a 2004 Deutschlandfunk
article introduces a treatise on
globalistation. It deals with the
pros and cons of globalisation.
The author of
the article Elmar Altvatar:
„When the
meteoric rise of the term
'globalisation' began in the early
1990s, the International Monetary Fund
initially de-dramatised it by saying
that the current globalisation was
nothing new. It called on renowned
economic historians to prove that world
trade, foreign investments or migration
movements of people were already as
intensive more than a hundred years ago
as they are today. However, this
comparison was not thought through to
the end. After all, the phase of
globalisation more than a hundred years
ago, traditionally called the "age of
imperialism", was followed by a period
of "deglobalisation" with
ultra-nationalist, fascist and extreme
anti-Semitic movements. Two world wars
and the extermination of European Jews
followed. It was only in the second half
of the 20th century, during the period
of the "economic miracles" and
afterwards, that integration into the
world economy once again led to a state
known as globalisation.“
Hardly any aother topic is dicussed as intensivelly as globalisation
The
gentlest definition of globalisation
describes that people all over the
world are networked, trade and
communicate with each other.
Globalisation is the rapprochement
of cultures, global economic growth
and the unimagined opportunities for
development that are inherent in it.
The focus is especially on the
possibility of determining one's own
life. "Globalisation ... can be the
gateway to an open, free, more
prosperous and democratic world,"
say the authors
Markus Balser
and Michael Bauchmüller in their
book "10 errors of the opponents of
globalisation".
That with
this international networking there
are at the same time more problems
and crises due to the increased
exploitation of labour in low-wage
countries, that international crime
has increased many times over, that
the exploitation of the resources of
the so-called emerging countries can
take place even more unrestrainedly
than in colonial times, that the
growing mobility of goods and people
is causing greater global
environmental pollution and that in
the end this neoliberal game of
trade only benefits the pockets of
the strongest - these aspects of
globalisation can only be seen in
reality.
In order to
understand these unpredictable and
uncontrollable consequences of
globalisation, it would be important
to take a look at economic journals
from time to time.
However, this article is not
intended to be a work on
globalisation or to point out
individual examples of how
globalisation cannot fulfil the
promise of prosperity for all.
That would go beyond the scope
of this paper.
And David
Ricardo already wrote about the
limits of free trade: free
trade, he concluded, creates
"redundant population". Because
specialisation (Ricardo's theory
of comparative cost advantages)
increases the productivity of
labour, more products can be
produced with less labour.
So the formula of the
market economy is simple: it
needs willing consumers all the
time. And that is the real
interface between globalisation
and resistance.
For every
commodity, every single product
that we consume, if we really
want to resist, we would first
have to examine the following
questions:
do I need this
commodity?
- Can I borrow it
or share it with someone?
-
Is the good produced in a fair
and sustainable way?
- And if
I no longer need the goods,
where can I give them to, if
necessary where can I dispose of
them properly?