Over the past few years "globalisation" - a word borrowed from the common jargon of economists - has become a buzzword in the media, among politicians and also to some extent, within the Left.
The advantage of using such a term, at least for those who choose to use it, is that it is an all-purpose catch word, which in itself, does not mean much. But used, as it is often the case, in association with phrases such as "free trade", "deregulation", "labour flexibility", "delocalisation", etc.. it becomes a way for some of pointing to a future of progress and happiness and for others to one of calamity. For the former, "globalisation" would bring to an end two decades of deep world crisis, by opening up an entirely new lease of life for capitalism internationally - admittedly at a price for the populations, but one which they consider well worth paying. For the latter, "globalisation" would mean a major change in the methods and mechanisms of imperialist rule, if not in its nature, a change which would irreversibly deprive ordinary people of any say in shaping their future and should therefore be resisted at all cost. And although these two views seem to lead to opposite conclusions, they both start from the same assumption - namely that "globalisation" marks a qualitative change in the way imperialism works.
The former view was argued at great length, for instance, in a "survey of the global economy", published in October 1994 by the business weekly The Economist. The focus of this survey was to outline the nature of the "momentous" changes which, according to this journal, were taking place in the world and, on this basis, to herald a new era of prosperity:
"Over the next 25 years, the world will see the biggest shift in economic strength for more than a century. Today the so-called industrial economies dominate the globe, as they have for the past 150 years or so. Yet within a generation several are likely to be dwarfed by newly emerging economic giants." Of course, argued this survey, "the adjustment forced on countries by competition from the third world will be painful, even if it is beneficial in the long run". But rather than resisting the unavoidable, the survey went on, "it would be more sensible to attack the rigidities in economies that hinder speedier adjustment. That means, first of all, making labour markets more flexible: by scrapping minimum wages that prevent relative pay from adjusting; pruning welfare benefits that discourage the jobless from seeking work; and relaxing restrictive hiring and firing rules that hamper recruitment." So workers should bow happily to the "new" iron laws of "global" competition and face the consequences.
But, as this survey concluded, "despite the scale of the coming changes and despite the difficulties they will cause, there is little reason for alarm. For the rich world, almost as much as for today's poor countries, the next 25 years will be a time of unprecedented opportunity." - thereby providing in a nutshell a justification for the government policies pursued in Britain since the early 80s, as well as for the long list of attacks waged by employers against workers' jobs, wages and conditions, over the same period.
Two years on, the working class has still to see any of this "time of unprecedented opportunity" heralded by The Economist. So far only the extent to which the bosses are still slashing jobs and imposing lousy casualised conditions on workers, is unprecedented! On the other hand, the fact that the capitalist class has enjoyed plenty of opportunities for making profits (unprecedented or not, is another question) is obvious.
As trade minister Ian Lang boasted on 6th December 1996 in the Commons, "we have now halted a long-term decline in Britain's share of world trade, and this has been in the teeth of unprecedented competition from all over the world. An inward investment bandwagon is rolling for Britain as the reputation of this country grows and companies look enviously at the performance of their rivals who choose to locate here. Inward and outward investment, linked to an export drive, can help form a golden triangle of prosperity for Britain, each interacting with and benefiting the other." Of course, Lang was being duly over-optimistic both about Britain's share of world trade and about his vision of huge numbers of foreign companies queuing up for the privilege of being allowed to create jobs in Britain. But at least, his image of "a golden triangle of prosperity" had some truth in it - the British profit barons have their golden triangle, just as the Burmese opium barons have theirs.
The "threat" of the "newly emerging economic giants" is a cliche these days. There are frequent complacent, if not enthusiastic references to the fact that wages in Vietnam, Malaysia or China are thirty times lower or so than here. But in most cases quoting the miserable wages paid in these countries is above all a way of trying to squeeze wages here. Most of the business tycoons who use this rhetoric have no plans to risk their own capital in these poor countries. And those who do resort to "delocalisation" - and it is more often than not towards other countries, where wages are comparable or even higher than here - do so out of choice, to maximise their profits, not because they are forced by some mysterious, or mystical "global law".
More generally, the fuss about "globalisation" gives credit to the idea that unemployment, worsening conditions and the running down of industries in Britain are inevitable consequences of the growth of world trade and capital export - the latter being more or less equated to delocalisations. If only Britain could be insulated from the world market and its competition, this would end the plight of the working class here - so goes the argument used by a whole current among union officials, Labour politicians and Left activists. This current, particularly among the trade-union milieu, is also addicted to the old "Buy British" slogan. And indeed, this whole reasoning is an old illusion - how much nicer capitalism would be, if only it remained British... As if British capitalists made their investment choices on the basis of the latest fad - be it "global" or Little-Englander - and not on the basis of what seems most profitable to them!
Such a line of reasoning is totally divorced from the reality we see today. And it could generate some totally absurd, and potentially dangerous ideas about the causes of, and indeed the possible remedies to unemployment.
Behind the jargon
So what really lies behind this "globalisation"? The word is meant to encapsulate a number of evolutions which can be seen in today's economy. These may be summarised as follows:
- The more extensive integration of the whole planet in the world market. This is due to the progressive disappearance of the spheres of influence of the secondary imperialist powers (primarily the remains of the former French and British colonial empires) and the end of the relative isolation of the countries which used to make up the former Soviet bloc.
- The development of world trade. This is being encouraged by international trade agreements like those which have resulted in the setting up of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which is attempting to reduce customs and other barriers liable to constitute an obstacle to international trade.
- The unfettered circulation of capital. This results in an increase in what economists refer to as "direct investment" - although they largely fail to draw a clear line between this and purely speculative movements of capital. It should be pointed out, however, that capitalists use the term "investment" to refer to total or partial takeovers of existing companies as well as to the setting up of new ones. While the development of capital exports over the last fifteen years is undeniable, it is mainly due to the partial or total buying up, one way or another, of existing companies.
- The increased concentration of capital. This results from large-scale mergers of financial and industrial groups and takeovers of companies by these groups on an international scale. A few gigantic multinational companies organise the economic activity of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people in a large number of countries across the world. The policies of these companies are worked out on a worldwide scale. Where they choose to locate their assets and activities depends solely on how they can maximise their overall profits.
- The domination of finance over industry and of the circulation of capital over the circulation of goods.
- The progressive rolling back of the economic role of the state, both in the rich and the poor countries - in that it abandons the direct management of more or less large sectors of the economy, and even public services.
The predominance of financial capital over industrial capital, the export of capital, and the emergence of large financial groups which play an important role in many countries - due to a growing concentration of capital - are indeed major trends which shape the whole economy, and, beyond that, the whole of social and political life. But these trends are not new. They have already been visible for almost a century!
As early as 1916, Lenin noted in his pamphlet "Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism", that "the twentieth century marks the turning point from the old capitalism to the new, from the domination of capital in general to the domination of finance capital".
Like all Marxists at the time - although they did not all draw the same conclusions - Lenin called this new stage of capitalism, "imperialism". He did not fight the emergence of this new stage by arguing that the old stage was preferable - that it was a "lesser evil". He did not fight the growing power of large financial groups by advocating a return to family capitalism and free competition. Nor did he fight the increasing international competition, the export of capital and "delocalisation" (the term is new but not the phenomenon) by arguing that competition should be contained within national boundaries - which would have been merely utopian anyway. Lenin did not argue either for national protectionism as opposed to free international trade. Indeed Lenin knew that these are policies that the capitalist classes may use in various ways and to various degrees depending on the balance of power and necessities of the time. And he certainly never suggested that the proletariat should adopt either of these bourgeois policies as its own.
Nor did Lenin call for a stronger national state to "stand up to the financial markets" - as some Labour politicians do. He knew that, far from being "impotent" in the face of multinationals and financial groups, the imperialist states are merely their instruments.
If Lenin drew any conclusion from all of this, it was that capitalism in the imperialist stage, while being a source of decay for society, had at the same time accumulated all the materials necessary for its destruction and the rational reorganisation of the economy under the leadership of the proletariat. Certainly, the following passage from Lenin's pamphlet sounds more modern, and above all more correct, than all the literature devoted today to "globalisation":
"When a big enterprise assumes gigantic proportions, and, on the basis of an exact computation of mass data, organises according to plan the supply of primary raw materials to the extent of two-thirds, or three-fourths of all that is necessary for tens of millions of people; when the raw materials are transported in a systematic and organised manner to the most suitable place of production, sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles; when a single centre directs all the consecutive stages of work right up to the manufacture of numerous varieties of finished articles; when these products are distributed according to a single plan among tens and hundreds of millions of consumers (the distribution of oil in America and Germany by the American "oil trusts") - then it becomes evident that we have socialisation of production, and not mere "interlocking"; that private economic and private property relations constitute a shell which no longer fits its contents, a shell which must inevitably decay if its removal by artificial means be delayed; a shell which may continue in a state of decay for a fairly long period (if, at the worst, the cure of the opportunist abscess is protracted), but which will inevitably be removed."
A mere question of vocabulary?
Presenting "globalisation" as a new phenomenon is more than simply adopting a new vocabulary - although the choice of a new vocabulary would already be in itself necessarily biased. Indeed, behind the apparent neutrality of words like "globalisation", there is the choice to disguise, or in any case to blur the real nature of the relations of domination between a small number of imperialist countries and the rest of the world.
The word "globalisation" thus makes it possible to suggest that a large number of countries have set out on the path of capitalist development, and that their economic strength could reach a level comparable, if not superior to that of the old industrialised powers. For most politicians across the political spectrum, this is no longer a mere possibility, it is a fact. So they hail the "economic miracles" of the so-called "Asian Tigers" (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Malaysia), Brazil or Chile. It is even fashionable among academics to get involved in learned polemics over the exact year when, according to them, the Chinese economy will become the largest in the world.
It is also in the name of "globalisation" that, in 1993, the World Bank and the IMF - which are controlled by the main imperialist powers, and primarily by the USA - adopted a new method for measuring a country's Gross Domestic Product. The main result of this change was to reduce the apparent gap between the rich and poor countries, especially those with the largest populations, thereby making economic comparisons between poor countries and industrialised powers sound a bit less lunatic - proof of the fact that if the choice of a vocabulary is biased, the choice of statistical instruments can be too.
Likewise, "globalisation" in the sphere of international trade implies that an increasing number of countries - including some among the poorest - are already, or are in the process of becoming, fully-fledged competitors, capable of putting a spanner in the works of many industries in the imperialist countries, if not in their economies as a whole (some even go that far!). This leads quite naturally to the argument that unemployment stems from the competition of low-wage countries and that, as a result, workers in imperialist countries should feel that they are competing with those of poor countries. At the same time, talking of these countries as competitors in their own right makes it possible to hide the fact that most of them are effectively controlled by financial groups from the old imperialist powers.
Another cliche which can be found all over the so-called serious papers these days is that of "global capital" - which is meant to describe the enormous amount of capital which circulates around the world. Being "global", this capital seems to have no roots, no identified owners, as if it existed and circulated under its own steam. This conveniently obscures the fact that these thousands of billions of pounds are either under the direct control, or owned privately by individual capitalists, the overwhelming majority of whom are based in the handful of rich imperialist countries.
Besides, the fact that this "global capital" is usually identified implicitly with "investment", hides its real nature. Most of it serves no other purpose than speculation on the so-called "emerging" stock markets, generating large gambling gains (or losses) for the owners. The only thing the local economies have gained from this speculation is the emergence of a layer of local finance intermediaries, who mimic the parasitism of their Western masters, and... occasional market crashes which, time and again, have wrecked local finance and trade, not to mention the purchasing power of the population.
Finally, the "global" rolling-back of the state and opening up of trade barriers, so often hailed by Tory politicians here as the proof that Thatcher's policies "led the world onto the right track", conceals once again the uneveness of its consequences. The rolling back of the welfare state, for instance, spells poverty for a section of the working classes in the rich countries. But in the poor countries, it means the disappearance of any kind of health care for the vast majority, the end of food subsidies for the starving masses - it means guaranteed death for millions. Likewise, in the rich countries, the privatisation of the state-owned sector generally means a drop in the standard of living of the working population. But in the poor countries, it means the breakup of the entire local industry and the tightening of the imperialist grip over the economy.
Scope and limits of the growth of international trade
The capitalist economy is international and has long been suffocating inside national frameworks. But these national frameworks persist, and the "globalisation" of the economy is the result of a constant struggle in which each capitalist, each capitalist group and their states seek to protect themselves within their national market while at the same time trying, by "freeing" the international market of existing trade barriers, to enlarge their access to other parts of the world market.
Despite the increasing numbers of bilateral, regional or international trade negotiations, and despite the existence of the World Trade Organisation, which has been in operation since January 1995, the international market is in no way "free" in the sense of offering equal access for everyone. It is a place of confrontation between competing powers. The leaders of the most powerful imperialist power, the USA, who are also the main promoters of the World Trade Organisation, quite openly declare that they will only accept the rules of this organisation provided they do not go against their economic interests. US foreign policy is nothing but an auxiliary for the economic strategies of the big American corporations - even more so now that the Soviet Bloc no longer exists to impose political and military considerations on US diplomacy. To talk of free trade in the on-going economic war between American and Japanese imperialism, for example, would be a joke - as the domestic and foreign leverages of both states are actively used to defend the rival interests of their respective capitalists.
In other words, only the richest powers have really full access to the world market. When a poor country does gain some degree of access, this is very often because one imperialist power found it more expedient to use it as a Trojan horse for its own goods. Part of the industrial development of South Korea and Taiwan, for instance in electronics and kitchen equipment, was due to the high tariffs and quotas imposed on Japanese goods by the USA and some European countries, at various points. The Japanese corporations chose to get round these obstacles by replacing "made in Japan" labels with "made in Taiwan" or "made in Korea".
According to "Globalisation in question", a recent book by two British economists, Hirst and Thompson, the growth of international trade in value has been consistently faster than the growth of production since 1945 - showing an increasing integration of the economies. However, Hirst and Thompson show that this difference in speed was more than halved in the 1980s compared to the previous three decades - thereby indicating a deceleration of the integration process of the world economy, rather than an acceleration. While the fast postwar growth of world trade, relative to production, has certainly played a part in preventing the economic stagnation of the past twenty years from turning into a catastrophic collapse, it would seem, therefore, that the past period was not characterised by the spectacular growth of international trade which is implied by many commentators of "globalisation". Moreover, as Hirst and Thompson point out, overall, the proportion of world production which is exported to foreign markets is not significantly larger today than it was in... 1913!
Changes of borders in some cases, along with changes in the nature of the products, make comparisons difficult. Nevertheless, for the USA, exports still represent only 7.1% of its production, whereas they accounted for 6.1% in 1913. The proportion of exports has admittedly increased for France and Germany, two complementary countries, increasing from 13.9 to 17.5% and from 17.5% to 24% of national production respectively between 1913 and 1992. On the other hand, and contrary to many received ideas, the proportion of exports compared to production decreased for Japan and Britain, falling from 12.3% to 9.2% and from 20.9% to 18.2% respectively between 1913 and 1992.
It must be added, however, that a considerable proportion of today's international trade is made up simply of exchanges between companies which are subsidiaries of the same multinational, or even between departments or workshops of the same company. For example, in 1993 it was estimated that for over one third of American exports, the seller and the buyer belonged to the same corporation. In 1995, the Wall Street Journal quoted a worldwide estimate of 50%. If these figures are anything to go by, today's increased interpenetration of the economies may well have been achieved mainly through the tentacular expansion of multinationals.
The role of Asian competition...
Is the running down of British industry - and the resulting massive shedding of manufacturing jobs - the result of competition from low-wage countries, particularly Asia? Is it due to British factories being "delocalised" abroad?
Stories about Asian competition threatening jobs in Britain are old news, going back to long before anyone thought about "globalisation". Car workers in Britain heard it throughout the 70s and the 80s - the "Japanese threat". They were told that agreeing to speedups - and later to job cuts - was the only way to prevent a tide of Japanese cars from flooding the country and the end of car production in Britain. And what happened? Tens of thousands of jobs disappeared in the car industry while car production continued to increase. The last two sizeable British car companies, Rover and Jaguar, were sold off - not to Japanese "villains", but to BMW and Ford respectively. The fresh money thus earned by British shareholders was not reinvested in new production. In fact the only new production facilities in this industry were those set up by Japanese companies in the 80s - Nissan, Honda, Isuzu, Subaru, etc.. - which created several tens of thousand direct and indirect jobs. In any case the "Japanese threat" scare story was a con. British capitalists used it to squeeze more profits out of workers and... shifted their capital elsewhere when they saw more profitable ventures.
Today no-one yet is threatening workers in Ford, Rover or Vauxhall, with "Asian Tigers" competition. South Korea's Hyundai or Malaysia's Proton (which are both to various degrees subcontractors for Japanese car companies) have a small presence in Britain. But it would take a certain amount of hypocrisy for the British bourgeoisie to use this presence as evidence of a competitive threat. After all, if the British government lowered its custom barriers to allow in goods from the "Asian Tigers", it was certainly not for nothing, but in exchange for British companies being allowed to sell weapons, aircraft, machinery, etc.. in these countries, or to build power stations, dams, airports, etc..
Behind capitalist competition, it is not abstract economic forces which are acting, but vested interests. And the state is not subject to forces against which it is powerless: it bargains on behalf of its capitalists.
... And that of "delocalisation"
Hirst and Thompson argue that "the loss of jobs to low-wage countries is much less significant in generating structural unemployment in the advanced countries than is the on-going process of steady improvement in productivity in both manufacturing and services in most of these countries." In others words job losses to low-wage countries are not a significant factor compared to the greed of British capitalists.
Of course, some British industries, such as textile and electronics, have been seriously affected by "delocalisation", due to the attraction of low wages - Courtaulds and Coats Viyella are two well-known examples of this. However, it must be noted that these "delocalisations" to the Third World, mainly in the 1980s, coincided with the introduction of new technology which would have resulted in drastic job cuts even without any "delocalisation".
Considering industry as a whole, by definition, only labour intensive industries can be really attracted by low-wage countries. It is estimated that, in the rich countries, labour costs represent generally no more than 20% of the total cost in manufacturing. In more capital intensive industries, this figure is said to fall drastically: 10% in the car industry, 5% in the production of new generation TV tubes, 3% in the manufacture of highly-integrated electronic chips. Therefore, for instance, all the latest microprocessors and high-capacity memory chips are manufactured in the US or Japan. It is only once they have been superseded by several newer generations, and provided there is still a demand for very cheap older components, that their production is, in some cases, moved to other countries like South Korea. And when Ford decided to build a car plant in China - like most of the car giants over the past ten years - their aim was to produce for the Chinese market, not for Britain. Here, they choose to use components which come from all over Europe, including from Germany, where the much higher labour costs are apparently more than compensated for by higher productivity.
Looking at the so-called "direct investment" of the rich countries in the Third World can help to put these "delocalisations" into perspective. This "direct investment" includes several components - productive investment, investment in services and probably also a certain amount of speculative capital. Mining, oil and tourism are said to represent nearly half of this "direct investment" - and these cannot result in any "delocalisation". Therefore manufacturing investments represent probably no more than half of the total. Yet, it has been estimated that the total flow of "direct investment" from the rich to the poor countries between 1990 and 1994 reduced the total stock of available investment in the rich countries by only 0.5% - a mere drop in an ocean which certainly cannot account for the 800,000 jobs (nearly 16% of the total) which disappeared in British manufacturing over the same period.
What about "delocalisation" towards rich industrialised countries, then? Of course, one could argue that with one million American workers employed directly by British-owned companies in the US, in 1994, there must have been a massive movement of "delocalisation" from Britain to North America. But is it the case? Direct productive investments by British capitalists in the US fall more or less into two categories. Either their aim is to bypass the trade barriers set up by the US government by buying existing companies to take over their share of the US market, their share of state procurement or their technology - and this can only boost exports from Britain, and therefore jobs. Or these direct investments have a purely short-term speculative aim, whereby British companies buy existing US companies to sell them back as soon as a comfortable profit can be made (such is, for instance, the main activity of the Hanson group). In any case, only a very small number of these investments can be described as "delocalisation".
Finally, it would be ridiculous to lay the blame for unemployment here on the two million or so workers who found a job abroad with British-owned companies, when, in 1993, 33% of Britain's capital spending and 25% of its manufacturing output came from the activity of foreign-owned companies!
The "global" threat on jobs in Britain is a con. The only real threat comes from the way individual British capitalists use their capital - in order to to maximise profits rather than as a function of the needs of society. What is outrageous is not the fact that production and factories can be moved around - it is the fact that an employer has the "right" to close down a plant and throw thousands of people on the dole just to suit his own interests.
Are the poor countries catching up with the rich countries?
This is a widespread self-interested stupidity. It is primarily based on a double swindle - first blowing up out of proportion the cases of the small number of so-called "new industrial countries", and second extrapolating from these cases to all poor countries.
The administrator of the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), who, is certainly not a revolutionary, declared in a recent interview: "There is a first myth we need to combat. This is the myth of a developing world which, thanks to the globalisation of the world economy, will get better and better, led by fifteen or so dragons" In reality, "in more than a hundred countries, per capita income is lower than it was fifteen years ago. To put things plainly, nearly 1.6 billion people are worse off than at the beginning of the eighties. In the space of a generation and a half, the gap between rich and poor countries has grown wider. At the beginning of the sixties, the poorest 20% of countries in the world were 30 times poorer than the richest 20%. Now they are 60 times poorer, while at the same time overall wealth has considerably increased (...). Three quarters of the flow of direct foreign investment intended for the poor countries is in fact concentrated in less than a dozen countries, most of them located in Asia. Africa, meanwhile, only receives a few crumbs (6%), and the least advanced countries, most of which are in Africa, receive a miserly 2%." Moreover, the gap between the wealth of the 20% richest countries and the 20% poorest is increasing at the same speed in the 90s as it was in the 60s - which is not surprising given that, for instance, in 1994, the flow of direct investment to the poor countries was actually £38bn less than the interest on debt paid by these same countries to the imperialist banks!
As to the alleged development of the dozen or so countries which receive almost all the flow of western investment to the poor countries, it is itself a biased extrapolation, based on the industrialisation and rapid increase in production in a few "free trade" areas in accordance with the needs of their imperialist partners.
How long can these countries sustain the spectacular growth rates which have been hailed so much here as proof of their development? Even bourgeois economists who jumped happily on the "globalisation" bandwagon in the past, are beginning to have second thoughts. Thus for instance, Barry Riley, a columnist with the business daily Financial Times, gave a much more sober assessment of the situation in an article entitled "Asian miracle takes a break: many of the tigers have begun to look like pussycats" (28 Nov 1996).
Discussing the "faded oriental glamour" of the "Asian Tigers" financial markets, which is resulting in an increasing number of "investors" (i.e. speculators) looking for more promising sources of profits, Riley explains that these markets "recovered quite well during 1995 after hitting a low point, but they have made very little further progress since February this year. A common theme has been a sharp slowdown in the economic growth rate of the export-led Asian economies. GDP growth in the region was typically 8 or 9% during the previous two boom years, but it has slipped to about 5% in 1996." What are the causes of this slip? According to Riley, "whereas export growth last year was often in the range of 20 to 30%, this year it has crashed to under 10% in countries as varied as China, Singapore and Thailand (..) Depressed Japan and continental Europe have been poor customers (..) In fact there appears to be a general over-capacity problem". And Riley concludes by saying "south-east Asia has become a strongly cyclical region depending for its economic health on strong world growth".
In other words, after only a few years of this spectacular growth, the "Asian Tigers" are coming up against the old chronic problem of the imperialist market, and the cause of the on-going world crisis of the past two decades - namely the incapacity of capitalism to match production to actual solvent demand. Moreover, their economic development is, at the end of the day, totally dependent on growing demand - and therefore economic growth - in the imperialist countries, which has failed to materialise so far.
Disappointment with China's potential is already creeping in among British economists. In the 1994 survey already mentioned, The Economist journal quoted enthusiastically the new measurements of GDP adopted by the IMF the previous year, saying: "The IMF puts China's GDP at $1.4 trillion in 1991, making it the world's third-biggest economy (behind America and Japan). But alternative estimates range up to $3.4 trillion, which could make it the second biggest. It is only a matter of time before it will be the biggest" And the survey went on heralding the huge consumer market that China could not fail to become for the industrialised countries. Two years on, however, in its issue dated 12 October 1996, the same journal published an article entitled "How poor is China?". Quoting a recent World Bank report, The Economist admitted with some contrition that "the new figures reduce estimates of the size of the Chinese economy by over 25%. And the bank has also decided that the proportion of the Chinese population living in poverty is closer to a third than the 7% or so that was commonly cited until recently (..) China's economy is now roughly 10% of America's and may catch up in about 40 years' time.". A month later, the Independent on Sunday published an equally sobering article on China's car market. According to this article, 1992 official projected sales of family cars for the year 2000 were 1.4m units, with an estimated 300m potential buyers in total. On the strength of such figures the main Western car and component manufacturers rushed to set up large factories in China. But selling prices are still twice the annual revenue of the Chinese better-paid professionals. As a result, sales only increased by 5% this year, to reach a miserly 340,000, leaving all the manufacturers with huge stocks of unsalable vehicles - a far cry from the previous dreams of a new consumers Eldorado!
So, is China developing? Is even Mexico developing? The "privilege" of benefiting from western investment means above all greater exploitation and plundering, the emergence or reinforcement of a more or less "comprador" local privileged layer of intermediaries, with (and this is the only positive aspect for the future) the transformation of a (very small) fraction of the poor classes of these countries into an industrial proletariat. But are foreign companies in China really any bigger in relative terms than they were in 1927?
It is possible to name a few Korean or Brazilian multinational companies. Even then, one would need to qualify this by taking into account the proportion of American or Japanese capital which is behind these companies. But in any case, among the hundred biggest corporations which dominate the world economy, there is not one which is based in the Third World. Three quarters of them (75 out of 100) are shared between five imperialist countries: the USA, of course, Japan, Germany, France and Britain. The balance of power between imperialist powers has changed since the time when Lenin wrote "Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism", but not the identity of the main brigands who plunder the world.
Globalisation and the state
"Globalisation" has not reduced the role of states. The opposite is true, and not only in the area of economic diplomacy. Even The Economist had to admit this in a leader article untitled "The myth of the powerless state" published in October 1996: "Since 1980 the public-spending ratio has increased in average from 36% of GDP to 40%. National governments not only retain wide discretion over the extent to which they control resources, but after 15 years of integration are tending to control more, not less."
In all the imperialist countries, even those whose leaders are the most ardent advocates of liberalism, the state budget and public coffers are transformed into reservoirs of funds to finance the parasitic existence of big financial groups. Hence the increasing rolling back of public services even in the richest countries. Hence also the considerable and constantly increasing state debts.
It is a particularly biased interpretation to present the imperialist states as the powerless victims of the financial markets. States are not the passive victims of economic changes, but conscious agents in these changes. It is they, their deficits, their borrowing to make up for these deficits, their needs for finance to help their bourgeoisie, and even their policies of privatisation, which fuel speculative capital.
That is why calling for an increased role for national states as an antidote for "globalisation" - considered as a synonym for unbridled capitalism - and presenting this as a progressive idea, as some do in the trade-unions and Labour left, is an absurdity. And it is a reactionary absurdity.
There is no going back as far as imperialism is concerned. And if imperialism felt constrained by a crisis, by an economic collapse, to take refuge behind protectionist policies, this would be carried out at the cost of an even more disastrous fall in the standard of living of the working class, and at the cost of authoritarian or fascist regimes to impose this. It is in the interests of the proletariat not to combat the globalisation of production and the interpenetration of economies, but to fight for the overthrow of the capitalist order on a worldwide scale. The reorganisation of the economy on a superior, rational basis - that is communism - is only possible on the basis of an economy which, whatever reactionaries of all kinds may say, has long been internationalised. And if, as modest by-products of the export of imperialist capital, industrial facilities are set up in places where there were none previously, and if this leads to the emergence of an industrial proletariat in places where there had previously only been impoverished underclasses, then so much the better. The workers of South Korea, Indonesia or China are not enemies or even competitors, but new contingents of the world proletariat, which alone can wrest power from the hands of the bourgeoisie and put an end to capitalism and its final incarnation, imperialism.