Marx and Globalization

[LordJFT]

I'm doing a paper on how Marx's ideas of class struggle still apply today with globalization. It's reccomended that we include info about the WTO. Does anyone either have ideas specific topics I should approach or resources? ALL help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[Taverner]

1. Check out differences between Comecon and the WTO.

That could be a study within itself

[LordJFT]

3. thanks, i'll look into that

[panader0]

2. No link, just my ideas

I think that Marx's ideas of leveling off the mountains to fill in the valleys, of making the difference between the poor and the rich much less, then that is what globalization is doing. It's not just economies that will achieve parity, but race and religion too. It's already happening, and I see no problem with it.

[LordJFT]

4. do you mean after the economies go through the cyle and become "developed"

because it seems like the wealth inequalities are initially greater in developing countries.

[Terry in Austin]

5. Class and global capitalism: suggested resources

Class struggle issues do indeed apply to the system known as "globalization," which is essentially warmed-over colonialism based on an assumption of near-zero transport costs. The WTO is just the British East India Company in modern costume.

I've found that some of the writers of the "Braudel School" offer a lot of insight into these issues. While not Marxist as such, they do make use of some of his better ideas, and go on to analyze political and economic relationships between "core" and "periphery" on an international level. They also examine the issues in a context of deep historical time, over the 500 year period dominated by our present system of nation states that co-evolved with capitalism as we know it.

I'd recommend Immanuel Wallerstein, whose books include World-Systems Analysis and Geopolitics and Geoculture, and Giovanni Arrighi, whose very comprehensive work The Long Twentieth Century actually goes back and starts with the 14th century in setting the evolutionary context for the 20th.

Fourteenth-century Florence was where capitalism (aka banking) in its modern form got started. Arrighi shows, for example, how a labor revolt by the wool-workers (ciompi) was an almost immediate consequence of the new system.

These writers bring class struggle into a new perspective, taking more of a systemic view of concentration of wealth and power as it occurs in capitalist nation-states, and less on individuals' identifying with "class" as a group that they belong to. Either way, it comes to exploiter vs. exploited, and how that dynamic occurs.

If you're doing any research on economic inequality, and how it gets institutionalized globally, these guys are a must-read.

Happy hunting!