Question:
Who are the “globalists” that are referenced so often?
—P. K.
Hi P. K.,
It seems the right will do anything but name capitalists as their enemy. While “globalism” can mean many things—including recognizing the global impact of local actions—the right tends to use the term as a sort of conspiratorial umbrella with which to shade their centrist opponents. In this vein, a globalist is someone who advocates trading off national sovereignty to a multinational governing body, such as the European Union or United Nations. Previous years have seen fixation with the World Economic Forum and their “Great Reset Initiative,” an alleged scheme to end personal property ownership through mind-controlling vaccines and outright seizure.
From a Marxist perspective, the frustrating aspect of the right wing globalist conception is the truth embedded within it. Globalization is characterized by multinational firms outsourcing employment, corporate-drafted free trade agreements, international warfare and the financial takeover of the economy by hedge funds, asset managers and banks. These trends have been a chimera for the left for some decades now, and past protests in Quebec, Seattle and New York attest.
The membership of corporate clubs like the WEF is drawn directly from the global capitalist ruling class. Meanwhile, international trade agreements like the USMCA and political organizations like the UN and OECD are subsidiary to the reality of global commerce and economic interdependence. In other words, “globalism” is a mental image projected by the actually existing liberal capitalist economic order. The right seeks to alter the image while the left wants to smash the projector.
Incredibly, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels perfectly diagnosed the problem in 1848:
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.1
The “great chagrin of Reactionists” toward globalization during Marx’s lifetime has clearly never gone away—it is the root of the “globalist” slur. Many millions of people around the world rightfully bemoan the loss of local industries and a cosmopolitan economy that rapidly revolutionizes culture. But the right has never wrapped their arms around the problem, as evidenced by reflexive conservative support for corporate-friendly rates of taxation and deregulation that lubricate the globalization machine.
The reason why corporate-funded media and think tanks are so hostile to socialism is because it is the only remedy to what ails the capitalist economy. Unfair trade and the outsourcing of labour and capital is impossible under a system of nationalized finance, rational economic planning, public ownership of strategic industries and worker owned enterprises. Exceptionally low rates of taxation on workers are also possible under a system that allocates public sector surpluses toward infrastructure, as China proves. Facts are stubborn things and capitalism will one day have a final reckoning that puts an end to the contrived “globalist” contention once and for all.
In sols.
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Footnotes:
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Bourgeois and Proletarians” in The Communist Manifesto. ↩︎