GLOBALISATION

Globalisation

Globalisation in United States

Introduction

Despite the rapidly growing body of literature on the topic of globalization and its implications, there is disagreement about how to conceptualize what is happening. Although the term is widely used to characterize the profound changes unfolding in the world, the nature of these shifts and what they mean remain debated questions. This chapter presents a perspective on the phenomenon of globalization that is intended as a contribution to an understanding of what is happening. (MacEwan, 1999, 18)

Globalization: Definitions

Globalization can be defined as the unfolding resolution of the contradiction between ever expanding capital and its national political and social formations. Up to the 1970s, the expansion of capital was always as national capital, capital with particular territorial and historical roots and character. Afterwards, capital began to expand more than ever as simply the corporation; ownership began to correspond less and less with national geographies. Just as capital once had to create a national state and a defined territory, in the form of the transnational corporation (TNC) it has had to remove or transform this 'shell' to create institutions to ensure and facilitate accumulation at the global level. Globalization is the close of the national history of capital and the beginning of the history of the expansion of capital sans nationality. (Arrighi, 2001, 69)

Globalization also represents the shift of the main venue of capital accumulation from the national to the supranational or global level. This is evidenced in the large number of TNCs that dominate world production and distribution, the pervasive trans-border operations of these corporations, the preponderance of foreign direct investment (FDI) over other forms of investment, and in the extensive numbers of transnational corporate mergers and takeovers, joint-ventures, share agreements, cartels and oligopolies. This shift, 'the end of (political) geography', has required the establishment of administrative bodies at the global level and a transformation or harmonization of national relations of production that have become barriers to the global accumulation of capital. (Drache, 2001, 250)

Globalization can also be grasped as the 'triumph of capitalism', that is, as the ascendancy of economics over politics, of corporate demands over public policy, of the private over the public interest, of the TNC over the national state. It is the last stage in the capitalization of the world. This 'triumph' is embodied in global agencies whose function is to facilitate global conditions for capital accumulation. These agencies have global powers, structured in the interests of corporate private property, but are neither democratic nor representative of other interests. 'National' and 'general' interests become subordinated to those of the corporation.

Globalization can further be defined as the arrival of 'self-generating capital' at the global level: that is, capital as capital, capital in the form of the TNC, free of national loyalties, controls, and interests. This is different from the mere internationalization of capital, which assumes a world of national capitals and nation states; it is the suppression by capital of the nation state. All the circuits of capital become global in nature and ...