The Dark Side of Globalization: Who is Controlling the World's Process?

The Dark Side of Globalization: Who is Controlling the World's Process?

From 1989 to 1991, the "Cold War" ended. Around the same time, globalization was officially launched. The term "globalization" appeared in the same year as the phrase "virtual reality" was born, and also in that year, the HIV virus was formally discovered — although humans had already monitored its existence earlier, it was confirmed by calculation before being publicly announced. These three events happened in the same year. To me, the coincidence of "virtual reality" and "globalization" appearing in the same year is highly symbolic. That year was 1983.

There are two main views on the issue of globalization. The first view holds that globalization is a long-standing process, and the dispute lies only in the starting point: some believe it began with the first British globalization in the 19th century; others think it began in the 16th century; the third view points to the period of the Crusades; the fourth believes it dates back to the Roman Empire; the fifth traces it to ancient Egypt; and the sixth even claims it started with the Neolithic Revolution. Why not consider the most severe "Upper Paleolithic Crisis" in human history as the beginning of globalization? The second view argues that globalization is a new phenomenon that emerged in the 1980s and has since continued to develop. I support the second view, which holds that globalization is a completely new phenomenon.

The problem is that people often confuse globalization with two other similar processes — "integration" (интеграция) and "internationalization" (интернационализация). In fact, integration, which arises alongside expansion, might indeed be traced back to the Upper Paleolithic Crisis, at least from the Neolithic era onwards, and it is an independent process. Economic internationalization began in the 1960s and 1970s. As for globalization, it was born in the 1980s and is now rapidly heading towards its own crisis.

It is not difficult to see that the core of integration, internationalization, and globalization is entirely different production structures. Although integration continued to develop later, its origin was based on "pre-industrial production." Economic internationalization originated from "industrial production" in the 1960s and 1970s. If we temporarily set aside political aspects (I will discuss the political dimension of globalization later), let us briefly cite Kissinger's view as a "forward-looking introduction." Kissinger once said, "Globalization is nothing but another name for American imperialism." From a political perspective, Kissinger's statement is completely correct.

However, from the perspectives of political economy and technological economy, it is evident that without a revolution in communication and information — what the Soviet Union later called the "technological revolution" — globalization would not have been possible. As Zygmunt Bauman pointed out: "When capital is converted into electronic signals, it is no longer bound by the geographical restrictions of the country of origin, transit countries, or receiving countries." When I press a button, capital can be transferred from Hong Kong to New York, Los Angeles, or London, and the destination is irrelevant. The key point is that this information and communication revolution has completely broken the geographical and territorial constraints of capital.

It can be said that "time" has finally defeated "space." Overall, what is the core driving force of capitalism, which is a highly dynamic social form throughout its entire development history? The answer is: the entire history of capitalism is a history of the struggle of capital to constantly break through development limitations. It is this "continuous breakthrough of old limitations and responding to new limitations" that gives capitalism extraordinary developmental vitality. By the time of globalization, capital has cleared all obstacles in its path. First, the material limitations — thanks to the so-called "technological revolution," capital can now easily be converted into electronic signals and freely flow.

Additionally, there is another key reason why globalization exhausts the development potential of the capitalist system: Capitalism is essentially an "expansionist system" with clear expansionist characteristics. Within the capitalist system, there are "core areas," "semi-peripheral zones," and "peripheral zones," as well as vast "non-capitalist areas." For example, in the 18th and 19th centuries: whenever global profit rates declined, capital would seize new spaces from non-capitalist areas, transforming them into their own "capitalist peripheral zones" — that is, new markets and sources of cheap labor. Through this process, profit rates could be restored and increased again. Each serious crisis of the capitalist system relied on this "spatial expansion" to resolve. The arrival of globalization means the end of this process.

Today, capitalism has penetrated every corner of the world: "mafia capitalism" in Russia, "special forms of capitalism" in relevant countries, "caste-based capitalism" in India... Capitalism is everywhere. This means that current crises have nowhere to be shifted. In other words, capitalism must shift from an "expansionist system" to an "inward development system." But the problem is that capitalism was designed from its inception as an "expansionist system," and a series of institutions embedded within it fundamentally prevent it from transitioning to inward development. From this perspective, capitalism is very similar to Athens after Solon's reforms.

The core of Solon's reform was to cut off the source of slaves within Athens — Athenian citizens could no longer become slaves, and slaves had to be seized from outside. This reform ultimately created a highly dependent expansionist system (both Athens and later Rome were like this). This system could only continue to expand and expand, because the internal source of slaves had been blocked. The system of Rome eventually reached a turning point in AD 212 — the Edict of Caracalla granted Roman citizenship to all imperial citizens, and soon after, the Roman Empire began to decline. Capitalism is currently facing the same fate.

At its core, capitalism has established a series of institutions from the very beginning, which block the possibility of inward exploitation of the "core population." These institutions include the state apparatus, civil society, an independent political system, and a mass education system — the latter, while to some extent cultivating suitable talents for "systemic exploitation of individuals" (at least meeting the minimum needs of the industrial system), also requires resources to be invested in individuals. These institutions and other factors together became obstacles to "strengthening internal exploitation." In other words, the upper class of capitalism must make certain "concessions" to the core population while exploiting the semi-periphery and periphery.

Between 1945 and 1975, such "concessions" became inevitable — because the capitalist system needed to compete with the Soviet Union. To prevent left-wing and centrist parties supported by the working class elite and middle class from leaning toward the Soviet Union, the upper class of capitalism had to make compromises. Additionally, the capitalist system between 1945 and 1975 had the capacity to bear these "concessions": during the 30-year recovery period of post-war capitalism (1945-1975), the total value of goods and services created exceeded the sum of the previous 150 years. This period of capitalism achieved remarkable prosperity, but by the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, this momentum began to wane.

Furthermore, a key invention emerged in the 1950s: it allowed the bourgeoisie to free itself from the constraints of the colonial system and begin "sacrificing" the interests of its own people; through it, the upper class of capitalism could solve many problems through economic means alone, without worrying about its own people. Although this system was fully formed in the 1970s and 1980s, it had already taken root in the 1950s — it was the "offshore financial centers" (оффшорные зоны). Offshore centers became a "gift from heaven" for the global capitalist upper class, especially the British upper class, because American capital began to flood into Britain and continental Europe. Regarding the reasons for Kennedy's assassination, there are many factors (such as his impact on the Federal Reserve), but one key factor was that Kennedy issued a law strictly limiting capital outflows, which caused significant controversy.

In fact, Britain had already begun discussing the "globalization project" as early as the late 19th century, and at that time, this project was viewed as a "project on an imperial scale." Notably, the British upper class held great favor for any form of globalization, whether it was capitalist or anti-capitalist. An example from the intelligence field illustrates this well: in the 1930s, all communist international agents known to the British intelligence department were not automatically classified as "Soviet agents." For Britain, the Comintern (the representative of left-wing globalization) was one thing, and the Soviet intelligence agency was another. Therefore, even members of the "Cambridge Five" — I am not referring to the one who fled, Philby, but rather Brandon Blunt, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess — were never held accountable. They claimed they were only "Comintern agents" and had never engaged in activities that harmed Britain on behalf of the Soviet Union.

It is evident that the "idea of globalization" had already spread among the upper circles of global capitalism, but as a socioeconomic process, it could only be realized in the late 20th century, and it required two prerequisite conditions: first, the emergence of a technological revolution that allowed capital to be converted into electronic signals; second, the dissolution of the Soviet Union — because the Soviet Union pursued a completely different global development plan compared to capitalism. A highly representative example is that after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the pace of globalization accelerated significantly. Additionally, it should be noted that Western globalists had already realized in the late 1960s that if they could not reach some consensus with the Soviet leadership, globalization would not be able to proceed. Therefore, the "Club of Rome" chose to "dialogue" with the Soviet leadership, and "environmental issues" became the entry point for the dialogue — from the perspective of the Soviet leadership, this issue seemed to be the most "safe and harmless."

In the mid-1970s, a joint U.S.-Soviet institution (more accurately, a joint CIA-KGB institution) was established in Vienna — the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (МИПСА). Its members included experts from both the United States and the Soviet Union. On the surface, it aimed to develop a "global governance model," but in reality, it sought to build a "global system." It is worth noting that this global system was designed with a strong "eco-friendly facade," which was not accidental — because "ecologism" (экологизм), as a quasi-ideology, was inherently positioned as the "antidote to industrialization." It should be noted that the first report published by the Club of Rome in 1960 was titled "The Limits to Growth" (Пределы роста).

This report was a complete fraud! It seemed "scientific" and contained a large amount of data, but it attempted to prove a conclusion that was completely inconsistent with the facts: that Earth's resources had been exhausted, and industrial growth must be stopped, shifting industry to the "Third World," leaving only the service and financial sectors in the core regions, and moving all other industries out! Obviously, this conclusion hides a clear class political purpose — weakening the economic base of the working class. In the 1975 report "The Crisis of Democracy," globalists openly stated this intention.

Original text: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7565824536155914752/

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