Globalization is Bad For You

Globalization, speaking roughly is a move toward eliminating the barriers between nations and enabling things like unfettered trade all the way up to and including softening immigration and borders in general.

Capitalists have already taken advantage of this to the detriment of workers. In the past, prior to things like multinationals corporations, capitalists were tied to a nation, and had some reason to invest in it - tax breaks aside. It's home - or was. National borders no longer apply to the capitalists.

What does that mean for us? It means it's near impossible to organize labor against them because they can just pull up stakes in one nation, while doing business in another. Just the threat of that is enough to fuel union busting efforts. It means it's near impossible to regulate them, since they operate under several different nations, and they again pose a "flight risk" if regulations or taxes get too onerous for their taste. There's no loyalty, no ties to the nation it operates in, and that hamstrings us. They know it, and level threats of leaving whenever it benefits them. Boeing moving its headquarters to Chicago is a microcosm of this.

The other problem with globalization is hegemony. As we soften borders and more freely travel, we will naturally homogenize as we're exposed to other people groups. We'll start sharing language, even cultural and value norms - we become a "melting pot" which sounds nice until you learn a little bit about the history of this and how it decimated indigenous cultures like the Mixtecs and Triquis of Mexico as all the leadership of those groups assimilated and learned Spanish and forgot their own language over generations. They lost their written language, they lost their history, the Mixtecs that remain lost everything. I could digress and write about them for pages, but it wasn't just colonization that did their culture in, it was voluntary assimilation by the leaders and bourgeois segment of their society - the ones who could read and write, and owned property. They took all that with them.

I want to be clear, this isn't about race mixing which people will do anyway, but about the erosion of sovereignty and the cultural attrition that goes with that, as happened to the Mixtecs in Mexico and many Indeo tribes here, and there's real tangible loss that goes with that.


It's not just indigenous people this impacts. Muslims have been assimilating swaths of Africa as they expand. What happens to local cultures when that happens? As brutal as that expansion is, the developed world uses the brutality of economics to achieve their own ends in that regard - and then there's the droning. At least Iraq has a McDonalds now? How voluntary is it when the bombs preceded it? The bombs always come first when we bring "freedom" to your country.

All of this is part and parcel to the construction of a global world order, which sounds like a conspiracy but it's not. Agencies like the Trilateral Commission under Carter, or the more recent WTO and IMF are key to it, and have been pushing their neoliberal economics and policies precisely to that end.

The EU is a step in that direction as well. A unified Europe on the one hand is good. A huge, centralized government presiding over vastly different countries? Maybe not so much.

Nations need their national identity. Globalism may not eliminate it, but it erodes it over time.

There's perhaps a more important issue of it, and that is a centralized body cannot adapt to change as well as multiple decentralized bodies. Several complex adaptive systems is better than one. It's more stable. If one falters it's not a crash for everyone. What happens if the EU leadership implodes the way the US leadership has?

If a global society goes off the rails the damage won't be containable. At least with individual societies if they go on tilt they don't necessarily take the world with them.

What happens when a global governmental body goes on tilt? What happens when a fascist manages to get control of it and in control of a global military?

This shouldn't be read as a treatise on nationalism. It's not. This isn't a simple dichotomy. Read this as an appeal to consider the preservation of cultural and ethnic habitat for all people, as well as the safety in diversity of government and leadership.