Marx on Globalisation

Intro note:

For the past two decades "globalisation" has become the buzzword. In recent history hardly any other process has dominated the spectrum of social science as globalisation. From political scientists to economists, from right wingers to the ultra leftist, from academics to corporate managers everyone has been analysing and trying to understand this phenomenon unfolding before us all. Like the Russian roulette the unfolding globalisation has in itself all the tragicomic events causing a global Domino ripple hitherto unheard and unseen.

In this entire drama what is intriguing is the fact the as more and more world enters into the so-called "global age", the analysis and 'prophesies' of Marx increasingly seems to be coming true. At the dissolution of Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukoyama boisterously proclaimed the “end of ideology” and capitalism’s indisputable victory and consigning Marxism to dust bin of history. Hardly did he imagine at less than a decade and half the very same bourgeoisies economist and intelligentsia would be forced to read and re-read the works of a person, termed the ‘Satan’ more than 150 years after his death. A person whom they have refuted ad infinitum terming his views as anachronistic.

It must have been quite difficult for the international speculator George Soros – the revered new age financial guru –by the mainstream media and the bourgeoisie world over to write:

                Global Capitalism “is coming apart at the seams”

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge of the fiercely pro market The Economist in their book A Future Perfect: The Challenges and hidden Promise of Globalisation:

“As a prohet of socialism Marx may be kaput; but as a prophet of the ‘Universal interdependence of nation’ as he called globalisation, he can still seem startling relevant ....his description of globalisation remains as sharp today as it was 150 years ago”

So it becomes pertinent to understand how Marx investigated and analysed the process of ‘globalisation’. Though he never used the term ‘globalisation’ per say of capital yet the underlying meaning is clearly discernable in the Marxian term ‘world market’ and ‘foreign trade’. Both of them being liberally used un the extant ext of Marx(and also Engels). For Marx ‘capitalism’ represented a specific mode of production characterised by the separation of producer (i.e. the workers) from the means of production, based on wage, labour and capital.....

The Capitalist Mode of Production (C.M.P)

“ replaces and put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations”

(Karl Marx and Fredric Engels, Communist Manifesto, SW 1, Pg 111).

 Unlike earlier mode of production, the Capitalist Mode of Production takes the form of commodity. Labour subsumes under capital, and every occupation become a “paid wage labour” ( KM, CM, 111) to the bourgeoisie.

Here it is important to understand how the Capitalist Mode of Production differs from all the other historic modes of production that it succeeded.

Where as in all the pre-Capitalist Mode of Production , the society was driven by need, CMP replaced it with exchange. To elaborate, a product in the pre Capitalist society was in demand for its value of utilization (or need) by the consumers, it is diametrically different case in the capitalist society.

In CMP products take form of commodity. ......................

The Capitalist Mode of Production thus is characterised by lust of production, that drives it into a maddening rage, termed by Marx as ‘enrichment mania’

                “The enrichment mania itself is impossible without money, the common form in which all commodities are transformed as exchange values. All other accumulation and passion for accumulation appear as naturally given, limited, on the one hand by needs, and, on the other hand, conditioned by the limited nature if the product.” (Marx, contribution to the Critique of political Economy)

Thus it is only under CMP that exchange value replaces the need value.

                “....it is the exchange value and not use value which is the determining end-in-itself of the movement”.  (KM, Capital Vol.1, Progress Publishers, Moscow, USSR at www.,   )

As if commenting on the current trend of imperialism and the multinationals to homoginise the word order, Marx wrote:

“the bourgeoisie has through it exploitation if the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption 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 became 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 zone; 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....

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization.” 

(KM, CM,112)

Marx profoundly wrote about the ‘interdependence of the nations’ as well as the ‘positive side of capital’ his admiration of CMP as a superior economic system can be seen from the following lines where though against the devastating effects of British imperialism in India, he appreciates the bourgeois as it [will] ...

“....create the material basis of the new world—on the one hand the universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of that intercourse...”

(KM, Future Results of British Rule in India, SW 1 199)

He expressed his optimism that colonial power whatever may have the crimes of England (in case of India) she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution. Thus for Marx the process of interdependence of nation would bring about not only benefits for the bourgeois but would hasten the social transformation of the pre Capitalist Mode of Production societies.

In 1847, addressing the workers, Marx termed big industries, the free trade and world market as the ‘positive side of capital’. Without capitalism there would have been no proletariat, neither could the material means for the worker’s emancipation and the foundation of a new society could be laid. He believed capitalism as an historically inevitable, a step along the path of humanities destiny.

Contradiction is pre requisite for progress. The only way a mode of production paves way for the other more superior mode of production is by the historical development of their inherent contradiction. The capitalist system continuously seeks to overcome its inherent antagonism. But its crisis keeps recurring, and assumes the form of cycle.

In the opening chapter of ‘Capital’ Marx termed the inherent cyclical crisis as the character of Capitalism:

If the interval in time between the two complementary phase of the complete metamorphosis of a commodity become too great, if the split between the sale and purchase becomes too pronounced, the intimate connection between them, their oneness, asserts itself by producing — a crisis. The anti theses, use value and value (i.e. exchange value — P.); the contradictions that private labour is bound to manifest itself as direct social labour , that a particularised concrete kind  of labour has to pass for abstract human labour; the contradiction between the personification of objects and the representation of persons by things; all these antitheses and contradictions, which are immanent in commodities, assert themselves, and develop their modes of motion; in metamorphosis of a commodity, these modes therefore imply the possibility, and no more than the possibility of crises. The conversion of this mere possibility and no more than the possibility crises . the conversion of this mere possibility into reality is the result of a long series of relations.....(Marx, Capital vol.-I)

In the Communist Manifesto Marx  pellucidly explains the capitalist’s futile attempt to overcome the periodic crises.

“ And how does the bourgeois get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other by conquest of new market, and by the more through exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

“ Capitalist production begets with the necessity of a natural process, its own negation. What is glaring in this periodic crises is the revolt of the bourgeoisie’s ‘grave diggers’ against their own ‘producers.’

--Pratyush

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