Divina Grace R.

Sobrepea

Eng 10 THU3

2015-02864

Outline

Globalization and Political Strategy

Fredric Jameson
Because ideological appropriations of globalization are both totalizing and isolating, it
may be more productive to combine all its descriptions and to take note of its ambiguities
to demonstrate the cohesion of its distinct levels and to articulate a politics of resistance.
I. Introduction
A. Definition of Globalization
1. Discussion of its effects are totalizing in nature.
2. Functional descriptions tend to isolate particular elements without relating
them to each other.
3. It may be more productive to combine all the descriptions and to take an
inventory of their ambiguities.
B. Levels of Globalization
1. Technological level
2. Political level
3. Cultural level
4. Economic level
5. Social level

II. Technological Level

A. Innovations
1. New communications technology
2. Information revolution
B. Industrial production and organization
C. Marketing of goods
D. Luddite Politics
1. Can globalization be stopped, diverted or reversed?

III. Political Level

A. Nation-state
1. One pressure among many on national governments
2. Spreading economic and military might of the US
a. Weakening of the nation-state
b. Subordination of other nation-states to American power
i.
Through consent and collaboration
ii.
By the use of brute force and economic threat
B. Imperialism
1. Pre-First World War
a. Colonialist order practiced by:
i.
A number of European countries
ii.
United States of America
iii.
Japan
2. Post-Second World War
a. Subsequent wave of decolonization by a Cold War form
i.
Used economic pressure and blackmail
3. Three-pronged Strategy
a. Nuclear weapons for the US alone
b. Human rights and American-style electoral democracy
c. Limits to immigration and the free flow of labor
d. Propagation of the free market across the globe
C. Nationalism
1. Cultural question
a. As a whole internal political program, it usually appeals to something that
is not technological, political or economic, but rather to something we
tend to call cultural

IV. Cultural Level

A. Standardization of world culture
1. Heart of globalization
B. Fear that US models are replacing everything else now
1. Result of economic domination
2. Ethno-national ways of life will be destroyed
C. Cultural Imperialism
1. It is not clear if the defense against cultural imperialism requires overt acts of
resistance

2. To doubt the defensive strength of various, non-American cultures is to offend

or insult them
D. Cultural Politics
1. Confronts a rhetorical alternation between:
a. Overweening pride in the affirmation of the groups strength
b. Strategic demeaning of it for political reasons
i.
Such a politics can foreground the heroic and embody forth
stirring images of the heroism of the subaltern in order to
ii.

encourage the public

It can insist on that groups miseries and/or sufferings to arouse
indignation to make the situation of the oppressed more widely
known

V. Economic Level
A. Economic dimension of globalization constantly seems to be dissolving into:
1. Controlling the new technologies
2. Reinforcing geopolitical interests
3. Collapsing the cultural into the economic, and the economic into the cultural
a. Cultural into the economic
i.
Commodity Production
ii.
Entertainment business
b. Economic into the cultural
i.
Financial markets
ii.
Commodification is also an aestheticization
c. Cultural Imperialism
i.
Dominance of US films in foreign markets
ii.
US attempt to batter down cultural protectionist policies
iii.
Efforts to supersede local laws with international statutes that
iv.

favor American corporations

Postmodern forms are those working through the projects of

NAFTA, GATT, MAI and WTO

B. Transnational Corporations
1. First sign and symptom of the new capitalist development
2. Raised political fears about the possibility of a new kind of dual power, of the
preponderance of these supranational giants over national governments

a. Paranoid side of such fears may be allayed by the complicity of the states
with these business operations
b. Worrying feature of the new global corporate structures is their capacity
to devastate national labor markets
C. Expansion of finance capital markets
1. Spectacular feature of the new economic landscape
2. We now have to deal with the capital itself
3. Destructive speculation on foreign currencies seen over recent years signals
the absolute dependency of nation-states outside the First World core on
foreign capital in the form of:
a. Loans
b. Supports; and
c. Investments
4. Processes that have eroded many countries self-sufficiency in agriculture
a. Leads to import-dependency on US food-stuffs
b. Might be described as a new worldwide division of labor
5. Spate of financial crises, statements of political leaders and economic figures
a. Have given stark visibility to the destructive side of the new world
economic order
D. International Transfers of Capital
1. One method by which some of this financial damage might be contained
2. Played a leading role within the International Monetary Fund
a. IMF was long perceived to be the driving force of attempts to impose
free-market conditions on countries by threatening to withdraw
investment funds
3. It is clear that the interests of the financial markets and those of the US are
identical
a. These new global financial markets may yet mutate into autonomous
mechanisms that produce disasters no one wants
E. Irreversibility
1. Feature of the story
2. First mooted at the technological level
3. Political level
a. Encountered in terms of imperialist domination
4. Cultural level
a. Globalization threatens the final extinctions of local cultures
5. Economical level

a. Dooms that seems to hang over globalizations putative irreversibility

seems to confront us with our own inability to imagine any alternative

VI. Culture of Consumption

A. Further dimension of economic globalization
B. Developed initially in First World countries but now purveyed around the world
C. Social sphere:
1. A specific mode of life generated by late-capitalist commodity production
2. Threatens to consume alternative forms of everyday behavior in other
cultures
D. A part and parcel of the social fabric
E. Consumption individualizes and atomizes; its logic tears through the fabric of
daily life
F. Critique of commodity consumption parallels the traditional critique of money,
where gold is identified as the supremely corrosive element, gnawing at social
bonds

VII. Effects of Globalization (John Gray)

A. Essential contradiction of free-market thinking:
1. The creation of any genuinely government-free market involves enormous
government intervention
2. An increase in centralized government power
B. Free market must be brought about by decisive legislative and other
interventionist means
C. Thatchers free-market experiment:
1. Its socially destructive force not only produced a backlash among those
whom it impoverished, it also atomized the popular front of Conservative
groups who had supported her program and been her electoral base
a. Two conclusions drawn by Gray:

i.

True cultural conservatism is incompatible with the

interventionism of free-market policies

ii.
Democracy is itself incompatible with this last
D. Neo-liberal theory
1. Grays fundamental ideological target in his book
a. Considers it a genuine agent, an active shaping influence, of disastrous
changes around the world today
b. Powers free-market globalization
c. It is an American phenomenon
i.
US doctrine, reinforced by American universalism, is not shared
anywhere else in the world.
d. The cultures of Europe (social market), Japan and China, Southeast Asia
and Russia are not innately hospitable to the neo-liberal agenda,
although it may succeed in ravaging them
E. Social and Cultural Levels
1. Gray falls back on two standard social-science axioms:
a. That of cultural tradition
b. That of modernity
2. Samuel Huntingtons opposition to the USs claims of universalism
a. Universal Western values are not rooted in eternal human nature but are,
rather, the expression of one particular constellation of values
b. Eight currently existing world cultures:
i.
The Wests
ii.
The culture of Russian Orthodox Christianity
iii.
Those of Islam
iv.
Of Hinduism
v.
Of Japan
vi.
Chinese or Confucian tradition
vii.
African culture
viii. Latin American culture
c. Social phenomena are characterized as cultural traditions, which are
explained by their origin in a specific religion
d. Values survive the secularization process, which explains the difference
in cultures

e. Astonishing feature of this antagonistic world survey of the

globalization process is the absence of serious economics; political
science of the most arid and specialized type
f. Plurality of cultures stand for the decentralized, diplomatic and military
jungle with which Western or Christian culture will have to deal
3. Gray talks about cultures and traditions in terms of their capacities to furnish
different forms of modernity
a. Achieve modernity by renewing own cultural traditions
i.
Modernity: kinship capitalism, samurai capitalism, chaebol,
social market, anarcho-capitalism
4. Grays account of the resistance to the global free market is not cultural, but
social in nature
a. The various cultures are able to draw upon distinct kinds of social
resources over and against what free market brings
5. Grimmest dystopia lies in the United States itself (prospects of a society
lured towards an absolute free market):
a. Drastic social polarization and immiseration
b. Destruction of the middle classes
c. Large structural unemployment without any welfare safety net
d. One of the highest incarceration rates in the world
e. Devastated cities
f. Disintegrating families
6. American social realities spring from the atomization and destruction of the
social
F. Modernity
1. Modern technology
a. Cars
b. Telephones
c. Airplanes
d. Factories
2. Having a constitution of laws
3. Capitalism has no social goals
4. Globalization in the current sense is irreversible
5. Social democracy
a. Unviable today
b. Many of its core policies cannot be sustained in open economies

c. Countries will have to try to alleviate the rigors of the free market by
fidelity to their own cultural traditions
d. Global schemes of regulation must be devised
6. Gray attributes both the preconditions of the global free market and its
irreversibility to technology
a. Advantage of a multinational company comes from its capacity to
generate new technologies and to deploy them effectively
b. Root cause of falling wages and rising unemployment is the worldwide
spread of new technology
c. Technology determines social and economic policy
d. A truly global economy is being created by the worldwide spread of new
technologies, not by the spread of free markets

VIII. Efficiency of the System of Analysis

A. Technological level
1. Luddite politics
a. Awakes skepticism regarding technological irreversibility
b. Ecological critique
c. Various proposals such as the Tobin plan
d. Deep-seated belief: technological can only be irreversible that is itself
the greatest barrier to any politics of technological control
B. Political level
1. Secession from a pre-existing global system
2. Nationalist politics
a. Nationalist project is inseparable from a politics of modernization
b. Nationalist impulse must always be part of a larger politics that
transcends nationalism
c. Goal of national liberation
i.
Failure in that countries that have become independent of their
ii.

colonial masters subsequently fall into capitalist globalization

Countries outside that orbit do not inspire much confidence in the

viability of a purely nationalist path

d. Resistance to US Imperialism constitutes opposition to globalization

i.

Areas best-equipped in socio-economic terms to sustain

resistance (Japan and the European Union) have mixed feelings
because of deep implication in the US project of the global free

market
e. Nation-state today remains the only concrete terrain and framework for
political struggle
i.
Anti-World Bank and anti-WTO demonstrations
ii.
Such struggles in other countries can only be developed in the
iii.

fashion of the nationalist spirit

Political countermove: US coopts the language of national self-

iv.
v.

protection
Struggles can be conflated with the Iraqi-style resistance
The opposition between universal and particular is embedded as a
contradiction within the existing historical situation of nationstates inside a global system

C. Cultural level
1. Political resistance: A defense of our way of life
a. Powerful negative program
b. Ensures the articulation of all forms of cultural imperialism
c. Positive substance of what is being defended tends to reduce itself to
anthropological tics and oddities (religious traditions)
d. These forces can no longer constitute a universalistic opposition
e. Religious form of political resistance
i.
Power derives from its grounding in an existing community
D. Economic and Social levels
a. Economic: Capitalism is the motor force behind the destructive forms of
globalization
b. Economic to Social
i.
Economic proposals for resistance must be accompanied by a
shift of attention
ii.
Forms of social cohesion are preconditions for political struggle
3. Labor organization (Combination)
a. Symbolic designation for what is at issue on this social level

b. History of the labor movement everywhere gives examples of the forging

of new forms of solidarity in active political work
c. Not always at the mercy of new technologies
d. Social collectivity is the crucial center of any truly progressive and
innovative political response to globalization