Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Globalism is not so much about 'connecting people'.

It mostly has a neolibaral foundation, and secondarily a governance and NGO ethos.

Anti-Globalism in the 1990's was by the Left, and they were against the WTO and mostly neoliberal world order.

Anti-Globalism today is much more complicated issue, but with the more popular versions being more or less Nationalist, anti-UN/WHO/Multilaterialism.

Personally - I think there are very good arguments on all sides of this subject and it's sad that it's ideologically aligned.

Global neoliberalism has brought zillions out of poverty, but has wicked externalizations and a lot of inequality.

Globalist institutions have a certain kind of individual corruption (think FIFA) and are also subject to the completely antithetical influences of bad actor states (think Saudi Arabia on Human Rights) etc. and finally, very susceptible to ideological institutionalization, elitism and creeping, ineffectiveness and bureaucracy.

Yet at the same time there are some parts of some orgs that are super essential. Like the WHO right now and probably the IPCC for a few reasons.

Great comment. I think globalizations problems are those of accountability at scale. I think one constant of humanity is that hierarchies / cultures / institutions will grow. So in that sense I see globalization as inevitable, but we haven't solved accountability. If we want to go the liberal route, our institutions need to be accountable for the externalities. I think this is almost impossible without backsliding into (also potentially-apocalyptic) factionalism

The whole concept of 'neoliberalism' is simply the far left being angry at literally everybody to the right of them. People from right wing nationalists, libertarians, center leftists all with diverse opinions were all simply called neoliberal. Neoliberalism has never been an actual movement or philosophy or anything coherent but rather is everything the far left doesn't like since the late 70s.

What both the left and the right complain about in their 'anti-globalist' is 'we are unhappy with the situation here' and we blame the rest of the globe. The left believes that all changes to the economy they don't like could just not effect them if you didn't have free trade. And the right, by now is basically the party of the white working class has the same issue.

This is also why the left is now the pro globalism party, they are now the party of the urban people rather then the (white) working class and cities have much fewer of the problems from change in industrial structure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com