I guess we were all lacking wisdom.
When I was in college or going to parties with New Yorker Reader types I'd try to argue against globalization and they would start smugly dropping their theories on me. I was too young and naive to refute them in any kind of convincing way, but my life experience told me that it was wrong.
But it was pervasive in the zeitgeist. Basically anyone trying to argue against it was backwards and stupid, or shrill if they were lefty.
However I'm not sure it could really be stopped or whether it was inevitable from containerization. Can you really prevent people from getting cheaper products forever?
What technology was invented in 2000 that allowed everything to go to China? No technology. That was the year the US adopted Permanent Normalized Trade Relations with China. It was a government policy change!
By the way the US already had trade relations with China. All PNTR did was promise not to change the policy in the future. That was the starting gun that signaled to all American companies that they should start investing in production in China.
So would globalization happen on some scale just because of the march of technology? Sure. But the way it happened, the speed at which it happened and the extent to which it happened, were the result of policy choices.
This sort of thing takes time, and by the 00s, enough time (and a recent Hong Kong transfer that did not result in mass liquidation) passed, and foreign investors were gaining confidence.
The world, and especially China has agency of its own, it isn't sorely driven by whatever American policy is it's flavour of the week.
No, but there definitely was a much slower gradual repression over a longer period, with a final round of protest repression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_Hong_Kong_pr...
> The world, and especially China has agency of its own, it isn't sorely driven by whatever American policy is it's flavour of the week
Amen. A two-pole model is simple and attractive but the rest of the world is also, you know, doing stuff and buying things. America can, for example, preserve its car industry by refusing to allow Chinese EVs, but will gradually discover it has become uncompetitive overseas.
The point is that it wasn't technology it was policy, on the Chinese and American side, that drove the China Shock.
This was also what a lot of anti-globalization people were say at the time. The pro-globalization people were saying not only is it good but it's inevitable. There Is No Alternative.
The anti globalization people were saying if it's inevitable why does it need all these policy changes, trade agreements, and bigwig conferences?
This whole subthread is from like an alternate timeline where the world actually found out or agreed that globalization was bad and stopped or slowed it somehow? Did the US meaningfully take back manufacturing or something?
If globalization is not inevitable, what's the alternative?
The local consumers don‘t want this and would rather get quality products for a fair price, but are forced to participate because of the economic situation. Likewise the workers in the cheaper labor markets don‘t want this but are forced to participate due to their economic situation. And there are systems in placed enforced by both global capital as well as governments to keep it that way.
True globalization would have open borders where the flow of workers are as free as the flow of capital in the current system. Where cheaper labor markets simply wouldn’t exist and therefor could not be exploited by the owning class. True globalization would have solidarity of workers reach across international borders. Such that striking textile workers in Bangladesh would see retail workers in America refuse to sell clothes from involved factories to American consumers in solidarity.
The type of globalization we are talking about here is only globalization of capital. It is a misnomer, and should instead be called global exploitation of the workers.
This is true, but, in their efforts to maximize short term gains, they are moving us towards your "true globalization" whether they intend to or not. That's kind of the inevitability. You can't send all that economic activity and expertise over there without lifting those people up. They are inexorably chipping away at the reserves of cheap labor to arbitrage. China's getting better, and I'm here for it.
China is getting more rich, that is true, and workers in China are not living in the same abject poverty they were in the 1980s, but labor rights in China have not improved much, and neither has consumer rights. And even if by some miracle the next General Secretary of the Chinese Communist party is a socialist that enacts labor rights and consumer protection across all of China, making exploitation just that much more expensive for capitalist exploiters, there are other labor markets which are unlikely to get such reforms, particularly in India and West Africa. Also the borders into China are not exactly open either.
Yes it will be annoying for the capitalist class, but they will absolutely do it, if it means more profits, and they will lobby governments to keep borders closed, to shut down any potential for free movement of workers, and global solidarity.
There is a reason why a popular slogan among unions is: “No free movement of capital, without free movement of people!”
EDIT: Thought of an example to back up my case. Within the EU the free movement of people was inseparable from the free movement of capital from the start. This has been a great success. On the contrary, NAFTA had only the free movement of goods and services and capital, but neglected the free movement of people. Allowing free movement of people was hardly even discussed, and after 9/11 there was no way it was ever going to realize. Now NAFTA is dead. True globalization was, in fact, not inevitable it turns out.
I recall an example of when a Mexican worker in an LG plant lost her hands in a poorly-maintained stamping press. Theoretically Mexico has robust worker protection laws, but in reality the courts are corrupt and controlled by the maquiladoras.
So instead lawyers tried to sue LG in US court on her behalf. In fact they sued the actual TVs being imported by LG US that were made in her factory, the same way counterfeit goods are sued and arrested at the border by intellectual property owners.
The US judge dismissed the case arguing that the TVs were owned by LG US, who bought them in Mexico from LG Mexico. Both companies being owned by the same parent company is irrelevant to the law which saw them as completely separate entities and neither LG US nor the TVs it bought have any responsibility for the conditions in the Mexican factory.
Now if the drafters of NAFTA cared at all about worker conditions they could have easily made liability follow the goods across the border the same way they made copyrights and trademarks follow the goods across the border. They did not care about the workers and in fact they saw the mistreatment of workers as an advantage of the free trade deal.
Even back then people on the left had a problem with the term globalization. On the left it was wildly recognized that the term came from the right to decorate global capitalism and (what was then called) Neo-colonialism in a more palatable light for liberals. In Iceland we used to make fun of it and said it should instead be called Americanization.
Right-wing anti-globalization is basically just hating foreigners (except white Americans), and supporting border fascism. Interestingly the right wing types in Europe love American culture, and have no problem with America spreading their capitalism and Neo-liberalism world wide (they only hate it when the EU does it).
Do you even want cheap products? We're all trapped in low-quality-product hell together, and some of us have realized we'd be less frustrated and less poor with something at least not-quite-so-low-quality.
If people could have realized that sooner, and if there had been some vision or political will at the top, stopping this would've been a matter of very boring policy decisions. It wasn't inevitable. Containerization might have made it easier, but it didn't make it irresistible.
Right-wing parties are very opposed to organic food and local production, and always defend transnational treaties. Hell, even Mercosur, which Marine Le Pen spent years arguing against, 100% of Front National MPs voted for it.
So beyond that words come out of these lying scumbags, i'd be curious how you came to this idea that anti-globalization is right and not left?
It was so very weird. Even in Ireland (which was the target of the first wave of US outsourcing), people seemed to believe that everyone could be "knowledge workers" and that industry was unimportant.
I still don't really get why everyone believed this, but they did. Something something Upton Sinclair I guess.
Yes, economists famously do, and they also lack intelligence and knowledge given that their theories keep being proven wrong by reality but they never update them.
A trained economist either sells out to the Overlords or he gets a job as a barkeep. Or he ends up as some crank in a half-forgotten nonprofit somewhere. There's no middle ground.
Human intelligence is a remarkable adaptation, but "tendency towards delusion" might be the decidedly maladaptive trait that comes with it.
It's like saying that the Titanic was at risk of sinking after it hit the iceberg.
> A trained economist either sells out to the Overlords or he gets a job as a barkeep.
That's what training is for.
> Human intelligence is a remarkable adaptation, but "tendency towards delusion" might be the decidedly maladaptive trait that comes with it.
I'd say the reason is more external than internal - personal interest is a mind bender.