Of course, it works! II

January 12, 2005
By Bukka Rennie

In the last column the point was made that capitalism is by objective necessity a global system and through the fulfilment of its economic requirements the world and humanity itself were catapulted onto higher forms of existence and away from abject scarcity and want. Humanity on a wider scale proved able to meet basic needs. No one can argue with that.

And the column ended with the statement of fact that whereas capitalism in its ascendant stage found it best expression in the context of the nation state and highly protected closed economies, in its stage of bloom it would debunk closed economies for world free trade through which existing markets would be opened up to all enterprising capitalist producers or group of producers, competition would be intensified but prices would be forced down and products would become more affordable to the masses of people...

Right on to that, all rational people will say. But there is more to it.

The intense competition and demands of the free trade scenario demanded tighter and more centralised capitalist organisation. The initial "chartered companies" and "joint-stock companies, of which we know so much in Caribbean history, by legal definition could no longer suffice in the new environment and gave way to corporations, trusts and consortia as big fish ate up smaller fish and centralised to fortify themselves to own and control interrelated areas of production, monopolise certain markets and face each other on the international front.

The difference was that the corporations as legal entities binded their member shareholders firmly to their mission and provided the organisations with rights and privileges as that of a single individual.

The corporation could buy, sell and inherit property and did not allow scope for the whims and fancies of individual investors, yet at the same time the company was legally protected from the liabilities of its individual members.

Crucial to this transformation was the transition from family-owned and managed businesses to professionally managed situations in which the managers, who were not necessarily stockholders, could be driven only by the dictates of profit accumulation rather than any subjective considerations.

Later, many private business organisations would become public corporations selling shares on the open market to raise investment finance so as to maintain their cutting edge in competition.

When such corporations themselves began to globalise their organisational structures across national boundaries, the multinational corporations emerged but not before the professional managerial-class had become a truly international critical mass available everywhere and with the same mindset.

What is evident in the two distinct periods of globalisation described and in the development of chartered and joint-stock companies into multinational corporations is the tendency not only to centralise and concentrate capital but moreso the tendency to depersonalise it altogether so that capital becomes a truly objective social force beholden to no one and nothing but the maximisation of profits.

Despite the material gains that humanity has obtained from the globalisation of capital, the path has not been easy. The question of national sovereignty and the balance of power in Europe brought world wars, and the quest for self-determination in the colonies brought wars of liberation.

Economic aberrations were to appear as a break on the globalisation process of capital until under the sheer weight of the international capitalist market, the concept of non-alignment died a natural death and both the Iron and the Bamboo Curtains came down.

This present stage of globalisation is about fully integrating the entire world market and deepening it, at first through the interplay of regional trading blocs and multilateral agencies.

The major question is that free trade must also be made fair trade and the battles will be about removing inequalities and the issues of environmental sustenance.

The G-8 countries are being challenged every which way precisely because of their callous disregard for both fair trade and the necessity to preserve the environment for the coming generations.

Every single nook and cranny of the world will be drawn into the globalised ambit and every nook and cranny will someday be brought into the folds of modern existence. That is the objective basis to the present jingoism coming out of the think-tanks of America.

And when it has all been accomplished, what will happen next when the cyclical crises catch up and there is no longer any extending or deepening of the market to be had? Will we seek to colonise and globalise another planet? Or will we seek to harness the tiger that is capital, that objective social force, and subject it to the collective reason of humanity as Butler advised on his death-bed?

The "collective reason of humanity" can only be expressed through a genuine representative government of the world. Nothing less will suffice then.

PT I