September 29, 2002

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, many saw it as a triumph of capitalism in its war against communism. But as the 1990s unfolded, it became manifest that it was global capitalism specifically that had scored a victory over Stalinism alone.

Hence, neither can capitalism claim a decisive win as pronounced by Francis Fukuyama in End of history, nor can socialism be regarded as a phenomenon of the past. And it is too early to say which direction and form the process of globalization will ultimately take.

The author of this highly enlightened theoretical work Globalization, capitalism and its alternatives is of the view that as the dominance of the capitalist global system spreads and deepens, it also sows the seeds of competing forms of globalization. The book is a new version of what was previously published under the title Sociology of the global system.

The book is intended to serve as an introduction to the study of globalization which is a relatively new discipline. Having been done to death by the mass media, the term has been causing confusion on occasions. There is no single agreed definition of globalization as yet and it seems its significance has been overly exaggerated. Not all those who use the term distinguish it clearly enough from internationalization and some writers tend to use the two terms interchangeably.

The central feature of the very idea of globalization is that many contemporary problems cannot be adequately studied at the level of nation-states and need to be seen in terms of transnational processes. There is a fear that the global forces — transnational corporations and some global institutions — are already becoming so powerful that the nation-state is about to lose its relevance. This may not be so in actuality but the fact remains that the nation-state is in relative eclipse.

As globalization has come to be identified in the minds of most people with the capitalist system, the author deems it necessary to make the basic distinction between globalization as a generic term and its various forms. He distinguishes between capitalist globalization which is the critical object of his book, and socialist globalization which is his dialectical subject.

Why is globalization held to be synonymous with the global spread of capitalism? That is because the rise of multinational corporations, the rapid spread of free trade, the weakening of nation-states, the penetration of the mass media (culture- ideology of consumerism) into all corners of the world combined with the denationalization and privatization of state entities have come about as consequences of capitalist globalization in the second half of the twentieth century.

The sheer productive might of this ongoing process was so overwhelming — though not identified as such — that it deflected our (theoretical and empirical) attention away from the possibilities of other types of globalization. In particular, when the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc collapsed, the prospect of anything remotely like socialist globalization was regarded as being out of question.

The decade of the nineties proved decisive in one respect. The victory of capitalism that immediately followed the demise of the USSR was extremely short-lived. The onward march of capitalism was stalled by an unforeseen adversary. Within a few years, an anti-globalization movement — rather a network of anti- capitalist movements and organizations — had emerged as an effective counterweight to the capitalist way of globalization. It saw its first imposing victory at Seattle in 1999.

The collapse of Stalinism, the author argues, highlighted the fact that the two main crises of global capitalism, namely class polarization and ecological unsustainability, can never be solved because they directly undermine the human rights movement. The theme of the globalization of human rights within an emerging socialist form of globalization, he thinks, is the most powerful and the most accurate representation of the “central world- historical direction of change”. Movements for human rights, which focus on democracy, community, gender, ethnicity, religion, education and ecology, have been nurtured and then undermined by the capitalist globalization. But the struggle for economic human rights by the socialists has taken this movement into new, globalizing spheres that directly challenge capitalism.

The argument of this book is that there are several other systems regionally important, ethnically, culturally or theologically based, but none has, as yet, dominated the global system as did capitalism in the twentieth century. Meanwhile, resistance to capitalism, in the form of radical social movements, continues to gain strength and influence in spite of the fact that few offer genuine alternatives to capitalist society and none has had success in state-building and institution-creation that capitalism enjoyed in the twentieth century. But, the author claims with confidence, this phase may now be coming to an end.

How will capitalist globalization end? This is a question that requires conceptual and substantive work to come up with even the first glimmers of an answer. And it is the search for the right answer that runs through the whole book spread over twelve chapters.

The author is quite convinced that it is socialism which is the only viable alternative to capitalism but that as a global project it has hardly begun to make an impact in either material, political or ideological terms. The author draws a measure of hope from the fact that the transnational capitalist class which the global capitalism has created is not simply an effect of the system. It can turn the developmental strategies of global capitalism to its own end and challenge those who wield central power in the system. In doing this, it creates contradictions and throws up opposing classes, provokes class struggles and sets in train political and economic changes.

In the early 1990s, the argument was that there is only one dominant global system, which is structured around the transnational corporations. With the beginning of the 21st century, this argument has lost its validity in the aftermath of the battle of Seattle and other challenges to the capitalist hegemony. Now it is a struggle between the forces for and against capitalist globalization. And there are indications that the current decade will see the flowering of alternative non-capitalist forms of globalization.

Globalization, capitalism and its alternatives
By Leslie Sklair
Oxford University Press, Oxford. Distributed by Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi
Tel: 021-5683026
Email: libooks@cyber.net.pk
ISBN 0-19-924744-7
372pp. Rs975

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