Shifting Conjunctions. Politics and knowledge in the globalization debate

Samenvatting

This article discusses the various currents and critiques of recent globalization theory as it has reflected and helped to produce a chain of world historical events since the end of the Cold War. It argues that globalization theories were emic as well etic tools for the making of political positions and alliances to guide political agency in the One World created by the collapse of 'actual existing socialism.' It discusses, respectively, liberal, institutionalist, and critical Marxist approaches. It reaffirms Karl Polanyi's vision in arguing that globalization in its current forms should be seen, above all, as a political project of technocratically imposed marketization. This imposition of markets from above is generating local, national, and regional forms of popular claims making vis-a-vis states and elites; some enlightened, some less so. In the process, a transnational class is emerging that is the prime benefactor of its outcomes as it becomes nested in an incipient transnational state structure closely intertwined with core financial and corporate interests -- in other words, empire. This emergent transnational state structure serves to force local states and elites into a largely self-interested and consensual compliance with core states representing the logics of finance capital and its accumulation imperatives. I identify three systematic outcomes of this process: the ongoing proletarianization of the world population, including the accelerated transformation of the peasantry into informal and mobile labor; the gradual delegitimation of the postwelfare and postdevelopmentalist state; and the 'indigenisation,' ethnification, and parochialization of post-citizens as a response to the formation of transnational classes and the neoliberal global empire state, as noted earlier by Jonathan Friedman. 130 References. Adapted from the source document.