Anti-Globalization V. Anti-Globalism

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/anti-globalization-capitalism-globalism-bannon wrote:For decades Third Way advocates held up globalization as humanity’s evolution beyond the crude errors of Keynesianism. With free trade and free markets, boats would be raised, knowledge and technology would blossom, poverty and corruption would be innovated away, and profits would trickle down.

The Left was quick to challenge the globalization fantasy. Before globalism became the epithet du jour, there were two schools of criticism of globalization: the globalization skeptics and the anti-globalization movement.

The globalization skeptics, writing in the 1990s and early 2000s, questioned the veracity of claims that the state was shriveling, that production had become truly globally integrated, and that cultures were homogenizing. Skeptics argued that the state remained a dominant force in shaping the terrain of global capitalism and that corporations were not as footloose and fancy-free as they professed. They emphasized that globalization was a political project, not an implacable force of nature, and as such, could be challenged and shaped by social movements.

In this the skeptics intersected with the loosely defined anti-globalization movement, comprised of groups who were perhaps less skeptical of the reality of globalization but considerably more forceful in their disavowal of its processes and effects. The last decade of the twentieth century saw fierce battles in cities across the globe as grassroots activists North and South tried to disrupt the workings of the Washington Consensus.

But the centrists retained the upper hand. September 11 and the second Bush administration’s War on Terror pulled the rug out from under the burgeoning anti-globalization movement. In the United States many leftists turned their energies toward anti-war work and mobilizing against the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant turn of law enforcement. Fighting globalization took a back seat.

After the 2008 financial crisis the notion of the global returned to the popular imagination. But critique of the globalization project became shaped by the Right more than the Left. Anti-globalization gave way to anti-globalism — a worldview with a very different politics.

Anti-globalization movements emphasized justice and equity for all. Grassroots organizations championed food sovereignty, workers’ rights, and an end to sweatshops. They organized around the rights of migrants and indigenous peoples and demanded that corporations be held accountable for their abuses against people and the environment.

Anti-globalism, while it also denounces the elite status quo, is grounded in an aggressive nationalism that views migrants, Muslims, and progressives as the problem. Instead of highlighting the inherent contradictions of global capitalism, anti-globalists want to build a wall around America, imagining that if we expel or repress the “undesirables” we’ll be able to rebuild a Judeo-Christian capitalist paradise of white picket fences and jobs in the local manufacturing plant. The specter of globalism has spawned a right-wing fantasy even more dangerous than the centrist globalization project.

No doubt the problems identified by the anti-globalization movement persist. In fact, they’ve worsened, compounded by a profound popular distrust of institutions amid the inaction and inefficacy of governments, corporations, and big NGOs on issues of environmental destruction, poverty, and inequality. But the vision of an alternative to neoliberal globalization is now being shaped by ideas rooted in hate and exclusion.