Subject: AUT: Re: International Environment and Development Prize SOPHIE awarded
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 1999 03:35:26 +1000



> Today we are in the context of GLOBALIZATION - LIBERALIZATION.

i thought we'd been in the 'context of globalisation' for about two hundred
years now.  there has been some, not much, freeing up of trade policies.
likewise, there have been significant changes in the ways capital can move
around globally, and in many cases escape the confines of national taxation
regimes, but ther restrictions on the movements of labour have increased.
from our perspective, therefore, it isn't exactly globalisation.

as for liberalisation, this is not entirely true either.  the reasssertion of
liberalism perhaps, but not liberalisation.   the latter sounds like the
erosion of regulation and authority, which is clearly not what's been
happening.   an example: a recent report by the australian centre for
industrial relations research argued, pretty convincingly, that there are now
more, not less, controls on industrial action, on the ability of workers to
strike, on what can and cannot be regarded as appropriate objects of
industrial action.  add to this recent censorship laws and charges in
australia, the increasing restrictions on immigrants and refugees, for
instance, it looks like an increase in the authority of the state and
capital.   so, from our perspective, again, it is not liberalisation.

i could say, 'i know what you mean', and not quibble about definitions.  but
there are other things in this post which suggested to me that there are
implications flowing from these premises that need to be addressed.

the extent to which the left has adopted terms to desribe what has been
happening over the last twenty years which are premised on what i think are
quite xenophobic premises:  that the source of danger is global ('out there',
beyond our national borders and destructive of them); that the state is
increasingly 'powerless' (which it may be with respect to capital movements,
but certainly not with regard to labour and its organisation); and that the
solution to both resides in nationalism, if not increasing the power of
national states, or a reassertion of state/national authority.

> The words look very attractive, but the vast majority of the people,
> are the victims of Globalisation. Globalisation began with
> COLONIALISM.
> In the sixteenth century Europe was overpopulated and the people
> began to migrate from Europe to other continents as if they were
> discovering new places.

and here, where the narrative begins with a connection between colonisation
and migration, the theme of 'danger as global' comes into its own, alongside
the assertion that it was 'overpopulation' which prompted people to move from
Europe to other continents, which needless to say, is the big theme of
Malthusian racism: the connection between population and resources (repeated
today in the guise of environmental concern) which overtakes accounts of
capitalism as the machine which determines what is or is not a productive use
of resources and therefore 'acceptable population levels'.

Angela
---
rcollins-AT-netlink.com.au




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