I made a few tangential points regard globalization in a similar discussion. Basically wondering how globalization which was a very right wing corporatist idea (Sanders calls it a Koch brothers proposal here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0 basically) became a favorite of the new left. And conversely anti-globalization was a top issue for the left along with TPP, NAFTA and other such stuff.
I think it is rather ironic that the new "left" love them globalization all of the sudden, even when their younger brothers were tear-gassed protesting it, just a decade ago or so protesting against it.
(More discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682260 along with a promising book on the subject, 'The Technological Society' by Jacques Ellul suggested by Drumlin. Still waiting for it to come from Amazon)
Disagree completely. I grew up in pretty "elite", mostly left-wing circles, who were heavily pro-globalization. The reason in a nutshell is "freedom". When your friends growing up come from all over the world, and you understand that with anti-migrant policies, you wouldn't have ever met any of them, you'll be pro-freedom of movement. If you grew up in Alabama, and still live close to where you were born, you won't be.
Maybe none of this is in the interest of factory workers, but that's not what the left is about anymore, and it's not the left's fault either. The world moved on. You will never get the "old left" back. Weakening the influence of corporations will still be popular on the left, but reversing globalization and freedom of movement will hopefully never be a left-wing position again.
The factory-worker type who complains that his job moved to China, while he only buys the cheapest Chinese crap at Walmart, is not the future of the left.
> The factory-worker type who complains that his job moved to China, while he only buys the cheapest Chinese crap at Walmart, is not the future of the left.
What about the poor Mexican farmer who couldn't make a profit because NAFTA stripped away tariffs of import and he now has little chance except to pay a smuggler to take him up north so he can wash toilets or pick cotton away from his family. Is he the future of the left.
> I grew up in pretty "elite", mostly left-wing circles, who were heavily pro-globalization.
I think it is fair to say that "elite" left-wing circles are probably also not the future of the left either.
> The reason in a nutshell is "freedom".
When were elite's freedom ever restricted? Even in the most restrictive dictatorships elites can fly and spend the weekend in New York shopping.
> you'll be pro-freedom of movement.
That's exactly what the left has been fighting for. The PR twisting of the concept of "freedom". Elites and corporations always talk "but don't you want to be friends with everyone and hold hands and trade". What they mean is they want to be able to move without restriction and tariffs and exploit labor or resources in any country they want. The poor and disenfranchised are precisely even more restricted in the new "globalization". The more companies and elites more around, the more inequality they create and the more restriction, passport controls, visas and the poor get.
> What about the poor Mexican farmer who couldn't make a profit because NAFTA stripped away tariffs of import and he now has little chance except to pay a smuggler to take him up north so he can wash toilets or pick cotton away from his family. Is he the future of the left.
That's what welfare and unions are for. Free trade deals are, overall, better for everybody.
The solution is education and retraining, not protectionism. You can see this in South-East Asia, where various countries progressively went from agriculture, to low-tech manufacturing, to high tech, over a few decades. Manufacturing jobs won't come back. Making labor more expensive will just make automation come quicker.
Furthermore, restricting trade will just hurt the US, from a game theory standpoint, since other countries will just compensate by trading more.
> What they mean is they want to be able to move without restriction and tariffs and exploit labor or resources in any country they want.
Globalization doesn't mean letting companies evade taxes. That's a problem that precisely can't be solved individually, and has to be solved on a global level. It can be solved, and is being solved, worldwide.
> When were elite's freedom ever restricted? Even in the most restrictive dictatorships elites can fly and spend the weekend in New York shopping.
That's precisely why the elites are pro-freedom of movement. They couldn't imagine life without it.
I'm having a difficult time squaring your comments here in this line with your comment elsewhere on the thread about Taleb's ideas of anti-fragility and complex systems. Are you making a normative argument about how these "well designed, functional governments" should behave? Because if you are I'm having a hard time parsing how these governments behaving this way would be sufficiently different from how we got here (manifested by Trump, Brexit, FN, AfD) which seems to have exposed the world to some pretty serious systemic risk. Forgive me if I sound obtuse.
> Globalization doesn't mean letting companies evade taxes. That's a problem that precisely can't be solved individually, and has to be solved on a global level. It can be solved, and is being solved, worldwide.
I don't see this as being true at all, and it seem at odds with your earlier point about things "that just can't effectively be solved by bloated entities." There's elements of what you are saying that I agree with (anti-fragility, industrial inertia leading to stagnant workforces, the importance of retraining/education), but on the whole it seems a little one-foot-in-one-foot-out (which may have been intentional, if you're making a subtle point about hedging strategies.)
You're not, I was thinking of how to reconcile the two comments while writing the second one actually. I see globalization as driven by a) inevitable and b) irreversible trends. Like increasing ease of movement, ease of communication, ease of money transfer (Bitcoin). That doesn't exclude decentralization.
For your first point:
"Decentralization" doesn't necessarily entail every country breaking up into a billion tiny Singapores. It just means decisions being made locally, from the bottom up. In the US, it could look like increased states rights. Want to try libertarianism? Want more refugees? Legal drugs? Go ahead. There wouldn't be half the hysteria if willing states could just opt out of welcoming refugees. They'd keep them out, but that would be that, and there wouldn't be much fuss beyond that. The attitude on the right just would be: "glad we avoided that, why go through the trouble?", instead of moral outrage and self-preservation instincts. In complex governmental systems, you inevitably have coercion, which leads to instability.
Someone in the Northern UK might not meet many immigrants, but he doesn't like the idea of someone from migrant-heavy London voting to bring migrants into his little town, if he views it as a threat. It breeds resentment. Democracies, especially complex ones, have to compromise between millions of voters that each want different things. The more people that want different things from official government policy, the more unrest. If you're in a political minority, there's functionally no difference between a government being democratically elected by a majority that is nothing like you, and an authoritarian regime that's accountable to nobody. In both cases, you're (effectively) not represented (how many Clinton supporters feel represented by Trump?). The larger the scale, the more disparate the population, the more important it is to favor local power structures over national ones.
You know the argument that goes "democracy is just war by another name", and is a very nice thing because it allows for "bloodless revolutions"? That's not the case if the country is too complex (population too disparate) and the government represents only 30% of the country rather than 80% (pretty sure only a quarter of the country voted for Trump, the earlier figure is a reference to that, everyone else probably dislikes him to some extent; and in a functional, ideal country, you may not have voted for the current government, but still don't mind them too much, that's what the 80% refers to).
Not sure you mean by "how we got here". Low growth and economic uncertainty seem necessary for populism. In the EU, the euro is the main cause of that (not an optimal currency area, preventing there from being true freedom of movement for labor, as well as messing up the exchange rates and screwing any country that isn't Germany). I'm very pro-EU (and live there) but there's little doubt in my mind that the euro is responsible for much of the rise in populism here, and it's the quintessential example of something done for small incremental efficiency gains while disregarding the systemic aspects. The Greece situation is already worse than the US Great Depression, and resembles the one between creditors and Germany before WW2. It isn't that bad yet, but the only reason is that they had the euro, so inflation and capital flight couldn't destroy the value of their currency. Yet, in all of history, every multinational currency has eventually collapsed. Greece may not have the euro forever. The current debt loads aren't the only problem: if any country leaves, the destruction of wealth caused by inability to settle TARGET-2 balances might cause a cataclysm. In other words, we increased systemic complexity, and vastly increased systemic risk.
For your second point: you can coordinate to solve global problems, without increasing systemic complexity and risk. In a more decentralized world, you'd have more direct governments, and so populations that really care about "green" would just vote straight for that, and those that don't would eventually have enough smog that they would vote straight for it, too. Right now you have 50+% of the US population that wish US climate policy was more progressive but has exactly 0% of power over those policies. Wouldn't decentralization be better on the whole?
The freedom of movement for capital without the freedom for movement of humans is the problem here—you seem to be indicating that without directly pointing at it.
Neoliberal globalization is precisely the free movement of capital and goods and services to exploit opportunities created by restrictions on the movement of people (whether as consumers or as labor).
Movement of people (labor) at the behest of capital (but not freely on their own)—e.g., various employer-sponsored work visas—is often part of that.
Exactly. When corporations sell "globalization" they mean something other really than "we can all freely travel and be friends" unless "we" must means elites and other corporations.
Chomsky interestingly also predicted the influx of immigrants from Mexico after NAFTA years back: https://chomsky.info/secrets03/
For example he mentions:
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In addition, cheap US agricultural exports are expected to drive several million people off the land. That’s going to mean a substantial increase in the unemployed workforce in Mexico, which of course will drive down wages.
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I think there definitely was an influx of poor farmers being displaced looking for work. That didn't happen as an act of God or just randomly as it may seem. It was predicted and expected.
No offense, but I think you're swallowing a lot of right-wing lies about what "the left" believes. "The left" is as opposed to the plutocratic tendencies of globalization as it always has been. Believing in freedom of movement, and that immigration does not lead to the downfall of a society, does not mean having to believe in, for instance, corporate sovereignty.
I am quoting Sanders here not some fringe anarchist nobody has heard of. Chomsky also wrote about it.
> Believing in freedom of movement,
I believe in equality of freedom. So far I haven't seen a lot of poor and disenfranchised being able to move freely. Are you saying Facebook here represents or is a proxy for them and so when it talks about globalization it means anything other than getting more clicks and users who log into it.
> but I think you're swallowing a lot of right-wing lies about what "the left" believes.
I don't listen to much to right wing lies but I don't listen to left wing ones as well. I am happy to not be in either camp. I've always been an outsider. Quite used to it. But here I am trying to even see what left even means anymore. I just made a point that in what "left" means has changed, and I think it is an interesting change.
Chomsky and Sanders are very different from the democratic party. The democratic party is to the left of the GOP but to the right of anything else, including the American people.
Elections have become an us vs them thing focusing on a few issues that will divide us, but mostly the population are significantly to the left of both parties in the US on actual issues.
If you described something exactly like Obamacare, but called it Trumpcare it would be super popular with GOP voters and maybe hated by democrat voters.
Alright good point. Heck Sanders and Chomsky might be centrists in Europe as well probably.
> The democratic party is to the left of the GOP but to the right of anything else,
I think at least in the PR domain they don't shy away from calling themselves "the left". Which I think it is interesting. And the left (if there is one, and that's separate point to talk) hasn't exactly disavowed or pushed against it too much.
> but called it Trumpcare it would be super popular with GOP voters and maybe hated by democrat voters.
The fascinating thing is Trump has picked up "the concern for the workers", NAFTA and TPP as central talking points and ran with it. That was Democrat's bread-and-butter in the past. I am not sure if it was is sincere or pure opportunism (he did pull out of TPP, so that's something...). But I can't deny that it was a good strategy for him.
Even more interesting to me is to see that as soon as he did those things, the new "left" almost immediately reverted to talk about "how TPP is great" and "NAFTA is a good thing" and workers are just idiots brainwashed by fake news and such.
I was watching Reddit's /r/politics and after TPP pull-out and there were posts explicitly saying "we have to support TPP because Trump is against". There is something fascinating there, I think. Remembering the DNC primaries with TPP signs everywhere. And then few months later "what do you mean, we love the TPP".
Trump is running on "the concern for the voters", but in my humble opinion none of his solutions are going to be good for workers.
There will be less healthcare, less worker protections and less taxes paid by rich people.
The TPP is interesting in that as I understand it was meant to be a big political bargain to fence in China with a lot of concessions give to large cooperations.
Another thing is that free trade in general is good for poor workers somewhere, but unless it comes with some agreement on worker protections they will all be eroded in the long run.
Both left wing and right wing people can find something to like there, it depends on how it is implemented. Kind of like UBI which the far right and the far left in theory agree to, they just use the same name for widely different things.
The democratic party is to the left of the GOP but to the right of anything else, including the American people.
I'm assuming you mean big-D Democratic Party. When you say American people, what do you mean? A majority? How much of one? What are you basing this on? Polls? If so, which ones? Something else?
I'm pushing a little because the statement seems to lack nuance, which is something I think we so desperately need in American political discourse.
I agree, I am basing it on things I vaguely remember having read and a tiny bit out of my ass. Chomsky uses this a consistent talking point, sorry again no reference, that the polls are consistently to the left of the Democrats.
I wish I could give you a better answer, and will concede my documentation is lacking. I do believe this is true based on my conversations with Democrat and GOP voters when living here. Most people are fairly leftist when it comes to specifics, well except paying taxes.
Thanks for providing your source. Having lived on both coasts and the Midwest, I've met a lot of people of a variety of political stripes, and wouldn't agree with this unqualified assessment.
Think of the poor and how much they have been helped by the globalization of the world is how they were won over. See how many people we've lifted out of poverty because of globalization.
That's not really something people typically argue against when criticizing globalization - the issue is that these people are often helped at the expense of citizens of other countries that pursue a globalist agenda, and that people believe their government has a duty to protect the interests of its citizens above all others.
The countries don't pursue globalist agendas. Their corporations do. And they have benefited immensely because of that. The poor being helped is just a side-effect of that. In the end they care about profits, the side effects are irrelevant to them. It's just a peripheral side effect used for its marketing value, to turn the attention away from self-interest of the people negatively impacted.
Ideas very similar to globalization have a long history in socialist thought. L'Internationale is a left-wing anthem for a reason. See also the conservative conspiracy theories about the New World Order.
I'm not sure it's even true that the left wing anti-globalization movement is actually smaller rather than better dealt with at events like the G20 and/or perhaps less reported on.
>Ideas very similar to globalization have a long history in socialist thought.
Yes, it's important to note that Hitler started out as a Socialist, at the dawn of Socialist thought. He differed with them on the idea of globalization and multiculturalism. As it turns out that's a pretty huge ideological split, and in Hitler's case, it became a violent one. He basically said: "screw you guys, I'm going to start my own Socialist Party - with blackjack, and hookers. And racial purity, global war, and genocide."
That's why you get rightwingers accusing the Left of being "Nazis" because the "Z" in the NAZI acronym stood for the German word for Socialism.
As the Nazis began to gain ground in Germany; they used propaganda tools to tell Germans what they wanted to hear: "you're a 'master race', and all others are inferior", and "We'll get rid of these foreign influences, and degenerates of other races, who are the cause of all your problems!"
At the time, REAL socialists ran counter protests, and would even riot at Nazi meetings and demonstrations, and there was a lot of civil violence over this issue. (Which is today, romanticized heavily by the far-left, anarchist, and 'antifa' movements). In their minds, WWII was a large-scale playing out of this conflict, between Soviet Socialists, and German Nazis, who lost. The result was the bombing of much of Europe (and especially Berlin) to Rubble. Millions dead.
The rise of America's free-enterprise system was seen as a repudiation of these two extremes of thought (Socialism vs Nazism). And became an extreme viewpoint all it's own. It became what the Socialists, and Nazis were rebelling against, and now we're repeating the whole thing all over again.
I think anyone who thinks they are "left wing" AND anti-globalist, is ignorant of history, and quite confused. Part of that is due to the anti-globalist propaganda, which mostly uses the argument: "these foreigners are causing all your problems - let's build a wall and get rid of them". (can't really argue for 'racial superiority'; because it's so easily disproven - very nearly nobody who thinks they're "Aryan" can actually trace their ancestry back long enough to make a case that they're not a mongrel just like the rest of us - the only way they can accept this ideology is to be in denial).
I think it is rather ironic that the new "left" love them globalization all of the sudden, even when their younger brothers were tear-gassed protesting it, just a decade ago or so protesting against it.
(More discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682260 along with a promising book on the subject, 'The Technological Society' by Jacques Ellul suggested by Drumlin. Still waiting for it to come from Amazon)