Doug Henwood on globalization
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to www.marxmail.org on
In the 2519 word article by Doug Henwood titled "Beyond Globophobia" (http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031201&c=1&s=henwood) the word "imperialism" does not appear once.
Although the article is adapted from his new book "After the New Economy", there is nothing particularly new in his analysis. Henwood has been a critic of what he calls "globaloney" for more than a decade. On his website you can find a 1996 article titled "Antiglobalization" (http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Globalization.html) that makes essentially the same points that he makes in his new book, but with lip-service to Marxism. In the mid-1990s Henwood was widely perceived as a Monthly Review Marxist and it was not too much of a stretch to see him as the next Paul Sweezy or Harry Magdoff.
But events transpired in 1996 to move him in the opposite direction. Alarmed by angry outbursts by graduate students in the audience hostile to postmodernism, the organizers of the '96 Rethinking Marxism conference persuaded Henwood to advise them on plenary speakers for their next conference. As an outside consultant who reflected classical Marxist thinking, Henwood was supposedly in a position to balance their own postmodernist leanings. By the end of 1997, however, Henwood became convinced by Rethinking Marxism organizers that they were more correct than his allies at MR. He would soon drop all pretensions to classical Marxism.
This transition has been marked by howling inconsistencies,
however. While Henwood has been enamored of the post-Marxism of the
It would be useful to start off with an appraisal of "globalization" theory such as it is. I believe that it is essentially a form of neo-populism that targets "corporations" rather than the capitalist system in general and imperialism in particular. Like the populists of the early 20th century, it is focused almost exclusively on the surface manifestations of the system rather than the underlying structure. In his 1996 article, Henwood quite rightly singled out David Korten, author of "When Corporations Rule the World". Korten believes that in the past "rich and poor alike...shared a sense of national and community interest." He also believes that "the problem is not business or the market per se but a badly corrupted global economic system that is gyrating far beyond human control. The dynamics of this system have become so powerful and perverse that it is becoming increasingly difficult for corporate managers to manage in the public interest, no matter how strong their moral values and commitment."
For those who have studied American history, it is obvious that Korten has much in common with the small farmers of Tom Watson's age who rebelled against railroads, oil companies, banks and other exploiters but who failed to understand the systemic nature of the exploitation. It should also be obvious that the global populism expressed by people like Korten can make concessions to reactionary values as was the case in an earlier era. For example, some of the trade unions that participate in anti-globalization protests blame foreign workers for their plight, just as the populists of the last century blamed African-Americans.
The antidote to all this mystification is Marxism. Unfortunately, in his haste to distance himself from classical Marxism, Henwood has lost the ability to put forward a powerful alternative drawn from its arsenal. In the final analysis, Marxism is the only theory that can make sense of imperialism, whose latest phase has been misidentified by people such as Korten and others as a fundamentally workable system that has been hijacked by greedy individuals.
Turning now to Henwood's article, we learn first of all that worldwide trade and investment are nothing new. Henwood writes:
"International flows of investment capital were
particularly robust in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
against a backdrop of free trade and exchange rates fixed under the gold
standard. Indeed, flows to developing countries were larger in relation to the
world economy during this first 'golden age' of financial globalization than
they are today. Here in
This observation is obviously meant to reinforce the
argument that economic penetration by one country into another might not be
such a bad thing. It is implicit in Henwood's formulation that
"The relation is far from perfect, but if anything,
more globalized countries are less unequal than less globalized ones. Western European social democracies are
more globalized than the
You will note that despite his disdain for
"globalization" discourse, Henwood is all too eager to utilize it in
his analysis above. To start off, what in the world is a "globalized" country? This is a singularly unhelpful
unit of analysis. Henwood states, "
Missing from this menu is a free
Although Henwood does not openly challenge the Marxist theory of imperialism, he does seem to target one of its central tenets, namely super-exploitation. He writes:
"If you look at the distribution of investment by US
multinationals abroad, several things stand out. First, such investments are
overwhelmingly located in rich countries. Over half is accounted for by
"The poorer countries aren't the profit gushers one
might expect either. Rates of return in
Now the logical person might read the above and ask themselves whether these "poorer" countries might press for more foreign investment so that they can move on up in the world. Indeed, Henwood made the case for this a while back in an article on the war on terrorism:
"
This formulation about the need to be exploited reminds once
again of Tex Antoine. It is entirely possible to operate outside this framework
altogether. Somehow, Henwood seems to have forgotten about other views
associated with economist Joan Robinson. For her,
Henwood chastises anti-globalization activists for retaining some kind of nostalgia for the nation-state, as do his co-thinkers Hardt and Negri:
"Among some antiglobo activists, there's a strange nostalgia for the nation-state, as if it's one of the innocent structures that globalization is undermining. At least two aspects of the nostalgia for the nation are worth picking apart. First, in the narrow economic sense, fond memories of the pre-1980 protectionist regimes are often evoked. Like many nostalgias, the historical record doesn't justify the sentiment. Even the most protected developmental state is shaped by external forces; the height of the tariff walls and the vigor of the state intervention themselves are testimony to that. But they seem to flourish in particular historical enclaves, like the Latin American import-substitution model from the 1930s through the debt crisis of the early 1980s, and run into trouble when their moment passes."
Once again his argument suffers as a consequence of
neglecting Marxism. Of real interest in understanding the pre-1980 period is
not the extent of tariffs, but the degree to which a government is driven by an
overall *nationalist* agenda. Henwood refers to their "moment
passing" as if it were a sun-shower. Those who have studied the history of
Argentina, for example, understand that we are not dealing with a change in the
weather but a systematic imperialist campaign to punish and ultimately overturn
*nationalist* governments. Since Hardt and Negri view such experiments as "poisoned pills",
it is no surprise that Henwood finds little to inspire him as well. Of course,
a new chapter is opening up in Chavez's