Globalization Protests
Posted in Unfounded Speculation
on June 27th, 2010 by
Stephen DeGrace
The G20 meeting in Toronto is wrapping up with the usual protests and usual violence and destruction having entailed. It leaves me with the question, why does the Left so reliably show up to protest all forms of multilateral discussion and international cooperation? You would think that the xenophobic and isolationist Right would take that role and that the Left would be the cheerleaders of multilateralism. And yet, the opposite is usually the case. Instead, the Left engages in pointless protests which always draw violent factions, which necessitate severe security measures at these types of events. Certainly this contributes to the alienation of the Left from most of the population and their continuing slide into political irrelevance.
You would think that I would if anything be sympathetic to the radical Left, given my involvement with gay rights, but I'm actually from what could be characterized as the conservative wing of that movement. Leftist gay radicals wish to challenge institutions of gender and sexual identity, whereas I have agitated for things like equal protection under the law, non-discrimination and gay marriage. Gay marriage is the death of the queer radical. There is no institution more bourgeois than marriage, and gay marriage is the ultimate extension and acceptance of gays into the mainstream.
All in all, I believe strongly in preserving our institutions and way of life, but in extending their benefits to everyone and making them sustainable. Sustainability means turning our backs on fantasy-land economic theories, making capitalism work, and above all living within our means. It means working towards sustainability with energy and the environment - but preserving comparatively high-energy civilization and attempting to extend its benefits. I am not a leftist, I am a Liberal.
So I don't intuitively sympathize with these people and their globalization protests. Personally, I think they should all be rounded up and slapped in jail. I don't see what they're doing as valuable or worthwhile in any way. So to me the question is, why can you not have more than three world leaders in a room without the Black Bloc showing up?
Partly, of course, it's for attention, the theory being that any attention is good attention (however, the way these protests always play right into the hands of the Right and marginalizes the Left makes that questionable). However, these protests are neither mindless or cynical. While many or most of the participants lack intellectual clarity, to put it charitably, there is real emotion and real strategy (of a sort) driving these things. What is behind it?
The uniting factor is anti-globalization. Globalization is essentially the dropping of tariff walls, which, combined with cheap energy, allows almost any stage of any process short of actual resource harvesting to be done literally anywhere in the world. A typical good might travel around the world three times before it makes it to a store shelf. This is good for consumers because it allows work to be done in the cheapest possible location, bringing down the price of consumer goods. Some argue that this is also good for the countries where the work is done, because they get a huge infusion of foreign investment and technology transfer to bootstrap their economies.
However, the dark side of globalization is that when you send manufacturing to the cheapest possible labour markets, you eliminate jobs in expensive labour markets in the developed world. Up until about the late 70s, high transportation costs and tariffs effectively forced local markets to be supplied locally, giving local labour forces and their unions huge leverage to improve their wages and working conditions and hence to increase the cost of manufacturing goods in the developed world - meaning that everyone paid for those living wages in the form of higher prices, which up to the point where the benefits and wages get ridiculous, is actually a good thing. Democracy in the First World gave the Left, which championed this movement, a lever to defend itself against coercion, and gains were made.
Globalization, however, destroyed the Left's leverage, because factory owners had the option to simply go overseas, to factories whose employees could be treated as virtual slaves, with low wages and wretched working conditions. This made the West complicit in virtual slavery, as well as crippling the forces of progressivism in the West.
So, the Left sees globalization as its central problem, but aside from voluntary measures like education into working conditions in the Third World and Fair Trade labelling on products, they don't have much of a game plan to fight back. Nor can they, really... until rising oil prices and hence transportation costs eliminate the effects of lowered tariffs, globalization is a juggernaut that can't be stopped.
So globalization protests it is, as an outlet of the Left's impotent fury. Unless, of course, they figure out that if they can find ways to make oil more expensive, they can effectively put a potato in globalization's tailpipe...
Comments:
There are 0 comments on this item. Be the first to comment.
Post a Comment
* Required field, your email will not be posted.