April 29 2008

... focusing on what happened after colonization, namely the rise of "CORPORATE GLOBALIZATION"

The first clip illustrated how corporations can drive people off the land simply by underselling them. They can no longer compete with the big corporations so they are forced into the city and into the cheap labor pool.

One of the most interesting aspects of corporate globalization is "The Fetishism of the Commodity," which means that commodities "magically" appear without any trace of the power relationships behind their production.


So Let's follow a commodity - My suit.

It starts in southern Australia, where wool is produced where Tasmanians once lived until the genocide that occurred there during the colonial era. Much of the current world system rests on a dark history of colonialism.

Then the wool goes to Amritsar, Punjab, India where it is spun into cloth. Amritsar is where there was the horrible massacre about 85 years ago when Britain ruled India. Indians have been forced off their land first by colonial regimes and later by economic pressures from corporate agriculture. Now many of them form a very cheap labor pool - which is why the material is made there for less than $3/day.

Buttons from Canda, shoulder pads from China, and lining from Korea all meet with the material at Hamburg Germany where it all goes to Russia to be assembled for $2/day.

The question posed by the CEO of the suit-making company is this:

"Are we exploiting this labor market, or helping them?"

Is the first world helping to develop the third world, or is the first world continuously UNDERDEVELOPING the third world in order to maintain a vast pool of cheap labor and raw materials?

We find that as a system, corporate globalization is very productive, BUT it creates tremendous inequality, environmental devastation, and is not likely to be sustainable in the long term.

So who is to blame?

It is difficult to point a finger because it is an ENTIRE SYSTEM. It is STRUCTURAL POWER.

We know it is STRUCTURAL because any time you point a finger at an individual, they might defend themselves by saying: "If not me, somebody else." Meaning that the structure creates the roles.

So what can we do?