Restructuring the World

...In what sense is that Ford car or truck or SUV an American product...

...He frequently resorts to such formulations as "the evidence seems to elude us," or "I have not been able to find empirical evidence," or "it is hard to find evidence...

...By this point, what began as a dry theoretic treatise has morphed into a tub-thumping harangue...

...The globalization of production has entailed the fragmentation and decentralization of complex production chains and the worldwide dispersal and functional integration of the different segments in these chains...

...the World Trade Organization (whatever it was...

...Free trade, it seemed, could be staggeringly expensive...

...Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie...

...Robinson writes that he hopes "to present in a manner accessible to the student of globalization and to concerned members of the lay public a particular theory of globalization, one based on the global capitalism approach...

...William I. Robinson is not an economist but rather an associate professor of sociology, global and international studies, and (for good measure) Latin American and Iberian studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara...

...Thanks to globalization, he insists, "the nation-state is no longer the organizing principle of capitalism and the institutional 'container' of class development and social life...

...He alludes regularly to movies—Erin Brokovich, The Insider, Manhattan—and to a host of writers, including Shakespeare, Lady Murasaki, Dr...

...Parents will choose to feed their children instead of schooling them if forced to make a choice...

...Bhagwati dem-onstrates admirable fairness toward his opponents...

...Now, a product, such as a vehicle from Ford, is manufactured piecemeal by workers in the U.S., Canada, Korea, Spain, and Mexico...

...Okay, what about all those jobs that have been outsourced by profit-attentive U.S...

...He sees evidence of this worldwide: "The 1980s and 1990s were largely a time of sustained growth in the world economy yet also a time of declining living standards for most people of the world...

...However," he continues, "from the viewpoint of a broader social logic the model is irrational," since it leads to "a fall in popular consumption and social conditions, a rise in poverty, immiseration, 'food riots,' heightened inequalities, social polarization and and resultant political conflict...

...What about the notion that globalization's hunger for cheap labor dooms children in impoverished countries to early servitude...

...and privatization of formerly public spheres that could hamper capital accumulation if criteria of public interest over private property remain operative...

...Edwards' success with this issue prompted John Kerry, the eventual nominee, to adopt it as his own...

...What institutions are protecting them...

...This is what economists call the 'income effect...

...BHAGWATI ACKNOWLEDGES at the outset that those who want to see capitalism dismantled will be deaf to his arguments...

...was nothing to worry about, that the short-term pain of displaced American workers would be soothed by long-term improvements in prosperity wrought by free trade both in India and here...

...READINO the final chapter of A Theory of Global Capitalisai would probably give Bhagwati dyspepsia...

...did with the New Deal legislation of the 1930s...

...Stated differently, in a world of national economies classes developed around national circuits of accumulation...

...In the four years that have passed since then, the rage that erupted in Seattle near the dawn of the third millennium became considerably easier for many mainstream Americans to grasp...

...There was, for one thing, the announcement in February that the nation's 2003 trade deficit had hit a record $489.4 billion, up about $70 billion from the year before...

...The "structural adjustments" required for globalization's optimal efficiency include "deregulation, which removes the state from economic decision making...

...He characterizes the position of the "anticapitalist revolutionaries" as "anyone who is into stocks and bonds should be put in stocks and bonds" (italics in original...

...looking like a road company of Hair that hadbeen caught up in and then expelled from a time warp—incensed enough to hurl themselves into police barricades and through plate glass windows, performing a variety of guerrilla street theater that had not been seen in a U. S. city since the peak of the anti-Vietnam war movement, in order to oppose it, i.e...

...Sociologists do not generally display strong emotions about their subjects of study, but it becomes clear that Robinson fears and loathes globalization...

...A number of Bhagwati's refutations of antiglobalization arguments, however, are based not on anything demonstrable but on what he thinks has happened or what he hopes will happen in the future...

...No, "poor parents, no less than rich parents, generally want the best for their children...

...Friedman repeatedly assured his readers that this exodus of jobs from the U.S...

...education of one's children is a superior good, the consumption of which rises as incomes rise...

...Globalization, he insists, will not produce a "race to the bottom" in wages as employers seek to outsource jobs to the cheapest possible labor force...

...The same tack was taken by Jagdish Bhagwati, an economics professor at Columbia University, on the Times" Op-Ed page in mid-February, under the headline "Why Your Job Isn't Moving to Bangalore...

...Hardly any sense at all, Robinson would answer...

...In the end, Robinson states that "a democratic socialism...

...He puts the Seattle protesters in this camp...

...Bhagwati is perhaps the most influential current advocate of free trade, both in his extensive writings, academic and popular, on the topic and through his work as a former special adviser to the United Nations on globalization...

...He does so by taking up each antiglobalization worry in turn and presenting what he characterizes as the economic evidence against it...

...The power to regulate commerce has shifted from the laws and governments of individual countries to the arena of what Robinson calls "transnational space___The declining ability of social forces based in the nation-state to intervene in the process of capital accumulation and to determine economic policies reflects the newfound power that transnational capital has acquired overpopular classes...

...Readers who detect a tinge of redundancy here will find even greater challenges to comprehension down the road: "Until recently the reality of capital as a totality of competing individual capitals and their concrete existence as a class relation within specific spatial confines determined geographically as nation-states worked against a trans- or supranational unifying trend in the development of world capitalism...

...And why were rampaging hordes of people—many of them imaginatively costumed, painted, feathered, etc...

...When he doesn't have the evidence, Bhagwati falls back repeatedly on the contention that globalization is good because people are, in essence, good and can be counted on to do the right thing...

...It makes sense that economists—with a few exceptions, notably the Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz—would champion globalization, since it virtually makes the whole planet their laboratory...

...Does globalization threaten democracy by imposing external financial imperatives that override the exercise of local or national political choices...

...Exactly what, for openers, was the World Trade Organization...

...Globalization seeks to "dismantle" the ability of governments to act in this way...

...economy's so-called jobless recovery, but who also saw their white collar positions being outsourced to educated, low-wage labor pools in India and China...

...These fears relate to several areas, among them accentuation of poverty in both rich and poor countries, erosion of unionization and other labor rights, creation of a democratic deficit, harming of women, imperiling of local mainstream and indigenous cultures, and damage to the environment...

...When incomes improve, poor parents can generally be expected to respond by putting children back into school...

...He doesn't mind letting his readers know that he is a person of some consequence in the world ("Prime Minister Morarji Desai of India told me once...

...some, he says, raise objections that are merely misguided...

...Our institutions are simply too strong to permit this...

...Yet this worldwide decentralization and fragmentation of the production process has taken place together with the centralization of command and control of the global economy in transnational capital" (italics in original...

...He is attracted, usually with good effect, to humor...

...A reference to Bill Clinton is followed by the aside, "who could feel your pain before you did...

...It is worth persevering through such swatches of sociological murkiness because Robinson has some interesting things to say and usually manages to say them comprehensibly...

...Pangloss' assurance that "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds" strangely familiar...

...some free traders, with apologies to George Orwell, were more free than others...

...It is difficult to find fault with such an amusing, charming and erudite debater...

...He also admits that not all of the critics of globalization are slaves to their ideology...

...may be humanity's 'last, best,' and perhaps only hope...

...His central point is that globalization is not simply an acceleration of free trade as it existed in the past, it is an entirely new animal...

...but the pleasure he takes in doing so seems infectious rather than annoying...

...Surely that has had a deleterious effect...

...Bhagwati does not allude to Voltaire's Candide, but he might find Dr...

...Capitalism," Robinson writes, "produces vast amounts of wealth," but it "also generates, as a tendency inherent to the very way the system functions, social polarization and crisis...

...Does globalization enrich the few at the expense of the many...

...And that is what the book delivers, although getting through parts of it can be tough sledding...

...Globalization, Robinson argues, represents a "qualitative difference between the world in the early 20th century and the world in the early 21st century...

...the collapse of Communism and the failures of Third World socialism amount to the "vanishing of different possibilities [that] has led to what I have called the tyranny of the missing alternative, provoking a sense of anguished anticapitalist reactions from both the old and the young...

...Eliot, VS...

...He promises to assuage their concerns by proving that "globalization has a hu-man face...

...companies to places where workers are paid substantially less...

...Governments have historically intervened when the inequalities between owners and workers became so oppressive as to be socially unacceptable, as Britain did with child-labor laws and similar reforms in the 19th century and as the U.S...

...Bhagwati's argument is, on the surface, extremely appealing...

...Stated differently: Products used to be manufactured in one country and marketed to other countries, with the profits from sales returning to the owners, investors and laborers in the country of origin...

...Globalization is portrayed as capitalism run amok, a catastrophe from which the world might, but only might, still save itself...

...His new book, A Theory of Global Capitalism (Johns Hopkins, 200 pp., $46.95 hardcover, $ 18.95 paper), comes with a subtitle, Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World, that suggests a focus less on the behavior of money than on the behavior of the people who make and handle the money in this new economic world...

...New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, an ardent champion of globalization, grew alarmed enough at the protectionist rumblings emerging from the campaign trail to spend 10 days or so in Bangalore, India, a high-tech center where local workers perform a variety of tasks—fielding telephone calls requesting technical computer help or billing information, refining software programs, analyzing medical x-rays, etc.—for U.S...

...The chief task before those who consider globalization favorably, therefore, is to confront the fears that while globalization may be economically benign (in the sense of increasing the pie), it is socially malign...

...Try telling that to American computer programmers who are unemployed because programmers in India are willing and able to do the same work at one-sixth the cost...

...No, "It can be argued that trade with poor countries is likely to have improved wages, in the sense that it has moderated the decline that would have occurred due to non-trade-related factors, chiefly labor-saving technical change...

...The World Trade Organization, the uninitiated had learned somewhere along the way, was largely a target of convenience, a palpable embodiment of the mysterious and apparently implacable movement bearing the unlovely name of "globalization...

...Poverty is what drives many to put children to work ratherthan into school...

...This term could be defined—sympathetically—as unrestricted trade, no tariffs, no duties, across formerly protected national borders, or—with undisguised hostility—as the apocalyptic triumph of capitalism in transforming the entire world and its inhabitants into raw materials to be exploited for profit...

...Those who missed this piece or would like a fuller exposition of Bhagwati's position can find it in his new book, In Defense of Globalization (Oxford, 308 pp., $28.00...

...Such adjustments, Robinson believes, are "rational vis-àvis the logic of global capital adjustment...

...The effects of pressures from trade and outgoing investments on our standards are simply not substantial enough to undo the gains we have made after decades of political action...

...firms...

...It would be interesting to hear Bhagwati's response to Robinson's argument, since it flies in the face of his own contention that "trade enhances growth, and that growth reduces poverty...

...For the moment, at least, Robinson seems to have the last, more persuasive word...

...This is not, Robinson strongly suggests, good news for the popular classes...

...That list is a fair representation of what those opposed to globalization, at least in the shape it has taken so far, actually do worry about...

...If he can't convert the unbelievers into enthusiastic globalizers, probably no one can...

...Why not...

...Although he is an economist, he has interests well beyond the domain of the dismal science...

...But even those inclined to view free trade as a good thing, at least in theory, had reasons to wonder in the opening months of 2004 whether globalization was really aligned with the best interests of the United States...

...No, "globalization leads to prosperity, and prosperity in turn leads to democratization of politics with the rise of the middle class...

...During the Democratic Presidential primaries, candidate John Edwards struck surprisingly responsive chords among voters by highlighting the plight of American workers, who were not only adrift in the U.S...

...Writers & Writing Restructuring the World By Paul Gray When fervent protests and demonstrations, some of them violent, broke out in Seattle, the site of a meeting of representatives of the World Trade Organization (WTO), in December 1999, most casual newspaper readers and viewers of television newscasts felt baffled...

...Bhagwati makes the same observation without dwelling on it or its implications...

...Johnson, Gerard Manly Hopkins, T.S...

...No, "trade enhances growth, and that growth reduces poverty...