Globalization as “Glebalization” of the Masses
For years we have been witnessing the replebeianization of the masses, for a time protected by rights conquered within the framework of sovereign national States and now redefined as an immense army of serfs at the mercy of capital without borders, on which rests the essence of this “glebalization” as the foundation of the New Liquid-Financial Feudalism.
The globalization of the market occurs in unison with the glebalization of the workers and the pauperized middle classes, in accordance with that integral proletarianization of society already foreseen by Marx and, after him, by the “Erfurt Program” (1891): the globalism of the dominant is the glebalism of the dominated. Workers are reduced to the new plebs of the planetary system of de-ticized needs: theirs are considered to all intents and purposes as “waste lives” and treated as such, at a time when the welfarism of the compromise between State and market has given way to the liberal criminalization of social misery.
The flexibilization of the masses today is producing, in fact, a gigantic postmodern and migrant plebs (the Pöbel, of Hegelian memory), composed of telephone operators and researchers, workers and caregivers, scholarship holders and laborers, that is, of equally uprooted figures, sidereally distant from each other and yet united in the extortion of surplus value, in the exclusion of full citizenship, in the impossible eticized existential stabilization and in the provision of intermittent and time-limited plustra-work.
It is this mass that suffers in the flesh, on a daily basis, the consequences – or rather, with Hegel, the “ethical tragedies” – of globalization, the free market, competitiveness, privatization and competition, that is, of those dimensions always praised by the neo-feudal lord and by the “orators” who serve him. The globalization movement is, by its essence, a “globalization of precariousness” and, therefore, a “glebalization” of the entire planet.
As an emblem of the alchemical link between liberalization and globalization of misery, we can mention, by way of exemplum, the case of Uber, so symptomatic that, in many sectors, the formula “uberization of work” has been used to allude to the general trend of technocapital.
A qualified expression of the sharing economy, Uber is an application that connects drivers and passengers via cell phone. It allows the latter to book rides at prices slightly lower than those of traditional cabs.
Faced with the Uber model, the cab drivers’ guild, especially in Europe, has risen up in opposition to this form of unfair competition. For its part, the aforementioned Uber has invoked the values of liberalism and competition as a claimed antithesis to corporate monopolies and category resistance: these values – the company’s representatives have argued – would guarantee advantageous prices for consumers.
However, upon closer examination, the real scenario is different. Uber drivers are not employees: they are precarious seasonal workers who have to perform other activities to supplement a clearly insufficient income. Ultimately, the Uber model – the umpteenth liberal Americanization of the Old Continent – proposes to Europe a paradigm centered on the war among the poor: a paradigm whereby those at the bottom suffer the competition of those even lower down, in order to allow the offshored owner to make more profit and to save, in the end, very little money for those who could afford to continue paying for traditional cabs.
Uber—it was said—represents the emblem of the technocapitalist sharing economy, of which it summarizes the main characteristics. First of all, work becomes even more clearly flexible, individualized and deregulated. In order to earn a decent income, all inhabitants of the globalized smart city are forced to develop a heterogeneous “package” of differentiated activities which, taken individually, are in themselves barely profitable.
Once again, with the Uber model all class identity is dissolved and an amorphous mass of independent individuals is configured who, in the abstract, compete with each other as startupper and who, in concrete terms, are condemned to the daily struggle for survival through a set of crazy activities; activities that -suscitating in those who develop them the illusion of being self-employed and not part of the dominated class- do not offer stability, nor secure income, nor professional projection, nor control over their own existential time.
In short, with Uber it seems evident the new tendency of capital to rely on the parasitic activity of speculation to the detriment of the work of others and, at the same time, on the growing inequality between the incomes of multimillionaire top managers and those of workers, who very often have considerable difficulties to survive decently. In fact, technocapital exploits new technologies to extract income from other people’s property (cars in the case of Uber, apartments in the case of Airbnb, etc.) and to gain monopolistic positions even less susceptible to being affected than those of national corporations (in the case examined, that of cab drivers).
In the apotheosis of the principle of performance and of the ésprit de géometrie, turbo-capitalist globalization is verified on the destruction of the residual politically guaranteed social rights. Such destruction takes place for the sake of the logic of this globalized competitiveness, which Paul Krugmann has rightly defined as the “dangerous obsession” of the cosmopolitan elite and of those who suffer from its hegemony.
The three main dogmas of liberal cosmopolitanism can thus be condensed: a) there can be no growth without a reduction of the public debt; b) privatization, i.e. the dismantling of public assets, must be carried out; c) it is necessary to generate the flexibilization of labor relations and regulatory simplification.
In this context, States that still protect social rights are forced to liberalize, shedding them in order to survive the challenges of globalization (or, as has been suggested, of “globalizations” in the plural). They must adhere to the all-pervasive pace of planetary competition and its borderless deregulation, that is, to what Mike Featherstone has described as the “de-monopolization of economic structures through the deregulation and globalization of markets, trade and labor.”
If for the “beautiful souls” obscured by ideology, globalization is ideally identified with the “mush of the heart” of low-cost intercultural travel and with the united colors of a superficial and treacherous multiculturalism, at the structural level it corresponds in reality to the depoliticization of the economy, to the hegemony of the globalist Lord over the precarious Servant, to the triumph of the deregulated sovereign market and, therefore, to the elimination of social rights and the planetary domination of capital over labor and over human life.
Thus, globalization is, in reality, the very essence of the class struggle redefined as a planetary massacre of those above against those below, of the globalist Lord against the globalized Servant.
The fact that in some areas of the planet work costs less, due to the absence of rights and recognition of the workers, and that consequently the goods coming from those places are economically advantageous, determines the delocalization of production and, synergistically, the progressive elimination of rights and recognition also for the workers of the other areas of the planet.
Let us imagine the workers of FIAT Mirafiori in Turin, temple of Fordist capital production. Thanks to the class struggles of the 20th century and the gains won in those struggles by the workers’ movement, they benefited from a series of social rights linked to the length of the working day, to the dignity of the recognized wage, to the right to strike and to trade union guarantees. The Italian national State constituted the framework within which the conquests of the working classes were guaranteed through the normative force of politics and its representation.
If now the workers of FIAT Mirafiori find themselves in the situation of having to compete on a global scale with workers in, say, India, Pakistan or Bangladesh, who have no union guarantees, produce the same goods at lower costs and without fundamental rights, what will be the consequence?
Contrary to the apologetic rhetoric of globalization, it will certainly not be the rights and gains of the Italian working class that will be transferred to the East and given as a gift to the workers of India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. The dynamics will be exactly the opposite, according to that dialectic between Center and Periphery punctually examined by Wallerstein in The Modern World-System (Ed. esp. The Modern World-System).
In the name of competitiveness and the unified global market, it will be the Italian workers who will be deprived of their protections, their rights and their conquests in order to be competitive with their Eastern competitors. The super-exploitation of the latter, far from being extinguished or attenuated, will also infect the Italian workforce.
Suffice it to recall here, en passant and for information purposes only, that in 1994 the cost of labor in Germany was around 44 marks per hour, 36 in Japan, 3.5 in Poland and barely 1 in Indonesia. Globalization could be understood as the choice, on the part of cosmopolitan businessmen (who always hide it behind the anonymity of the markets and the objective laws of economics), to put the workers of these different countries in competition with each other, with the disastrous consequences already described.
In this game of massacre smuggled ideologically as Progress lies the secret of global competitiveness as a coercion towards the glebalization of the working classes, forced to compete with each other according to a logic which, contemplating only profit, will relentlessly lower their conditions.
The same could rightly be affirmed with reference to the dominant pole: by virtue of the illogical logic of globalization, the large global corporations successfully force governments to compete in lowering taxes for cynical multinationals; which, in turn, operate in national territories with the same logic as cancer, destroying the body that houses it in order to move elsewhere, towards new mines of profit extraction.
In the absence of the protective politics of national states and the operability of politics within national borders, the depoliticized economic on a cosmopolitan scale quickly becomes a fundamental lever of the unregulated class massacre of the dominant against the dominated.
Without the element of the national State as a third figure, which limits the aggressiveness of the dominant and guarantees the dignified existence of the dominated (making their conquests operative at the juridical level), the free market and free competition dominate exclusively, id est free cannibalism and the law of the strongest.
From this perspective, there is total convergence between the theorem of Thrasymachus and what we could call the axiom of Callicles, as described in Plato’ s Gorgias (481 b – 506 b). Thrasymachus unmasks the falsely universalistic character of the law, just as Callicles opposes the idea of a conventional justice that really applies to all: this would be, in his view, an unjust stratagem of the weaker to dominate the natural aristocracy of the stronger.
Globalization as imperialist globalization of the market is thus also revealed as an instrument in the hands of the dominant in the context of class conflict, as a means of repression of the workers and as a method to make the axiom of Callicles triumph.
By means of planetary competitiveness and wage dumping, it makes possible the reoccupation by capital of the sphere of rights and conquests that the Servant, through conflicts and class organizations, was in a position to obtain in the dialectical phase.
The plutocratic elite and their clergy of company call it globalization: it is class struggle or, rectius, massacre of classes executed univocally by the competitivist Lord. It is, then, the struggle that the turbo-capital and its globocratic class of reference wage: a) to become independent of space and volatile without limitations; b) to be uncapturable for politics; c) to occupy and conquer the entire planet; d) to take advantage of the downward and borderless competitiveness in the field of the circulation of labor.
Proof of these “paradoxes of the competitive society” is, moreover, that the workers, the middle classes and the States are the losers of globalization. In antithesis to the sweetening liberal narrative and the caricatured image of happy globalization, globalization actually favors the exponential growth of inequalities between and within states. The more markets open up and become more flexible, the more wealth is concentrated in the hands of the restricted and opulent globalist elite of the post-bourgeois lord.
Indeed, market globalization does not simply coincide with deregulation, which is also present in many sectors and under many guises. Parallel to it, we can also glimpse an evident project of “Re-regulation” aimed at producing a plethora of provisions and laws which, at the juridical level, establish functional rules for the casualization of labor while safeguarding the interests of the Lord.
As we shall see more extensively below, the deregulation of the old system proper to the social State and Re-regulation in the liberal sense for the benefit of the financial oligarchy are mutually intertwined.
Following the central intuition of Dardot and Laval’s The New Reason for the World (2009), the spontaneity of the market must, in fact, be constructed through a sophisticated system of rights and sanctions that – by molding society and the economy through the production of specific inter-human relations, forms of life and subjectivity – prohibit specific interventions and guarantee the triumph of ordoliberalism.
In its most general meaning, the formula regnandi, the perfect rule of government of the liberal State, is that according to which “business can interfere with government as it pleases, but not vice versa”. It is, in other words, the State redefined as an entity at the service of the market.
Thanks to the pace of globalization, Monsieur le Capital quickly manages to recover what had been taken away from him by the conflict and the reasoned indocility of the Servant, but also by the experience, not without contradictions, of the communism of the nineties: high wages and social rights, Welfare State and legislative restrictions on dismissal, strong trade union protection and the right to strike.
The conquests of labor, social rights, the recognition of the Servant, the very dictates of the Constitutions, are for capital a “citadel” which restrains competitiveness and which, as such, must be conquered in the name of planetary competition: they are, in the syntax of Marx’s Grundrisse, that limit which the norm of excessive accumulation and infinite growth must necessarily overwhelm in order to be able to impose itself absolutely.
The amor infiniti of the economy, in fact, attentive only to the cold spectral value of profit, is founded solely on the possibility of deliberately modifying schedules, wages, dismissals and hiring, which, precisely, is prevented by the aforementioned citadel. It is the culmination of alienation, nihilism and the dehumanization of human relations: nothing is left of the human and the process of valorization of value becomes the only subject and the only norm.
The global market operates with a triple leverage to favor this illogical logic of liberation of capital and synergistic destruction of the rights of the Servant: (a) through the free circulation of goods it always rewards, in the game of competition, the most economically advantageous, regardless of their quality and the conditions under which they are produced; (b) by way of overcoming the borders of national States, it generates and facilitates the processes of delocalization, by virtue of which production is transferred to places where labor is available at lower prices and where labor rights are little less than non-existent; c) through immigration flows it introduces into Western countries a new “industrial reserve army,” according to Das Kapital’s formula, always blackmailable, devoid of rights, conscience, understanding of language and the possibility of using it properly, ready to do anything to survive.
The only “invisible hand” of the global market seems to be, then, that of a violence that can only be seen in its effects, in the “ethical tragedies” that it generates in the world of work and in human communities.
In this sense, the elimination of the national sovereign state has made possible the dialectical development of capital not only because it has fulminated the residual disciplinary force of politics over the economy, but also insofar as it has favored the overcoming of the moment of conflict proper to the dialectical phase.
In fact, it has succeeded in allowing exploitation to remain unchanged while at the same time eliminating the oppositional and conflictual moment that was possible in the arena of the national State, where the Servant and the Lord could look each other in the face and confront each other on the field.
The conquests and rights were the fruit of the practices of conflict within the circumscribed and governable spaces of the national State, of the organizational capacity of the Servant conscious of himself and of his own demands. That is why, in modernity, there is no real progress or social, economic or political achievement that has not been attained thanks to the State and within its operational field.
If the sovereign national State is the scene of open conflict between Servant and Lord, liberal cosmopolitization, overcoming the sovereignty of the national State, overcomes the biunivocal conflict or, better, the possibility for the Servant to fight: the latter now suffers univocally the delocalized and faceless violence of the depoliticized, supranational and rhizomatic economy.
The class struggle—Marx notes in the incendiary pages of the Manifesto—is international in “content” (Inhalt) and national in “form” (Form). It is international in content, since the capitalist mode of production, as Marx makes clear from the beginning of the work, is by its essence globalizing and capable of becoming the world. Thus, in order to defeat it, it will be necessary to defeat it at the global level. It is national in form, because “the proletariat of each country (das Proletariat eines jeden Landes) must naturally first of all come to a reckoning with its own bourgeoisie”: that is, it must organize itself in national spaces in order to be able to limit, govern and finally destroy capital. Thus it is expressed in the Manifesto:
“The struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie is initially, as regards its form, a national struggle (ein nationaler Kampf). The proletariat of each country must naturally first of all come to a reckoning with its own bourgeoisie.”
Only through the practice of concrete conflict in the political spaces of the national state, where oppressed and oppressors can confront each other visu visu, there is the effective possibility for the former to overthrow the domination of the latter.
It may be true that “the proletarians haveno fatherland (haben kein Vaterland)”, but since they must conquer the State, that is, political domination, they must at the same time constitute themselves as a national class and literally become a nation. In the words of the Manifesto:
“Since the proletariat must first conquer political dominion, raise itself to a national class (nationale Klasse), constitute itself into a nation, it too is national (ist es selbst noch national), though certainly not in the sense of the bourgeoisie.”
Marx is fully aware – he will make this explicit mainly in the first book of Capital- of the fact that the conquests of the workers’ movement always take place within the framework of the national States, through the limitations of working hours, the introduction of norms in defense of the proletarian condition and the protection of labor. To maintain that “the proletarians have no fatherland” means, then, as Löwy has suggested, that the proletarians of all nations have the same interests.
With the disarticulation of the sovereign national States, the ring in which a conflict developed, the outcome of which was not obvious, because it derived precisely from the concrete practices of the counterposition, has been eliminated. The structure of the national State was capable of forcing capital to take into account the interests of the subordinate classes, insofar as these were organized in the intermediate bodies between State and market (unions, parties, strikes, etc.).
It remains a one-way massacre, which the dominated suffer without even seeing the face of the executioners and without having the possibility of actively fighting against them. Herein lies the cunning of liberal reason and its fierce aversion to any national frontier and to any form of sovereignty, immediately identified with the return of possible democratic control of the economy.
National sovereignty had been, in fact, the indispensable framework for the social conquests of the dominated classes and for the struggles of the Servant. It is within it that the confrontation between organized political forms of right and left, rivals concerning the different idea of distribution presupposed by the monetary sovereignty of the State itself, has historically developed.
In synthesis, sovereignty is connected with the possibility for what we could generically define as a “political body” – the people or the nation – located in a territory and in a historical context and endowed with its own will to act. Sovereignty, therefore, implies the fundamental question of the nexus between unity and plurality, between politics and economy, between society and the individual, between politics and law, between identity and cosmopolitanism.
Even sovereignty—which must be limited in terms of territory (based on borders and delimited spaces) and, at the same time, perpetual in terms of time—determines the interest of the party and the collective. And it implies both inclusion, through the creation of a geometric order, and exclusion, that is, the expulsion of a real or potential enemy of the order. In the absence of sovereignty, the State dies, because it loses its “soul”, according to the image already used by Hobbes in Leviathan to demonstrate the equivalence between sovereignty and life.
With a heuristically fruitful image, one could compare sovereignty to a fire that burns; or, if one prefers, to the vital energy of a singular-collective subjectivity, which chorally pursues its own objectives. In its very interior, such subjectivity is traversed by heterogeneous tensions and visions, connected to the various classes that make up the social fabric.
Sovereignty is, then, the product of the class (or classes) that conquers hegemony within the national State and, in this way, can form the living Whole of the nation.
Therefore – it is worth insisting – there can be no politics in the absence of sovereignty. And to affirm, sheepishly following the order of discourse, that the space of politics is now the world, and no longer the State, is nothing more than a poorly disguised way of arguing that politics no longer has or, rather, should no longer have a space, its space of action. Such is the dream of liberal cosmopolitanism, centered on the double figure of the market that regulates itself and of the economic subtracted from the political.
Democracy implies, by its essence, the possibility for the sovereign people to decide on the economy and society, on the organization of the internal and external politics of their own community. In the time of widespread spiritual freezing and the economic system of international financial speculation, decisions in the economic and political sphere are being abandoned to the sovereign will of those suprasensible entities that are the stateless markets.
This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia.
Featured: Les Halles, by Léon Augustin Lhermitte; painted in 1895.
