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Charles Jaco has written opinion and commentary pieces for dozens of magazines and newspapers. Each week, read and comment on a fresh on-line version. The discussion page enables you to share your view points world wide. If you would like to make a comment go to the " Join the discussion" link below. If you would like to view past editorials visit the Editorial Archive. Editorial: 12/3/99
In dissecting the sound bites and grafitti from the anti-world trade protestors
in Seattle, the media missed a couple of quotes. Number one--"New machines...deprive
millions of workers of their livelihood within a year's time. Big industry has brought
all the world's people into contact with each other and has merged all local markets into
one world market." Number two--"Improved communications have been the key to prosperity.
The entire globe has been girdled...and the efficiency of the capital involved has more
than doubled or tripled."
Alan Greenspan and Bill Gates, maybe? Wrong continent, wrong century. The first
quote is from "The Principles of Communism" by Fredrich Engels, written in 1847. The
second is from the pen of Karl Marx in 1867's "Das Kapital." Both men lived during the
last major economic upheavel, when railroads and steam engines were costing millions of
people their livelihoods on farms and in small hand-building factories. Where Ned Lud
and his Luddite followers attacked the new machines, Marx and Engels embraced them.
They reasoned that a global economy would lead to the rise of a united global working
class.
It didn't. But their analysis of global capital still makes some sense. Global
business is the ultimate tautology. It neither thinks nor feels. It just is. The
company you work for, in all proability, doesn't care if your children starve or you
lose your job. It has the same loyalty to you as a shark has to a grouper. You are
valuable only as long as you feed its need for profit.
Which was the point made by the motley assortment of protestors in Latte City.
But like Marx and Engels, they got the cause right and the effect all wrong. World
trade and the global economy are already here. Propaganda from Serbia, porn from
Holland, chat rooms from Pakistan, diamonds from South Africa, and medical research from
France are all a mouse-click away in your office or bedroom. The clothes you're wearing
probably came from China and Malaysia. The car you're driving has parts inside from
around the world, whether it's a Ford or a Toyota.
The effect of all this, eventually, will be to de-centralize everything, giving
monolithic structures from government to corporations less power, not more.
Charlesjaco.com is a world-wide billboard and editorial forum run by one person. The
cottage industries of the future will be controlled more and more by small groups of
people. Even media will end up being customized, so people can have the books they
like printed on demand and news customized for them alone appearing when they boot up
their computers.
World trade ends up changing people, although not in the way the 19th century
communists or the 20th century anarchists thought. It liberates them, or at least some
of them. The have-nots of the last revolution were those who kept outmoded skills like
shoeing horses at the expense of new ones, like repairing an automobile. The have-nots
this time around will be those stuck without education, without new skills, without
optimism for the future.
The only ones who should fear the future of globalization are the ones who hide
from it. The ones who will succeed are the ones who embrace it in a bear hug,
squeezing and molding it into something that works better than what we have now.
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