Donald Trump and Globalization
There’s globalization and then there’s globalization:
“The mainstream-media (MSM) particularly The New York Times published an article titled ‘Donald Trump’s Victory Promises to Upend the International Order’ by Peter Baker which claims that Trump’s victory is “upending an international order that prevailed for decades and raising profound questions about America’s place in the world.” America is the engine of the ‘international order’ or the ‘New World Order’ (NWO) in fact; it has intervened in numerous countries by launching wars of aggression and has instigated numerous coups since the end of World War II. They have imposed international trade policies that favored U.S. corporations, advocated for open borders on an international level and maintained U.S. dollar hegemony as the world’s reserve currency.”
Timothy Alexander Guzman “Is it Fact or Fiction? US Media Says that New World Order is in Jeopardy with a Trump Presidency” (Underlining added.)
“The real meaning of this election is not, as bitterly disappointed Hillary supporters still maintain with tears in their eyes and fear in their throats, a victory for racism and sexism. The real meaning of this upset is that Wall Street’s globalization project has been rejected by the citizens of its homeland. This has major implications for the European nations that have been dragged along into this ruinous project.
“Hillary Clinton was the candidate of the military industrial complex and international finance capital. She designed herself to be the figurehead of those forces, as queen of regime change. She aspired to be the one to remake the world in the image Wall Street dictates. It was a project enthusiastically and expensively supported by the one percent who profit from arms contracts and the trade deals they write themselves for their own interests.
Diana Johnstone.“Hillary versus Donald: Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead! Victory for the Wizard of Oz!”
Any assessment of Donald Trump’s impact must begin with where the economy of capitalism is today. The objective forces that drive globalization must be distinguished from the subjective policies of capitalists, who strive, with limited success, to command the process.
Globalization began with the application of the microchip to machinery and economic production in the 1970s. By the 1990s, it was clear that electronics was replacing mechanical industrial production and the Electronic Era was coming online. Already, electronics had provided the capacity to miniaturize machine components, allowing for the rapid decentralization of production around the globe. The same electronics, augmented through global communications systems, allowed for a machine in Brazil to be controlled from a corporate office in Michigan.
The continuing objective impulse towards globally integrated production and distribution is constantly driven by new innovative developments in electronics, computers, software and robots. These new means of production not only automated the productive capacity of the Industrial Era; they are also reconfigure human society that evolved on this basis. Facebook became a company only in 2004. When Obama was elected in 2008, the Iphone was only a few months old, the app didn’t exist, nobody knew what a social network or “the Cloud” even were. Now new means of production are coming online that will transform the world again in the next decade: Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, plus a new global smart infrastructure.
This objective globalization cannot be stopped. It is an ongoing process and not yet complete. This side of globalization is driven by qualitative leaps in the means of production that are systematically replacing human labor in production and creating a global system of laborless production. This technology also produces in abundance the necessities of life that could be provided to all humanity for free, according to need, but which capitalism refuses to distribute unless they can be paid for.
By the 1990s, the initial effects of electronic production lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the transfer of industrial manufacturing to the low-wage proletariat of China, India and countries outside of Europe and North America. Capitalism must constantly expand in order to make new private profits. Once global in the geographic sense, capitalism could no longer able to expand extensively by conquering new territory.
The structure and nature of capitalism today is highly global in scope, increasingly integrating production and finance as well as national and international capitalism. Local and international circuits of capital accumulation are ever more tightly coordinated. Electronics creates a new class of capitalists – transnational capitalists – one step removed from production – whose private profits come from exploiting global production rather than simply national production as in the Industrial Era. Transnational capitalism (TNC) operates on a global, rather than national bases. It operates through a nascent and emerging transnational state, one that is not a monolithic global hegemon; rather it operates within and through various national states to expand global capitalism.
Capitalism’s political power has always been based in their claim to “own” the tools and technology of society, the means of production that society uses to produce the social wealth that capitalists expropriate as private riches. Every phase of technological development creates a concrete dialectic between extensive development – the spread of capitalist relations of production into new geographic areas – and intensive development, where more and more elements of society are monetized, corporatized, financialized and securitized under capitalist relations of production. Modern electronic, computer-based, information technology further drives capitalism to develop intensively.
Today intensive development drives TNC to seize more social wealth by launching attacks on the public property created by governments in the Industrial Era, as well as attacks on the the paltry personal property that the industrial workers had managed to eke out under capitalist exploitation. This is Dispossession.
Since the ‘90s, globalizing capitalism has increasingly seized and privatized national public property such as oil fields, water and satellite communications systems, as well as workers’ pensions, educational systems and housing. This process is also not complete. Also augmented by electronic production, transnational capitalism has created a global manufacturing platform that is based on outsourced global production chains networks that cross and re-cross national borders with “just-in-time” production. These production chains ever more integrate global production. In addition, the Iphone is also emerging as the platform for the new global “sharing” economy that is turning employed workers into desperate temp workers.
Made in America” and “Made in China” refer to a past era of manufacturing and are not really valid concepts in the globalization era. While final fabrication may occur in a given country, the parts come in from all over the world. In is difficult to locate a national market today. TNC is not going back to the Industrial Era, no more than they are going back to mechanical cash registers.
The intensive expansion of capitalism, driven by electronics, also creates a new class of proletariat, since automated production requires no human labor. This new class is being driven outside of the capitalist relations of production to survive as best it can without work or wages. The very technology that allowed for transnational capitalism therefore also attacks the very base of capitalism. There can be no private profit from laborless production, since it is the exploitation of labor, not machinery, that produces private profit.
With objective globalization, the contradictions of capitalism became replaced by antagonism. The struggle between the fluid and exponentially developing technology and the rigid social relations of capitalism have lead to challenges that transnational capitalism cannot solve: the massive reliance on fossil fuels, massive numbers of human beings who can no longer work and who can barely survive, plus the historic crisis of Global Warming.
For over 30 years, global capitalists have relied on Neo-liberal policies seek to manage this antagonistic situation with constant wars and a rising global police state. The global financial regime, international finance and trade, is still driven by the somewhat antiquated national organizations that capitalism put in play right after World War II. These include the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the European Common Monetary Fund, NATO, the UN, and the World Trade Organization in 1994, all of which the US dominates.
The “Neo-liberalism” model of globalization is a set of policies that have been directed until today by the Bush and Clinton families, backed up by the Neo Cons, and further implemented by Obama. They rely on ariel bombing, Austerity, debt and financial manipulation to force regime change and impose transnational notions of globalization that are distinct from the objective process. While the US can wage war anywhere in the globe, the results of the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan show that Neo-liberal capitalist policies cannot establish the stable political order needed to expand the free flow of capital across the globe.
Globalization and Neo-liberalism
Neo-liberalism is not TNC itself, nor is it the same as the objective process of globalization. However Neo-liberalism proclaimed itself as “globalization” and combined wars for regime change with global financial assaults against specific countries to increase the free flow of capital and speculation. TNC is driven by predatory financial speculation, based in the global 24 hour stock market, and is constantly funding, bankrupting and accumulating the productive infrastructure built by governments in the Industrial Era. It has waged systematic warfare against both public property and any social relationship that does not facilitate privatization.
The US savaged the peoples of the old Soviet Union when it collapsed in 1991. As a result of the “Asian Tigers” financial crash in 1997, international finance seized control of communications systems of countries from Thailand to South Korea. Clinton began bombing Yugoslavia in 1999 to facilitate the penetration of transnational capital. In 2003, the US took advantage of the 911 attacks to invade both Afghanistan and then Iraq, with failed goals of imposing regime change and political stability. In many Muslim countries, religious organizations guarantee the distribution of the necessities of life to the poor without commercial distribution. Likewise TNC today is forcing Mexico to re-write its Constitution to privatize the national petroleum company, Pemex, and open it to foreign investment. At the same time, transnational corporations are employing paramilitaries to destroy the traditional rural ejido system of joint-land holding that prevents land being used for debt.
After the crash of 2008, the US engineered the largest transfer of public wealth to private hands in history with the bailout of $16 trillion or so. Then it organized world governments, under the demands of the financiers, the world’s countries to impose Austerity in 2010.
The common imposition of Austerity in various forms lead to the largest uprisings in global history. They swept the world. The US response to the Arab Spring was to bomb Libya and impose regime change. Then it moved on to the Ukraine, where it organized a fake uprising to impose a billionaire fascist. Now it seeks to impose regime change in Syria, including the option of open conflict with Russia. And, as the US election was occurring last Fall, the US and NATO conducted the largest mobilization of troops on the border of Russia since the Nazis invaded. Does the US intend to impose continental war on Europe one more time and increase the nuclear threat? This is exactly what Neo-Liberalism under Clinton and Obama is lurching towards.
TNC is attempting to manage the objective technological transformation to save the full spectrum dominance of private property. The Clintons have been leading this “new deal” for transnational capitalism, for 25 years. Transnational capitalists were all invited into Iraq and Greece, but they are finding Neo-liberal policies are increasing less effective in imposing political solutions. The Neo-liberal strategy for globalization is running out of options.
In 1991, there were 99 billionaires in the world. Mark Zukerburg and Sergei Brin were little more than gleams in their fathers’ eyes. There were 695 in 2005 and 1826 in 2015, with new billionaires coming into dominance in every country of the world. Parallel with the rise of transnational capitalism, scientific progress, which had became regularized through the application of electronics, began to payoff. The Internet became adapted to global corporations, and what are commonly now called “tech companies” began to dominate in new ways.
The transnational capitalist class is not just white, American or European anymore. These global billionaires are just as based in the global agribusiness revolution, global manufacturing, financial deregulation and information technologies as are those from the US. Maybe the new boys on the block are concerned that nuclear war affects their business plan.
President Trump and Oil Politics
During the election, candidate Trump was openly critical of clashing with Russia over Syria, stating that it really wasn’t worth having World War III over. He downplayed NATO, noting that it was formed in an earlier age. Then he tanked the TPP – a boon to China, since it was originally designed especially to isolate China. He has ranted against NAFTA and various TNC trade agreements.
Could it be that the Donald is against the global free flow of capital, even though his real estate empire, such as it is, has completely benefited from them? Impossible! Renegotiating global treaties certainly opens the door for the elimination of the tiny, few protections they have for the environment and labor rights.
The elections were the Waterloo for the Clintons and perhaps the end of the Neo-liberal model of globalization. But to date the US has always directed the economics and politics of globalization. Since World War II, the national interests of the US have always dominated and yet furthered with the next stage of global capitalism. Now that the policies of Neo-liberalism have failed, as capitalism finds itself incapable of reconstructing a new world based on new technology, another US mob is attempting to impose a new set of policies. We all saw the Godfather. There’s a new gang in town. Trump represents a new TNC approach.
With the Bush regime, heavily tied to oil, a rogue Republican group seized power in the party and the Neo-Cons furthered TNC with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Petroleum is still the most valuable commodity on the planet, and it appears that Trump’s foreign policy includes an alliance of the three greatest energy producers on the planet – the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia. Rex Tillerson, the new Secretary of State, straight outta’ Exon, didn’t accept the position without a plan. We will see how far this goes and how it is tied into TNC policies.
In 2014, the US, under Obama and Clinton, tanked the price of oil. Three years ago in 2014 the price of oil per barrel was about $150; by summer of 2016, the US drove it down to around $50 by flooding the world with fracked natural gas. The US Congress voted in late 2015 to end the legal policy prohibiting the export of US energy, in place since the Energy Crisis of the ‘70s. Suddenly the US became the world’s largest energy exporter. This was a unilateral, aggressive move that has an ongoing impact.
Turning on the energy spigot included cooperation from Saudi Arabia to keep oil production high. In addition Obama’s deal with Iran allowed for even more large-scale oil production to come on line! Furthermore, US is funding and supporting the “terrorist” groupings that dominate territories at the western end of pipeline, from Gaza to the Ukraine, conveniently making the establishment of a pipeline an impossibility… at least until the US calls the dogs off. The US-backed wars in Ukraine and in Syria are but two fronts in the same strategic war to cripple Russia and China and to rupture any Eurasian counter-pole to a US-controlled New World Order.
Super cheap energy destroyed Venezuela’s economy and has seriously affected Bolivia’s. It also destroyed credit and debt funding for Brazil’s off-shore oil fields as well as the new ones at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.
This maneuver was a serious attack against the political independence of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.) In 2014, Russia and China, along with India and with open support from other BRIC countries launched the New Development Bank, based In Beijing, as well as the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. These institutions are designed to compete with the IMF and the World Bank. The move is the first step away from pricing oil in dollars. This could amount to tens of trillions in loss for demand of petro-dollars per year (US GDP about 17 trillion dollars – December 2013) – leaving an important dent in the US economy.
The outspoken goal is the creation of a “New Silk Road” linking Asia and Europe. Another goal is to build a natural gas pipeline that connects Russia with China and Duisberg, Germany, the world’s largest inland port.
The U.S. and the European Union are concerned that the European gas market would be held hostage to Russian gas giant Gazprom. The ultimate aim is to de-link Europe’s economy from Russia and weaken Russia’s energy dependent economy. The goal is to also ensure Europe remains subservient to Washington, not least via the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and in the long term via US gas and Middle East oil (sold in dollars, thereby boosting the strength of the currency upon which US global hegemony rests).
Trump may propose the new, latest transnational capitalist plan for globalization. He may win a new consensus from the billionaires, the financiers and their political hacks. But he can’t reverse automation and the global development of laborless production. He promises, as is common with most fascists, the restoration of national glory. Two year from now – when it hasn’t happened – Donald will tell you who is to blame.
Trump and TNC War
Donald Trump may not favor immediate war with Russia, but he has no problem with the new wars for dispossession that have become part of a global war against civilians. Trump will not be reversing globalization or transnational capitalism here.
Aside to opposition to some of the policies of Neo-liberalism, neither Donald Trump, nor transnational capital, has any real opposition to fascism, the seizure of public property and achieving transnational goals like building a new and privatized smart global infrastructure, a project already recognized as a multi-trillion dollar global market for corporations. Since 2001, the US combined The War on Terror with The War on Drugs and The War on Communism to produce a global military police force that looks strikingly similar whether it is attacking protestors in Greece, Ferguson or Mexico. This lucrative global war on civilians has become a source of military accumulation in virtually every country of the world. Under Trump, the US can still use the threat of terrorism as a lever for the global re-design that they intend. Trump will facilitate the expansion of objective globalization, and may well try to do so by rejecting Neo-liberal policies while negotiating a new transnational global consensus. In this he will be far more successful than Left forces who have railed against Neo-liberalism for years while refusing to connect it to capitalism.
Now with the Dakota Access Pipeline, the chickens are coming home to roost. The pipeline represents petroleum politics in the US and reveals the new TNC State form in action… inside the US. Trump reversed Obama and reinstituted support for both the Dakota and the XL Pipeline. These pipelines carry the world’s dirtiest oil and gas. The Koch brothers are heavily invested in Canadian and US shale deposits. More pipelines are being constructed to transport natural gas for the US to ship as liquid natural gas. In the US, as around the world, pipelines are highly unpopular since they constantly leak, damage the environment and represent a quantitative leap in fossil fuel production.
What is so striking about the Standing Rock battle is that the water protectors were up against exactly the same paramilitary model that has been used to dispossess rural in Mexico. Water protectors are facing the same toxic mix of privatized paramilitary corporate vigilantes, combined with militarized police armed with drones that illegally seizes the land and dispossesses the inhabitants, adding them to the 73 million global migrants, part of a new class that wanders both internally and externally in search of jobs that capitalism can no longer provide. The US perfected this transnational model in Mexico under the War on Drugs. This State form now operates paramilitaries in cooperation with militarized police in Indonesia, the Congo and across the globe. This form of warfare is the rural model for capitalist dispossession.
This is one half of the new transnationally imposed State. The other half is the US urban model for dispossession: the policies of criminalization embodied in the New Jim Crow, mass incarceration to control the waves of the dispossessed new class of proletarians in the world’s mega-cities, backed up by Stat-sanctioned murder. The New Jim Crow model has gone global, taking the form of criminalizing of the behaviors of poverty, homelessness and the Youth, as the means to impose order and dispossession in urban areas. The Gentrification and Dispossession plan that is sweeping the cities of North America is a transnational real estate plan that is backed up with killer cops.
In summary, Donald Trump’s Administration is far from a reversion to nationalism. It represents the contradictory struggle by the US to try to maintain TNC dominance and establish the plan to reconstruct the world of the 21st Century. The need for reconstruction is objective. The question is which class will lead this process.
We are witnessing an earthshaking historical transformation that must realize itself through a highly contradictory political process. Global politics are conditioned by the continuing capitalist crisis as the system destabilizes under the transformation of the economy by laborless production.
There are a number of forces in play, from the so-called “Deep State” that has been strongly wedded to regime change in Russia, to the world’s largest corporations, to global national and transnational forces. Meanwhile a vast new global proletariat class is in rapid formation. This includes 50 million refugees, the massive rise of temp work to replace the 40 hour week of the Industrial Era, and vast internal migrations of new proletarians who are desperate to survive as they are being rapidly Dispossessed. It is the presence of this new class, whose needs can be met only by distribution without money, that is the bone in capitalism’s throat that further destabilizes capitalist attempts at a New World Order.
Steven Miller
Oakland, Ca
June 15, 2017
References
The development of globalization, transnational capitalism and its combination of privatized paramilitaries and police forces to increase dispossession are described in detail in:
William I Robinson. Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity. 2014.
Stephen Graham. Cities Under Siege – The New Military Urbanism. 2010.
Dawn Palley, Drug War Capitalism. 2014
Steven Miller writes about privatization, science and historical materialism. He taught science for 25 years in the Oakland Flatland high schools of Fremont and Life Academy. He observed the intense privatization of public schools, out-of-control police, and the growing dispossession of three generations of families from their communities
Signed articles are the responsibility of the author.
