THE WEATHER MAP OF GLOBALIZATION

By Robert Kurz

[This article originally published in August 2004 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.exit-online.org/html/autorin.php.]

The heated debate on globalization in the 1990s has died down. Was the term only a soap bubble of the post-modern discourse or the invention of a neoliberal putsch in world politics as some old leftist critics thought at that time? The facts speak another language. Globalization is a real process rooted in the crisis of worldwide capitalist exploitation and describing a new quality of capital export. “Outsourcing” individual economic areas in the global repression competition replaces the export of complete industrial products. Capital export has become a function of rationalization and reduction of overcapacities. This is far greater than expansion investments abroad.

Administrative globalization rapidly accelerated while many leftist theoreticians denied the character of globalization and escaped into the Keynesian nostalgia of political regulation fantasies. Suppliers became transnational after automobile corporations were the transnational trailblazers according to a recent study of the University of Aachen’s management advisory service. Many partial functions of medium-sized businesses migrate following global cost differentials. More and more areas are taken by special external enterprises including manufacturing and developing parts, not only cleaning services and payroll accounting. Globalization spills over into branches. The most successful sector of German industry, mechanical engineering, with almost a million employees, is in the midst of outsourcing complete assembly.

Shifts of rationalization exports can also be seen. Direct investments in the US obviously reached a satiation level after the boom of the 1990s. China has become the preferred nerve-center of transnational profit chains. The deficit-nourished US market is supplied from China. German and European capital export follow the trend of US industry, the main direct foreign investor in China. In Europe, the focus of outsourcing has shifted from countries like Spain, Portugal and Ireland to Eastern Europe in the course of admissions to the European Union. This is particularly true for the suppliers of the auto-industry and mechanical engineering.

One could speak of a weather map of globalization. With the greater shifts of the cost-differential, the more investment movements of rationalization exports are also shifted. Outsourcing is concentrated in the central regions of North America, eastern Asia and Europe including the newly admitted eastern European countries. The larger part of the world is completely uncoupled and abandoned to growing impoverishment. A process of differentiation is simultaneously occurring in the core zones of globalization. Secondary areas of lower quality of income and life, from extended work benches and poverty services to a poverty population that literally feeds on the wastes of the others.

The Hartz reforms of Germany that exist in different variants in all countries move in this direction. The Monday demonstrations emphasize firstly that the orientation of official policy is pointless. An independent non-parliamentary social movement is necessary. Secondly, every national orientation is condemned to fail. Only a transnational resistance can stop transnational capital and its executors from the political class.

The flea market here is as dark and hazy as an opium den, its flimsy tin roof turning back the midday sun as Edward Mansa robotically unbundles the shipment of secondhand clothes that has just arrived.



The dull, red DKNY T-shirt catches his eye. "This," he says admiringly as he holds the shirt up to the dim light, "is not bad." He says he can probably get a dollar for it.



The shapeless plaid skirt is another matter, however, as is the dowdy, ruffled blouse and the banana-yellow sport coat that causes Mansa to shudder. He'll be lucky to get anything for them, and chances are Mansa will trade them with other vendors for some cooking oil or dried fish. "You can't afford to let anything go to waste," he says.



Mansa provides for his wife, mother and baby daughter with the little money he earns selling hand-me-downs, the old and unwanted clothes that Canadians, Europeans and Americans donate to groups such as the Salvation Army or Goodwill. With more donations than they can use, the charities unload their surplus on wholesalers who buy the clothing in the West for a few pennies a pound, then ship it here and sell bales of it to Mansa and other street retailers at a markup of 300 percent to 400 percent.



As Mansa peels an oversize Orlando Magic basketball jersey from one such bale, his eyes brighten. Even with its curious red smudges and loose threads, the jersey can go for as much as $3.



"This is a gem," he says. "The young people really love the clothes they see the American rappers and the athletes wearing, but everyone -- young and old -- buys their clothes secondhand in Zambia. It is better-made than what our own clothing industry used to make before they all closed down, and it's certainly cheaper since it's used clothing. But is this the way to develop your economy? I don't think so."



This southern African country once had a thriving clothing industry. But when government officials began opening Zambia's economy to foreign trade 10 years ago in exchange for loans from international donors, tons of cheap, secondhand clothing began to pour into the country, virtually duty free.

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