ER2000-09-#02 Globalisation: The Doctrine of Inevitable Revolution in Reverse (Economic Reform, Vol. 12, No. 8, August 2000) The Civil Commons Globalisation: The Doctrine of Inevitable Revolution in Reverse by John McMurtry The slogan "Marxism is dead" was proclaimed almost immediately on the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Very soon after, a strange ideological inversion occurred. In place of "the inevitable victory of the proletariat" which Marx had predicted almost 150 years earlier, there was the "inevitable process of globalisation" instead. The victory of the working classes of the world, according to scientific socialism, was inevitable because of historically deepening contradictions between capitalist productive forces and relations, contradictions which would by dialectical necessity issue in socialism (or "the first stage of communism" as Marx put it). This defining certitude of the greatest oppositional movement in the history of capitalism did not, as we know, turn out to be in accord with the facts. Much has been made of the failure of this "inevitable revolution." An industry of post-modernism has arisen to attack Marx's meta-narrative of necessity for violating the contingent, the plural and the free. But a still deeper irony of history has emerged which no-one in the post-modern global order has yet noticed. The certitude of an inevitable world revolution has merely shifted sides. What was once abhorred by liberal theory as the metaphysic of "Marxist economic determinism" has become instead the neo-liberal program of "inevitable economic restructuring." What was formerly condemned as a brutal violation of people's freedom to decide how they live was now declared a matter in which "there is no alternative." All societies on earth have now been issued one decree. "Society must adjust to the necessary changes of globalisation, or perish." As for the reversal of Marxist and market positions on the question of knowing history in advance and the economic necessity of society-wide shock treatments and social re-engineerings, this astonishing transferral of superpower identities has transpired in the dark regions of the Western ruling-class psyche. Its psychopathological projection and re-introjection remains repressed today. But the irony is that no moral anchor was more deep-seated before the fall of "the Marxist state" than repudiation of such "denials of free will" and of "moral choice." No doctrine was thought more objectionable by such cornerstone social ethicists as Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin than one prescribing belief in whole societies' submission to "the external forces of historical necessity." The heroic story of Western civilisation was finally triumphant, most believed, when such scientistic predestinations of world power had been defeated by the free world in the victory over Nazism, and the defeat of "the evil empire" of the USSR But hardly had this last historic victory of global freedom been won than memory of the old enemy of historical inevitability dissolved unremarked into thin air. The "global market revolution" has ever since been declared as an overriding destiny, determining the future as surely as the laws of nature make objects fall and heat rise. Few in this era dare to declare a contrary belief. The test is simply to look at any day's newspapers or television broadcast to see if this ultimate assumption is once overtly questioned by any representative of the world's decision-making institutions or those who comment on their policies. The ineluctable destiny of all societies on earth to compete for survival within this final global order-no alternative is conceived possible-has achieved a status beyond doctrinal dogma. It has become a regulating principle of public consciousness. So occupied with its demands are the mass media across cultures and continents, so commandeered by its funding regime have the academies and sciences of the world become, that one comes to believe that indeed this "new revolution of shareholder value" is inevitable. When Winston finally confesses in Orwell's 1948 novel 1984 that "at last he loved Big Brother," he sounded the tocsin of a time to come. One day soon, in under a half century, all would assume as their home of life what they had earlier set their soul against-an order imposed on them by wheels of a higher, inexorable power whose finally defining command is that there is no alternative but to submit to it. More astoundingly, all human will would be urged to dedicate itself above all to serving its demands. When Margaret Thatcher made the slogan "There is no alternative" so famous that the acronym TINA has since become a transnational watchword of recognition, the backbone of six centuries of British working class struggle first resisted as a battle for the future. But saturation conditioning of consciousness with no other public message permitted reproduction eventually overwhelms the mind. If the mass media's spaces are owned by those who multiply their wealth from the "necessary economic restructuring," then how can opposing voices be communicated to the public as a whole? In such circumstances of silencing, but with new conditions of social insecurity lurking everywhere underneath, there are two general pathways for adapting disquieted publics to the "no alternative" rule. Both depend on the new final selectors for political survival and success-the corporate media and the financial markets. One course for maintaining the no-alternative order is to finance official and unofficial armed militias to terrorize, torture and kill effective opponents-as typically US-directed and narcotic-financed operations have done from Indonesia and Chile to Guatemala and the former Yugoslavia. At the other pole of decision path, which is confined to the most developed electorates, a leader of "progressive" aspect can be selected to be presented to the public as the finder of "a new message." Here what is sold is a poll-validated image of reassurance which will appeal to increasingly insecure populations who remain uncertain of the new rule within which they could be the next to lose out. There are also various paths in between the poles of "no alternative"- from dumb-down bullies who ram through the social re-engineering behind the orchestrated solidarity of attack-the-poor "populism" (as in Ontario Canada), to back-pedalling social democrats redirected in office by business and media-created crises (as in Ontario in an earlier term of government, or in Germany later). What all have in common in the post-1991 era is rigid maintenance of the no-alternative order. Let us here consider Britain. To ensure that its inevitably restructured economy continued down the same path after Maggie Thatcher and her lacklustre Tory successor, a movement was selected from long-out-of-office Labour. It was called "the third way," a vague slogan recycled from the days of the Vietnam War. The "third way" was led by Tony Blair who could be counted on to, precisely, not represent another way, but to hold to the course of "no alternative" as a condition of achieving office. Before being trusted by business as the successor TINA regime, Blair had to make his servitude to the new order perfectly clear to the primary selectors-the corporate mass media and the nation's London financial centre. This route of succession was predictable from the given circumstances if Blair's leadership was to be counted on to sustain the still ongoing revolution. Blair turned the Labour Party inside out to secure this trust. The Murdoch press in ongoing exchange favoured him with the mass media attention required for public image sale. The London financial district silently approved by not warning of a severe economic downturn or threatening capital flight if he were elected (the standard blocking tactics against a real Labour government). Evidence for the success of these arrangements is not hard to piece together. Only favourable coverage of Blair-unheard of for an actual Labour leader-came from the Murdoch press empire. No dire forecasts or even hints of economic instability came from London's financial district. The other side of the arrangement proceeded in pattern. Murdoch's giant corporation was not pursued to pay tens of millions of British taxes which it continued to evade by financial location in offshore banks (again unprecedentedly). Questions of the legality of Murdoch's growing media-and-professional sport monopoly were at the same time not further raised by the "New Labour" government. More significantly, the London financial district got what it had been unable to wrest from any past regime-the "New Labour" government's formal and immediate relinquishment of all control over national interest rates and currency exchange values to the Bank of England, so that elected government control of the nation's main financial levers were now exclusively in London bankers' hands. The public record testifies to all these facts, but only in the fragments of unnoted connections. To observe their pattern at work again, watch the corporate media's lavish attention to the witless Stock Day in Canada, and the executioner President-in-waiting, Junior Bush. John McMurtry is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, ON. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Copyright © 2000 John McMurtry (COMER Publications, used by permission). "Economic Reform" is the monthly journal of the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform (COMER), a Canada-based publishing think-tank. Annual subscription, 12 issues, is CD$30 in Canada, US$30 United States, and US$35 Overseas. 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