(This is the same garbage found in Meghnad Desai's "Marx's Revenge". People
like Desai and John Gray have a rather limited and restricted view of Karl
Marx's views on this topic. Late in life, Marx championed the Russian
communes against the onslaught of capitalism. If Marx were alive today,
he'd be opposed to NAFTA, CAFTA and all the other "free trade" pacts that
Thomas Friedman drools over.)
NY Review, Volume 52, Number 13 · August 11, 2005
Review
The World Is Round
By John Gray
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
by Thomas L. Friedman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,488 pp., $27.50
1.
The belief that a process of globalization is underway which is bringing
about a fundamental change in human affairs is not new. Marx and Engels
expressed it in 1848, when they wrote in a justly celebrated passage in The
Communist Manifesto:
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and
man is at last compelled to face with his sober senses his real conditions
of life and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding
market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of
the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish
connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the
world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption
in every country.... It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to
adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what
it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois
themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
Marx and Engels had no doubt that they were witnessing the emergence of a
global marketa worldwide system of production and consumption that
disregarded national and cultural boundaries. They welcomed this
development, not only for the increasing wealth it produced but also
because they believed it enabled humanity to overcome the divisions of the
past. In the global marketplace nationalism and religion were destined to
be dwindling forces. There would be many convulsionswars, revolutions, and
counterrevolutionsbefore the Communist order was securely established; but
when global capitalism had completed its work a new era in the life of
humankind would begin.
The centrally planned economies that were constructed to embody Marx's
vision of communism have nearly all been swept away, and the mass political
movements that Marxism once inspired are no more. Yet Marx's view of
globalization lives on, and nowhere more vigorously than in the writings of
Thomas Friedman. Like Marx, Friedman believes that globalization is in the
end compatible with only one economic system; and like Marx he believes
that this system enables humanity to leave war, tyranny, and poverty
behind. To his credit Friedman recognizes the parallels between his view
and that of Marx. He cites an illuminating conversation at Harvard in which
the communitarian political theorist Michael Sandel alerted him to the fact
that the process of global "flattening" he examines in his new book was
first identified by Marx, quoting at length from The Communist
Manifestoincluding the passage cited aboveand praising Marx for his
prescience. This acknowledgment of the parallels between his view of
globalization and Marx's theory of history is welcome and useful.
full: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18154
--
www.marxmail.org
