[OPE-L:6631] [OPE-L:92] Globalisation

Brendan Tuohy (Reg@ReddFish.Co.NZ)
Thu, 3 Sep 1998 16:51:17 +1200

Kia ora koutou.

First, thanks to Andrew Kliman and Bill Cochrane for providing plenty of
reading for me to do on the debates on Marx's theory.

I want to take up Alfredo's suggestion that globalisation is a question
we should discuss. It seems to me that I've read screeds of stuff in
which globalisation appears as an inevitable and homogeneous process
(and a rationale for a pro-imperialist orientation). But empirical
justification for this characterisation of globalisation seems very weak
to me.

Is globalisation happening? OK, international economic links have grown
faster than intranational ones. But is it true that international trade
within "blocs" has risen faster than between blocs? Surely that's the
case for the EU, for example. In that case the European economy is
becoming less global, not more (and more regional).

The implications of a this view (a new partitioning of the world between
imperialist blocs) are obviously very different from the implications of
the conventional globalisation schema (a Kautskyian
"ultra-imperialism").

I would like to see some quantitative analysis of the extent of
regionalisation versus globalisation, for financial and real economic
links. Does anyone have that information?

Brendan