Cheery

A really dismal view on the retreat of globalization from Foreign Policy in Focus:

From today’s vantage point, globalization appears to have been not a new, higher phase in the development of capitalism but a response to the underlying structural crisis of this system of production. Fifteen years since it was trumpeted as the wave of the future, globalization seems to have been less a “brave new phase” of the capitalist adventure than a desperate effort by global capital to escape the stagnation and disequilibria overtaking the global economy in the 1970s and 1980s. The collapse of the centralized socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe deflected people’s attention from this reality in the early 1990s.

Many in progressive circles still think that the task at hand is to “humanize” globalization. Globalization, however, is a spent force. Today’s multiplying economic and political conflicts resemble, if anything, the period following the end of what historians refer to as the first era of globalization, which extended from 1815 to the eruption of World War I in 1914. The urgent task is not to steer corporate-driven globalization in a “social democratic” direction but to manage its retreat so that it does not bring about the same chaos and runaway conflicts that marked its demise in that earlier era.

A Marxist historian would point to the breakdown of the first era of globalization (I'd argue with that count, but not now) as the cause of the first two World Wars, so the idea that we're entering another era of chaos and disequilibrium is not exactly comforting. Even a non-Marxist could see that period of transition from one hegemonic power to a period of disorder are the most prone to devastating systemic wars.

So, um, happy new year.