Impending Threat of Rent Globalization and the Defence of Capitalism by Labour

Abstract

It is wrong that globalization necessarily leads to a world system where all participating economies are capitalist economies. Under the prevailing conditions of disempowerment of labour, capitalism is too weak to transform rent-based underdeveloped economies. Globalization is driven by currency devaluation, which transforms new comparative advantage into cost competitiveness. The major check on devaluation is full employment. It is often not achieved in countries engaging in devaluation-driven exports. In order to globalize capitalism, labour in the South would have to be empowered. At the theoretical level, a neoliberal understanding of capitalism as against Keynesianism blocks an understanding of the importance of mass consumption for maintaining capitalism. At the political level, mass movements where they exist in the South are captured by secular nationalism or cultural nationalism. An increasingly fragmented multipolar system emerges where governments promote rent seeking.