Globalization and the Decline of Social Reform: Into the Twenty-First Century - Softcover

Teeple, Gary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551930269 ISBN 13: 9781551930268

Publisher: Garamond Press, 2000

Synopsis

Globalization is the coming of the 'triumph of capitalism,' the growing ascendancy of economics over politics, of corporate demands over public policy, of private over public interest. It represents the approaching completion of the capitalization of the world, carried out by 'self-generating capital' in the form of transnational corporations within an increasingly coherent transnational regulatory regime. Neo-liberal policies at the national level, argues the author, represent the policy side of globalization, the political requirements of global capital, the harmonization of the national with the global. They mark the transition between two eras, from a world of national corporations and nation states to a world of transnational corporations and supranational regulatory agencies. The author examines the postwar conditions that gave rise to the modern welfare state and the politics of social democracy throughout the industrial world. He traces the transformation of these conditions in the 1970s with the coming of a computer-based mode of production and the consequent necessity for global relations of production. In the face of global assertions of the rights of corporate private property, he makes the case that the world's subordinate classes and peoples will have to create global means of resistance.

About this title

Review:

"...argued with impressive cogency and authority... extraordinarily well documented. Peter Eglin, Canadian Public Policy;...has already taken its well deserved place as a required text in numerous undergraduate courses. Indeed, it has already infiltrated a number of less academic, more transformative working-class circles. James R. Sacouman, Labour/Le Travail"

Synopsis:

Too often we assume implicitly the continuous existence of a world of capitalist nation-states, without recognizing that they came into existence at a certain point in history. This book examines postwar conditions that gave rise to the welfare state, explains how these conditions were changed in the 1970s and argues that more than ever we now need to find alternatives. First published in 1995, this revised and updated edition has expanded the discussion of the preconditions of globalizatin with a focus on the reciprocal relation between the rise of transnatinal corporations (TNCs) and the creation of a global "enabling framework". A new chapter on globalization as the second bourgeois revolution makes an analogy to the transformations that took place with the coming of the first bourgeois revolutions most of which occurred in the 18th and 19th centuries and, like the social, political and economic structures that they displaced, they too will necessarily be displaced or transformed. A new chapter 8 continues with a critical review of some current objections to the idea of globalization.

By addressing counter arguments, the shortcomings of the concept and the nature of the reality conceptualized can be analyzed and assessed. In a final section, the author addresses the new contradictions that globalization brings and the consequent necessity for new forms of resistance and alternatives. There can be no successful opposition without knowledge of what it is that is opposed to without knowledge of the principles of the future that is desired.

About this edition

• Publisher: Garamond Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1551930269
• ISBN 13: 9781551930268
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 256