WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, FDCA, Il Cantiere #18: Productive globalization: economic models and social analyzes - Roberto Manfredini (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The crisis of state sovereignty, produced by the globalization of the economy,

has brought out new figures of "sovereign" within multinationals or international
organizations that have updated the legal status of the post-modern state. This
has aroused a new interest in studies of a fluid international reality with new
competing powers. ---- There are those who have gone so far as to define a new
"empire" by a single superpower, or there is a reading that glimpses a
"biopolitical" crisis of a totalitarian nature. On a general level, there are
those who envisage the end of the State and of centuries-old modernity with the
affirmation of a new entity, the Market.
One of the most critical analyzes of contemporary society is that represented
metaphorically in the transition from solidity to liquidity, in today's
capitalist economy, precariousness and uncertainty have become central elements
of society, with consequences that have repercussions in the various fields of
culture and politics. Society no longer recognizes and no longer seeks any
alternative to itself, the removal of the citizen-consumer from the public sphere
gives way to liberalization and deregulation in the areas of the labor market,
the welfare state and international law.
In support of the ideologies of the Market, active in America since the 1970s,
there is the "anarcho-capitalist" or even "paleolibertarian" current, which marks
a break with the tradition of libertarian thought, as it places these movements
in the most extreme area of the political conservatism.
Based on the liberalism elaborated by the Austrian school (Ludwig von Mises,
Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Popper) and taking up the classical theory of
natural rights expressed by John Locke, the two main exponents of this current
are: Robert Nozick (1938-2002) and Murray Rothbard (1926-1995).
Supporters of free competition and total privatization of the economy, regulated
solely by the mechanisms of competition between private individuals, they hope
for the extinction of the state and all forms of taxation. More strategic
objectives are the attack on the welfare state and trade unions, on egalitarian
liberalism as well as on socialist planning. By overturning the contractualist
positions on the legitimacy of the state, anarcho-capitalism hopes for a process
of relations between proprietary individuals with a purely mercantile nature,
without any need for a constituent pact between them.
These movements that appear in the USA at the end of the cold war differ from the
classical or contemporary tradition of the left-libertarians (Godwin, Rocker,
Warren, Chomsky) and are placed in the conservative movement. They aggregate
various liberal, far-left or neo-conservative sectors around a new isolationist,
liberal vision and contrary to the "Wilson" doctrine of war interventionism in
support of democracies. The central point of their elaboration is the radical
condemnation of the modern state, proposing the defense of natural rights such as
freedom or property.
In the 80s of the twentieth century these movements aggregated in the Libertarian
Party but also around the electoral program of Ronald Reagan, up to the support
of the electoral campaign, in 1992, of the conservative republican Pat Buchanan,
supporting the program of returning to the origins of the American Old Republic;
or providing content even to the "alt-right" Richard Spencer.
The goal of this campaign is an attempt to overturn the experience of the
protests of the 1960s which, according to them, led to the overcoming of
traditional culture and the decline of American civil religion.
Instruments of this return to origins are identified in a society founded on
capitalist laissez-faire, in a retreat of the welfare state to the models of
Victorian England or the United States of the 19th century, with a welfare system
based on individual charity and compassionate philanthropy .
Therefore, the abolition of mandatory pension systems, and of state
interventionism, considered elements of decivilization and responsible for the
crisis of the economic system such as inflation or debt for military spending.
This is also part of an isolationist strategy, aimed at hindering international
exchange treaties (NAFTA, GATT, WTO) as expressions of a supranational
government, to which American decision-making power would be transferred. The
path that the globalization of markets has undertaken may therefore have
different implications on a social level
and landings not yet defined in terms of law and democracy; in particular, a
supranational constitution project that surpasses that of the national state has
not yet been defined.

These analyzes and reflections on globalization have been the basis of various
elaborations. There are those who have responded to the historical dysfunctions
of the capital economy (Imperialism, Monopoly, the corporate state) and in
particular to the fall in the rate of profit, aiming at the processes of autonomy
of the financial markets, separating production from monetary distribution. Even
the hypotheses in the trade union field, on the control of investments and on the
organization of work in companies, were redimensioned in the following decades
and inserted in new macroeconomic contexts. The process of globalization
associates the effects of the cycle of accumulation and consumption in a model of
deficit exchange between backward and advanced countries.
The globalization of the economy has also brought out new forms of sovereignty
(multinationals or international organisations) which overlap with the juridical
status of the national state. Studies on the international reality also
hypothesize the bourgeoisie as the only and last class and foresee new economic
competitions between nations.
The study on the organization of work in this new productive reality has opened a
debate that has involved various cultural areas, also at an international level.
The general analysis on the European industrial reality identifies also the new
sociological basis of the working class, the role of employees and the end of the
Fordist compromise born in Europe after World War II. The studies of Michel
Aglietta, Robert Boyer and Alain Lipietz on the induced processes of economic
rupture are resumed; the different aspects of the contemporary factory are
analyzed: widespread, fluid, integrated, automatic and we also focus on the new
terms of social consumption, such as telematics, and on the transformations of
professional or specialization wage categories and finally on modern crises such
as the ecological one or the social fabric.
Other examples of industry analysis can connect these aspects with the globally
structured economy in all areas of the planet. The analyzes focus on the
reorganization of the production units, on the industrial reorganization by
geographical area and on the types of product and, as regards the organization of
work, on the campaigns for total quality. On the side of the transformation of
work and its crisis, the works of James O'Connor on the globalization of work or
of Sergio Bologna on self-employment are taken up again. On the subject of work
flexibility, we note the analyzes by Fabio M. Rapiti, who analyzes the
experiences of flexibility started from the mid-1980s, noting how these do not
increase the competitiveness of companies, but only widen the precariousness of work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Noam Chomsky, The fifth freedom, Elèuthera, Milan, 1987;
Alain Bihr, Du "Grand Soir" to "L'alternative". Le mouvement ouvrier européen en
crise, Series "Portes ouvertes", Les Editions Ouvriere, Paris, 1991;
Danilo Zolo, Globalization. A map of the problems, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 2004;
Fabio Chiusi, The man who wants to solve the future, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin,
2023.

http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca