To Be Or Not To Be: The Nation Centric World Order Under Globalization
By Jerry Harris

Nation centric forms still exist in all social, political and economic arenas, and they have a particularly strong hold ideologically, within popular consciousness and in concepts of how the world functions. There are also real existing material benefits connected to the remnants of the old system in all classes throughout society. But all this is under unending attack and change from the new form of accumulation that creates its own alternate relationships, benefits and concepts. This period of transitional instability constitutes the basis of struggle and conflict in the world today, creating a situation of disequilibrium between the descending and ascending forms of accumulation.

As cities, regions and countries transform their structures to insert their economies and social institutions into patterns of global production contradictions between the national and transnational erupt. Most often this process is viewed from a national perspective, as if new policies are forced upon actors incased in a national cocoon reacting to outside forces such as China stealing jobs or immigrants flooding across the border. But the outside is inside. There is no real separation, the process is interconnected and driven by a national remolding to the new transnational economy. True, the emerging relationships are mediated by local conditions, the political balance of forces and previously existing structures. But the real push for change comes from the transnational capitalist class inside the national structure not just outside pressure forcing its will on the nation.

Therefore we can no longer study national conditions without their interconnectness to the transnational. Each nation is at a different stage of transformation, each facing a host of particular issues. Previously existing unequal relationships between the North and South, the size and strength of different classes, the particularities of national institutions, the level of social subsidies, economic infrastructure and political legacy create an array of different responses. All of the historic relationships that were born within each nation/state help codetermine the emerging dialectic. Only by recognizing this uneven development can we begin to understand the specific ways globalization is emerging.

Eventually a structural synthesis will emerge that will lead to the relative institutional stability of a new era. The last structural synthesis produced the institutions of industrial capitalism and the Fordist model of accumulation that arose in opposition to the remnants of the landed gentry and mercantile capitalism. That era was punctuated by many major upheavals. Imperialist rivalries, World War I and II, the Soviet and Chinese revolutions, wars of national liberation and the Great Depression, but all of these reflected contradictions within the industrial capitalist framework. Even the socialist alternative was conceived within the structural limitations of industrialism and the existing international market.

But the transnational era emerging today is a structural shift in the forms of accumulation and social organization that undermine the Fordist model and do away with the decisive role played by the electro/mechanical technology of the industrial era. While capitalism has always been an expansionary system the digital/information revolution is the current framework through which this logic unfolds. The embedding of microprocessors in the tools of production and communication has allowed capitalism to reorganize itself on a qualitatively more integrated level. The entire global financial network, the world spanning command and control system of production and the communication and delivery of hegemonic cultural values are all accomplished with the digital/informational transformation of technology. More >>