Ominous Proximities | A Critique of Globalisation and Reactionary Ideologies

In their criticism of neoliberalism and globalisation the Left and the Right are sometimes uncannily close. One has to look very carefully to find the differences between their struggles against ‘financial capital’ or ‘speculators.’ Left-wing critics of globalisation often defend themselves with the assertion that there is no protection against uninvited support.

Stephan Günther

Many of the left-wing critics of globalisation argue that their criticisms are not wrong just because they are also formulated from a different political position. However, the notion that their own criticism might principally be short of the mark usually doesn’t occur to them. Yet the affinity to right-wing agitation is self-made: even left-wing criticism of globalisation is often not critical (of the system) but moral. And since morals are the grammar of religion it often ends – just like right-wing criticism – in categories of good and evil and divides of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Closely connected with this type of moral thinking is the reference to ontological categories such as the people, ‘nation state’ or organic communities. Structures are not recognised and criticised, but only their manifestations and thus often also the persons who represent them.
Two examples from the spectrum of critiques of globalisation make this connection between moral judgment and personification clear: Moral and cultural decline are the sure signs of the complete failure of the established politicians. Unlimited craving for profit, lust for power and cold egoism are their base motives. And: The most prominent characteristic of this new form of capitalism is the subjugation of the economy and society to the aim of the maximisation of stock exchange profits, profits from the movement of share prices and from financial speculation. (…) The fear of the loss of social status becomes the decisive driving force for the behaviour of people. (…) Life in the family, with children and in partnership becomes more difficult. The ‘flexibility’ demanded by today’s labour market is antisocial. These quotes are only extracts from longer documents of political agitation. Naturally the parties quoted here – NPD and PDS – draw very different conclusions from their analysis of the new capitalism. But the structure of the arguments is very similar: the craving for profit and financial capital are destroying society, morals, culture, the family and the labour market. This morality of globalisation critics will be demonstrated in the following taking up four of their lines of argument: protection of nature, locality/homeland, labour/financial capital and anti-Americanism/anti-Semitism. The intention is not to equate left-wing and right-wing criticism, but to point out the structural similarities, which have their origin in the fact that parts of the globalisation critical left-wing cultivate the politics of morals and identity instead of a critique of capitalism.

Back to nature

Ten years ago, when the first world summit of the United Nations was held in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, the forest was at the centre of the debates. Whether the tropical rainforests or the European pine forests – they were all threatened. Criticism of this ominous development was aimed first at the obsessive wish for economic growth. The left-wing saw the capitalist system at an end because it was robbing itself of the basis of its own existence, and Greens demanded zero growth. But the arguments changed rapidly: pragmatists looked for opportunities for qualitative growth and sustainable forms of economy – and were joined by NGOs, only to negotiate at the second world summit in Johannesburg with representatives of governments and voice concerns over protection of the environment and species. The radical protectors of nature, on the other hand, soon began to speak of the threat to creation, occupied trees and praised the economic forms of the last natural peoples. In brief: they replaced critiques of capitalism with a backward-looking morality, which sees good in the old and in nature and bad in progress and technology. The protection of nature movement increasingly uses religious motives and arguments. The transfiguration of a supposed originality corresponds to the conservative-religious rhetoric of preserving and living in harmony.
A further line of argument in the critique that directly follows from this has to do with the relationship between local and globalisation. The Local Agenda 21, which came out of the Rio process, sees in the slogan think global – act local the key to the improvement of the world. Practical approaches to environmental protection however – such as support for local agriculture in order to shorten transport distances and thus to reduce the amount of traffic – are often closely associated with an ideology, which formulates a dichotomy between that which is local, which should be protected and preserved, and that which is alien, which threatens to dominate everything that exists. For example in agriculture: the argument of the shorter distances is soon followed by the argument that local farmers use fewer chemicals anyway. Since time immemorial they have produced in small units, using traditional, intrinsic methods, while industrialised agriculture (in the Netherlands or the US) shows no scruples in using pesticides, fungicides and genetically manipulated seeds. The fact that it was Europe, which is praised today as a bulwark against genetically manipulated and fast food, which was the engine for the industrialisation of agriculture, is preferred to be forgotten.

In France and Germany, in particular the debate on regionalisation quickly takes on culturalistic and thus right-wing features. Besides the fear for one’s own cultural industry – against Hollywood and for more German or French songs on the radio – it is above all the rural culture, sometimes also the national culture which is regarded as endangered. As an alternative to uncultured globalisation, old customs are revived or classical methods of cultivation resumed, traditional festivals observed.

That is all harmless as long as it is not utilised as a barrier against that which is different. The critics of McDonaldisation (such as the French farmer activist José Bové) choose to ignore, however, that it is the local farmers who deliver the meat to these fast food chains and that it is the local consumers who prefer Burger King to Nuremberg sausages. What remains, is often an eco-movement concentrated on the homeland, the primary aim of which is to create markets, which are morally superior because they are authentic and ecological. Every historical epoch, every people, has its own way of feeding itself. But when this diversity is destroyed, something fundamental is damaged. Sustenance cannot be made uniform; that would be a direct attack on the lives of people. (Bové)

Good euros, bad euros

The back to nature view of the eco-movement is reactionary in itself, just like back to the soil. In addition, the arguments are closely linked with the notion of honest (manual) labour, which is held to be not only an ecologically good policy but is also stylised to having a value in itself. The farmer who reaps and sows has not yet lost his regard for his environment, he knows every potato field and every one of his cattle. In the hierarchy of jobs he is followed by craftsmen, blue-collar workers, white-collar workers and – there, where honesty stops – bankers, stockbrokers and speculators.
On the stock-exchange, where money is made from money, where you can get richer from a fast click of the mouse than from the work of your own hands, justice cannot prevail. This statement is not wrong. But it becomes wrong if it is not understood that in capitalism every form of work is a commodity and that trading with money is not principally any different from trading with computers or carrots. The initiatives for a worldwide Tobin tax or against the Multilateral Investment Agreement (MAI) imply that financial capital is different from productive capital. The right wing differentiates between hoarding and productive capital. But those who believe they can tell the difference between a euro and a euro or a dollar and a dollar also divide the owners into good and bad capitalists: on the one side are the productive forces, the investors, the farmers, the Europeans; and on the other the banks, financial capital, speculators, the Americans, the transnational companies and their bosses.
This personification and individualisation leads straight to anti-Semitism. For the (moral) differentiation between speculative and productive capital, between labour and the money economy makes possible the naming of the bad in the system. They are thirsty for money and powerful – the speculators and bankers, the bosses and the string-pullers. Such personalised conspiracies, which do not need the Jews in order to be structurally anti-Semitic, only work if one does not perceive capitalism as a system and at the same time perceives oneself as a bystander. It is hard to find rational reasons why this is possible – particularly in the epoch of globalisation, in which Daimler-Benz (production) and Deutsche Bank (speculation) are closely connected, in which the productive Germans have bought their people’s shares (although this has not necessarily made them rich) and in which the generation of heirs in any case lives off its savings rather than from its hourly wages.
Thus, if the globalisation-critical movement receives growth from an undesired corner, if right-wing demonstrators join in the protest marches and shout slogans like national rebellion against globalisation this is not necessarily for purely tactical reasons. In their concern over the loss of cultural identity, the fear of the destruction of creation and in the apportioning of the blame for this to financial capital or the US American cultural industry, right-wing oriented groups and persons are often closer in substance to the globalisation-critical movement than the movement should want them to be.

Stephan Günther works for the Information Centre 3rd World (iz3w) in Freiburg, Germany

Original article title in German: Fatale Nachbarschaften. Globalisierungskritik und Reaktionäre Ideologien, published in,Blätter des IZ3W no. 265, Wo steht die Bewegung, Eine Zwischenbilanz der Globalisierungskritik, (Where does the movement stand? – An interim balance of globalisation criticism) Nov. 2002, p. 58-59, translated by Irene Wilson.