A post-history strip tease

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A post-history strip tease

Posted on April 26, 2013 by The Global Realm

A post-history strip tease

By Pepe Escobar
THE ROVING EYE
Asia Times
April 26, 2013

This is an abridged version of a lecture this week at the 13th Seminary of Political Solidarity Don Juan Chavez in memoriam at the University of Zaragoza, Spain.

How cozy it would be to summon the retro-spirit of Burt Bacharach to define our geopolitical future and start singing, “What the world needs now, is love, sweet love”.

Sorry to scratch the vinyl. We interrupt this lovey-dovey to bring you breaking news. You have been catapulted to the age of the new Hobbesian “hero” – digital and virtual as well as physical.

Casino capitalism – aka turbocharged neoliberalism – is ruthlessly destroying the last vestiges of the welfare state and the egalitarian consensus in the industrialized West, possibly with the odd Scandinavian exception. It has established a “New Normal” consensus, intruding into private lives, dominating the political debate and institutionalizing for good the marketization of life itself – the final act of fierce corporate exploitation of natural resources, land and cheap labor.

Integration, socialization and multiculturalism are being corroded by disintegration, segregation, and widespread de-socialization – a direct consequence of the David Harvey-coined notion of “dis-accumulation” (society devouring its own).

This state of things is what Flemish philosopher and art historian Lieven De Cauter, in his book Entropic Empire, calls “the Mad Max phase of globalization”.

It is a Hobbesian world, a latent global civil war, a war of all against all; the economic haves against the have-nots; intolerant Wahhabis against “apostate” Shi’ites; the children of the Enlightenment against all manner of fundamentalists; the Pentagon militarization of Africa against Chinese mercantilism.

The disintegration and balkanization of Iraq, detonated by the Pentagon’s Shock and Awe 10 years ago, was a sort of prelude for this Brave New Disorder. The neo-con worldview, from 2001 to 2008, advanced the project with its ideology of Let’s Finish Off The State, everywhere; once again Iraq was the best example. But from bombing a sovereign nation back to the Stone Age, the project moved to civil war engineering – as in Libya and, hopefully for the engineers, Syria.

When we have armchair analysts, influential or otherwise, paid by flush foundations – usually in the US but also in Western Europe – pontificating about “chaos and anarchy”, they are just reinforcing a self-fulfilling prophecy. If “chaos and anarchy” turns them on, it’s because they are just reflecting the predominant libidinal economy, from reality TV to all sorts of what De Cauter describes as “psychotic games” – inside a room, inside an octagon, inside an island or virtually inside a digital box.

So welcome to the geopolitics of the young 21st century: an age of non-stop war (virtualized or not), sharp polarization and a pile-up of catastrophies.

After Hegel, Marx and that mediocre functionary of Empire, Fukuyama; but also after brilliant deconstructions by Gianni Vattimo, Baudrillard or Giorgio Agamben, this is what we get.

For Marx the end of history was a classless society. How romantic. Instead, in the second half of the 20th century, capitalism married Western liberal democracy till death do them part. Well, death is now upon them both. The Red Dragon, as in China, has joined the party and came up with a new toy; single-party neoliberalism.

An individualistic, self-indulgent, passive, easily controllable consumer drowned in a warped form of democracy that basically favors insiders – and very wealthy players; how could that be a humanist ideal? Yet the PR was so good that this is what legions in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America aspire to. But it’s still not enough for the geo-economic Masters of the Universe.

Thus post-history as the ultimate reality show. And war neoliberalism as its favorite weapon.

Choose your camp

We are now familiar with Giorgio Agamben’s paradigm of the state of emergency – or state of exception. The ultimate example, until the mid 20th century, was the concentration camp. But post-history is more creative.

We have the Muslim-only concentration camp – as in Guantanamo. We have the simulacrum of a concentration camp – as in Palestine, which is virtually walled and under 24/7 surveillance, and where “the law” is dictated by an occupying power. And we have what happened – as a dry run – last week in Boston; the euphemistic “lockdown”, which is a suspension of the law to the benefit of martial law; no freedom of movement, no cell phone network, and you if you go the corner shop to buy a soft drink you may be shot. A whole city in the industrialized North turned into a high-tech concentration camp.

Agamben talked about the state of exception as a top-down excess of sovereignty, and the state of nature – as in Hobbes – as a bottom-up absence of sovereignty. After the Global War on Terror (GWOT), which, despite whatever the Pentagon says, is indeed eternal (or The Long War, as defined in 2002, and part of the Pentagon doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance), we can talk about a merger.

The war on terror, seductively normalized by the Obama administration, was and remains a global state of exception, even though trappings come and go; the Patriot Act; shadowy executive orders; torture – a recent US bipartisan panel accused all top officials of the George W Bush administration of torture; extraordinary rendition, with which secular then allies of the West such as Libya and Syria collaborated, not to mention Eastern European nations and the usual Arab puppets, Egypt under Mubarak included; and the sprawling apparatus of homeland security.

As for a real concentration camp, once again we don’t need to look further than Guantanamo – which, contrary to Obama’s campaign promise, will remain open indefinitely, as well as some among the vast number of Bush-era CIA “secret” prisons.

In all these cases whatever happens to social life – suspension, dissolution, balkanization, implosion, a state of emergency – what happens to normal citizens is that citizenship (bios) evaporates. But ruling elites – political, economic, financial – don’t care about citizenship. They’re only interested in passive consumers.

Pick your dystopia

 
The dystopias of the New Global Disorder are all being normalized. We’re familiar with state terrorism – as in the CIA’s “secret” drone war over tribal areas in Pakistan, in Yemen, Somalia and soon in other African latitudes. And we’re also familiar with non-state terrorism, as applied by that nebula that we in the West describe as “al-Qaeda”, with its myriad franchises and copycats.

We have a bunch of hyper-states – such as the US, China and Russia and the EU as whole – and myriad infra-states or failed states, some by design (Libya, and Syria is on the way), as well as satellite states, some essential to the Western-controlled system such as the Gulf Counter-Revolution Club (GCC – Gulf Cooperation Council).

It’s always enlightening to look back at how the Pentagon interprets this world. Here we find an “integrating core” opposed to a “non-integrated gap”. The “core” is what matters, in this case North America and most, but not all, of the EU. Sheepish, passive populations, with a consumer elite – the fast, mobile elites of liquid modernity, described by Bauman – and a vast mass of surviving toilers, a great deal of them expendable (as the millions of European victims of troika austerity policies who will never find a decent job again).

For the non-integrated gap, it’s Hobbes all the way. In the case of Africa – until virtually yesterday derided as a black hole – there’s an added geopolitical power play; how to counter-attack the extraordinary penetration of Chinese mercantilism over the last decade. The Pentagon’s response is to deploy Africom everywhere; to subdue nations that are too independent, such as Libya; and in the case of the French elite, also on the bandwagon, to try to regain some imperial muscle in Mali, profiting exactly from the implosion and balkanization of Libya.

The look of post-history, its aesthetic ideal, is the city as theme park. Los Angeles may have been the archetype but the best examples are Las Vegas, Dubai and Macao. In the absence of Umberto Eco and Baudrillard, who reveled in the mirror images of simulacra, we may follow master architect Rem Koolhaas – a keen observer of the urban dementia in southern China – to learn what junk space is all about.

Then there’s the security obsession – from cities like London turning into a sprawling version of Bentham’s Panopticum to the pathetic strip tease ritual at every airport, not to mention the gated condo or “community”, more like gated atoms, as the emblem of capsular civilization. Guerrilla counter-attacks, though, may be as lethal as Sunni Iraqis fighting the Americans in the “triangle of death” in the mid-2000s. In Sao Paulo, Brazil – the ultimate violent megalopolis – gangs “clone” cars and license plates, fool security at the door of gated condos, drive to the garage, and proceed to systematically rob each apartment in every floor.

You’re history 

Conceptually, post-history cuts all corners. The flow of history is degraded as fake. Simulacrum trumps reality. We see history repeating not as tragedy and farce but as a double farce; an overlapping example is jihadis in Syria weaponized just like the former “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan in the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad conflating with the Western gang in the UN Security Council trying to apply to Syria what they got away with in Libya; regime change.

We also have history repeating itself as cloning; neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics beating the West in its industrialization game – in terms of speed – while at the same time repeating the same mistakes, from the mindless excesses of an acquisition mentality to no respect for the environment.

It goes without saying that post-history buries the Enlightenment – as favoring the emergence of all sorts of fundamentalisms. So it had also to bury international law; from bypassing the UN to launch a war on Iraq in 2003 to using a UN resolution to launch a war on Libya in 2011. And now Britain and France are taking no prisoners trying to bypass the UN or even NATO itself and weaponize the “rebels” in Syria.

So we have a New Medievalism that cannot but fit wealthy neo-theocracy – as in Saudi Arabia and Qatar; because they are Western allies, or puppets, internally they may remain medieval. Superimposed, we have the politics of fear – which essentially rules Fortress America and Fortress Europe; fear of The Other, which can be occasionally Asian but most of the time Islamic.

What we don’t have is a political/philosophical vision of the future. Or a historical political program; political parties are only worried about winning the next election.

How would a post-state system look like? Independent minds don’t trust mammoth, asymmetrical, wobbly blocs like the EU, or the G-20, or even aspiring multipolars such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa – which still do not represent a real alternative to the Western-controlled system). No one is thinking in terms of a structural mutation of the system. Marx was beyond right on this: what determines history are objective, concrete, palpable processes – some of them very complex – affecting the economic and technological infrastructure.

What is possible to infer is that the real historical subject from now on is technology – as Jean-Francois Lyotard and Paul Virilio were already conceptualizing in the 1980s and 1990s. Technology will keep advancing way beyond the capitalist system. Techno-science is on the driving seat of history. But that also means war.

War and technology are Siamese twins; virtually all technology gets going as military technology. The best example is how the Internet completely changed our lives, with immense geo-economic and political ramifications; Beijing, in a 2010 white paper, may have hailed the Internet as a “crystallization of human wisdom”, but no state filters more information on the Internet than China. Pushing the scenario to a dystopian limit, Google’s Eric Schmidt argues, correctly, that with a flip of a switch, soon an entire country could even disappear from the Internet.

So, essentially, we may forget about a utopian regression to the state of the tribal nomad – as much as we may be fascinated by them, be they in Africa or in the Wakhan corridor in Tajikistan. If we survey the geopolitical landscape from Ground Zero to Boston, the only “models” are declinations of entropy.

Meet the neoliberal Adam

Now for post-history’s favorite weapon: war neoliberalism. The best analysis these past few years by far is to be found in French geostrategist Alain Joxe’s book Les Guerres de L’Empire Global.

Joxe mixes it all up, because it is all interconnected – the eurocrisis, the European debt crisis, occupations and wars, restriction of civil liberties, totally corrupted elites – to unmask the project of Neoliberalism’s Global Empire, which goes way beyond the American Empire.

Financialization’s ultimate goal is unlimited accumulation of profit – a system where the wealthy get much wealthier and the poor get literally nothing (or, at best austerity). The real-life Masters of the Universe are a denationalized rentier class – cannot even call them noblesse, because mostly their absence of taste and critical sense is appalling, as in purveyors of unabashed bling bling. What they do is to the benefit of corporations, instead of the protecting functions of states. In this state of things military adventures become police doctrine. And a new information technology – from drones to “special” munitions – can be used against popular movements, not only in the South but also the North.

Joxe is able to show how a technological revolution led at the same time to the IT management of that goddess, The Market, as well as the robotization of war. So here we have a mix of economic, military and technological mutations, in parallel, leading to an acceleration of decisions that totally pulverize the long span of politics, generating a system incapable of regulating either finance or violence. Between the dictatorship of the “markets” and social democracy, guess who’s winning hands down.

In fact, Slavoj Zizek had already posed the key question, at least in terms of the Decline of the West. The (closet) winner is in fact “capitalism with Asian values’ – which, of course, has nothing to do with Asian people and everything to do with the clear and present tendency of contemporary capitalism to limit or even suspend democracy”. (See here.)

French philosopher Jean Claude Michea takes the political analysis further. He argues that post-modern politics has become in fact a negative art – defining the least bad society possible. That’s how liberalism – which shaped modern Western civilization – became, as neoliberalism, the “politics of lesser evil”. Well, “lesser evil” for who’s in control, of course, and damn the rest.

In another crucial book, Michea comes up with the delightful metaphor of the neoliberal Adam as the new Orpheus, condemned to escalate the path of Progress with no authorization to look back.

Not many contemporary thinkers are equipped to thrash Left and Right in equally devastating measure. Michea tells us that both Left and Right have submitted to the original myth of capitalist thinking; this “noir anthropology” that makes Man an egoist by nature. And he asks how could the institutionalized Left have abandoned the ambition of a just, decent society – or how the neoliberal wolf has wreaked havoc among the socialist sheep.

Beyond neoliberalism and/or a desire for social democracy, what the reality show tells us is that an internecine global civil war is at hand – the hypothesis I explored in my 2007 book Globalistan. When we mix Washington’s pivoting to Asia; the obsession with regime change in Iran; the fear of Western elites with the ascension of China; the real Arab Spring, which has not even started, via young generations who want political participation but without being constrained by religious fundamentalism; Muslim resentment against what is perceived as a New Crusade against them; the growth of neo-fascism in Europe; and the advanced pauperization of the Western middle class, it’s hard to think about love.

And still – Burt Bacharach to the rescue – that’s exactly what the world needs now.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-260413.html

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GLOBALISTAN: How the Globalized World Is Dissolving Into Liquid War

by Pepe Escobar

Globalistan weaves three parallel and intersecting themes: globalization, energy wars and the Long War. It shows how globalization is not proceeding according to the myth of "everyone profits": instead, it is fragmenting the world into even more explosive inequality, into "stans" - some stans configured as fortresses, some stans at war with others. Energy wars, and the mul...more Globalistan weaves three parallel and intersecting themes: globalization, energy wars and the Long War. It shows how globalization is not proceeding according to the myth of "everyone profits": instead, it is fragmenting the world into even more explosive inequality, into "stans" - some stans configured as fortresses, some stans at war with others. Energy wars, and the multiple intersections of globalization and war, only increase the polarization. Globalistan argues that the world is being dissolved into Liquid War - a natural consequence of "liquid modernity," a concept formulated by Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. The book is 80% based on reportage - from China to Central Asia and Russia; before, during and after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; in Iran and in the Middle East; in Western Europe, Western Africa and South America. It is also an Atlas - with maps - of the world in conflict.

Paperback, 368 pages

Published January 1st 2007 by Nimble Books

ISBN

0978813820 (ISBN13: 9780978813826)

original title

GLOBALISTAN: How the Globalized World Is Dissolving Into Liquid War

Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War, by Pepe Escobar

Book Review

By F. William Engdahl

Global Research, April 03, 2007

3 April 2007

Region: USA

Theme: 9/11 & 'War on Terrorism', US NATO War Agenda

Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War,  

By Pepe Escobar,

Nimble Books LLC.

This marvelous book by Pepe Escobar, the well-known ‘Roving Eye’ of Asia Times Online, ought to be placed on the desk of every member of the US Congress, as well as British Parliament members and any others who are debating placing their troops in far-flung remote areas of the world to ‘make the world safe for Globalistan.’

Escobar is at his inimitable best in his personal narratives, with his keen eye for the absurdities of the globalizing world, the contrast between obscenely wealthy and dirt poor. It is no simple description, however. He has not merely gone to Iraq or Afghanistan as a journalist embedded in to a NATO fighting unit to report the filtered perceptions allowed reporters in this bizarre new form of controlled journalism. Escobar gets out of the jeep, wanders off the beaten paths, into the villages, talks with the rich, the poor, the young, the old, the scholars, the tradesmen. The result is in the best tradition of a Peter Schall-Latour or John Gunther, the famous political traveler of the 1940’s.

Yet this book should not be mistaken for a travelogue through the mysterious regions of Eurasia or Latin America. It is a rich, political history of our time.

Escobar manages to capture the absurd element of what he appropriately names ‘Jihad Inc’ as a Made in America phenomenon emerging from the ill-considered experiment in the early 1980’s by a part of US intelligence to unleash the force of Islamic believers against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan: “Jihad Inc is an American invention, along with associate executive directors Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan. It was a US strategy in USSR-invaded Afgjhanistan in the 1980’s—‘Let’s launch one billion Muslims against the Evil Empire!—that catapulted jihad to the forefront of political Islam. Zia ul-Haq, the Pakistani dictator, supported by billions of dollars, could not pass up the opportunity to launch a true, pan-Islamic jihad against Russian infidels. Wahabi Saudi Arabia also jumped at the golden opportunity to spread its rigid interpretation of Islam. In 1985 Ronald Reagan described the Afghan jihadis visiting him at the White House as the ‘moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers.’ Even at the time Whitney Houston-fan Osama bin Laden would frown if landed in the same corner of lower Paradise in the company of Thomas Jefferson. The Looney Tunes element of it all is deliriously funny—if it was not tragic. First the US pitted political Islam against communism. Then communism died. Now it’s the US against political Islam. A historical ‘what if’ perfectly allows us to think that were the Cold War still on, everyone would still be watching the same movie…” (p.92).

The writer manages to mix his unique wealth of personal experiences as a global journalist talking, listening, observing, with that of a serious student of culture and history. Another brief excerpt is useful: “But then, around mid-2004, Islamic scholars from Morocco to Malaysia started to finally legitimize al Qaeda as a Muqadamaul Jaish—in fact a revolutionary vanguard. This totally Western concept was absolutely unheard of in Islam—well, at least until the symbolically-charged spring of 2003 when Baghdad was ‘liberated’ by George W. Bush’s Christian armies. The concept of revolutionary vanguard simply does not exist in Islam. Before Hezbollah surged to the fore in the summer of 2006, al Qaeda’s internationalism might conceive of merging with some radical strands of the only other global protest movement: the alter-globalization, anti-imperlialism brigade…As much as al Qaeda’s only strategic goal is trapping the US, Washington helped al Qaeda by trapping itself in Iraq and in still another, dangerous form of hubris, George W. Bush’s Greater Middle East.” (pp.100-101).

What is most compelling is the unpretentious manner in which Pepe Escobar sifts through the incredibly complex historically-rooted strands of Islamic history and political geography to clarify the implications of the historical fault-line cutting through Islam, that between Shiite and Sunni and all its manifold complexities. It makes starkly clear how Washington and the pro-war Pentagon hawks are playing with a fire that has the potential to ignite a conflagration not even the Pentagon’s Smart Bombs, Full Spectrum Dominance, Net-Centric warfare methods, its Revolution in Military Affairs, laser-guided bombs or deadly chemical weapons would be able to control. Iraq today should serve as ample warming, were anyone in Washington even dimly aware.

On another front in today’s ‘war against the Axis of Evil’: “The only reason Afghanistan matters in the (Bush Administration’s) Long War worldview remains the same one when the Taliban rose to power: as a transit corridor for (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline) TAP from Turkmenistan to Baluchistan and eventually to India…The only way for TAP to be profitable is with India as a final destination—and Delhi knows its best bet for natural gas is from Iran, and the second best from Qatar. Hamad Karzai wants TAP by all means—not TAP itself but the badly needed US$300 million a year he could collect in transit fees. In Pakistan the independent Baluchistan Liberation Army would certainly raise some hell to get a piece of the action. The Taliban also have TAP on their sights—but for more ballistic motives”… (p.168).

Escobar manages to capture the impact of the War on Terrorism as it hits the so-called Islamic street: “The Bush Administration may have demonized [Osama bin Laden] as the Prince of Darkness in a 24/7 planetary soap. But for millions of urban, radicalized, dirt-poor seething in anger in an immense Islamic slum nebula, Osama is comparable to El Comandante Fidel in 1959 Cuba–a true mass hero. Destitute Arab brothers know there are no more heroes rising from the desert like Muhamad in the 7th Century, so for them Osama became the remixed version of the Holy Prophet—the media-savvy Warrior Prophet…He knows how to tweak the financial markets. And of course he knows everything about Globalistan. No wonder. People from the bin Laden clan are bedouin fishermen from the Hadramut region. They have been ‘global’ since time immemorial…’” (p.107).

That’s the point. The book illustrates that in some 340 pages of invaluable mixture between personal anecdote and relevant history. The central conclusion the reader is left with is the futility and the unbelievable arrogance of those who believe they can ‘put into play’ forces such as Islam to further their own geopolitical agenda of domination and ‘pre-emptive’ hegemony. It’s a ‘must read.’

F. William Engdahl  is author of  “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,” Pluto Books. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/globalistan-how-the-globalized-world-is-dissolving-into-liquid-war-by-pepe-escobar/5265

Excerpt from Pepe Escobar's Globalistan

GLOBALISTAN

Visit the market and see the world.
- Western African popular saying

A tawdry cheapness shall reign throughout our days.
- Ezra Pound

Globalization is like Poe's maelstrom. A black void, rather. No one can escape it. And we don't know how it ends.

What we do know is that it has nothing to do with an "invisible hand." It has to do with maximization of profit; a huge
concentration of capital; and the unrestricted power of monopolies. German cross-cultural scholar Horst Kurnitzky tells us globalization has configured "a new world, in which wealth and poverty, with no control by markets or the flux of cash, coexist with no form of social equality." So it's not globalization per se, but greed (that classic Christian sin ...) and high concentration of capital that are responsible, in Kurnitzky's formulation, for "the uniformization and cultural and real impoverishment of the world."

Globalization has been with us for quite some time - in business, finance, culture, drugs, music, pornography. What is relatively "new" is the concept. Now let's summon our good ol' friend Baudelaire, and he'll pop up the question: Hypocrite reader, my equal, my brother (sister), are you sure that technological, capitalistic globalization is a heavenly invention devised for the greater good of Mankind by Adam Smith and Thomas L. Friedman? Are you sure it's inevitable, and that the best that we (and Clyde Prestowitz's Three Billion New Capitalists) can do is manage the necessary adjustments to it? Let's take a closer - global - look from a broader, and more questioning, perspective.

The invaluable Immanuel Wallerstein defines our reality (our Plato's cave?), also known as the capitalist world economy, as "a historic system which has combined an axial division of labor integrated by means of a world market less than perfect in its autonomy, combined with an interstate system composed of presumed sovereign States, a geoculture that has legimitized a scientific ethos as the basis of economic transformations and the extraction of profit, and liberal reformism as the way to contain popular discontent with the continuous socioeconomic polarization caused by capitalist development."

This system, as we all know, was born in Western Europe and then took over the whole world. Now fast forward to the mid-2000s. Wallerstein's judgment is like Zeus throwing his lightning bolt: "The capitalist world economy is in crisis as a historic social system." The world we live in, the way this system we take as a natural fact is articulated and produces "reality," is in "a transition phase towards a new historic system whose contours we don't know." What we can do at best is to contribute to conform the new structure: "The world we 'know' (in the sense of cognoscere) is the capitalist world economy and it is beset by structural faults it cannot control anymore." Gramsci would have framed it as the Old Order has fallen but the New Order has still not been born.

Inevitably, the stage is set for conflict if not mayhem. Wallerstein identifies for the next decades three geopolitical faults we will have to confront.

1) "The struggle among the Triad - U.S., E.U. and Japan - over which will be the main stage of accumulation of capital in the next decades." The third pole of the Triad - Japan, for Wallerstein - should rather be considered as "East Asia," with an emphasis on China.

2) The struggle between North and South, "or between the central zones and the other zones of the world economy, given the continual polarization - economic, social and demographic - of the world system."

3) Wallerstein defines it as "the struggle between the spirit of Davos and the spirit of Porto Alegre over the type of world system we want to build collectively." That is, the system preaching TINA ("there is no alternative") against anybody believing "another world is possible."

Wallerstein reminds us that the concept of Triad became popular in the 1970s - with its first institutional expression‎‍ via the Trilateral Commission, which was "a political effort to reduce the emerging tensions between the three members of the Triad" (Chinese gangs happened to become globally popular at the same time). has happened after what Wallerstein describes as "a phase A of the Kondratiev cycle from 1940-1945 to 1967-1973": euphoria over the fabulous expansion of the world economy, Baby Boom heaven, Elvis, the Beatles, a beautiful house, a beautiful kitchen full of appliances and a red convertible. The next 30 years were "a phase B in the Kondratiev cycle," where speculation became the name of the game, unemployment exploded and there was "an acute acceleration of economic polarization at the global level as well as inside States."

In the early 1920s Nikolai Dmitrievich Kondratiev was the very talented director of the Moscow Institute of Economic Investigations. In 1922 he coined his legendary theory of the "long waves" which not only explains but also previews the sweeping flow of History. Kondratiev ended his days in misery in a Stalinist gulag in Siberia. But his reputation as an economic guru survived him. Nowadays everyone from right to left to all points center invoke Kondratiev to justify the capitalism system forever surfing History in a succession of "long waves."

Trotsky was one who didn't fall for it - as Alan Woods impeccably summarized in a post on www.trotsky.net. Trotsky always mocked robotic Marxists who rhapsodized about "the final crisis of capitalism." But he also could not agree with the Kondratiev assumption that the "unseen hand of the market" would always intervene to restore the equilibrium of capitalism between one wave and the next. Trotsky accepted there were economic oscillations. But he denied they were cyclical. Trotsky did see History as a series of phases; but all of these phases had different booms and busts, related to different, specific causes. In a famous speech at the Third Congress of the Comintern in 1922, Trotsky stressed how "capitalism establishes [an] equilibrium, disturbs it, then re-establishes it only to break it again, at the same time as it extends the limits of its dominion … Capitalism possesses a dynamic equilibrium which is always in a process of breakdown and recovery." It's as if Kondratiev had seen capitalism as a pendulum. It's not: capitalism is in fact anarchy, chaos, no "equilibrium" but a succession of crises, revolutions and even wars which no one can reasonably predict (who predicted The Triumph of Capitalism/The Fall of the Berlin Wall double bill?) Woods prefers to quote George Soros - a man "who knows quite a lot about how markets move": for Soros "the market is not like a pendulum striving for a definite point of equilibrium, but more like a smashing ball." Capitalism as we know it is an unpredictable wrecker's ball. The way Wallerstein himself examines what's been happening inside the Triad seems to privilege Trotsky's intuition over Kondratiev's. Wallerstein's point is that for the members of the Triad, roughly Europe got the better out of the 1970s, Japan out of the 1980s and the U.S. out of the 1990s. "Under the supposition that this long phase B of the Kondratiev cycle will reach its end," Wallerstein wonders which pole of the Triad will jump ahead. That is, which will better survive the current wrecker's ball. The winning player will be the one who sets his priorities in terms of investment in research and development, and thus on innovation; and who best organizes "the ability of the superior strata to control the access to consumable wealth." Les jeux sont faits. If this was Vegas, one might suspect that the house was betting on East Asia.

Yet in this chaotic wrecker's ball who's actually fighting whom, with what weapons, and what for? Trompe l'oeil is the name of the game. Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has explained how Michel Foucault defined Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon as the "arch-metaphor of modern power." Bentham was an English jurist who published his Panopticon at the end of the 18th Century: an exercise on ubiquitous power surveilling society. Foucault examined in detail Bentham's description of a "visibility totally organized around a dominating and vigilant eye" and defined it as the "project of a universal visibility, acting to the benefit of a rigorous and meticulous power." Technically, humankind had finally acceded to the idea of an "omni-contemplative power."

Bauman for his part describes how "the domination of time was the secret of the power of managers - and immobilizing the subordinates in space, preventing their right to movement and routinizing the rhythm to which they should obey was the main strategy in their exercise of power. The pyramid of power was made of speed, access to transportation and the resulting freedom of movement."

There was one problem though: the Panopticon was too expensive. Capitalism needed something more cost-effective. So when power started to move, says Bauman, "with the speed of an electronic signal" it became, in practical terms, "truly extraterritorial, no more limited, or even desaccelerated, by resistance in space." This gave the rulers of the world "an unprecedented opportunity" to get rid of the old-fashioned Panopticon. Bauman tells us that the history of modernity, right now, is in its post-Panopticon stage. In essence: those who operate power now are virtually inaccessible. Welcome to German sociologist Ulrich Beck's society of "the second modernity," or Bauman's "liquid modernity."

The consequences, Bauman tells us, spell no more relation "between capital and labor, leaders and followers, armies at war. The main techniques of power now are flight, cunning, deviation and dodging, the effective rejection of any territorial confinement, with the complicated corollaries of construction and maintenance of order and with the responsibility for the consequences as well as the necessity to pay for the costs." Capital is free - thus the daily, trillion-dollar global Russian roulette of speculation.

"Capital," says Bauman, "travels hopeful, counting on fleeting and profitable adventures," just with "hand luggage - toothpaste, laptop computer and cell phone." It's like the delightfully quirky Richard Quest announcing to his multinational corporate audience on CNN: "Whatever you're up to today, I hope it's profit- able." Soft capitalism may be very sexy, but only if you're a player. Bauman adds: "Capital may travel fast and light, and its lightness and mobility become the most important sources of uncertainty for everything else. Today this is the main base of domination and the main factor of social divisions."

We all know how the process is also leading to a control freak horror story. Bauman contraposes the visionary dystopia of Huxley's Brave New World to Orwell's 1984, the "misery, destitution, scarcity and necessity" of Orwell's world to the "land of opulence and debauchery, abundance and fulfillment" of Huxley: "What they shared was the feeling of a world strictly controlled.." Orwell and Huxley essentially saw us going to the same place, but taking different paths, "if we continued to be sufficiently ignorant, obtuse, placid or indolent" to allow it to happen.

Just like "Plato and Aristotle could not imagine a good or bad society without slaves," Bauman tells us, "Huxley and Orwell could not conceive of a society, be it happy or unhappy, without managers, planners and supervisors which in group would write the script that others should follow ... they could not imagine a world without towers and control rooms." We're already there - perhaps one step beyond. The post-Panopticon society is actually Sinopticon, where many observe just a few, everyone is disciplined and regimented by spectacle and discipline works by temptation and seduction, not by coercion.

Bauman resorts to Claude Lévi-Strauss, "the greatest social anthropologist of our time," who determined that whenever human history had to deal with the necessity of facing The Other, it came out with only two strategies: "The first consists in 'vomiting', throwing the others out as they're seen as incurably strange and alien: preventing physical contact, dialogue, interaction and all the varieties of commercium and connubium." Bauman lists as the extreme varieties of this strategy "incarceration, deportation and assassination," and "refined forms" as "spatial separation, urban ghettos and selective access to spaces." That's how the Sinopticon society deals with the vast masses of the urban poor, or with its own Islamophobia. The second strategy "consists in a soi-disant "desalienation" - that means "ingesting, devouring alien bodies and spirit as to make them, by metabolism, identical to  the bodies that ingest them, thus indistinguishable." This strategy has included "cannibalism and forced assimilation" - cultural crusades, declared wars against local practices, against calendars, cults, dialects and other prejudice and superstitions." That's how the Sinopticon society also deals with its own Islamophobia.

In between, the faceless multitudes are left with the proliferation of what Bauman refers to as "no places" or "cities of nowhere," places that are ostensibly public but definitely non-communitarian, places of passage like airports, hotel lobbies, highway convenience stores. Already in the mid-1980s French multidisciplinarian Paul Virilio was saying that in the future all prisons, hotels, airports and shopping malls would look exactly the same. Liquid modernity. Sinopticon society. So many other ways to define the realm of globalization.

Ulrich Beck refers to "the nebulous word 'globalization' as code for 'the struggle of national against international elites', these ones struggling to gain position inside national power spaces." As an alternative he proposes other theories of the State, which would "break the false alternative between deregulation neo-liberal strategies and the interventionist and protectionist neo-nationalist strategies" and also address "what the politics of self-adaptation to neo-liberalism has unforgivingly omitted, that is, those disparities and conflicts (which nevertheless public opinion have sufficiently noticed) that sprang up either from the endemic destruction of Nature and the environment as well as the question ... of full employment which, if it exists at all, is precarious."

Beck believes in the possibility of a new pact between economic power and political power and democracy. This could only happen via "a reform of the transnational institutions which coordinate the world economy." That's quite unlikely, to say the least. Beck's proposition of an "active cosmopolitan project" would mean not only grassroots mobilization but major players - from NGOs to top managing officials - trying to change the system from the inside.

Beck compares the irruption of global terrorism to "globalization's Chernobyl: then the benefits of nuclear energy were buried; now neo-liberalism's promises of salvation. The suicide attempts and massive assassinations not only showed the vulnerability of Western civilization but also allowed us to savor in advance to what class of conflicts globalization can lead. In a world of global risk, neo-liberalism's dictum, that is, to substitute the economy for politics and the State, rapidly loses its force of conviction." Beck could be placed in the same company of an array of Islamic scholars who worry about the "globalization of the culture of fear." (As do many commentators in the United States, both liberal and conservative, who worry about the abridgement of fundamental rights or believe that "if we change our behavior, the terrorists win.")

Now compare Beck to Anthony Giddens, former director of the London School of Economics and guru of Tony Blair's Third Way. Giddens could be seen as a globalization insider with a transforming agenda. He never bought the idea that deregulated markets were the most efficient mode of economic production. His emphasis is on civil society. Giddens, in The Third Way and its Critics, admits that globalization is not exclusively economic but also social, political and cultural. "In all these levels," it implies a "highly unequal group" of processes which follow up in "a fragmentary and contradictory" manner. He contends that globalization is not Westernization.

Giddens' Third Way, in its ambitious struggle to become a global political phi- losophy, was supposed to be about integration. He could not but know that "it's a mistake to simply oppose the State and the markets… Without a stable civil society, with norms of trust and social decency, it's not possible neither for markets to flourish nor for democracy to be maintained."

Giddens was convinced that "nation-states remain the most important actors in the international scene" because "they control territory," are able to "legitimaly exercise military force" and are responsible for "sustaining a legal apparatus." He hailed the confluence of global markets and new communication techniques as "a globalizing process that comes 'from underneath' ... and is building an infrastructure of global civil society ." But in 2000 Giddens could hardly have imagined that one of the key expressions of this "global civil society" would be on February 15, 2003 when more than 10 million people all over the world marched against an illegal war that had not even started and in which Tony Blair's Third Way government was totally implicated.

French sociologist Alain Touraine has been keen to point out that Globalization does not define a stage in modernity, a new Industrial Revolution. It intervenes at the level of modes of management of historical change, and corresponds to an extreme capitalist mode of modernization, a category that should not be confused with a type of society, like feudal society or industrial society. And war, hot or cold, belongs to this universe of competition, confrontation, empires and not to the universe of societies and its internal problems, including class struggle.

What does occupy central stage, according to Touraine, is "the triumph of capitalism." But this does not mean we are facing the end of History, just a "certain mode of administration of historical change, of modernization." In a similar vein Brazilian economist José Fiori describes globalization as little else than a technique for profit optimization in a historically specific world environment - the current situation of a relative abundance of literate workforces outside the Triad.

Unlike Bauman's liquid, fluid, amoral modernity Touraine's concept of modernity is linked to human rights, and modernity is seen as an appeal to the universalism of rights. But he is forced to admit this concept is facing two very powerful enemies. Touraine identifies the first enemy as "Islamic or Asiatic, which refuse any universality to the Western model and affirm that their model, determined by a communitarian conception of social life and the maintenance of traditional family, has revealed to be more efficient than ours, affected by all forms of personal and collective decomposition."

Touraine could be referring to Singapore's resident Confucius and founding father Lee Kuan Yew and the famous 1990s Asian values debate. The two volumes of Lee's political autobiography are nothing but a glossy, extended paean to Asian values. Moreover Lee's masterpiece, Singapore, works wonders, even tough civil society is largely defined by a shop-till-you-drop mentality. Lee's Confucianism is the opposite of the Enlightenment. It's another - extremely effective - model of modernization as the Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping himself noted on the spot before copying it and launching his own modernization drive in China. The second enemy of Touraine's concept of human rights-based modernity spans a tradition that stretches from Rousseau to Hobbes, "which defines democracy as the kingdom of the General Will or, in other words, the utmost respect to popular sovereignty." Touraine admits that this idea was attacked "from the right by economic liberalism and from the left by the idea of class struggle" but "it's still predominant, especially in the U.S."

It's inevitable that all those who put globalization at the center of the representation of our world show how it is conformed by American hegemony - since most nodes of the global network are U.S.-owned. It's not that simple. The world economy's geography is not spatial, but a demented speedball of flux – with globalization as a mechanism configured by trade flux, financial flux, information flux, human flux and the uncontrollable explosion of the key nodes in the grid, the world's megacities. But as much as a "global economy" - Bauman's liquid modernity - a map of those fluxes would also stress a significant black void, a collection of stagnant puddles accounting for the intersection of war and poverty, war and globalization and the "war on terror."

Imbalance and inequality are the names of the game. Trade in goods and services are a virtual monopoly of the Triad - North America, the E.U. and North Asia. This has increased the tension - bordering on open war - between the U.S. and the E.U. on, for instance, civil aerospace, agriculture subsidies or genetically modified organisms. So the Triad does not operate like a unified cartel: there is fierce internal competition. The Triad concentrates no less than 70% of the wealth of the planet.

Africa is on the other end of the spectrum. Africa's exports were 4% of the global total in the early 1980s; they had fallen to 1.5% by 2003. And then there's trade as a weapon; if a country falls foul of the great powers, a commercial embargo - shut up and don't trade! - is the weapon of choice (even though other countries always manage to sneak around them).

The East to West financial market flux - Tokyo, Frankfurt, Paris, London, Wall Street - is a given. As for the human flux as well as the info flux of ideas, they should be increasing in all directions - but the flow still privileges the Triad. "The end of geography" and, in theory, political borders should have led - according to globalization cheerleaders - to a new configuration of the world population and a better division of wealth. Reality proves otherwise.

Flux is not a congregation of random electrons. Flux needs controlling engines - thus the criss-crossing networks and companies articulated with the finance, insurance, innovation, counselling, publicity and security industries. Only megalopolises can function as the ideal providers for all these industries. And this of course increases their seduction appeal. Since 2005 more than 3 billion people - half of the global population - are urban.

So the globalization flow is leading to increased concentration, not dispersion. The real world centers of economic and political power are networked cities monopolizing economic, financial and political flux.

We can identify 3 main nodes - all of them interlinked, of course.

Node 1 - New York/Boston/Philadelphia/Washington, linked to "secondary" L.A., Mexico City and Sao Paulo.

Node 2 - London/Paris/Frankfurt/Milan, linked to "secondary" Moscow, Dubai, Lagos and Johannesburg.

Node 3 - Tokyo/Osaka - linked to "secondary" Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sydney.

R&D remains strictly a Triad affair. Less than 1% of patents come from outside the Triad. There is of course the odd foreign hub of technology and research like Bangalore. But as multinational corporations increase the amount of patents they register in the U.S. from overseas branches that gives a false impression of globalization of innovation. Technological innovation in a tectronic-mad world originates from less than 20 countries - accounting for 15% of the global population. Although China and India are mounting challenges to the Triad's R&D supremacy, for now the Triad (including Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Israel) still "reigns," in Ezra Pound's words.

The 3 controlling nodes listed above are inserted into the Big Picture of the Great North/South divide - which in itself is also totally fragmented. Take the North. The former Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus are not exactly part of the North en bloc, some with annual GNPs per capita lower than US$ 2000. Nor are other lower mid-level income countries (GNP per capita less than US$ 10,000 annual) - and these include E.U. member Poland and key global player Russia. Even inside the E.U. Portugal's GNP per capita, for instance, is still two-thirds of Germany's.

Take the South. Australia, New Zealand and South Africa are in fact part of the North. So are the four original Asian tigers - South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong - plus the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Israel. The South is heavily populated by a higher mid-level - Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, most of Latin America, central Europe and some scattered players like Botswana and Mauritius. There's China, India and the Andean countries at a lower mid-level. And then we find what we could call the Deep South, the 48 LDCs (least developed countries) which the OECD euphemistically describes as "next emerging countries." Under the current rules, where future wealth is inevitably tied to the influx of more foreign direct investment (FDI), once again it works in tiers. When sub- Saharan Africa captures only 1.2% of global FDI, Venezuela, Chile, Malaysia, Thailand and Poland capture almost 1% each, Mexico and Brazil almost 2% each, and China a staggering 10% all by itself. In 2004, the whole of Africa captured 4% of global FDI. China captured 22%. Savings usually do not remain in Africa; they migrate to wealthy members of the Triad and assorted fiscal paradises and are not reinvested in Africa.

Wallerstein has been one among many showing how the South remains dis- united politically, pullulating with client regimes of the North in contrast to the few - like the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), plus Indonesia and South Korea - with real or potential geopolitical power.

The bottom line remains polarization "expanding geometrically," as Wallerstein puts it. "The North maintains this structure by means of its monopoly of advanced productive processes, control over the world financial institutions, dominance over knowledge and information media at a global level, and what is most important, by means of military power." Essentially, the North still brandishes an Iron Fist even though sometimes enveloped by a sexy, red velvet glove.

So the mantra that everyone equally profits from globalization is a myth. Further fragmentation flows through internal borders - like between coastal China and the countryside; south India and the rest of the country; Mexico and the southern Indian states; or southeast Brazil and the rest of the country. Niches prevail - like Silicon Valley, with 2 million people and a GNP bigger than Chile's. The internet may represent the most glaring metaphor of inequality. By 2005, 1 billion people were connected - less than 15% of the world's population, a figure that confronted with 3 billion people barely surviving on less than US$ 2 a day, and 5 out of 6 billion people living on only 20% of global GDP, spells out that the world economy can function just fine serving only 20% of the world's population, that is, virtually the ones who are connected. As for the others, the harsh conclusion is inevitable: they are expendable. Forever.

While 3 billion people barely survive on less than US$ 2 a day; at least 850 million - roughly 1 in every 7 - suffer from chronic malnutrition ingesting less than 2300 calories a day (in the wealthy North the average is 3400); hundreds of millions have never made a phone call; and thousands of children die every day from diarrhea due to the absence of clean water, the number of global air passengers, according to IATA, has shot up to over 2 billion since 2005. Hong Kong-Taipei is the busiest air link in the world, followed by New York-London and London- Amsterdam. Once again, all Triad links.

An absolutely key phenomenon for the next few decades will be South-to-North immigration. Wallerstein alerts us to the fact that in the long run "the North is creating an ample strata of resident persons which don't have all the political, economic or social rights" of the citizens of any particular country. There may be differences of gradation, but it's the same picture from the U.S. to France and Spain. This spells endless internal political turbulence.



The daily apocalypse of the excluded is what we see when we travel deep in the heart of Africa, China, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America. But what most people don't see is that the key cause of hunger is war. Superposing hunger during the 1990s - because of drought or floods - with the geography of war, the result is that hunger is less due to climate than to politics. Examples abound - in Somalia, Angola, Mozambique, plus the undisguised ethnic cleansing in Liberia, Ethiopia and in Darfur, not to mention the 4 million Afghan refugees to Pakistan and Iran who fled the Taliban during the 1990s. That is hunger as a political weapon. Wars will still be fought for access to power - like in Afghanistan, Sudan and the Ivory Coast; for territorial control - like in Israel/Palestine; for separation - like in Chechnya, Georgia, Kashmir and Aceh; or for a minority to express their grievances - like in southern Thailand. The privatization of war and its asymmetrical, trans-State mutations will only increase the influence of hunger as a political weapon.

Technically, the world will remain able to feed itself for generations. Demographic growth won't affect it. But how could agriculture win over malnutrition? There are only two possibilities: sustainable development or genetic manipulation. Two poles of the Triad - the U.S. and the E.U. - produce 40% of the wheat exported globally. 50% of their cereals are exported to developing countries. Both the U.S. and the E.U. practice heavy subsidies to exports. This massive unloading at cut price rates of the rich countries' excess production will continue to lead - in the rest of the world - to massive destruction of rural jobs and irreversible dependence on imported agricultural products. That's trade as lethal weapon. The Sahel is a fitting example. In the Sahel, traditional cultures such as manioc have receded at a rate of 1% a year for the past 20 years compared to export cultures - like cotton, coffee and cacao - which are the source of precious foreign exchange. Meanwhile imports of wheat have been growing by 8% a year. According to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) at least 50 countries are threatened by this process. In less than 15 years Russia and most of the former Soviet republics became net importers of food.

According to Eric Hobsbawm, for multinational corporations - we call it Corporatistan - "the 'ideal world' is a world without States, or at least with small States." (And perhaps a Super-State to enforce Corporatistan's worldview?) By 2004 there were more than 63,000 multinational corporations. When unreachable by national or international law, ecological preoccupations, social responsibility and all of the above simultaneously, they can become more destructive than hurricanes. According to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), 57% of the Corporatistan Top 500 has absolutely no plans to fight global warming. 140 companies didn't even bother to answer questions by CDP's research team. BAE Systems - a top U.K. weapons producer - happen to be among the worst in environmental protection. Well, Corporatistan rules. ExxonMobil is bigger than Turkey, Wal-Mart is bigger than Austria, GM is bigger than Indonesia, DaimlerChrysler is bigger than Norway, BP is bigger than Thailand, Toyota is bigger than Venezuela, Citigroup is bigger than Israel and TotalFinalElf is bigger than Iran. Ninety percent of the Corporatistan Top 500 is in the Triad. The Top 1000 accounts for no less than 80% of the world's industrial output.

Figures attest to a demential cornucopia of chaos - capitalism as a wrecker's ball where a happy few profit infinitely more than all the others: no equilibrium here. By 2007 there will be roughly 1.5 billion computers around the world; 38% of business software is already pirated (98% in Vietnam, 95% in China). The motor vehicle industry will remain the world's largest manufacturing business - 75% of the world's total output coming from only 6 companies (GM, Ford, Toyota, DaimlerChrysler, Volkswagen and Honda). 12% of all U.S. manufacturing jobs are concentrated in the chemical industry.

Mammoth construction companies are concentrated between France and Japan. 63% of all wood harvested in the world is consumed as fuel. The four world leaders in forest and paper products are all based in the U.S. The 5 largest trading companies are all Japanese; of the largest 17, 16 are in Asia (10 in Japan, 2 in South Korea, one in China). The Japanese sogo shosha - the 3 biggest are Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Itochu - deal with up to 30,000 products per company. Fifty-six percent of the Fortune 500 is composed by commercial and savings banks. American, German and Japanese bank payments turn over the equivalent of their country's GDP every few days. More than US$ 1.5 trillion move around the world every day in foreign exchange transactions; the bulk is to profit off of fluctuation between currencies. The world spends US$ 2 trillion a year in food - 10% of all economic activity. 75% of the world's advertising is purchased in the Triad (as far as Asia is concerned this means Japan only). Only seven companies dominate the global film market, and only 5 companies dominate the music industry. Major U.S. TV and film studios collect up to 60% of their revenues overseas, the music business 70%. Corporatistan - or the consumption of products made by Corporatistan - accounts for 50% of the gases responsible for global warming, source of much of the world's toxic waste. Two- thirds of hazardous waste produced in the U.S. comes from chemical corporations. Corporatistan controls 50% of the world's oil, gas and coal mining and refining. Since the early 1990s the Clinton and Bush administrations, U.S. big business and U.S. big media have sold globalization the world over as benign Americanization. It's really an either/or epic battle.

For apostles of Wild West free trade, Corporatistan stars are engines for progress, efficency and economic development. They produce an extensive range of products, find markets and employ people all over the world; this means a globally connected capitalist marketplace promoting positive competition, innovation and progress.

For the alterglobalization movement, and a myriad of groups worried about the social, economic and environmental consequences of globalization, Corporatistan stars symbolize a system of global capitalism run amok. The enormous size and unrestricted power of multinationals and their transnationality lead to corporate profits being the ultimate priority over everything: the welfare of workers, the environment and the economies - sometimes very fragile - of numerous countries. Especially when the magic mantra is delocalization. If everyone lived like a citizen of Triad member France, we would need two planets Earth. If everyone consumed like an American, we would need five.

In his Power and Counter-power, published in Germany in 2002, Ulrich Beck notes that "the neo-liberal agenda is to institutionalize the benefits of capital, benefits that are historically fleeting…The perspective of capital, radically taken to its limits, postulates itself as absolute and autonomous…The result is that what is good for capital is good for everyone. The promise is that we will be all wealthier and finally even the poor would benefit. Thus the capacity for seduction of this neo- liberal ideology is not in stressing egoisms or maximizing competition but in promoting global justice. The proposition is: the maximization of the power of capital is finally the best way to socialism." That's how the (social) State is rendered superfluous.

That may also explain why former Trotskyites have a penchant to become neo- cons - or in fact bourgeois neo-revolutionaries. It may have to do with the concept of permanent revolution. Permanent revolution would eventually solidify the victory of socialism. Well, real socialism of the USSR kind collapsed - thus demonstrating the superiority of Capital. So why not apply Trotsky to the superior virtues of Capital? Hence we're back to Ulrich Beck - "the maximization of the power of capital is the best way to socialism," and that includes of course capital imposing its will at the barrel of a gun, preemptive or not.

In Western Europe and Latin America societies are extremely alert to the ravages of Maximum Capital. Not necessarily the U.S. According to Egyptian economist Samir Amin, director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal and one of the great transcultural intellectual minds of the developing world, "not benefiting from the tradition by which the social democratic worker's parties and the communists marked the formation of modern European political culture, American society does not have the ideological instruments at its disposal to allow it to resist the dictatorship of capital. On the contrary, capital shapes every aspect of this society's way of thinking." But we should also remember that the U.S. is the most religious member of the Triad; although capital permeates religion in every way, there is still a healthy undercurrent of resistance that has more spiritual authority than elsewhere in the Triad.

A delightful example of the "capital is good for everyone" syndrome was an August 2006 Financial Times story announcing the demise of the financial journalist. Computers are now so fast that an earnings story is uploaded within 0.3 second of a corporation making results public. No financial journalist can possibly compete with that. A Thomson Financial executive, quoted by the FT, summed it all up: "This means we can free up reporters so they have more time to think." Mark Tran of The Guardian wisely preferred to connect past and future, alerting readers about "what happened in [2001: A] Space Odyssey when HAL took over the spaceship. Or worse still, think of Terminator 3, when the Skynet network of computers unleashes nuclear war."

By the mid-2000s the absolute majority of the developing world had noticed that the "globalized" geography of wealth had basically remained the same since the 30 World Bank-denominated "East Asian miracle" of the late 1980s-early 1990s - and it looked positively calcified as an immutable order. This was compounded with the worldwide suspicion that globalization was a game where Corporatistan - especially from the U.S. - wins and almost everyone else loses.

New York-based investment banker Henry Liu framed some of these "wins" when he wrote in Asia Times that "with the U.S. relocating all manufacturing offshore under globalization, high tech and military systems are the main U.S. exports outside of agriculture and financial services."

War and globalization cannot escape each other's seductive embrace. "Borders" and "markets" can be "liberated" as much via the WTO/ IMF/World Bank trio of enforcers as with B-52s and Abrams tanks. As far as Wall Street, Anglo-American and European Big Oil and the interlinked U.S.-U.K. industrial-military complex are concerned, the ends justify the means. The key example of the "war on terror" smashing sovereign, recalcitrant nations into submission to "free markets" has got to be Iraq.

Bauman points to the "new type of war in the era of liquid modernity: not the conquest of new territory, but the destruction of walls which blocked the flux of new and fluid global power" (old-fashioned, physical walls now serve the exclusive purpose of blocking undesirable masses, like Mexicans and Latin Americans confronting the southern U.S. Wall, Palestinians facing the Israeli Wall and Iraqis facing the upcoming - in 2012 - Saudi Arabian Wall).

Bauman formulates the new war, paraphrasing Clausewitz, as "the promotion of free trade by other means," stressing that "the power of the global elite resides in its capacity to escape local commitments, and globalization is geared to prevent this necessity so local authorities have to bear the responsibility of being the guardians of law and order (local)." No wonder, adds Bauman, "globalization seems to be more successful in raising the vigor of enmity and inter-communal strife than in promoting the peaceful coexistence of communities." That's globalization dissolving the world into Liquid War.

Investing in war is essential business for key nodes in the U.S.-E.U. poles of the Triad. In the summer of 2006 BAE Systems Plc (the former British Aerospace, privatized in the early 1980s), one of Europe's top weapons corporations, confirmed the sale to Saudi Arabia of 72 Eurofighter Typhoon jets - a deal worth as much as US$ 19 billion, a pittance considering that at the time Saudi Arabia was bagging around US$ 17 billion a month on crude oil sales.

Eurofighter is a Munich-based joint venture between BAE, Finmeccanica SpA and European Aeronautic Defense & Space Co (EADS). Of course, the deal had absolutely nothing to do with a US$33.4 million slush fund to finance fun and games to the Saudi royal family, including "sex and bondage with Saudi princes", as Indymedia UK had reported in November 2003, based on accusations by a former BAE employee. BAE Systems in North America has long been associated with Boeing and Lockheed Martin and is totally integrated with the Pentagon - as if it was part of US Corporatistan. When BAE Systems bought United Defense Industries in 2005 - the makers of Bradley fighting vehicles, those intimate friends of Iraqi guerrillas - the British became the No 7 Pentagon contractor. Accusations against BAE Systems are of the "business as usual" variety - corruption, pollution of the environment, dirty deals and dictatorships. BAE Systems CEO Mike Turner of course has dismissed all allegations as "history".

The two Western poles of the Triad are in fierce competition for supplying not only any unsavory regime on hold but every former USSR satellite in Eastern Europe as well. In this dogfight between Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman plus BAE Systems on one side and EADS - a fusion of Deutsch Aerospace (DASA), Aerospatiale Matra and Construcciones Aeronauticas from Spain - on the other, peace is just another word for everything to lose. The Anglo-American industrial-military complex alliance, plus the Wall Street-City of London financial alliance, plus Big Oil alliance, explain why the British pound may never be dropped in favor of the euro.

The U.S.'s top industrial policy is to sell weapons. What kind of globalization is this? Samir Amin points out that "the U.S. only benefits from comparative advantages in the armaments sector, precisely because this sector largely operates outside the rules of the market and benefits from state support." The business of selling weapons is roughly 80% more profitable than shipping Hollywood movies, straight- to-DVD masterpieces and Shakira CDs to the rest of the world.

Hence the marketing strategy of Military Corporatistan has got to be Long - Infinite - War. In the summer of 2006 Frida Berrigan, Senior Research Associate at the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center, issued a very detailed report - "Weapons at War 2005: Promoting Freedom or Fueling Conflict" - relayed by Tomdispatch, on this discreet business where the stars are Lockheed Martin F-16s, Raytheon Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles or Maverick Air-to-Ground Missiles, a business conducted via "the Pentagon's predilection for less than magnetic Power Point presentations, unbearably unexpressive acronyms, and slightly paunchy, older white men in business suits."

The playground is every dictatorship's dream: as BAE Systems sell their 72 Eurofighters to Taliban-friendly Saudi Arabia - perhaps to bomb the next Shiite insurrection in Hasa - Lockheed Martin sells 36 F-16s to Taliban-friendly Pakistan - perhaps to be engulfed in the next scramble for Kashmir. For P.R. purposes all this awesome firepower will be channeled towards the "war on terror." Berrigan notes, in quite understated terms, that 20 out of the U.S.' Top 25 weapons clients are "undemocratic regimes and/or governments with records as major human-rights abusers." According to her report, "U.S. arms exports accounted for more than half of total global arms deliveries - US$ 34,8 billion - in 2004, and we export more of them ourselves than the next six largest exporters combined."

While the Western poles of the Triad export loads of weapons, the South is busy developing its own version of Corporatistan. A key 2006 report of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) titled The New Global Challengers: How 100 Top Companies from Rapidly Developing Economies Are Going Global - and Changing the World has detailed how the future of Corporatistan is in the so called RDEs: China, India, Brazil, Russia, Malaysia, Thailand and Turkey. The report is convinced the so-called "RDE 100" will "radically transform industries and markets around the world." Only corporations with a turnover of more than US$ 1 billion in 2004 were taken into account. Economic analyst Kunal Kumar Kundu, writing for Asia Times from Bangalore, stressed that "taken together, these companies accounted for US$ 715 billion in revenue" in 2004, and "boasted US$ 145 billion in operating profits, a half- trillion dollars in assets, and a combined US$ 9 billion in R&D spending. Plus, they have grown at an average rate of 24% for the past four years." They may be unknown to many, but then nobody knew Toyota, Honda, Samsung or LG 40 or 30 years ago. Who knows Johnson Electric from China, which is the world's leading manufacturer of small electric motors?

Not surprisingly the Top 100 is dominated in 70% by Asia - China with 43 companies and India with 21. The wave of the future players include Lenovo - which bought IBM's notebook PC business; China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC); Indian information-technology-services giants Infosys, Tata and Wipro; Embraer from Brazil - the world's biggest producer of regional jets; Brazilian oil giant Petrobras and food processor giants Sadia and Perdigao; and Gazprom and LUKoil from Russia. All these represent fierce competition to the U.S.-E.U. pole of the Triad. As Kumar Kundu notes, they "are in nearly all sectors: industrial goods (auto equipment, basic materials, engineered products); consumer durables (household appliances and consumer electronics); resource extraction; technology and business services."

Samir Amin insists that "faced by European and Japanese competition in high- technology products, and by Chinese, Korean and other Asian and Latin American industrialized countries in competition for manufactured products, as well as by Europe and the southern cone of Latin America in agriculture, the United States probably would not be able to win were it not for the recourse to 'extra-economic' means, violating the principles of liberalism imposed on its competitors." Amin sees the interlocking causes of the decline of U.S. production system as "complex and structural. The poor quality of general education and training in the U.S., the product of a deep-rooted prejudice in favour of the 'private' to the detriment of the public sector, is one of the main reasons." His verdict: "There will never be a 'authentically liberal' globalized economy."

Anyway the rules of the game may be slowly changing. Kumar Kundu details how the RDE 100 are gaining ground. They may use armies of skilled factory workers costing US$ 5 an hour, compared to US$ 25 an hour in the North. Raw materials and equipment are cheaper. They offer excellent value for money products. And crucially, "by 2010 China and India combined will graduate 12 times the number of engineers, mathematicians, scientists and technicians as the U.S." This may be the second phase of globalization. Call it The Revenge of the South.

But what about the Deep South?

Almost everything we need to know about the causes of most of the Arab world's grievances surfaced in the 2002 Arab Report on Human Development in Arab Countries, commissioned by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and carefully prepared by Arab college professors and researchers. Not surprisingly the report found deadly connections between poverty and health and education indicators - not to mention a stark contrast between the rulers and the ruled. Wealth concentration is the name of the game in an array of countries comprising 280 million people - 5% of the world's population, and much younger than the world average (38% are less than 14 years old).

The Arab states were behind the West and Asia on every possible index - from literacy, job creation and technology to life expectancy, intellectual prowess and human development. Orientalist Bernard Lewis, asking What Went Wrong?, answered that institutionalized irrationalism was to blame. Wrong: blame it as much on rapacious, corrupt comprador elites who were more interested in shopping at Harrods and shopping for fighter jets than investing in health, education and productive industry.

Since the early 1980s the rate of income growth per head in the Arab world has been the lowest anywhere - if we except Sub-Saharan Africa. This growth rate was only 0.5% a year by the early 2000s. If persisting, the report said, an Arab citizen "will need 140 years to double his income, against a little less than 10 years in other regions." Median GNP per head by 2002 was half of South Korea, for instance. 40 years earlier, it used to be almost double when compared to the future Asian tigers. The report also provided numbers to the feeling that Arab culture is closed to interaction with the outside world. The Arab world translates only 300 books a year - five times less than in Greece, for instance. Since Caliph Mamoon in the 7th Century, only 100,000 books were translated. That's what Spain translates in a single year.

And still one person in five keeps living with less than two dollars a day. Labor mobility is practically non-existent - fueling the current number one European nightmare: 51% of Arab teenagers are obsessed about immigrating to the affluent West.

The report points to three main reasons for the overall tragedy in the Arab world: "no freedom of choice, feeble promotion of the rights of women, and a knowledge deficit." At the end of the 1990s the level of freedom - also meaning participation and responsibility - in the 22 member countries of the Arab League was the lowest in the world.

The conclusion was inescapable: Arab governments and human development remain a mutually incompatible proposition. LDCs are in even worse shape than the Arab world. The E.U., on paper, considers itself to be a policy model for the North - because it actually removed tariff barriers against LDCs. But anybody bothering to read the labyrinth of "annex" rules in Brussels would verify that three absolutely essential items exported by poor countries - rice, sugar and bananas - are liable to be taxed to up to 98%. A theoretically unrestricted opening of rich countries' agricultural, textile and shoe markets to developing countries would mean a staggering US$ 700 billion a year. This is more than 13 times the aid to development budget practiced by the OECD countries by the mid-2000s: this budget is only 0.22% of GNP. The initial target, fixed in 1970, was 0.7% of GNP. This can only mean one thing: a total absence of political will to reduce the glaring North/South imbalance.

As an angry African delegate told me in a 2002 OECD meeting in Paris, the whole system is "a bloated exercise in hypocrisy." No spinning by any government or multilateral organization can disguise the fact that the system is "Europe and the U.S. against the rest of the world" - as recognized by an infuriated U.N. official: "And this is even more incredible when compared to the project of reducing poverty in the world by half until 2015." Development countries' officials ceased to be swayed by the usual mantras - the "virtues of the free market," "good governance," "equality of market access," "the merits of an impartial judge as the WTO." Already by 2002 Professor Jagdish Baghwati from Columbia University saw a risk of "aggressive unilateralism" becoming the new paradigm in international trade relations.

By mid-2006 the collapse of so-called global governance was self-evident. The cash-strapped IMF badly needed its own structural adjustment. The G-8 had turned into an innocuous, security paranoia, anti-alterglobalization media circus. The WTO not only could not negotiate hundreds of custom taxes for 150 countries as it could not reign in U.S. and E.U. subsidies. The consequences for the future are ominous: more protectionism, more law of the jungle, more of Professor Baghwati's "aggressive unilateralism."

A portrait of things to come is the U.S.-controlled Big NAFTA, or NAFTA-Plus, which will evolve into something called SSP - Security and Prosperity Partnership. SSP favors total flux of capital, goods, services, ownership and technology - but definitely not labor, specifically of the poor Mexican worker kind. Thus the 1,200km-long Senate-and-Congress-approved Wall of Shame that will barricade the U.S. southwest against Mexico and Central America. When SSP goes into overdrive it will simply gobble up Central America and the Caribbean. That's still a long way towards a U.S.-controlled FTAA, uniting Alaska to Patagonia; the dream collapsed with the South American counter-attack of a Mercosur uniting oil-and-gas giant Venezuela to Argentina and Brazil. For the moment the Big Three South American union is a tripod. Mexican oppositionist Lopez Obrador will continue to fight for a progressive government in Mexico, so by the early 2010s Latin America would then become a "chair" - not exactly one Washington would be invited to sit on.

At the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in January 2003 Samir Amin really let it rip. He emphasized that we, all of us "have all become 'Red Skins', the contemptuous name reserved for the Native Americans in the eyes of the Washington establishment - that is to say, peoples who have the right to exist only in so far as they do not frustrate the expansion of U.S.-based multinational capital." Amin was careful to point out that "the U.S. program is not 'imperial' in the sense that Antonio Negri has given the term, since it does not aim to manage the societies of the planet in order better to integrate them into a coherent capitalist system. Instead, it aims only at looting their resources."

In his 2005 lectures sponsored by Harvard's Program in the History of American Civilization, Professor Eric Hobsbawm - whose Age of Extremes has been translated into 36 languages - said that from its roots in the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. has never viewed itself as a part of an international system of rival political powers. It lacks a foundation myth - an Albion or Barbarossa - the basis for most other current nation states. That's the reason for the self-appointed uniqueness - and, according to Hobsbawm, the imperial drive. Hobsbawm - unlike right wing historian proponent Niall Ferguson, as well as civilizational clasher Samuel Huntington - was adamant that the American empire "will almost certainly fail." David Harvey worries that the failure may lead to "a catastrophic rupture of the system ... and maybe the return of the Lenin scenario of violent competition between capitalist power blocs."

In the summer of 2006, in one of his invaluable commentaries posted on the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University's website, Wallerstein wondered how the world would look like in 2025. He identified three sets of answers: "The first is that the United States will enjoy one last fling, a revival of power, and will continue to rule the roost in the absence of any serious military contender. The second is that China will displace the United States as the world's superpower. The third is that the world will become an arena of anarchic and relatively unpredictable multi-polar disorder."

Wallerstein doubts the U.S. may remain top dog. The first reason is economic - "the fragility of the U.S. dollar as the sole reserve currency in the world economy. When the dollar falls dramatically, the United States will lose its command on world wealth and its ability to expand the deficit without serious immediate penalty." The second reason is military: "Both Afghanistan and especially Iraq have demonstrated that a nation must also have a very large land force to overcome local resistance. The United States does not have such a force, and will not have one, due to internal political reasons. Hence, it is doomed to lose such wars." And the third reason is political: "Nations throughout the world are drawing the logical conclusion that they can now defy the United States politically" - like in the new impulse of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

China, according to Wallerstein, also faces three problems. The first is internal: "China is not politically stabilized. The one-party structure has the force of economic success and nationalist sentiment in its favor. But it faces the discontent of about half of the population that has been left behind, and the discontent of the other half about the limits on their internal political freedom." The second problem relates to the world economy: "The incredible expansion of consumption in China (along with that of India) will take its toll both on the world's ecology and on the possibilities of capital accumulation." And the third problem has to do with the neighbors: "Were China to accomplish the reintegration of Taiwan, help arrange the reunification of the Koreas, and come to terms (psychologically and politically) with Japan, there might be an East Asian unified geopolitical structure that could assume a hegemon- ic position." By the same token, there is a distinct possibility that North Korea's nuclear ambitions will lead to China being surrounded by remilitarizing powers, beginning with Japan.

The last of Wallerstein's scenarios is "multi-polar anarchy and wild economic fluctuations. Given the inability of maintaining an old hegemonic power, the difficulty of establishing a new one, and the crisis in worldwide capital accumulation, this third scenario appears the most likely." A key reason for this state of affairs, according to Brazilian economist José Fiori, is that "the U.S. does not have a project, an utopia or an ideology capable of mobilizing world public opinion. The globalization utopia is dead - killed by facts and numbers in the real world. Whatever master plan the U.S. elite currently in power may concoct, adds Fiori, "it cannot be articulated as a project, it cannot mobilize minds and it cannot organize the ideological strategy of American power."

Nevertheless the Bush administration - supported by sectors of the nomad elites of global liquid modernity, as Bauman would put it - will not accept "multipolar anarchy" without a fight. Thus non-stop Liquid War.

Bauman tells us that "sedentary populations under siege refuse to accept the rules and risks of the new 'nomad' power game, an attitude that the new nomad global elite finds extremely difficult (as well as repulsive and undesirable) to understand ... When it's a matter of confrontation, and particularly military confrontation, the nomad elites of the modern liquid world saw the territorially oriented strategy of the sedentary populations as 'barbarian' in comparison with its own 'civilized' military strategy ... The tables have been turned - and the old and tested weapon of "chronopolitics" used by the triumphant sedentary populations to expel the nomads to barbaric and wild pre-history is now used by the victorious nomad elites in their fight against what's left of territorial sovereignty and against those that are still dedicated to its defense."

Two scenarios are possible. The "let's-call-it-Aquarius" scenario is provided by Steven Pinker, director of the Center for Cognitive Neurosciences at M.I.T. For neurolinguist Pinker, human nature will not change. Slavery, despotism, Liquid War will vanish, replaced by human rights and the Rule of Law. Science will explain the mysteries of the Universe. Our descendants will not be more intelligent and will not be genetically redesigned (no catalogue-chosen kids). Machines, on the other hand, will understand our language and obey all our commands.

Then there's the let's call it Hobbes-gone-crazy-on-his-way-to-Aquarius scenario. Darwin essentially warned us that we are an accidental mutation condemned to extinction. Marx was more of a humanist: he explained the origins of capitalism, how it would be the dominant force of the world system, and finally how it would succumb to a more sophisticated, egalitarian system - socialism. He was - only partially - wrong: Bakunin had predicted the horror of Soviet bureaucratic socialism. But the idea of a more egalitarian system is not dead. The next world system may well be libertarian socialism - but the act of passage, with capitalism feeding on war, terror and undisguised slavery, and engulfed in a fight to the death for energy resources, will be inscribed in tremendous grief as much as the passage from feudalism to capitalism.

Bauman tells us that power will deploy any strategy to keep flowing: "Any dense network of social links, and in particular one that is territorially rooted, is an obstacle to be eliminated." In Europe (an Unfinished Adventure) Bauman analyzes how Capital and the military use the same "hit and run" tactics: "Lands up to now 'virgin' (from the point of view of marketing), or types of commodities that were never included in market circulation ... water, genetic stock, intellectual products or even historic traditions and memories ... are now transformed into 'mercantilization' targets." After savage privatization raids the expropriated masses are left behind. The main point is to evade the responsibility "for the incalculable lives deprived from their means of subsistence and self-reproduction, and thus virtually incapable of reacting to the exploitation of 'emancipated' manpower under the terms of capital." So for both Capital and the military the weapons employed are the same: the name of the game is "shoot and scoot": to leave the battlefield at full speed, "when the possibility of 'creative destruction' is over."

Bauman's judgment is clear: "The new planetary empire, governed and managed by capital and global trade, launches daily 'preemptive attacks' against any surge of 'thinking under the bases of a social contract' which may appear in the post-colonial world." This logic of Liquid War, if not broken in the short term, fulfills Wallerstein's projection - a world of three furiously competing main blocs, led by the U.S., the E.U. and an Asia led mainly by China, with Russia and/or India on the side, on their way to an Orwellian nightmare. The U.S. may always try to seduce and bully the E.U. towards the formation of a Western Triad bloc bent on controlling the Persian Gulf-Caspian energy Big Prize. In this Triad-at-war world, U.S. "target" Iran will inevitably be associated with Asia via the SCO. Doomsdayers may have a field of dreams gaming the consequences of China or Russia installing military bases to protect their ally in West Asia. So what if Hobbes loses his map on the way to Aquarius? Welcome to the future. Oil addiction fueling non-stop Liquid War. Law of the jungle. The seas rising five meters in the next decades. A new glacial age. The coming of Icestan - or should it be Waterstan? In the meantime, though, the future will be dominated by Pipelineistan.

Globalistan: How the Globalized World Is Dissolving into Liquid War by Pepe Escobar. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Nimble Books, 2006. ISBN 0-9788138-2-0. Price US$33.94, 354 pages.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/IB10Dj07.html