Globalization and

Political Strategy
Frederic Jameson
Globalization must be
challenged through a “politics
of resistance”
General Outline
I. Introduction
II. Five Levels of Globalization (Sections I-V)
A.Technological Section I
B.Political Section II
C.Cultural Section III
D.Economic Section IV
E.Social Section V
III. Free Market and Globalization Section VI
IV. Political Strategy Section VII
Introduction
In what follows we will explore these five distinct levels
of globalization, with a view to demonstrating their
ultimate cohesion and to articulating a politics of
resistance: the technological, the political, the cultural,
the economic, the social, very much in that order.
(Final Sentence, Paragraph 1)
Five Levels of
Globalization
 6

❑ Innovation
▫ New communication technology,
and information revolution
Technological ▫ industrial production and
organization, and on the marketing
of goods
 7

❑ New type of imperialism

⮚ spreading economic and military might of the US
⮚ subordination of the other nation-states to American
power, either through consent and collaboration or by
the use of brute force and economic threat
❑ New world order
Political ⮚
⮚
nuclear weapons for the US alone
human rights and American-style electoral democracy
⮚ limits to immigration and the free flow of labor
⮚ Propagation of free market
 8

❑ Nationalism
⮚ Struggle between various
nationalisms
Cultural ⮚ Standardization
⮚ Economic domination
❑ Cultural Imperialism
⮚ Cultural Politics
 9

❑ Cultural to economic
Economic
❑ Expansion of financial capital
markets
 10

❑ Culture of consumption

❑ Denunciation of individualism,
atomization of society, corroding of
Social traditional social groups

❑ Gold (money) corrodes the social

bonds
Free Market, etc.
 12

III.The Free Market and Globalization

A. John Gray on the Free Market and
Neoliberalism
B. Samuel Huntington on “Cultural Traditions”
C. John Gray on the Growth of the World
Economy
D. Modernity
E. John Gray’s Technological Determinism
 13

III. A Contradiction of the Free Market Idea:

John Gray on the
Free Market and “that the creation of any genuinely government-
Neoliberalism free market involves enormous government
intervention and, de facto, an increase in
centralized government power. “
 14

III. A Case Study: Margaret Thatcher’s Policies

John Gray on the
Free Market and “Backlashed, unpopular among Thatcher's
Neoliberalism electoral base
1) Cultural Conservatism incompatible with the
Free Market
2) Democracy itself is incompatible with the
Free Market
 15

III. A Neoliberalism is a genuine agent of disastrous

John Gray on the changes around the world today.
Free Market and
Neo-liberal ideology is an American
Neoliberalism phenomenon
 16

III. A Neoliberalism is a genuine agent of disastrous

John Gray on the changes around the world today.
Free Market and
Neo-liberal ideology is an American
Neoliberalism phenomenon
 17

III. A Gray espouses two social science axioms:

John Gray on the cultural traditions and modernity
Free Market and
Neoliberalism
 18

III. B Huntington is opposed to US Interventionist

Samuel Foreign Policy and as they impose American
values as universal ones
Huntington on
“Cultural
Traditions”
 19

III. B Huntington's Eight World Cultures

Samuel The West
Huntington on Russian Orthodox Christianity;
“Cultural
Islam
Traditions”
Hinduism
 20

III. B Huntington's Eight World Cultures (cont.)

Samuel Japan—limited to those islands, but very
Huntington on distinctive
“Cultural Chinese or Confucian tradition
Traditions” African culture
Latin American one
Despite secularization, “values” remain
intact
 21

III. B Jameson makes a comeback:

Samuel “This is truly political science of the most arid
Huntington on and specialized type, all diplomatic and military
“Cultural clashes, without a hint of the unique dynamics
of the economic that makes for the originality
Traditions” of historiography since Marx”
 22

III. C
Civilizations not of a universal
John Gray on
the Growth of kind, but of indigenous
the World capitalist cultures, a cultural
Economy form of resistance to the global
free market
 23

III. C
Examples:
John Gray on
the kinship capitalism that Gray traces within the
the Growth of Chinese diaspora,
the World the samurai capitalism in Japan,
Economy chaebol in Korea,

the ‘social market’ in Europe

Russia’s current mafia-style anarcho-capitalism

 24

III. C
Jameson makes a 2nd comeback
John Gray on
Gray classifies this resistance as cultural, when in fact,
the Growth of is social. In that, it is social resources/institutions which
the World are drawn to construct these indigenous kinds of
capitalism
Economy
 25

III. D
Modernity as a cover up for
Modernity
capitalism
 26

GLOBALIZATION IS IRREVRSIBLE, all

III. E other socio-economic models have either
John Gray’s failed, or are unviable for a world with “open
Technological economies” What should we do?
Determinism
1) Fidelity to cultural traditions
2) Creation of global schemes of
regulation
 27

John Gray’s Technological Determinism:

1.) Multinational companies gain advantage over rivals by means of

III. E creation and effective implantation of new technologies

John Gray’s 2.) New technologies make traditional policies unworkable, thus causing
the decline of wages and the rise of unemployment
Technological
3.) ‘the main motor of this process [of globalization] is the rapid diffusion
Determinism of new, distance-abolishing information technologies’.
 28

Jameson’s Final Comeback:

III. E Gray’s posits himself as “realist” when in fact
John Gray’s he is like the rest of so many other globalization
Technological theorists who try to balance “hope” and
Determinism
“anxiety”, with some politicization on the side,
which only results in a theory as ambiguous as
the others.
Political Response on
Globalization
 30

❏ Luddite politics
❑ -The breaking of the new
Technological machines
❑ Delinking
 31

❑ Purely nationalistic politics

❑ Goal of national Liberation
❑ Nation-State remains concrete
Political terrain for political struggle
 32

❑ Political resistance
❑ Articulate all forms of cultural
imperialism
Cultural ❑ Religious form of political
resistance
 33

❑ Capitalism is the motor force

behind the destructive form of
Globalization
Economic ❑ Economic proposals for
and Social resistance must be
accompanied by a shift of
attention