Global Reach : ONE WORLD, READY OR NOT: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism.<i> By William Greider</i> .<i> Simon & Schuster: 528 pp., $27.50</i>

In keeping with millennial hysteria, the world is enjoying the kind of tumult that invites observers to become prophets. There are the Pandoras, focused on conflict and tribalization--gloom-sayers like Robert Kaplan, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Samuel Huntington, who predict disintegration of the world into tribal, national or even civilizational warfare--and there are the Panglosses, obsessed with the global economy and its integrative impulses, celebrants like Francis Fukuyama and Henry Wriston of the triumph of capitalism and the coming of one world tied together by global markets. And then there is William Greider, a one-world Pandora who sees in the promise of capitalism’s productivity (in which he fervently believes) the seeds of global catastrophe (which he ardently fears).

In his pessimistic paean to American democracy, “Who Will Tell the People?” (1992), Greider was already looking askance at global markets. In the penultimate chapter of that book, he worried that “the global economy is running downhill--a system that searches the world for the lowest common denominator in terms of national standards for wages, taxes and corporate obligations to health, the environment and stable communities.” His new book, “One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism,” is an eloquent, empirically documented elaboration of this anxious thesis. But although it celebrates capitalism’s productivity and global labor’s capacity, it is ultimately even more of a jeremiad than “Who Will Tell the People?”

In “One World, Ready or Not,” Greider offers powerful evidence drawn from his journalistic pilgrimages to many of capitalism’s new “off-shore” venues in countries like Malaysia, Japan, Indonesia, China and Mexico that unregulated capitalism, for all of its formidable productive capacity, is creating dilemmas likely to destroy it. Having won the great struggle with the coercive state economy of communism, the global market economy stands ready to expire from within thanks to its own “manic market logic.” Crucial to this contradictory logic is capitalism’s tendency to accumulate supply surpluses that occasion a “gathering vulnerability of the industrial system,” a tendency now made far worse by the new practices of what Greider calls labor arbitrage--the export of jobs to cheap labor markets, which drives “the price of human labor downward.”

The convergence of “cheap people” and “expensive machines” impels the new global firms into what is little more than a “corporate form of brigandage.” In their “bidding war for employment,” they descend to “the bottom of the global wage labor” where they find a “seemingly inexhaustible supply of new recruits.” Neither government regulation nor unions nor international organizations are able to interdict this new labor arbitrage, which creates plenitude and disemployment in equal portions. Labor no longer shares in the extraordinary productivity of modern capitalism, setting up strains that in time degrade the rule of law, push resentful peoples into reactionary politics (Pat Buchanan or Jean-Marie Le Pen) and create a “haunting gap between supply and demand,” which endangers the global economy itself.

The “ghost of Marx,” the title of one of his chapters, haunts all of Greider’s book. Greider is bemused by capitalism’s contradictions and its tendency to self-destruct around its paradoxes. Neither an unrelieved pessimist nor a naive optimist, Greider is a dialectical thinker precisely in the Marxist or perhaps the Tocquevillean sense. Of 19th century capitalism in working-class Manchester, Alexis de Toqueville wrote: “From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. Where humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish, here civilization works its miracles and civilized man is turned almost into a savage.” Of 21st century global capitalism, Greider writes with a Tocquevillean twist: The new system of capitalism is the “source of vast creative energies” and at the same moment “generates the brutal swings and manic excesses--the herds of reckless investors, the false hopes of producers, the relentless drive to maximize return--that create so much destruction and human suffering, subordination and insecurity.”

Working dialectically, Greider sees that globalism brings both opportunity and risk. The new capitalism is extraordinarily efficient and productive. It demonstrates that people are capable everywhere, that the First World has no monopoly on competence or cultural efficacy. But the decoupling of productivity from wage labor creates a political vulnerability that invites civic anarchy. It is blind to the social costs of its efficiencies. It tries to conceal the costs of doing business and, where it acknowledges them, wants to pawn them off on the Third World. Greider approvingly cites Herman E. Daly’s Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare as an apt substitute for gross national product. He is too canny, however, not to recognize that economists and policy makers will ignore Daly, understanding all too well that his index compromises their mindless attachment to cost-free growth.

And here we come to the crux of Greider’s challenge, as well as to the primary defect of his own response to it. Greider is certain that “the future will be determined by whether people can confront capitalism’s repetitive pathologies and organize a new system that genuinely merges the market with democracy.” He knows that democracy’s task is to restore national controls over global capital; tax wealth more and labor less; stimulate global growth from the bottom up without risking the environment; compel trading nations to absorb more surplus production; forgive the debtors, especially the hopeless cases among the very poorest nations; reorganize monetary policy; defend labor rights in all markets; prohibit the ancient abuses renewed in the “dark Satanic mills.”

But how? With which public instruments in a world after the end of big government? With all the vital means of information communication and entertainment in the hands of global conglomerates like Disney-ABC, (this is a dimension of the new capitalism that Greider misses altogether) who indeed will tell the people about the risks of communications and information monopolies? At the very moment when we need more than ever our common democratic institutions to regulate and control capitalism’s contradictions, we have, with the help of McWorld’s cynical media corporations, turned on them with a vengeance.

Greider is here awash in his own paradoxes. In his own deeply pessimistic (but all too accurate) account in “Who Will Tell the People?,” he rued democracy’s “decayed condition,” the “systematic breakdown of [its] shared civic values,” its “permissive culture of false appearances,” its “deformed” sense of mutual understanding that resulted in “an enervating sense of stalemate.” How can the “warped and disfigured” democratic institutions of “Who Will Tell the People?” be expected to redress the self-destructive manic capitalist logic of “One World, Ready or Not”?

Greider acknowledges that he has “not offered any solution to the core problem of capitalism,” and he makes only weak noises on behalf of a fuzzy “new ideology of global humanism” supposedly waiting to be born. For in the end he is enough of a realist to know that “the political power arrayed against reform is overwhelming, while the people who support these new directions are everywhere quite weak.” His Pangloss--”the wondrous machine of free-running enterprise has fantastic capabilities,” Greider writes on the last page of the book--is finally put to rout by his Pandora; a series of “terrible events” and “wrenching calamities” will precede our coming to our senses, he concludes on that final page.

Greider completes his survey of global capitalism, by returning to the crisis of democracy. The implicit lesson he teaches, the last to be learned in our epoch when free markets are everywhere mistaken for free societies, is that capitalism needs democracy to survive and that this dependency, which market mythology refuses to acknowledge, is only exacerbated as capitalism pursues the manic logic of its disastrous global ambitions. This lesson alone makes “One World, Ready or Not” one of the most important books of the new year and leaves Greider as that most peculiar of journalists--an American Cassandra, who, like Lincoln, is able to coax hope from despair and who continues to demand against all odds that the democracy that wild capitalism is undermining must somehow contrive to save capitalism from itself. If people actually pay some heed to Greider, who knows? Maybe it even will.