Globalizers Are the Bolsheviks of Their Day

The great scientific discovery that gave us penicillin was achieved by Sir Alexander Fleming for one reason alone: When his routine cultivation of bacteria for an experiment failed because some mold contaminated the petri dish, Fleming immediately realized that it was not his original experiment that was important, but rather the “disturbance” that ruined it.

Once he focused on the mold, it was a straightforward deduction that it produced something that could kill bacteria--an antibiotic. Likewise, when we consider what happened at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, the key is to isolate the important phenomenon from all the confusion. Not the violence, which was the work of a tiny number of cultists; not the failure of the conference itself, which is the normal result when big international conferences are organized too quickly to respect an arbitrary date; not even the unexpected dimensions of the protests, which is possible because air fares are so low these days.

It was, rather, the incoherence of the protest that is truly significant. The politicians, bureaucrats and businesspeople who believe that the Seattle demonstrations were only a “disturbance” because environmentalists, trade-unionists and protectionists cannot form a coherent opposition to globalization in their respective countries are missing the point. What is significant is precisely the fact that there is only one truth and only one model on the WTO side, while there are many different reasons to oppose globalization.

Two generations ago, it was the Bolsheviks who proposed a single Leninist model for all industrialized countries. Today, the new Bolsheviks are the advocates of what I call turbo-capitalism, who believe that all economies should be opened to all forms of competition by privatizing everything, abolishing all economic regulations and removing all barriers to international commerce. Again, fundamental differences between countries are being ignored. The privatization of public services, for example, works very well if there is a dynamic and fearless anti-monopoly unit of government constantly attacking emerging monopolies, as the U.S. Justice Department is now destroying the power of Microsoft. Then we see services improve and tariffs go down.

But without that counterforce, public services become private monopolies that make a few people very rich and impose high costs on the entire economy. That is what happened in England with water and railway services and in Italy, where one man was allowed to monopolize the private television industry.

Likewise, the deregulation of the financial sector works well if there are modern laws to prevent abuses of power--and a highly motivated financial police with powerful computers and talented professionals such as the Security and Exchange Commission in the United States, which fined and jailed not only the billionaire junk bond king Michael Milken but also countless stock exchange manipulators and corporate barons. Half the top men in the London stock exchange would be in prison if they had operated on Wall Street.

In other words, if you have the Ferrari engine of a fully privatized, deregulated economy, you’d better have brakes just as powerful. Yet what we have seen in recent years is the promotion of free markets without any real effort to create equally dynamic controlling institutions. In Britain, Bill Gates would be Lord Gates of Windows, far more untouchable than Prince Charles. A French Microsoft would be a sacred institution and the anti-monopoly official who dared to start a case against it would find himself on a one-way flight to the Polynesian island where they test nuclear weapons. In Russia, he would have his own offices in the Kremlin, with an open door to Premier Boris Yeltsin. In Italy, he would buy himself three or four political parties to become the prime minister of his own coalition.

The much larger question that globalization specifically raises is nothing less than the relationship between culture and commerce. To stop European subsidies for wheat production not only would help the wheat farmers of Argentina, Australia, India and the U.S. but also would stop the destruction of the environment in northern France and elsewhere in Europe.

To fully open the Japanese rice market, on the other hand, would destroy the culture of rural Japan with its festivals and folklore--in other words, the Japanese part of Japan, whose industrial areas are nothing but a local version of undifferentiated modernity. Because the Japanese operate their economy to sustain their society and not the other way around, they correctly think that it is idiotic to destroy what they value most for the sake of a minor increase in efficiency. It is only in the Third World where state action is twisted to benefit the privileged few that turbo-capitalism is always a good idea.

Just as the old Bolsheviks ignored all structural differences among countries in their insistence that only state ownership of everything would eliminate economic inequality, today’s “turbo-capitalists” do the same when they insist that all trade barriers are inefficient (true), that a globalized world economy would be much more productive (true) and that all impediments to free trade should therefore be abolished (a giant non sequitur, because impediments may protect not only inefficiencies but also national cultures and societies).

This was the real significance of the Seattle demonstrations: Through their very diversity, they exposed the one-model extremism of the new Bolsheviks who would sacrifice everything for the sake of efficiency--and without even the counterweight of functioning regulatory institutions.