The Third Wave....Globalization, Information Age and how to respond
The big picture of where we are regarding class, lifestyle, nation states, shaping the future, etc.
excerpt:
What we face here is really a new personification of greed, one that has freed itself of distracting human feelings like love, compassion, charity, guilt, fear and other emotions, leaving only pure greed, unencumbered and free to pursue singlemindedly the one and only thing that motivates it: profit. It is the search for profit by global corporations that is powering the whole process. These corporations have even acquired their own rights, which are often more favorably recognized than the rights of real persons. They have learned to nourish themselves and to grow by feeding on nature, people, and information. They have become increasingly aggressive in asserting their freedoms ("liberalization"
, overcoming government controls ("deregulation" and in taking over government activities ("privatization" .
Corporations had earlier shared global rule with governments. Now, they want to rule it by themselves ("globalization" .
The colonization of our countries that began in the 16th century hasn't really stopped. It has just changed forms, coming in waves of globalization that intrude into our communities, impose their unwanted rule, and squeeze the wealth out of our people and environment. Each improvement in technology, each transformation of capital, creates new ways of extracting wealth from us, continually enriching those who control the technology and our economy while impoverishing us, destroying local livelihoods, ravaging our natural resources, and poisoning our environment. The first wave has ebbed, but we are still deep within the second wave, and the third wave has already started lapping our shores.
Responding to the third globalization wave
How do we respond to globalization? To the first wave, we responded with independence struggles, ranging from armed revolutions to peaceful lobbies for independence. Economically, our responses ranged from outright confiscation and nationalization of foreign property, to negotiated purchases of foreign corporations at full commercial prices. Thus, historically, we can identify a period of economic nationalism worldwide, when newly-independent countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America tried to regain control of their economies through a range of policies favoring local economic interests and institutions.
Then came the post-colonial second wave of globalization, both in response to our independence struggles and as a consequence of internal developments within the economies of powerful countries themselves. Responses to this second wave have ranged from communist-led armed struggles, to elite-led protectionist regimes. Many of these responses have floundered as crises upon crises beset our countries, enabling former colonial masters to recover much of their early privileges. In general, the second wave of globalization remains dominant over our national and community life, having managed so far to counter all the various responses that have confronted it.
We're still under the second wave, and now comes the third wave. How do we respond to this new wave, and how should our response be related to our continuing efforts to confront the second wave of globalization?
A Green response
We can learn from some of the responses of social movements which have confronted specific issues involving the information economy. An illustrative set of responses can be seen in the program of the Philippine Greens for a non-monopolistic information sector. The following are the major elements of this program (Society, Ecology and Transformation by the Philippine Greens, 1997):
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=1569
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