Is globalisation about sharing a global culture, or designing new cultural borders? Is cross-cultural awareness a new skill, a differentiated form of collective ...
Francois Bourguignon’s The Globalization of Inequality is an interesting companion to Tony Atkinson’s Inequality, which I reviewed here recently. It’s a different kind of book, a relatively short argument about why and how to make the globalization process fairer, as contrasted with Atkinson’s longer and detailed description and analysis of inequality in the UK with a substantial list of policy recommendations. It’s useful to have the global picture alongside the national one, however, because the story globally is of much increased incomes in the middle of the distribution in a few countries – largely China – as well as gains among the richest groups.
Since the previous global crisis, which had triggered the launch of global neoliberal restructuring known as Globalisation in the late 60s, there have been major contributions made from critical perspectives to understand the expansion of capitalist mode of production and the formation of the world market. Much of the insights were developed by political economy theorists from the West and the Center. Taken the first and second generation classical work of those like Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, Rudolf Hilferding, Vladimir I. Lenin, Bukharin, Peter Kropotkin, Karl Polanyi, Antonio Gramsci, third and forth generation classics came out in this period. Althusser, Foucoult, Lefebvre, Balibar, De Bord, Deleuze, Miliband, Poulantzas, Palloix, Murray, Hymer, Wallerstein, Amin, Arrighi, Baran, Sweezy, Breverman, Tronti, Negri, Verno, Cox, van der Pijl, Waterman among many others have re-worked on the state, classes, production, labour, capital, power, ideology, agency, and so forth, and have added new insights on our understanding of ever changing world historical structures and the possible vision for radical emancipatory change. In this post-war and New-Left era, both Gramsci and Polanyi had been rediscovered and their work stimulated -especially via Poulantzas’ analysis- the development of the analysis of the transnational dimension of the changing capitalism.
The Third Industrial Revolution will not only radically alter our economy, but also our social and political lives. The engine of the first industrial revolution, the railroad, and the defining feature of the second industrial revolution, fossil fuels, all require centralized management and massive concentrations of capital - the essence of modern capitalism. The third industrial revolution requires less. Author and economist Jeremy Rifkin tells Piya Chattopadhyay how an "energy internet" spread across millions of homes and offices will usher in a new era of decentralized, lateral power.
A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.
Ethan Zuckerman is one of the big thinkers, and doers who consistently inspires me. His Wikipedia entry identifies him as “an American media scholar, blogger, and internet activist.” All of this is true, but that’s just part of the picture. He’s also someone who consults regularly with major foundations, think tanks, NGOs, and policy-makers, as they try to understand the potentials, and risks, of networked computing. As the founder of GeekCorps and Global Voices, he’s put his geeky skills to work to try to change the problems which worry him the most about our contemporary culture. He’s someone who has a formed a network of other bloggers and digital activists around the world, and someone who travels often to parts of the planet that most of us could not point out on a map, in order to better understand the political, cultural, and technological conditions on the ground there. He’s become one of our best thinkers about “digital age civics” and through his work as the Director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, he’s leading a team of graduate students as they seek to design tools which might empower activists and community leaders to be more effective at fostering social change. He does this while remaining mild-mannered, easy-going, modest, and open-minded, a model for what an engaged public intellectual might look like in the 21st century. I am lucky to be able to call him a friend.
The barriers between political, economic and social issues have dissolved. The reality of our networked society is that global, regional and industry developments are intertwined and technological revolutions are disrupting our conventional decision-making processes. Today, to address these issues, the world needs a level of global cooperation that is increasingly difficult to attain, precisely due to the growing complexities in the world.
I realize that in today’s fast world—fast food, fast money, fast information—a few weeks is a long time, a month an eternity, and who can even describe the immense duration of a fiscal quarter or a season. In today’s fast world, President Obama’s State of the Union is long gone. But in the spirit of all things slow, I’m going to go back all the way to the 1960s and 1970s, to a few Kennedys and things of a Presidential nature said back then. And then to the roots of the modern social investment movement, with a brief aside on Greek mythology and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
As we enter 2015, the global corporate system deepens and spreads in its eco-genocidal effects. But the dots are not joined in their common cause across domains. Money-value coordinates like GDP, c...
Digital technologies are once again transforming global value chains and, with them, the structure of the global economy. What do businesses, citizens, and policymakers need to know as they scramble to keep up?
Rather than writing about the market and the industry at the level of specifics, I have tried to take a more probing, macroscopic point of view and assemble my thoughts on what it is that has recently been giving me an uneasy feeling. At the start of 2013, I had a sense - it was almost a conviction - that there were changes under way throughout the world that were far wider in scope and far more momentous than I had anticipated. Perhaps I only feel that way because my perspective has changed as a result of seeing various things. I didn't have an opportunity to organize my ideas in writing before, but over the New Year's holidays I had some time to put my thoughts together. These are entirely my personal views.
The word, cosmopolitanism, is often used and often misunderstood. What does the term mean to you? What do you see as the core values or virtues of adopting a more cosmopolitan perspective?
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