We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, March 20, 2017

What's So Bad About Global Capitalism? Ten Sociological Critiques of the System [fifth in a series of five]

Click here to access article by Nicki Lisa Cole, Ph.D. from ThoughtCo. 

I don't think that Cole wishes to imply that the other stages of capitalism were beneficial to working people. Because capitalist laws made everything created on the owners' property as belonging to the owner, and by reducing everything to a commodity that could be purchased, soon capitalist "owned" everything of productive value and workers were reduced to wage-slaves to be hired or fired at the discretion of the "owners".

I think she is arguing that each stage of capitalism tightened the hold that capitalists had over their nation-states and workers residing in these states, and now with the advent of trans-national capitalism things are even worse. 
The five key elements that make capitalism “global” are summarized below. A more detailed analysis can be found here.
  1. the fully globalized nature of the production and distribution of goods;
  2. the flexible nature of a global pool of labor that corporations can choose from;
  3. globalized circuits of accumulation and investment among wealthy corporations and individuals;
  4. the existence of a global class of elite who set the agenda for production, trade, finance, and development; and,
  5. a globalized form of governance, known as the transnational state, run by these elite via institutions like the WTO, World Bank, and IMF, among others.
Now, let’s take a critical look at the implications of these particular arrangements of capitalist relations of production.
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