The New Global Class Architecture: Neoliberalism and Class Formation

The New Global Class Architecture:

Neoliberalism and Class Formation

Eddie J. Girdner, Izmir University

(Published in the Turkish Yearbook of International Relations, No. 37, 2006.)  

“The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.”

                                                                                  The Communist Manifesto[1]

“And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? ...by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.”

                                                                                  The Communist Manifesto[2]

“Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.”

                                                                                  The Communist Manifesto[3]

“In really-existing capitalism, class struggle, politics, the state, and the logics of capital accumulation are inseparable.”

                                                                                  Samir Amin[4]

            Actually-existing neo-liberal capitalism inevitably creates crucial contradictions which cannot be overcome.[5] Among these are the inability to generate sufficient employment, inequality on a global scale, the continuation of imperialism and imperialist wars, continued enclosure of the earth’s resources, pauperization, ecological crises, over-production and under consumption, the enormous waste of human potential on a global scale, and the forging of a global working class which is in an ever more precarious position even as net global wealth increases. At the same time, neoliberalism tends to fragment consciousness, drowning class awareness in a sea of consumerism, which is making organizing and class struggle more difficult.

            All of these crucial contradictions were evident leading up to the global economic crisis which began in 2008. But the critics of the emerging neo-liberal system were ignored as voices crying in the wilderness. It seems that much of economic orthodox thinking is based upon class interest, rather than economic analysis. Kenneth Boulding has noted that anyone who thinks the economy can go on expanding indefinitely is either a mad man or an economist.

Resistance to the system which puts people into great stress just to make ends meet, from severe exploitation, and imperialism, tends to take perverted or alienated forms as seen in religious fundamentalism, ethnic chauvinism and random terrorist acts.[6] The ruling classes encourage these tendencies to help divert attention from the crucial contradictions of exploitation under neo-liberal capitalism.[7]

At the same time, the tools of propaganda in the global media have become more pervasive. Unable to deal with these contradictions, the powers at the helm of the global economy, following the reigning ideology, claim that the solution is more and deeper neoliberalism, which can only further exacerbate the crises. Neoliberalism, as we know, is not liberal and not new. It is statist, in the service of capital. Its adherents recognize that democracy slows capital accumulation. It is class struggle from above against workers and poor around the world. 

Some indications of the unfolding global crisis of actually-existing capitalism will be observed below, followed by some observations about the process of class formation on a global scale. While the “essential product,” the working class is continuously being formed on a global scale, the essential and unified class struggle has yet to emerge. While new and creative forms of class struggle are emerging, the theoretical historical process of transition to socialism, some superior and more rational economic system, remains uncertain. Clearly the seminal minds of socialist thought in the nineteenth century underestimated the difficulties of this dialectical movement. Actually existing capitalism, while brutal, bleeding and wounded, could not be transcended by the massive efforts to build alternative societies during the twentieth century. While this is the challenge of contemporary history, during and beyond the age of neoliberalism, and might prevent the onrushing demise of the human species, through weapons of mass annihilation, such considerations have today largely been buried beneath the “end of history” ideology of the neoliberal era. The global population, it seems, is being herded, lemming-like, in an opposite direction, toward an unseen sharp precipice.

The leading capitalist-imperialist nations of the world only pulled back from their adventurous rush to deeper neoliberalism when the banks of the major western countries began to collapse in 2008. A panic set in under the fear that the entire global financial system would unravel and collapse. It was, or should have been, an embarrassing situation after all the recent years of bending the ears of populations about the necessity of pushing further into the green pastures of neoliberalism. Not those who had been singing the praises of laissez faire and denouncing government as evil and incompetent in the market rushed head long to none other than the state to launch a salvage operation to save the system. As long as it was the working classes who were suffering, there was little concern, but when the crises threatened the financial system, the alarm bells were set off. The people had suffered from neo-liberal exploitation. Now, they would be made responsible for saving the technocrats and the business “masters of the universe” from their own shenanigans which brought down the system.      

It is useful to examine contradictions which bear out the words of Marx and Engels in terms of how leaders within the capitalist system seek to overcome crises by “paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises.” The first is the crisis of capitalist accumulation in the United States, characterized by a long period of economic stagnation, after the “Golden Age” of the l950s and l960s, and brought about primarily by neoliberalism utopianism.[8] Government and corporate officials have sought to overcome the crisis by first preventing national autonomous development in the periphery and secondly by clamping neoliberalism upon the entire world. This led to recurring imperialist wars, such as those in Korea, Vietnam, Central America, Afghanistan and Iraq, in which many millions have perished since 1950.[9] Some 3.4 million died in Vietnam alone, some three million in Korea, possibly as many as two million in Iraq since the l991 conflict, and millions in containing indigenous nationalist movements in Latin America, the struggle ongoing. Counterinsurgency warfare, the thrust of the John F. Kennedy Presidency, became necessary in the interests of capitalist profits, essentially the prevention of revolutions or more specifically the prevention of people from fighting for their freedom.[10] This is the fundamental contradiction gripping the world today. This imperialist enterprise continues to march forward today under the Orwellian rubric of a “war on terrorism,” which replaced the Cold War as a way of controlling global resources. If the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, had not happened, the “war on terrorism,” or its equivalent, would have had to be invented to control global resources and markets and maintain the rate of capitalist accumulation and corporate profits. The so-called “emerging countries” will be allowed to “emerge” if and only if their economies are entailed within the orbit of neo-liberal capitalism system and part of global imperialism.

            The other two contradictions are linked to the first. The second is the crisis over the Constitution in Europe, later the Lisbon Treaty.[11] This is a case where the elites of Europe seek to overcome the crisis of economic stagnation by clamping a neoliberal constitutional treaty on the entire continent, which would essentially lock in neoliberal institutions and mechanisms and lock out politics, democracy and class struggle. This approach merely ratchets up the crisis to a new level. In particular, more surplus value is extracted from workers, both in Western Europe and Eastern Europe as there is a neoliberal leveling down of social welfare across the continent. Reserve countries with a reserve army of cheap labor in Eastern Europe wait in the wings until the further erosion of life standards is required for the maintenance of capitalist profits and accumulation in the European Union.

            Following the Monnet method, most governments in the European Union have strictly avoided allowing the people to vote on the Lisbon treaty. When it was soundly rejected by the people in Ireland in a referendum in 2008, the bureaucrats in Brussels immediately and shamelessly began to devise a scheme to force the Irish people to vote on the treaty again. But the document ran into trouble in Poland and the Czech Republic as well. Some hoped in 2009 that the economic crisis might be exploited to help stampede the Irish into the fold with a second referendum later in the year. This would be ironic as the direction of European integration has been to institutionalize neoliberalism, largely the cause of the economic problems, which Ireland faces, to begin with.[12]   

            The third of these contradictions is the debt crisis in the poorest countries such as Africa. This demonstrates clearly the absolute failure of capitalism on a global scale,[13] which has come to the point that addressing the issue could not be avoided at the G-8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland, in June 2005. It became necessary to address this crisis, while the leaders would have obviously preferred to ignore it. The foreign debt of fourteen highly indebted poor countries was cancelled and future aid promised contingent upon structural reform. The result, not surprisingly, was merely a band aid, and a deceptive sleight of hand, to prevent an embarrassing mass starvation of those on the African continent. Whatever is brought about, will most certainly be oriented to steering African countries further in a neo-liberal and “open-market direction.” In other words, not only would the system that produced the crisis still be in place, its crisis-producing tendencies would become even more acute under further neoliberal reform.

            A further crucial contradiction is that of ecological destruction,[14] but obviously the chiefs of the capitalist and neoliberal locomotive are far from addressing this crisis in a serious way. Indeed, the furtherance of capitalism simply deepens the crisis.[15] The chief of the previous “fossil-fuel” administration, in Washington, former US President, George W. Bush, was finally forced to acknowledge that global warming “was an issue” late in his Administration.[16] But from the perspective of the Bush Administration, the battle was how to keep the US emitting more than a quarter of all global emissions of greenhouse gases to promote American based corporations in the rest of the world. No one really expected that figure to be lowered at the expense of the bottom line of profits. The US is essentially an oligarchy with big corporations driving the government. The big emerging market countries are merely trailing in the wake of flagship, USA. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair could not be taken seriously in his protests about African debt relief and concerns about global warming, as the Iraq war showed where the true concerns of fellow nations, with a continuing racist and colonialist mentality, lay. Britain would continue to be a partner in global imperialism. This is generally seen as the “special relationship.”

            These contradictions serve to remind us that there is necessarily, at this time, an emerging process of class formation in almost every country today. It further reminds us that the dynamics of the current neoliberal dispensation, ostensibly to overcome the crisis, have only accelerated that process of class formation. The mechanisms are familiar. In fact, they are designed for the purpose of diminishing democracy. Among these devices we may note (1) the shift of power from governments to corporations, (2) corporate globalization, (3) the attack on social welfare and the working classes, (4) diminishing democracy through neoliberal dictates, (5) increasing global inequality, both inside countries and between countries, (6) the hollowing out of politics and government, (7) and pauperization on a global scale. While there is an emerging consumerism, among the middle classes, which gives the illusion that everything is fine in big emerging countries today, such as Brazil, Mexico, and Turkey, these are potential bases for creating the conditions for an increasing class consciousness and class formation on a global scale.[17]

The Changing Global Economy as Historical Process: From Keynesianism to the Crisis of Neoliberalism

            The revolution in the global economy and production, commonly mislabeled “globalization,”[18] is essentially a class-war, a corporate-capitalist struggle from above, against earlier forms of production which emerged after World War II. Neoliberalism is a way of ratcheting up capitalist exploitation and diminishing democracy in a variety of ways. It is not the invisible hand, but the invisible foot which repeatedly gives the working classes a swift boot from above. The earlier forms included the Keynesian modes, import substitution industrialization, indigenous nationalist development in China and the Soviet Union, under state-led accumulation of capital, and other essentially mixed economies, which often fashioned themselves as “socialist” economies.[19] Today, the predominant form which has emerged, that of neoliberal or post-Fordist production, strips previously guaranteed welfare from the working class in order to increase the rate of surplus to capitalists and accelerate capitalist accumulation.

            Fordism was a historical compromise forced upon the bourgeoisie due to the fact that the possibility of an alternate economic system, which granted significant benefits to the working class, had not been completely defeated globally and locally. Consequently, considerable concessions could be wrung out of capital during the post-war historical period. Capital was forced to embrace this compromise, due to the vast opportunities for profits after WWII, with the opening up of former colonial areas for capitalist investment and exploitation. At the same time, capitalist forces bided their time, as wars of counterinsurgency were waged in the periphery, looking forward to the time when they could push their demands further upon the working classes. At the end of the Cold War, the world entered a “new world order,” a “world-wide-web” of deeper exploitation, unimpeded by the fear that a model of an alternative economics is on the horizon.

            Since the historically necessary shift to neoliberalism, necessitated by the ongoing crises in the actually-existing capitalist system, the global economy has been revolutionized. We have seen this ongoing everywhere, such as in China and Vietnam. At the same time, there is a congruous revolution in the global political system, that of neo-conservatism, neo-Wilsonian millenarianism, which bases its rationale on the Bush II Doctrine of “Preemption” or compellance, that is, the use of force and the ending of multilateralism. The emerging totalitarianism in the economic sphere requires an attendant totalitarianism in the global political sphere as discussed below. Neoliberalism is antidemocratic; it embraces freedom for capital, not for labor. Postmodernism has served this purpose.[20] These ideological tools are meant to ensure that the resources of the entire world and the markets are laid willingly at the feet of the western global corporations. The people are merely subjects in the global rule of capital. We see the twin thrusts, political and economic, being played out today from the banks of the Potomac, to the banks of the Euphrates and the Mekong. Socialists still embrace the hoary historical vision that this is a dialectical process vectored toward an eventual socialist dispensation.

            This is a global process that is ongoing that has tried to force every nation into roughly the same mold. At the same time, of course, this process produced greater inequality and threatened major pauperization around the world even before the onset of the economic crises which spread around the globe in 2008.[21] Wherever we look, we see the same global processes at work. There is the process of growing inequality, whether in China, the USA, EU, Turkey, or India. For the most part, there is a muted consciousness of what is going on in emerging societies, as the middle classes with disposable income have rushed into the consumer revolution. While there are labor struggles, they are uneven. Again, the ideology of the ruling class is the ruling ideology; there is an established ideological hegemony which inhibits resistance to neoliberalism.

Privatization, or more accurately piratization, is universally loathed by those human individuals thrown on the scrap heap of unemployment, but they are given counsel that this is for the salvation of all mankind. They are given the glorious opportunity to worship the Bill Gates’s the Lakshmi Mittals and the Warren Buffetts who profit by the demise of their welfare. These gurus, or rather “masters of the universe, are at the same time, held up to remind people of how miserably they have failed.

            From the standpoint of the ruling classes, any resistance is beaten down, sabotaged, in various ways, to produce a uniform totalitarian post-welfare world today. Every country, government, ruling class, is under the gun, so to speak, sometimes literally, to get with the program and renovate the old modes of production. Various forms of actually existing capitalism, that provided jobs and a good deal of social welfare in the past, are summarily abolished for new streamlined modes of exploitation and greater “productivity!” In some countries it is actually a law, as in the US corporate laws, that policies must serve the bottom line of profits. The goal is to clamp the rule of the global “corporatariat” upon all mankind.[22]

            At the same time, there is somewhat of a convergence occurring, not in terms of commanding capital and wealth, but in terms of production and social inequality. There is a uniformity being produced across societies where those with money live relatively the same everywhere, and those in the working class get proletarianized. As big emerging market nations develop, capitalist accumulation and economic growth is higher there, but the net flow of capital is to the center. This is because exploitation is greater in developing societies. China, the former USSR, Eastern Europe, the so-called communist countries, have engaged in forms of state-guided capitalist accumulation. But the contradictions in the global economy have not ended but grown sharper. This will likely continue. That is, the global economy, while appearing to be more rational, is actually becoming more irrational. At the same time capitalism continues to produce imperialism and wars.

Wars to subdue any economic autonomy in the periphery, previously called counterinsurgency wars, and said to be for the purpose of stopping Communism, were actually wars of imperialism. They were for the purpose of stopping freedom and democracy and preventing autonomous nationalist development. The American public, told the opposite, cannot be told the truth about these wars, as it would not appear legitimate in the hinterlands of Christian America. So the pretext was said to be “stopping communism,” just as today such wars are said to be a “war against terrorism.” It could not be admitted that these wars were wars against people fighting for their freedom from imperialism, capitalist exploitation, and feudal exploitation. The most recent have been the imperialist push since l990 to secure control of energy resources in Iraq, the larger Middle East, Central Asia and West Africa. The real aim is to launch preemptive strikes against the emerging potential of Russia, China and India, control the Eurasia heartlands, and consequently the world.[23] These are fictions to hide the truth about the political side of shoring up capitalist accumulation.

            The global class struggle at the end of the twentieth century resolved itself into a situation where it appeared to be nearly impossible for states to resist the consequences of neoliberalism. In both the Soviet Union and China, previous systems of welfare were largely taken apart by the indigenous elites from inside. This is also happening in Vietnam under the policy of Doi Moi. Variations of this process are seen all across the globe, orange and velvet revolutions, many of them funded by the US Government through the Orwellian-named National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

            These are essentially class struggles by the ruling classes against the system in place which often guarantees a degree of social welfare to the workers. One sees a typical similar situation in Turkey today, where many social guarantees are being eliminated, not only for the purpose of securing IMF loans, but for the purpose of fulfilling the requirements for joining the European Union. In one way or another, the surplus that has been produced by the workers over decades must be rendered into private hands for the purpose of capital accumulation. In Russia, and some Eastern European countries, it was a movement by the Mafia that resulted in the wealth getting into the hands of the private sector. The West did not care how they got the money; they only wanted to see it appear on the market, in the form of materials, buildings, companies, oilfields and rigs and so on. The West actually encouraged the Mafia operations to accelerate such forms of primitive capitalist accumulation.

            The bottom line was the encouraging of social irresponsibility driven by greed, the maximum sabotage of society in the shortest time possible. The faster the society collapsed, the sooner the West could get their hands on the wealth. The local state is rendered relatively powerless to stop it; and officials believe that it is not in their interests to resist. What this shows is that the genuine revolution, part of a larger historical process, was never completed in these societies.

            Capitalism and neoliberalism are continuously dismantling and recreating the forces of production. Growth slows down in the developed countries as neoliberalism is established and moves to the periphery. Does that mean that production will mainly be situated in the emerging societies? Today this is largely the situation in the so called big emerging market states. Why should there be a shortage in such societies, when they are supplying the whole world with their produce and being sapped of capital? This is simply an indication of how surplus value is pumped out of these countries through the global system of imperialism; this is a means of forcing the working classes of the world to finance the deficits brought about by the imperialist wars against their countries. This is another contradiction of the global capitalist economy under neoliberalism, as seen in the considerations below.

Imaginary Capitalism, Imaginary Democracy:

            Empirically, we will examine the various forms of actually existing capitalist accumulation below. The global system is essentially logic-driven by the requirements of capitalism and by the contradictions which exist. Capitalism cannot generate an adequate number of jobs nor create social welfare for all. As taught in the universities around the world, there is an imaginary economics of an imaginary capitalism,[24] and an imaginary democracy of imaginary democratic systems, which do not work at all as they are described in the texts. Rather, we have what Samir Amin refers to as “a low-intensity democracy.”[25] When economic crises are discussed, these are seen as exceptions rather than the normal operational state of the system. Therefore this serves the function that one has to be an intellectual dissident to view the system from without and get an insight into what is going on. In other words, neoliberal economic propaganda and “democratic” political propaganda continue on a global scale and the future guardians and functionaries of the systems must be steeped in this ideology.

            This is a global process as a part of the historical process. There is nothing to indicate that the conceptualization and analysis made by Marx and Engels about the operation of capitalism in the nineteenth century was mistaken.

            In the twentieth century, World Wars I and II were part of the same conflict among the imperialist powers. There was massive barbarity in the 20th century, in order to settle this question in Europe.[26] Tensions remained even after this. The United States could not dominate the whole world or even the whole continent of Europe until today. There was no actual communist threat but the ideological construct of a communist threat helped the US to dominate Europe.[27] Today, some countries are still not completely dominated by transnational capital, and the US seeks to bring these countries into the global system. This global class struggle took the form of imperialist wars after WW II, in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Iraq, and so on.[28] Today Iran and Syria are seen as obstacles as they threaten US-Israeli domination of Middle East energy resources and the opportunity for capitalist profits if the region can be “democratized” and integrated into the neoliberal order.

The Global Economy Today: A Profile

            Eric Hobsbawm has noted some salient features of the contemporary global world disorder. Establishing world order is more problematical than in the 19th century for two reasons. The first and most important of these is the growing inequalities due to free-market globalization, which are bringing “grievance and instability.” The second is that there is no longer a “great power system” that could prevent a collapse into a war such as happened between l915 and l945. He observes that “historically empires have not created peace and stability in the world around them.” There is not likely to be a “Pax Americana.”[29]

            Samir Amin has summarized the malady plaguing the global economy today.[30] The prevailing ideas for describing how the global economic system works, are based upon an eighteenth century idea or “imaginary capitalism.” Actually existing capitalism is something altogether different. He shows that actually existing capitalism is leading to pauperization on a global scale and a truly untenable system which cannot be sustained. Hobsbawm’s conclusions about the control of the world by a single superpower are similar. Such a system must break down and the only real question is how long it can be sustained at enormous cost.

            The system which has produced the contemporary global economic and political contradictions has deep roots, going back to the beginnings of the American empire at the end of the l9th century. The essential framework of Bretton Woods was set up after WWII, which has now matured into a globe-girdling neoliberalism with the end of the systems of state “socialism.” There is a vast literature today which documents in great detail the contradictions of the neoliberal capitalist order. Some of the gurus of structural adjustment, such as Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs, have become sharp critics of the neoliberal agenda.[31] Today, this reality is glossed over by the imaginary economics that is taught in universities and embodied in the prevailing global capitalist media today.

            The world is witnessing a fundamentally different kind of capitalism from that established immediately after World War II. This was an era of “rational capitalism,” an ideology provided by two of the most prominent economists of the twentieth century, John Meynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter, in response to the Great Depression. They understood that there were insoluble contradictions within the capitalist system, but believed that these could be “managed rationally”. Departing from Say’s law, Keynes argued that supply did not create its own demand, but that the state must guarantee effective demand. An important point was that this system could not be based upon the domination of financial capital, or speculation, but rather capital directed into productive enterprise. Of course today, we see the absolute domination of financial capital on a world-wide basis.[32]

            Safeguards were built into the Bretton Woods system that would ensure the comparative health of the global economic system, in spite of the contradictions of capitalism. Among these were the “euthanasia of the rentier,” “the tempering of free trade,” “a degree of national self-sufficiency,” “creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank”, and a degree of social democracy in the welfare state. This system of “greed and exploitation” might eventually develop a “new moral code” to lead society “out of the tunnel of economic necessity.”[33]

            Both Keynes and Schumpeter rejected the philosophy of Friedrich Hayek of the “self regulating market.” While Schumpeter did not believe that capitalism led to imperialism, he saw that capitalism, left to its own logic, would destroy itself and “undermine the sociological-cultural elements” necessary for capitalism. Under Bretton Woods, the third world was to be brought into the development process through the state management of the capitalist process, rather than the mechanisms of the market. Together these constituted the “myth of rational capitalism.”[34]

            Of course, this system was sabotaged from the right by the financial community, the bankers, after the l980s, and today financial capital has come to reign supreme. The necessary left critique of the “rational capital” paradigm was launched in the l960s, by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, using the critique of Michal Kalecki and Josef Steindl.[35] Baran and Sweezy argued that the prosperity experienced in the United States and Western Europe, following World War II, was a “special condition.” Under capitalism, the normal condition was “economic stagnation.”

            In other words, it was the special conditions which existed after World War II, which accounted for prosperity in the developed world. The specific factors included, the consumer liquidity in the US built up during the war, automobilization, rise of suburbs and highway building, the rebuilding of the Japanese and European economies, US hegemony and the global dominance of the dollar, military spending, advertising and consumption, and the new financial superstructure (growth based upon increasing household debt). But, for Baran and Sweezy, the system was an irrational one for a number of reasons.[36]

            This irrational system included militarism and imperialism as integral parts; US hegemony must be maintained through wars; Keynesian demand creation could not offset the tendency toward stagnation; vested interests blocked the welfare state in the US; sales and advertising took the place of productive investment; monopolies replaced the rational entrepreneur; monopoly prices were used to maintain profits; and wage exploitation increased, allowing less leisure time for individuals. The crisis of stagnation, which Baran and Sweezy predicted, set in after the l970s. After the Vietnam War, the steam had run out of the post WWII recovery. Decades of deepening stagnation have followed. Since this time, the per capita growth rate of world output has kept slowing.[37]

            Not surprisingly, the response of those at the helm of the global economy was the establishment of a system that would make the situation inordinately worse, that of neoliberalism. The era of Thatcher and Reagan and supply side economics began. It meant the end of Keynesianism, no more redistribution of income; no expansion of the welfare state; no more promotion of full employment and economic security; and no more aid to the Third World. Structural adjustment programs were brought in with restructuring, deregulation, privatization, a “free-market” system, globalization and neoliberalism.[38]

            This was, in fact, a classic class struggle from above, as a response to the general crisis. The attack from the ruling classes from above, led by Reagan and Thatcher, continues today and has been promulgated into a full-blown ideology of imperialism, and the disregard for international law. One can say that international law has become a fetter on capitalist profits today for the one global superpower. Preventive war is a new global grab of resources and markets, but has encountered resistance. The transparently false pretext is the “war on terrorism.”

            The war on terrorism is directed both outward toward nations that would escape the tyranny of US transnational capital and the international financial institutions and inward at the working class, which would wage class struggle for a decent wage and social welfare. Domestically, it is directed toward worker organizations and resistance. It is to make sure that neoliberal elites are in place all around the world in order to roll back working class movements, such as in India, in the new movements of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and wherever else they emerge. This is a class struggle from above on a truly global scale.

            Under neoliberalism, financial capital has come to dominate the entire world with power shifting to “financial markets.” There is a sustained and ruthless attack on the global ecology. Neoliberalism has led to increasing barbarism.

            Other elements of the emerging global economy today have been noted by Ismail Shariff. Since the early l990s, with the end of the Cold War, there have been rapid changes in the global economy. Greater economic integration has occurred in the triad, the US, EU, and East Asia and market reforms have been forced in almost all developing countries. The major countries have instituted more protection from competition from emerging countries, while on the periphery, there has been growing impoverishment and growing foreign debt. While the world pool of foreign direct investment (FDI) rose three-fold since l990, from $105 billion to $326 billion in 2003, the US share rose 8.7 times while US and foreign multinational corporations had an “explosive expansion.”[39] Clearly, changes in global business has benefited the developed countries the most.

            Shariff noted four types of changes in the global economy. First there was a restructuring of the business enterprise, with lean production, which essentially amounted to speedup of the work. A second significant change was seen in technology driven factors, such as cost performance, email and cheaper technology. A third change was in the large capital and development investments producing economies of scale and reducing costs. Fourth has been the role of governments, in terms of favorable trade policies, with most of these benefits again going to the developed countries.[40]

            Multinational corporations may be defined as those companies which have at least six foreign affiliates, operate in oligopolistic markets, and usually originate in developed countries. This means the center dictates economic development.[41]

            Something further can be seen from the statistics on FDI flows. While developing countries are compelled to open to attract FDI, the actual net flow of capital over the long haul is actually negative. Clearly, FDI has increased on a global scale, but this needs to be seen in the context of what it actually means. Looking at FDI stocks, the combined inward and outward FDI stocks as a percentage of GDP, between l985 and 2003, for the whole world, for l985, FDI stocks were 14.2 percent of GDP in l985 and rose to 41 percent in 2003. For developed countries, FDI was 13.6 percent of GDP in l985 and 43.1 percent in 2003. For developing countries, FDI was 15.7 percent of GDP in l985 and 35.9 percent in 2003. For Central and Eastern European countries, FDI was negligible in l985, 1.8 percent of GDP in 1990 and 17.4 percent in 2003. Of course, to attract FDI, many countries gave tax exemptions and provided subsidies to MNC’s, favoring them over domestic companies. While the figures show a redirection in FDI to the developed world, the triad, this is somewhat misleading in that 70 percent of all new FDI in the triad was accounted for by mergers and acquisitions. Some four-fifths of these were in transport, communications, finance, and business services. This story goes along with the dominance of finance and the fact that all of these countries saw a slow-down in growth over these decades.[42]

            In developing countries, studies show that multinational corporations have a negative affect on at least 60 percent of the world’s population. This is seen in three aspects. They have a negative effect on democracy, undermining the ability of the government to maintain employment, protect the money supply, prevent erosion of the tax base, and meet essential basic human welfare needs of citizens. Secondly, MNC’s increase inequality around the world. Thirdly, MNC’s misallocate resources by “following a narrow balance-sheet definition of efficiency.” Further MNC’s inhibit local competition or take over markets altogether. FDI from the developing world often is just a case of capital changing hands, buying local firms. All this does is lead to a net outflow of capital abroad. Such investments accounted for one-third of investments in American firms in Peru and Columbia between l980 and l997. In Latin America, only 17 percent of FDI was actual transfer of capital, since 87 percent of investments were locally financed. Moreover, foreign firms have an advantage over local firms since the financing is seen as more stable and funds available to local businesses decreases.[43]

            In terms of jobs and profits, in Latin America between l980-87, US owned firms mostly provided unskilled jobs while 79 percent of their profits were taken out of the country. At the same time, new technology destroyed local jobs. A myriad of other devices can be used by companies to increase the amount of profits taken out of the country. These include transfer pricing to conceal the real rate of profit. This means that the net flow of capital over time is actually negative.[44] Case studies by UNCTAD for Columbia, India, Iran, Jamaica, Kenya, and Malaysia, show that only 21 percent of foreign owned firms showed a clear positive effect on the local country. Anthuvan has argued that “an economic and social earthquake of unheard of dimensions is now looming on the horizon.” World unemployment or underemployment reached some 700 million by 2006.[45] This figure increased by at least another 100 million due to the global economic crisis which began in 2008.  

            The state of the global economy is becoming more problematical and miserable for at least half the global population. These are familiar statistics, but bear repeating. By 2006, of the 100 largest economies of the world, 52 were corporations, and 47 were US corporations.[46] Twenty-five percent of the world’s resources were consumed by 5 percent of the world’s population in the United States. The income ratio of the one-fifth of the world’s population in the wealthiest countries to the lowest one-fifth in the poorest countries continued to increase. In l960, it was 1 to 30. By l995, it was 1 to 74. Frequently noted also is that a couple of hundred years ago, the richest country was only 2 or 3 times as rich as the poorest. Today the gap is something like one to 300. On average, some 24,000 die every day in the poorest countries from lack of nutrition.[47]              

            John Perkins, who is a consultant to the World Bank, noted that more than 25 years ago, he was trained by an American covert operative to be an “economic hit man” These individuals recruit world leaders to promote US commercial interests. They are induced to get the country into a world of debt which insures future loyalty. He called this a new form of slave trading. Economic hit men are “mercenaries employed by the US-led corporate empire to coerce developing countries to submit to its economical and political control.” They cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars.”  They “funnel money from the World Bank and other organizations... to large corporations and ... a few wealthy families who control the ... natural resources.” Anyone or any groups, such as trade unions, that pose a threat to the “corporatocracy” are “disfranchised.”[48]

            How countries succumbed to the debt trap after the l970s was analyzed by Bienefield. When commercial loans from banks dried up, the IMF stepped in, imposing structural adjustment requirements on countries all around the world. To correct balance of payments problems, countries were required to shift their economies to promote exports. If countries refused, they were isolated from development capital. As bank profits grew steadily, countries sank deeper into debt.[49] Increasing numbers of economists have argued that the era of neoliberalism has failed. Clearly, the most successful countries have been those which resisted, such as China, India and Malaysia, to some extent.[50]    

            Samir Amin has pointed out the effects of continued enclosure by capitalist agriculture. The peasant question cannot be resolved by capitalism. Five billion peasants are to be replaced by 20 million efficient producers, the peasants destined for shanty towns, as outlined at the Doha World Trade Round. He calls this a “call for genocide.” Those in a “precarious position” in the periphery are some 70 percent of the popular classes. This number has gone from less than 250 million to 1.5 billion in some 50 years. This is the “modernization of poverty.”[51]

            Among other neoliberal trends, Fred Mosely pointed out that managerial ranks have expanded at the expense of workers. Chris Tilly pointed out that “no other country has experienced the kind of collapse in job quality and surge in inequality that the United States has undergone.” This has been brought about by “globalization, technological change and capitalist strategies.” Robert Pollin pointed out that since there has been a dramatic decline in worker power in the United States, unemployment can fall without bringing on any higher wages and inflation.[52] This situation was made much worse by the collapse of the US economy after 2007.

            In the l990s, US economic “prosperity” was “founded on a low-wage strategy” with the US Government assisting the “aggressive capitalist assault” on labor. In fact, the “net social wage,” social benefit to workers minus the taxes they pay, was zero. Workers paid a net tax, even in so-called tax cutting times, without “even a bare bones safety net for millions of Americans.” On the other hand, incomes had exploded at the top for CEOs. Europeans were better off, with a higher consumption tax, but this too became badly eroded by the march of neo-liberal practices.[53] 

            What is called for is a genuine democracy, not an imaginary democracy as now exists to serve actually existing capitalism. “There is no socialism without democracy, no democratic progress without the socialist perspective.”[54] The absence of such a possibility at the present time is pushing humanity on the periphery into religious, cultural, and ethnic cul-de-sac which results in alienating conflict. This appears to be a “civilizational conflict,” and serves the purpose of the dictatorship of capital on a global scale. This can only be broken by a clear class struggle which confronts the actually-existing contradictions of capitalism. Whether the great global economic crisis beginning in 2008 would result in a major movement of working classes around the globe could not be predicted, although labor unrest was clearly on the rise in Western Europe in 2008.

The Vietnamese War and the Policy of Doi Moi:

            Similar to the long US campaign against Iraq beginning in l990, the US war against Vietnam[55] was about destroying the country in order to ensure that autonomous development outside the orbit of US controlled capital could not succeed. While the US did not achieve its goals in Vietnam, militarily, today they were being realized through the back door of neoliberal reform. The real fear during the Cold War was that an alternative model to the US controlled global capitalist system would be established. The United States devoted considerable resources to the effort to ensure that this did not happen. This was the essence of the US wars of counterinsurgency. It was essentially about keeping peoples in capitalist bondage and ensuring that they would be forced to capitulate to the lie that “there is no alternative.” It was claimed that there was no alternative because any alternative was politically unacceptable to the world’s most powerful superpower and would be ruthlessly crushed by any and all means available.

Today, Vietnam seems to be following in the footsteps of China down the path of complete insertion into the global economy through the policy of Doi Moi.[56] Vietnam asked to join the World Trade Organization and is already experiencing many of the problems and distortions of neoliberal development in the rest of the world, such as inequality, and mass urbanization. Today the Vietnamese Government is torn between going for high economic growth through the import of foreign capital and extending social welfare. The policy of “building socialism through capitalism,” however, is fraught with many contradictions as seen in China today.[57]   

Class Profile and Dynamics:

            Eric Olin Wright has drawn attention to the “distinctively Marxist question”: “What sorts of struggles have the potential to transform capitalist economic oppression in an emancipatory direction?” The concept of class can be understood in terms “exploitation and domination.” For Wright, Marxist class analysis is a powerful tool for understanding economic and political dynamics. It also “infuses class analysis with moral critique.”[58]

            The Marxist analysis can explore the link between exchange and production, conflict, power, coercion and consent, and a “historical comparative analysis” of class exploitation. The first is simply the relationship of the individual to productive resources, we can say in terms of access to capital. This question shapes the relationship of the individual to production and exchange. The location within this nexus determines whether a person is able to exploit labor or have his or her own labor exploited.[59]

            Second, in terms of conflict, class conflict can be seen in terms of “antagonism of interests.” This approach is useful to cut through the obfuscating rhetoric of neoliberalism and analyze how workers and owners are exploited or benefit from processes going on in the real global economy. Power can be used to understand the existing situation and the potential for change. Power belongs to capital in actually existing neoliberal capitalism, but the working class have the potential to exert counter power, since capitalist accumulation is dependent upon the global exploitation of labor. This dialectic is useful for analysis and presents a fluid dynamic, in which labor has been on the losing end of power for some three decades, but which could potentially be reversed.[60]

            In terms of coercion and consent, workers are typically coerced, but since workers have the potential to resist, it is necessary to secure their consent. This is a “dependency relationship.” Finally, a historical and comparative analysis of class exploitation is useful. It is possible that resistance in the periphery and inside even developed societies, such as the European Union and the United States, can swing the leverage against capital, given the potential for organization and struggle. This sort of analysis clearly helps us see that neoliberalism “harms” society, and that class struggle can move toward an alternative society that embraces “social justice.”[61]

            Recent work by political economists can help in adapting Marxian analysis to contemporary neoliberal capitalism. For example, Michael Zweig defined social class by arguing that “class is about the power some people have over the lives of others, and the powerlessness most people experience as a result.”[62] In the United States, 62 percent are working class, and 38 percent are capitalist or middle class. Of these, only two percent are capitalists and 36 percent are middle class.

            Using this concept, the working class is made up of “those who do the direct work of production and who typically have little control over their jobs and no supervisory authority over others.”[63] A capitalist, on the other hand, includes “anyone who makes a living by owning a business.” But to qualify to be a capitalist one must be an owner who “no longer works directly with the workers,” an “owner or manager of a business with twenty or more employees,” one who “exercises control over the work force through at least one layer of middle management,” one who “becomes occupied full time with running the business as a senior strategist” and a “source of authority.” The “national economic elite,” those with real power, include the directors and high officers of the top 16,000 private corporations and can be considered to be part of the “ruling class.”

            That “class still matters” is driven home by Zweig, pointing out that within the middle class of doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers, and so on, those closer to capitalists enjoy greater power than those closer to the working class. While not exactly orthodox in the Marxian sense, it seems that this approach is not a large-scale departure as it can be argued that it is still the “ownership of property and relationship to the means of production” which largely accounts for the power relationships described by Zweig above.

            Political economists have made other useful observations about class in contemporary capitalism. For Howard Sherman, there are “multiple levels of class conflict” such as on the shop floor, political class conflict, and ideological class conflict. Bill Dugger defined class in relation to four different social relationships: “relationship to income, relationship to work, relationship to wealth, and relationship to technology.” He noted that workers were worse off than a generation ago and tend to “emulate the ruling class” going for more money, rather than principles of justice or equality.[64]

The Emergence of a New Global Class Architecture:

            The question we need to ask, then, is this: What is the result of a world that is essentially neoliberal on a global scale? To hide the reality, new mantras have been forwarded: “there is no Alternative,” “the End of History,” “the New World Order;” “the War on Terrorism,” “Preemptive War,” “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” and “democratization.” These mantras are essentially Orwellian. They enable the US and Western powers to control Iraqi oil and other global resources and help ensure that genuine democracy will not and cannot emerge. In other words, “democratization” to be forged through tools under the control of the US CIA, is a campaign to ensure that democracy cannot and will not emerge.[65] We see this clearly in the recent rigging of the Iraqi elections, an action which has not actually succeeded in its goals.[66]

            These are all propaganda “weapons of mass deception,” launched on a global scale. Struggle with the ruling classes comes when propaganda begins to break down. The Europeans reject the European Constitution and the Lisbon Treaty. But these are just bumps in the road. The juggernaut rolls on. However, one can argue that the result of this dynamic, this dialectical process, is that a new class cleavage is emerging all across the world that cuts through all societies and countries, whether rich or poor, right across the globe. This is bringing new forms of class struggle.

            I will refer to this phenomenon as the New Global Class Architecture (NGCA). It is a new global architecture of class cleavage that runs not between states and regions, but right through existing societies and states.[67] This new configuration of class cleavage may today be producing the “essential product,” which Marx and Engels wrote about in the Communist Manifesto.[68] This is, of course, a long historical development. What is emerging is the global proletariat or class in opposition to capital, and the current historical form of capital, neoliberalism, which has generally been misnamed globalization.[69] This illustrates the local and global dynamics of pauperization that is taking place. There are extant forces that are driving the emergence of this new global class architecture.[70]

            The forces behind US Imperialism in the 20th century have now been revamped to provide a new altered ideology of imperialism for the first decade of the twenty-first century. Twentieth century US imperialism was underpinned by Wilsonian millenarianism, a zealous crusading mixture of religious Calvinism, brutality and capitalism. This was a basis for global empire. With Bush II, this matured into a new “revolutionary movement,”[71] led by the neocons on the Potomac. A sort of crusading zeal has driven the neoconservative campaign. The neoconservative ideologues, such as Victor Davis Hanson at the US Naval Academy, were full-fledged imperialists and unilateralists. They promulgated the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war and elevated it to official policy. It was actually preventive war, which is illegal under international law. This was the new element in the Bush Administration, along with the provision that the United States was seen as the only state which was allowed to use preemptive war. This doctrine “scared the hell” out of the rest of the world. The elites of the world, with a few exceptions, largely went along with this dictatorship, however. One can argue that this, along with the fallout from the first application of the doctrine in Iraq, a tragedy and crime of world historical proportions, was a boon to the political consciousness of populations around the world.[72] The US was no longer seen as a benign superpower. A public opinion poll in Turkey in 2005 showed that Turkish people saw the US as the number one threat to Turkey.[73] It can be argued that renewed US imperialism has contributed to an emerging class consciousness.[74]

            To some extent, we can thank the George W. Bush Administration and the neoconservatives for this contribution to global political consciousness. At the same time, there is deepening of capitalist exploitation under the logic of neoliberal capitalism. This process is global in scale. As neoliberalism settles into developed societies, as in America and Europe, the rate of economic growth slows down. This is seen in the figures.[75] Then exploitation must be accelerated in the periphery, to make up for the loss and maintain rates of capital accumulation. This process is happening in the rapidly developing countries such as China, India, Turkey, and Vietnam.[76] This “solution” to the crises only serves to intensify the crises, as Marx and Engels observed in the Communist Manifesto. The effort would not be halted with the retrenchment made necessary by the global economic crises of 2008-2009.

            Class formation is accelerated as extraction of surplus labor is stepped up and as social welfare benefits and guarantees from the state are lost. Privatization cuts the possibilities of employment and urbanization creates greater pauperization. The extraction of surplus value on the periphery is rife with contradictions so that the extraction of surplus value is not a self-sustaining process. In addition, the global economy is unstable. If there is capital flight from any one country, an economic crises occurs, which collapses the wages for a large portion of the society. On the other hand, the crises may be global.

            Further, the contradictions are deeper and sharper in the neoliberal version of capitalism than in the previous, old fashioned version of Keynesianism, which was softened by Bretton Woods safeguards. The Keynesian pseudo-welfare state provided some cushion, which today is removed, under threat of IMF sanctions. Today the crises is deepening. As Noam Chomsky has suggested, at this juncture of history, the drive for global hegemony and capitalist totalitarian control begins to threaten the very human species itself.[77] All of these questions can be explored within a mass of extant empirical data that helps us to understand what is happening in the global economy.[78] 

The Possibility of Socialism:

            Georg Lukacs has pointed out that “bourgeois thought” always begins with the idea that the existing order of things is “immutable,” “there is no such thing as historical development.”[79] It can be argued that it is only at this time that the world has reached the historical stage that makes socialism possible, as well as necessary; perhaps only at this historical juncture have the productive forces been sufficiently developed.[80] However, the question of the transition to socialism is extremely problematical. The seminal thinkers of this question clearly underestimated the difficulties.

Marx, in his famous Critique of the Gotha Programme, suggested that the transition to socialism would be a two-stage process. The first would be defective, a society “just as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.” Here “equal right” is still “bourgeois right,” and this sort of equality still results in inequality since individuals are not equal in their situations and capacities. In the “higher phase of communist society,” “only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”[81]

Lenin saw in future “the withering away of the state.” “By what stages, by means of what practical measures humanity will proceed to this supreme aim-we do not and cannot know,” but he believed it would be a “rapid, genuine, really mass forward movement.”[82]     

In the 1960s, the American socialist, Michael Harrington suggested there were “three forces” in the U.S. “which could converge in the fight for a socialist society.” These were the old blue-collar working class, a new working class based on the emerging new technology, and university-educated young people who had a critical view of contemporary American capitalist society.[83]

Nevertheless, Herbert Marcuse was surely correct when he pointed out that “such a revolution is not on the agenda.” At best, there was a “pre-revolutionary situation.” The industrial working class had become a “stabilizing, conservative” force in the western industrialized countries. This means that “…its radicalization will depend on catalysts outside its ranks.” This will happen “…only if and when the economic stability and the social cohesion of the system begins to weaken.” As for the “new working class” of technicians, engineers, and so on, while they are in a position to “disrupt, reorganize, and redirect the mode and relations of production,” they are not interested in doing so because they are “well rewarded.” Technology at present tends to strengthen domination. “This fatal link can be cut only by a revolution which makes technique subservient to the needs and goals of free men: in this sense and in this sense only, it would be a revolution against technology.”[84]       

When the “gigantic broom” of history will finally usher in a radically different future economic era, it is, of course, not possible to know. But the bare indisputable facts about the global condition today are surely a forceful condemnation of the abysmal tragedy and failure of actually existing capitalism and neoliberalism for the overwhelming majority of humankind. As Istvan Meszaros has pointed out, capitalism “has the upper hand everywhere,” but cannot solve the problems it is generating. “Instead, it continues to generate them on an ever increasing scale.”[85] Can humanity be proud that: half of humanity is malnourished; one billion people live in slums; half of humanity lives on less than what two dollars a day can buy in the United States; one billion have no access to clean water; two billion have no electricity; two and a half billion have no sanitary facilities; one billion children (half of all children) suffer extreme deprivation because of poverty, war and disease.[86] 

            It is possible that all previously existing societies and economic systems have been preparations for a future rational society. Today capitalism seeks a solution to its contradictions in neoliberal utopianism. But in doing this, it only creates the conditions for its demise. The bourgeois solution to the crises is seen as that which deepens the crises. It can be argued that all forms of political economy, from the 18th century to the present time, have essentially been various mixed forms of actually existing “capitalist” society. None were actually “capitalist,” because that is an ideal which does not exist in the real world, but they were various types of exploitative economic systems which functioned for the purpose of accumulating capital, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, depending upon the forces driving the system. Social welfare, or even the means of survival, is withheld from nations under the fear that plentiful social welfare and leisure would result in slowing the rate of capitalist accumulation. The Euro served this function in the European Union.

            But while the technical means of production exist, on a global scale, which make socialism possible today, the political means or possibility do not currently exist. The enforced global agenda of neoliberalism makes the possibility of socialism in small countries like Vietnam very difficult. This is because attempts at socialism can be successfully subverted or destroyed by the actually existing global capitalist economy under the neoliberal dispensation.

Also in the existing “socialist countries,” such as Vietnam these countries lack the necessary technical means and capital for socialism. As a result, seeing the need for high economic growth, they may through a policy such as Doi Moi open up their country to outside capital. The argument is then made that this is a way to “build socialism through capitalism.” The argument is that this is so, because within the dialectic of globalism, socialism will ultimately emerge.

China and Vietnam have shifted to essentially state-led mixed economies, under the rubric of socialism. One dialectical argument is that bringing in elements of neoliberal capitalism will prepare the way for socialism in these societies. However, the question of the historical transition to socialism is meant to refer to a long historical process on a macro or global scale. Such logic should not be applied to individual countries over a short time period. Such a policy as Doi Moi in Vietnam, it is argued here, is at best a way to develop the technical means of production in the country, which is currently at a relatively low level.

Meanwhile, the country will suffer many of the negative effects of capitalist “modernization” as seen in other developing countries. But alternative strategies, which may take into account the needs of the people, not merely economic growth, must be sought. Small countries cannot go it alone. They must form coalitions with other like countries if they really do wish to raise the social welfare of their people. Venezuela, Cuba and other such countries can cooperate and not accept capital unless the capital is on terms favorable to the country. Some possible strategies have been suggested by Samir Amin, as discussed below.

Contemporary Directions:

            “It is no exaggeration to say… that we have entered the most dangerous phase of imperialism in all history.”[87]  Current global tensions seem to be reaching something of a critical stage that calls for action. If the remedy is not progressive, toward socialism and greater equality, then it is likely that resistance will take perverted or alienated forms, which we see happening to some extent today.[88] Osama bin Ladin was successful in pushing the world in a destructive direction, toward the violent disruption of society through sporadic violent acts of the repressed classes. This direction may possibly lead to the destruction of the human species itself, as noted by Chomsky.[89]

            On the other hand, we can observe developments led by President Hugo Chavez and others in Latin America, which are challenging imperialism in Latin America and involve a wider sphere of influence throughout the continent.[90] This Bolivarian Revolution movement is linked to the long and successful struggles in Cuba and Vietnam. In a similar vein, Samir Amin has suggested possibilities for a more effective class struggle from countries from below in order to reverse the gains made by neoliberalism in the last three decades. Among these are the following. The European Project needs to be redefined to depart from the agenda of US imperialism which could lead to a democratic and non-imperialist social Europe. The “solidarity of the peoples of the south” needs to be reestablished. This must involve the rejection of preventive war and the demand that the US dismantle its military bases in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The “reconstruction of a people’s internationalism” is necessary, to prevent capital flight. Regional organizations need to be established to stabilize currencies and economies on a regional basis and to regulate foreign investment in order to protect people’s interests. This can be positive globalization that works for the people. Traditional countries need to develop programs to protect the peasantry and free themselves from the global market in food. Debt collection by the IMF is a form of pillage which drains countries of their productive capital. Countries must challenge this system.[91]

            The possibility that the above agenda will not be stillborn is seen in the fact that the United States is more and more becoming a hollowed out power, economically, politically and morally. It can no longer command and control the entire world, since it has become dependent upon the entire world, particularly China, to finance its growing deficits. The world cannot be expected to go on financing the imperialist wars which rob their own people of the fruits of their labor. The time is crucial to demand real human rights, real human dignity and social justice. The only alternative is more bombs, more imperialist wars and the imminent end of the human species.

Conclusion: The Global Economy and the Essential Product

            The essential product today is the working class, broadly speaking, a class of society that will reengage in struggle for a rational society which works for a sustainable society for all. The tenets of the imaginary economics of capitalism must be exposed. If there is a political consciousness in society as to where neoliberal capitalism is leading the society, then there can be struggle to arrest and roll back capitalist gains. This was seen in the votes in France and Holland against the neoliberal European constitution and the vote in Ireland against the Lisbon Treaty. This process must take place in the periphery but it must take place in the center also. The potential may be greater outside the United States, but even there, there are surely limits to the degradation of the working class.[92] Global processes will likely force upon the emerging generation a greater degree of class consciousness. The emergence of a strong class-conscious movement all across the world is surely the best hope for the human species. As Istvan Meszaros has written, “the unfortunate truth of the matter is that if there is no future for a radical mass movement in our time, there can be no future for humanity itself.” [93]