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Title: Globalization and Postmodern Politics by Roger Burbach, Bill Robinson, Fiona Jeffries, William I. Robinson ISBN: 0-7453-1649-2 Publisher: Pluto Press Pub. Date: 15 February, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.50

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Summary: A 'post-Marxist' perspective on anti-capitalism
Comment: A new movement has arrived. Wherever the elites of global capitalism meet, under the auspices of the WTO, World Bank, IMF, or the EU, so too do protestors, in their tens of thousands. But what is its nature?
Some sense of it is given by Roger Burbach in this book. For him, public enemy number one is neo-liberalism. It was '[t]he dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile', he writes, that
served as the first laboratory for an experiment in neo-liberal economics in the mid- and late 1970s with its bloody repression of the working class, privatization of state companies, and dismantling of the public health system.
Neo-liberal strategies began in countries such as Chile, Britain and Canada in the mid-1970s and were internationally hegemonic by the late 1990s.
But the model is failing society. Neo-liberal globalisation has not ushered in an epoch of peace and prosperity. For Burbach, this is 'an epoch of extraordinary conflict, upheaval and uncertainty', as manifested in frequent economic crises and financial turbulence, particularly in the Third World.
However, despite economic implosion in much of the world, certain businesses have been doing very well for themselves, notably the major TNCs. The bulk of the world market in many sectors is divided amongst a few giants. These use their technological edge but also economic muscle and political influence in the pursuit of market dominance. One crucial means to this end is the control over knowledge. Burbach quotes an intellectual property lawyer to the effect that the control of intellectual assets by modern corporations 'makes the monopolies of the nineteenth century robber barons look like penny-ante operations'.
For workers the neo-liberal world has a different face. In the wake of employers' offensives against union organisation poverty and insecurity have been on the rise. 'While the new robber barons have accumulated enormous fortunes', Burbach claims 'workers have reaped few of the benefits'. Groups such as women and blacks have been affected especially adversely by labour 'flexibilisation' and welfare cuts. And yet the incomes of the upper echelons continue to soar. Polarisation, in other words, is not only a matter of the widening 'North-South gap'. As Burbach sees it,
[t]he concepts of core and periphery, or North and South, are increasingly not geographic per se as much as they are social class in character.

What of the movement that opposes these developments? Despite differences, there is one positive project that unites all its constituents, namely to encourage the self-assertion of individuals defending their conditions of life and work. Ultimately the common project is participatory democracy. As Burbach puts it, 'What these various movements have in common is the goal of expanding the practice of democracy to include the economic realm. They hearken back to the Greek origins of the word: rule of the people'.
Burbach's project is, despite his claim to be 'constructing entirely new radical narratives', strongly reminiscent of Proudhon's aim of marrying market competition to communitarian rules of exchange and ownership. His proposal for an 'alternative economy' reads like a manifesto for co-operative enterprise and small business, with its recommendation that small firms use the internet 'to take control of the marketing and distribution of their products', and its advocacy of small-scale agricultural enterprises, municipally-owned businesses, workers' co-operatives, employee share-ownership schemes, fair trade, socially responsible investment, microcredit banks, as well as land reform. A little later he gives examples of the 'alternative, postmodern economy' in Latin American cities:

These are all nascent, alternative economic activities', he opines, without a hint of irony, 'because they represent efforts by people to take control of their lives at the most fundamental, grassroots level.

For Burbach, the movement manifests a 'new politics' for a fractured, postmodern age. This thesis is developed along three main lines. First, this is an epoch in which national states are becoming increasingly subservient to 'footloose and entirely deterritorialized finance capitalists and transnational corporations'. Given the reduced power of states, 'it may be more effective to wage an ongoing struggle for change from below rather than holding formal power'. The paradigm here is the Zapatista rebellion. Because the Zapatistas did not seek power but merely 'to spark a broadly-based movement of civil society' they may be regarded as 'the first postmodern revolutionary movement'. However, how this aim is so radically different to that of the Zapatistas' namesake, to mention but one 'modern' movement of 'civil society', is unclear. Second, he argues that 'traditional class society' is fragmenting, giving way to entirely new strata: 'newly affluent employees and professionals' and, on lower rungs, a proliferation of 'segmented identities and localized groups, typically based on ethnic or sexual difference'. This social disarticulation is reflected in 'political fragmentation', notably the decline of 'class politics based on trade unions and a numerous industrial working class' and 'the rise of single-issue politics that appeal to the new social strata'. Burbach draws extensively upon the 'new social movement' paradigm developed in the 1980s. This refers to theories which predicted a waning of broad-based, anti-systemic, 'materialist' movements and their replacement by single-issue movements oriented to 'life-political' issues (such as the environment and human rights) and 'symbolic' questions of identity representation. Alongside the fragmentation of social movements, Burbach, in a poststructuralist vein, posits the demise of metanarratives', those theoretical frameworks that give coherence to practices of oppression.
There are, however, ambivalences in Burbach's position. He is sensitive to the challenge that metanarratives may also lend coherence to practices of resistance, and that the deconstruction of reason's foundations may point towards 'complete relativism, nihilism and a belief that political and social struggles are meaningless'. He feels obliged to concede that capitalism is itself a 'metanarrative', and is, moreover, becoming a 'universal system'. And he admits that 'some universals, like universal human rights, are necessary'. These ambivalences are explicable, in part at least, by the fact that the 'anti-capitalist' movement, by intertwining themes of 'life politics' with 'old' 'materialist' issues of working conditions and job security, undermine the assumptions of new social movement theory.