I have glimpsed the new level playing field and....

Hinkson, John

As all the nations of the world gather in Sydney, Australia, to compete in the Olympics, it is as though for a week or so the world has stopped. This is of course an illusion that will be quickly brought to earth. The games barely conceal a serious collapse of currency blocs relative to the US dollar and the threat of an oil shock reminiscent of the 1970s. Yet while these developments point to real difficulties for global processes, deeper problems create a more profound unease. How are we to account for the combination of economies, which on all statistical registers are booming, with the experience of life at a grass-roots level of pressure, unrelenting stress and doubt about the future?

Economists are quick to tell us that we have never had it so good, but most people find this claim counter-intuitive. That economic commentators fail to come to terms with how economic booms are not what they were, is one illustration of how globalization is the carrier of a radically new way of life which we feel and experience but, as yet, cannot interpret or shape. Jack Welch, the CEO at General Electric, goes straight to the heart of the matter.

He gives expression to the spirit of contemporary globalization while, like all of his colleagues in the top league of high-tech capital, showing no understanding whatsoever of the implications of what he says. At General Electric the expectation is a 30% reduction in costs by putting its entire operation into the setting of e-commerce. In his view 'productivity improvements' have barely begun in the advanced economies. The digitalisation of whitecollar will "make the modernisation of blue-collar workforces seem like a minor event".

Phenomenally it is not difficult to see why e-commerce carries with it a special form of productivity: one which combines productivity and endorsement of outcomes which both discard whole sectors of the working population and makes whole neighbourhoods unliveable. The question is what to do about it.

The desire of most major Third World governments to come aboard the global revolution is not in doubt. As yet they see no alternative. And with the entry of China into the WTO having now finally been agreed to by the US Senate, that strand of the global economic strategy which pursues the level playing field facilitated by the new global markets has made a giant step forward. Yet this is a step which on the one hand can seem to offer justice to countries which have long experienced the colonial yoke, yet on the other offers a renewed bondage by actually offering a decent existence to a relatively small proportion of people. The truth is that in the next twenty years the world will face upheavals which are unprecedented in scale.

Responses to these distinctively global processes are emerging. There has been quite a diffuse resistance from regional centres in many areas of the world which has produced significant electoral swings to both left and right. They still lack a positive policy. And such responses are now joined by massive and deepfelt protests against the institutions--here the IMF, there the WTO - which promote this very distinctive form of global development. These institutions now symbolise globalization. Wherever they meet becomes a focus and it turns into a type of political conflict which draws together people of widely different origins and who converge on the same sites of protest for different reasons.

The obvious problem is the lack of policy alternatives. These are especially difficult because the technological changes which arise out of the emergence of the techno-sciences are more basic than that revolution of two hundred years ago which eventually industrialised the planet. Novel policy requires a rethinking of basic issues. This issue of Arena Journal contains commentaries and articles which both reflect the impact of global ruptures while addressing them with searching questions. The significant contribution of intellectual practice to the emergence of the new situation is evaluated and conceptualised in one way in the article by Andrew Milner and in quite another in the article by Geoff Sharp.