Tag: Globalization

Article: The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism

Loyalist Arms Factory
Image by Burns Library, Boston College via Flickr

I managed to read this article while having coffee today in a exquisite café in front of the Palace Museum in Weimar. It was very hard to try understanding the author’s ideas while he refuses to accept that the value of a product is the result of an objective theory of valuation done by the consumers and sellers in specific contexts. He gives for granted that labor force is the one deterministic condition behind production and trying to get his point seems quite difficult at points. Nonetheless, this is a great opportunity to understand the mainstream ideas of Karl Marx theories in regard to Globalization and what some of them call “Global Capitalism / New Imperialism”. Here’s the intro and then a link to the article via EbscoHost,

The article discusses the ways in which the growth of the global capitalist labor force has altered the imperialistic nature of global capitalism, as represented by powerful multinational corporations, by negatively affecting wages in both developing and wealthy countries. The authors rely heavily on philosopher Karl Marx’s theories on the industrial reserve army and capital accumulation, which posit that wealth accumulation will invariably lead to increased suffering for the working masses. They go on to explain the exploitative nature of global labor arbitrage, which essentially means a corporation’s benefiting from low wages in developing countries. The process of arbitrage is related to the development of massive global supply chains.
Read more: The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism. (AN 66933797) Academic Search Complete. FOSTER, JOHN BELLAMY; McCHESNEY, ROBERT W.; JONNA, R. JAMILMonthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine; 11/01/2011

Paper: Eugene Kulischer, Joseph Schechtman and the Historiography of European Forced Migrations

Map of Jewish Migrations

Yesterday I had the honor of attending a lecture organized by the Centre for Area Studies titled “Migration and Transnational History” with Prof. Dirk Hoerder as lecturer.

Prof. Hoerder is the author of one of my favorite books: Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Comparative and International Working-Class History). The book is an encyclopedic historical treaty that reviews the story Global Migrations in the last 1,000 years.

Today’s paper is related to two other great specialists in Migrations: Eugene Kulischer and Joseph Schechtman whose works are among the most relevant for the study of Migrations and Globalization.

About the Article:

This article deals with two prominent figures in the historiography of twentieth-century European forced migrations: Eugene Kulischer and Joseph Schechtman. Their studies, although published between 1946 and 1962, are still among the standard works on the subject and are as yet unsurpassed in their scope and breadth of outlook, despite the flurry of new publications on the subject after the opening of East Central European archives after 1989. In this article I strive to explain how and why they were able to accomplish such a scholarly feat, paying special attention to their biographies which I have tried to reconstruct, using, for the first time, not only their own writings but also personal testimonies from their students and disparate archival sources located in the United States and Israel. I also discuss the strengths and weaknesses of their works by comparing them with more recent works on the same subject. This is, to my knowledge, the first attempt to reconstruct on the basis of archival evidence the lives and works of the two most important historians of a phenomenon whose impact on the overall history of Europe (and especially of its East Central part) is now generally recognized.

Continue reading: Eugene Kulischer, Joseph Schechtman and the Historiography of European Forced Migrations from Journal of Contemporary History recent issues by Ferrara, A.

Academic Article. French Intellectuals and Globalisation: A War of Worlds.

Alien tripod illustration by Alvim Corréa, fro...
Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday I posted the famous audio/story of Orson Welles‘ October 30, 1938 broadcast titled “Space invaders” that scared thousands of people who believed that Martians were invading Earth.

Today’s Academic Article recommendation will continue in that tone. This time, it is the turn for French intellectuals to play the role of Martians. 😉 They have leaded the opposition to what they call neo-liberal globalization (a.k.a. Westernization by means of corporate capitalism). Hope you enjoy it and don’t get too scared!

“French intellectuals have been at the forefront of a national and international movement of opposition to neo-liberal globalisation. Drawing on Samuel Huntington’s controversial work, The Clash of Civilisations, I will argue that French intellectuals shared a civilisational perspective of globalisation, seeing it not as a piecemeal market process or economic reform, but as an all-encompassing external threat. This civilisational perspective had contradictory effects on the nature of their opposition. On the one hand, intellectuals were able to produce a radical critique that challenged neo-liberalism and reinscribed the market within a specific political and ideological context. On the other hand, they tended to perpetuate an essentialist view of globalisation that saw this not as an economic process but as an expression of a pre-determined Anglo-Saxontype.”

Waters, Sarah. 2011. “French Intellectuals and Globalisation: A War of Worlds.” French Cultural Studies 22, no. 4: 303-320.  Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed October 31, 2011).
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Fight internet censorship and IP address blockades

A security line outside Google’s Beijing office. (AP/Andy Wong)

Is Internet a neutral zone? Is it a network that runs freely in any place of the world? Or is it controlled and regulated by governments and companies?

Sadly, it is not a free space in which people is able of doing whatever they rationally please. Internet is to a large degree a networked controlled and its globalizing effects are constantly been limited by the regulations and institutions of the countries from which we access it.  Specially in countries that have had a long history of citizen’s censorship and IP address controls.  CPJ‘s list of these countries that have managed to control the most it’s citizens freedom is #1 Iran, #2 Belarus, #3 Cuba, #4 Ethiopia, #5 Burma, #6 China, #7 Tunisia under Ben Ali, #8 Egypt under Mubarak (still continues being so), #9 Syria and #10 Russia.

Also, as noted in Wikipedia in 2006, Reporters without Borders (Reporters sans frontières, RSF), a Paris-based international non-governmental organization that advocates freedom of the press, started publishing a list of “Enemies of the Internet”. The organization classifies a country as an enemy of the internet because “all of these countries mark themselves out not just for their capacity to censor news and information online but also for their almost systematic repression of Internet users.” In 2007 a second list of countries “Under Surveillance” (originally “Under Watch”) was added. Both lists are updated annually.

Enemies of the Internet:

Internet censorship by country

As mentioned by Danny O’Brien in CPJ, “The world’s worst online oppressors are using an array of tactics, some reflecting astonishing levels of sophistication, others reminiscent of old-school techniques. From China’s high-level malware attacks to Syria’s brute-force imprisonments, this may be only the dawn of online oppression.”

Now, the principle in discussion here is what can we do to act freely in the Web? First, there are some services that enable you to block the origin of your IP address (learn what an IP is at the end of the post) and to access many websites by hiding your country of origin; one private and free service is HMA! or How to Bypass Internet Censorship.  But the most important one’s are the following online agencies and organizations that are working to inform and educate internet users of their rights and obligations:

What is an IP address:

Every device connected to the public Internet is assigned a unique number known as an Internet Protocol (IP) address. IP addresses consist of four numbers separated by periods (also called a ‘dotted-quad’) and look something like 127.0.0.1.

Since these numbers are usually assigned to internet service providers within region-based blocks, an IP address can often be used to identify the region or country from which a computer is connecting to the Internet. An IP address can sometimes be used to show the user’s general location. vía: http://whatismyipaddress.com/

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Finally, we are 7 Billion

Video: 7 Billion,National Geographic Magazine

The human population on planet Earth has reached for the first time in history 7 billion  as reported by the United Nations[1]. As of today, October 28, 2011 at  16:44 (GMT+1) it was estimated to be 6.92 billion by the United States Census Bureau[2] and you can check their World Population Clock.  and 7 billion by .  But also, we can also acknowledge that this is also the first time in human history in which most humans have access to medical services, potable water, electricity.

As Susa Lewis from Nova acknowledges, “For most of human existence our ancestors led precarious lives as scavengers, hunters, and gatherers, and there were fewer than 10 million human beings on Earth at any one time. Today, many cities have more than 10 million inhabitants each, and populations continue to skyrocket.”

Largest Urban Agglomerations, 1975, 2000, 2025

Source: United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision.
Source: United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision.

Also, the UN World Urbanizaiton Prospects reviewed that “Through most of history, the human population has lived a rural lifestyle, dependent on agriculture and hunting for survival. In 1800, only 3 percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas. By 1900, almost 14 percent were urbanites, although only 12 cities had 1 million or more inhabitants. In 1950, 30 percent of the world’s population resided in urban centers. In 2008, for the first time, the world’s population was evenly split between urban and rural areas. There were more than 400 cities over 1 million and 19 over 10 million. More developed nations were about 74 percent urban, while 44 percent of residents of less developed countries lived in urban areas.”

World Population Cartogram

Nova has the following interactive map in which you can trace the dramatic growth of human populations over recent centuries, and see where on Earth as many as three billion more people may live by 2050.

Launch Interactive – Printable Map Version

New challenges for humans will continue appearing with so many of us living here.  However, it is not the number what really matters but how we are all going to live here.  Currently, Thomas Malthus famous argument from 1798 in which he said “that population growth was a critical problem, reasoning that because human population grows exponentially while our food supplies grow linearly, that our growth would lead to massive problems” has already been proven wrong.

But what has still not being solved is the current philosophical crisis in which we live.  For a great part of human history, the world has been ruled by a collectivist philosophy of life that in the words of Ayn Rand “promoted the subjugation of the individual to a group (kings, oligarchs, nobility, religions, patrimonialists, corporations, parties, communities)—whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called “the common good.” The previous sentences are very important and cannot be passed without understanding its historical results.  You can further explore them in the work of Leonard Peikoff titled “The Ominous Parallels“.

For more information regarding human population check the following links:

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