The End of Globalization

Graphic by Harold Arthur McNeill

1,902 words

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The market is an inherently global institution. The market is non-racist, non-nationalist, and non-religious, for as long as decisions are made solely in monetary terms, the race, nationality, and religion of buyers and sellers simply do not matter. Often, they are completely unknown. 

I know the ethnic identity of the owners of the Armenian rug shop and the Chinese restaurant down the street. But what is the race, ethnicity, or nationality of the Coca-Cola Corporation? Its stockholders, employees, and customers have every identity in the world. But the corporation has none. It is global, cosmopolitan. As its famous jingle tells us, it wants to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, meaning that it wants a pacified planet where people have relinquished all boundaries and identities that might impede the sale of Coke.

Globalization is the process of making the inherently global, cosmopolitan potential of the marketplace actual by breaking down racial, national, religious, and cultural barriers to the market, such as protectionist laws, religious prohibitions on usury, ancient enmities between peoples, sentimental attachments to one’s community, tribe, homeland, etc.

For consumers in the First World, globalization starts out as a good thing. They can take their First World wages and buy lots of cheaper goods manufactured in the Third World. For capitalists based in the First World, it is an even better thing, for they can make enormous profits by selling Third World goods at only slightly lower prices than goods manufactured at far greater expense in the First World—and pocket the difference.

For example, to use arbitrary numbers, when shoes were made in America, a pair of shoes retailing for $100 might be manufactured by a worker being paid $10/hour, 40 hours/ week + overtime pay, plus benefits, plus vacation time, in a factory regulated for health, safety, and environmental impact. Sure, it sounds like a lot of bother. But it never prevented American shoe manufacturers from becoming millionaires.

And when such a manufacturer left his factory at the end of the day, his luxury car would share the road with the modest cars of his own employees. He would pass through a bustling downtown where the wives of his employees shopped; he would pass the school attended by the children of his employees; he might even attend the local high school football game and cheer the sons of his workers; he would drive through neighborhoods with neatly painted houses and manicured lawns, where his employees lived. And when he arrived at his columned mansion, he would simply pull off the road into his driveway. There would be no security gates and guards to protect him.

With globalization, however, a similar pair of shoes retailing for $95 might be manufactured in Indonesia by a half-starved wretch making a fraction of the wages, with no overtime, no vacation, and no benefits, in a factory with no regulations for health, safety, or environmental impact. And the shoe manufacturer pockets the difference.

Even if the American owner of an American-founded, American-based, American-staffed shoe manufacturer had a sentimental attachment to his nation and his employees, he could not compete with rivals who had no such ties. In the end, he would have to close his factory: either to ship his jobs to the Third World or simply due to bankruptcy. Thus the globalization process selects for and rewards rootless cosmopolitanism and anti-national, anti-patriotic, anti-communitarian sentiments.

In the long run, globalization means one thing: the equalization of wages and living standards over the whole globe. That means that First World living standards will fall a great deal, and Third World living standards will rise a little bit, until parity is achieved. In other words, globalization means the destruction of the American working and middle classes. It means a reduction of their standard of living to those of Third World coolies. Globalization means the reversal of the progress in living standards since the industrial revolution.

Specifically, globalization means the reversal of the genuine progress made by the left. Gone will be the higher pay, shorter work days, and benefits won by the labor movement; gone will be the health-care plans, safety regulations, welfare programs, and old age pensions created by liberals and social democrats (programs that do not exist in the Third World); gone will be the environmental protections won by ecologists (which are only imposed on the Third World by the First World, which will no longer have that luxury).

But globalization also affects the rich. First of all, those who have grown rich by selling things to the working and middle classes of the First World will disappear along with their customers. There will no longer be a market for riding lawnmowers or camper trailers. The rich who remain will produce either for the global super-rich or the global proletariat. And the lives of the rich will be dramatically transformed as well. Some people will grow very rich indeed by dismantling the First World. But they will end up living like the rich of the Third World.

They will commute from fortified factories or offices to fortified mansions in armored limousines with armed guards past teeming slums and shantytowns. They will socialize at exclusive clubs and vacation at exclusive resorts under the watchful eyes of security guards. Like Marie Antoinette, who liked to play milkmaid in the gardens of Versailles, they might even pretend to be bohemians in million-dollar flats in Haight Ashbury, or cowboys on twenty-million dollar ranches in Wyoming, or New England villagers in million-dollar cottages on Martha’s Vineyard—having ridden to the top of a system that has exterminated the people who created these ways of life.

The consequences of globalization are not secret. They are not random and unpredictable. They are not even arcane or controversial. They are predicted in every introductory economics textbook. They are apparent in the stagnation of American working and middle class living standards beginning in the 1970s and the steep declines of the last decade, when 50,000 American manufacturing facilities closed their doors, many to ship their jobs overseas—while millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, came to compete with Americans for the jobs that remain, depress wages, and consume public services for which they cannot pay.

Yet the American middle and working classes were never allowed a choice about globalization, for the obvious reason that they would never have approved of their pauperization. The labor movement, the political parties, the churches, and all other forces that are capable of resisting globalization have been coopted.

Sincere progressives recognize the destructive effects of globalization, but most of them think that the only alternative to global capitalism is global socialism, which is no solution, even if it could be attained.

But if we reject globalization, what is the natural economic unit? This is where White Nationalists are able to address the genuine concerns of the Occupy movement and other progressive critics of globalization. For the boundary where globalization ends is the nation. The United States and every other European nation entered modernity and made most of their economic and social progress by practicing nationalistic economic policies, including protectionism. Prosperity and social justice will return when globalization is replaced by economic nationalism.

Libertarians decry protectionism as benefiting one group at the expense of another (as if globalization did not do the same thing). But this is the wrong way to look at it. Every individual wears different hats and plays different roles: producer, consumer, family member, citizen, etc. Free trade makes us good consumers, but it also makes us bad citizens by undermining social justice and national sovereignty. Protectionism limits our acquisitiveness as consumers, but it strengthens us as citizens. Free trade empowers some businessmen at the expense of the common good, making them bad citizens. Protectionism and other regulations make all businessmen good citizens by making it impossible to profit at the expense of the common good—which leaves no shortage of opportunities to generate wealth in a socially responsible fashion.

But wouldn’t the completion of globalization, whether socialist or capitalist, be worth it, if it really could lead to a world without nations, borders, boundaries, and wars? It is this utopian hope that sustains the allegiance of many globalists despite the spreading desolation of the Earth. It is the same hope that sustained Communists despite the oceans of blood they spilled.

There are two basic replies to this. One is to argue that it is not worth it, which the die-hard utopian would never accept. The other is to argue that a world without nations will never be achieved, and the people who are pushing it, moreover, are not even serious about the notion. Globalization is not the overcoming of nationalism, but merely the way that market dominant nations break down barriers to expanding their own economic power. Today’s color-coded, Twitter and Facebook powered insurrections in Eastern Europe and the Muslim world are merely the modern version of the empire-building and gunboat diplomacy of centuries past. George Soros is just the Cecil Rhodes of today.

Jews like Soros, of course, are the primary preachers of universalist schemes such as global trade, open borders, racial miscegenation, multiculturalism, and other forms of identity erasure. But they show no signs of practicing these same policies among themselves. What is theirs they keep; what is ours is negotiable. The implication is obvious: their goal is to destroy all national boundaries and racial and cultural identities that serve as impediments to expanding Jewish power. Globalization is not a path to universal freedom. It is the creation of one neck to bear a Jewish yoke for eternity.

It is easy to see why Jews think that the devastation caused by globalization is worth it to them, but it is hard to understand why anybody else wishes to go along with it, except for the alienated, deracinated products of cultural decline. And even these people have to be asking themselves if this is the world they really want.

Universalism, after all, is not really universal. Only whites seem susceptible to it in large enough numbers to matter. But if universalism is merely a racially and culturally European belief system, then globalization will only work by exterminating Jews and other ancient, ethnocentric people like the Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Armenians, etc., who refuse to jump into the global melting pot. This means that globalization is not the path to a liberal utopia, but merely a genocidal extension of European imperialism. But given the massive investment in Holocaust propaganda, even the most fanatical globalists don’t have the heart for that solution, so in the end, they would have to allow ethnocentric peoples to opt out.

And if Jews and others get to opt out of globalization, then why can’t the rest of us? Especially since unreciprocated free trade is regressive, dissolving national sovereignty, undermining social justice, and delivering the destinies of European peoples into the hands of aliens.

The conclusion is clear: Progressive advocates of globalization are either ignorant or they are dishonest shills for a process that will pauperize and enslave the people they pretend to defend. There is a vast constituency in America for a racially-conscious, nationalistic, anti-globalist, protectionist, progressive political party. They are only waiting for leadership.