Second Nature Home > Short Essays by Dan Bruiger >

Globalist Rhetoric

Transnational capitalism as a whole is a virtual machine, an artificial parasite, which lives on slave labor and sucks wealth as a nonrenewable resource wherever it can. While the rhetoric of globalism is that all countries and all segments of society will ultimately benefit from free markets, in truth the rich get richer and everyone else poorer—and not only quantitatively. As the world becomes a monoculture, its diversity is reduced to a few standard services and products in look-alike cities around the globe. This is the actual purpose of globalism, moreover, and the ultimate economic fulfillment of the mechanist metaphor: to remake the whole world as a smooth-running, uniform and monolithic engine of profit. The consumer culture itself has become a virtual factory for turning out consumer clones and values, designed to function as an economic artery to a handful of ultra-powerful men. Just as pre-industrial society milked and bled its animal stocks for sustenance and slave labor; and just as industrial society herded peasantry into a new class of laboring poor; so corporate capitalism adroitly manages herds of consumer-investors, on the one hand, and herds of dehumanized foreign laborers, on the other.

RELATED TAGS: [global/transnational capitalism, artificial parasite, globalism, global monoculture, consumer clone, investor clone]