Book Review
Return to current issue
Rene Leal reviews The Global Trap, Globalisation and the Assault on Democracy and Prosperity Pluto Press, Australia. 1998.
The merits of this book are its great historical penetration and political audacity. Historical penetration is an achievement considering that this is a contemporary study about contemporary global issues. With this book, Martin and Schumann tell us that history is not only past, but that it is made by people every day. The book is brave because it reveals the neo-liberal character of the current globalisation process, confirming it with massive evidence. Thus, the study is a solid and unambiguous response to those radical free-market supporters, neo-liberal politicians, post-modern and technological determinist scholars who had already proclaimed the consolidation of a ‘global village’ whose history came to an end at the end of the 1980s. For the heirs of Hayek, human society had become, on the eve of the third millennium, just, ideologically and politically uniform human society. Martin and Schumann demonstrates that this is an illusion.
Martin and
Schumann refute this ‘virtual’ conception of the world going ‘where the real movement of
things’ is happening: production, trade and politics, sites from which they argue the
opposite of the neo-liberals. Their research demonstrates that neo-liberal globalisation has
deepened social inequalities; increased the gap between poor and rich nations and poor and
rich people within rich and poor nations; intensified the exploitation of workers and natural
resources and increased the rate of unemployment everywhere.
Go to top of page
The authors write in an accessible but by no means superficial style, through which they dissect the three ‘ations’ on which the dynamic of capital accumulation is currently carried out: deregulation, privatisation and liberalisation, the pillars sustaining the dogma of the 1980s they call neo-liberalism. Although The Global Trap focuses largely on economic processes, it also investigates the connection between economy and politics and the social consequences brought about by the rule of ‘absolute advantages’. By emphasising the negative effects of the three ‘ations’ for workers, the authors, through their account of the realm of production, trade and politics, show that the class contradictions have not disappeared. In an epoch in which capital, in contrast to Ricardo’s times of ‘comparative advantages’, has become more mobile than ever before and in which the main contradiction between capital and labour has been deepened everywhere, Martin and Schumann recommend us "to think globally and to act locally", and to act together across borders. They demand and encourage real participation and democracy, for people to recover the social role of the state and to invert the hierarchical relation of economy over politics.
Unfortunately, their advice is only in reference to the European context, a major weakness of their work. Their Eurocentric stand point leads them to sketch an ethnocentric perspective of the next century as well. Nevertheless, the merits far overwhelms the weaknesses of this study and the book is a very good guide for under - and post - graduate students in disciplines such as sociology, economics and political science.
Dr. Rene Leal Go to top of page
Sociology,
Faculty of Arts, University of Wollongong, Australia