LizRantsAboutYouth

Liz doesn't understand the internet.

[dinoplasty]

Person:World::Human:Globe

As the world became the globe, people began to focus on the idea of "humanity". Whereas a person has an individual identity, a favorite color, a personality, a member of "humanity" is characterized only by their basic needs and abstract universal qualities. "Human rights" include access to the necessities of survival. Devji argues that,

[G]igantic realities like the globe and humanity not only push the subject who would grasp them out of a geocentric or anthropocentric point of view, they also end up making his existence impossibly abstract. No longer a humanist subject, the individual serves as an example of humanity itself as a global fact, one which can not provide a mere backdrop for this individual, having stepped into the foreground and overwhelmed him. (Devji, 16)

[dinoplasty]

Market Globalist Utopia

Market globalism offers a vision of Utopia where goods are manufactured efficiently as possible, and free markets equal free humanity. Although market globalist true believers argue that market globalism is inevitable and unstoppable, they promote the idea of market globalism as a benevolent force. The joint communique from the heads of state at the 1996 G-7 summit paints a rosy picture of globalization:

Globalization provides great opportunities for the future, not only for our countries, but for all others too. Its many positive aspects include an unprecedented expansion of investment and trade; the opening up to international trade of the world's most populous regions and opportunities for more developing countries to improve their standards of living...Hence we are convinced that the process of globalization is a source of hope for the future. (from Steger, 81)

The myth of a market globalist utopia is that if a nation participates in the system fully and without trade barriers or protecting domestic markets, they will become wealthy and their peoples' standard of living will increase. For market globalists, free trade, free markets, and democracy go hand in hand. The market globalist vision: a democratic, unrestricted, wealthy, free trading globe.

[dinoplasty]

Justice globalists criticize the neoliberal market-globalist policy of "free-trade" facilitating a race to the bottom for wages and working conditions around the world.

[dinoplasty]

[dinoplasty]

What is Justice Globalism?

According to Manfred Steger, Justice Globalism arose as a reaction to the seeming ideological dominance of capitalism after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Global Justice Movement formed through the loose association of groups opposed to market globalism that "connected local or national grievances to the larger contexts of 'global justice', 'global equalities', or 'world peace.'"(Steger, 101)

Notable Justice Globalist groups include the Zapatistas (ELZN), WTO protestors, and ATTAC.  

[dinoplasty]

Market globalism, the dominant global view that is espoused by neoliberals as a force of nature, has been criticized by alter-globalists (sometimes referred to by the misleading term "anti-globalizationists") for its role in creating and perpetuating inequalities across the globe.

[dinoplasty]

The reality of globalization…is premised on an apocalypse that has not occurred, something that lends its experience an anticipatory though not necessarily a millenarian character, and its cause is human and not divine. (Devji, 11)

[dinoplasty]

The Cold War had for the first time put the globe itself at stake in the practice of politics, by dividing it into two rival hemispheres. Moreover two of its greatest technological events, the atom bomb and the moon landing, permitted us not only to grasp and see the globe as such, but also and in the same moment to conceive of its destruction and abandonment. (Devji, 10)

At the center of rhetoric on global humanity lies the threat of total destruction. "Humanity" is fully realized through suffering, meaning that notions of "global humanity" are intimately tied to visions of the Apocalypse and the extinction of the species. During the Cold War, humanity became self-aware as "humanity" through the threat of mutually assured destruction. The threat of global warming has again provided a global scale threat. After 9/11 and George W' Bush's declaration of the "Axis of Evil", the United States used the threat of "weapons of mass destruction" to prey on Cold War era fears of the destruction of the world by nuclear weapons in the hands of an evil "other". In tandem with this rhetoric of dangerous weapons was the idea that the United States had the duty to "spread democracy" and "liberate the Iraqi people", appealing simultaneously to global humanity through fears of annihilation and an understanding of "human rights".