Globalization and the Abridgement of Freedom

Abstract

This article argues that for large masses of the workers, peasants, agricultural laborers, and petty producers, especially in the Third World, for whom freedom consists in their ability to struggle to improve their living condition, globalization entails a loss of freedom compared even to what they had enjoyed under earlier dirigiste regimes that had functioned within a democratic set up. They become victims of growing inequality and even of growing absolute nutritional poverty through the spontaneous working of the neoliberal arrangement that characterizes contemporary globalization. At the same time, their capacity to bring about changes through collective political intervention is also taken away from them because of this very phenomenon of globalization, under which finance is globalized while the state remains a nation-state. The article also argues that delinking is also extremely difficult, as it brings in its wake transitional difficulties which are not just immense in themselves but become even more formidable because of the sanctions imposed at the behest of advanced countries. The working people of the Third World are thus kept in a bind. Moreover, as globalization gets engulfed in an economic crisis, this bind is further tightened through the institution of authoritarian and fascistic political regimes that launch an assault on individual rights and democratic institutions: the abridgement of freedom is then carried to an even higher level.