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Petras and Veltmeyer have dismissed the ‘inevitability bogey’. As both, a description of widespread, epoch-defining developments, and a prescription for action, globalisation has achieved a virtual hegemony, it is presented with an air of inevitability that disarms ominous apprehensions and prevents the thought of and action towards.
In more just social and economic order. The “inevitability” of globalisation is a critical issue. But a more critical issue, perhaps, is what the discourse on globalisation is designed to hide and obfuscate. This is the form taken by imperialism in the current, increasingly worldwide capitalist system for organising economic production and society.
The “inevitability” of globalisation and the adjustment or submission of peoples all over the world to free market capitalism depends on the capacity of the dominant and ruling classes to coerce people to their will, and convince them that their interests are the people’s interests. They make them see the interests of capital as their own. It also depends on the capacity of these dominant classes and their ideologues to undermine the growing resistance to the model of free market.
The two authors have also exposed the class project behind globalisation, namely, “the attempt to obfuscate rather than accurately describe what is going on worldwide”, and “the attempt to throw an ideological veil over the economic interests of an emerging class of transnational capitalists”.
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According to them, globalisation is little more than imperialism in a new form, yet another phase in the long historical process of imperialist expansion. Their reasoning is that globalisation was created by deliberate policies put in place by powerful states under the control of dominant classes to divert attention away from the resurgence of imperialist powers, and it is not a structural part of the capitalist system. Thus, it is an ideological smokescreen used to divert attention away from the resurgence of imperialist powers.
Globalisation is not merely an economic phenomenon. It has multiple manifestations such as political, social, cultural, and religious. These manifestations are ghastly and gruesome, especially in the developing countries. The political dimension is evident from the global “super-cop” stalking the world, making countries of lesser might live in insecurity.
The other manifestations have begun to unfold particularly in the developing countries, where societies have begun to disintegrate under the invasion of consumerism, culture, and social fads. In the ultimate analysis, globalisation is not global integration by breaking the barriers across and among the nations through a global compact for turning the world into a ‘global village’.
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It is common knowledge that the UN is often unable to exert an effective influence on global economic and political issues of critical importance. This is due to what may be called as ‘democracy deficit’, which prevents effective multilateralism, a multilateralism that is based on a democratically evolved global consensus. Therefore, reform and restructuring of the United Nations system can alone provide a crucial link in an expanding chain of efforts to refashion international structures, imbuing them with a greater degree of participatory decision-making, so as to make them more representative of contemporary realities.
Globalisation, according to Robert Woog and Vladimir Dimitrov, in their article “Globalization: Democracy in Decline”, presents many faces to many different observers. The most general and the most negative are those dealing with the process of economic globalisation. The ugly face of globalisation has become the huge transnational corporation with a relentless drive to create a consumer dominated global middle class.