East Asia is the locus of three countries - China, Korea, and Japan - which have long and related civilizational heritages. Up to the nineteenth century, to the extent that these countries were aware of the existence of the European world, it was a distant, not very interesting, and not very important part of the world. In the nineteenth century, this distant world, organized in the form of a capitalist world-economy, intruded suddenly into East Asia, and forcibly incorporated the region into the economic and political networks of this capitalist world-economy. From the point of view of the dominant strata and countries of that world-system, East Asia was considered merely one more area to be constructed as a zone producing peripheral products in the axial division of labor of the world-economy.

Needless to say, East Asians were not happy with this subordinated role in this world-system into which they had been incorporated. Japan began early to try to reverse this situation with the Meiji Restoration. It sought to learn the skills and create the internal institutions necessary to allow it to transform its role in the worldwide division of labor in which it now found itself. China began its effort at reversal a little later with first the Revolution of 1911 and later the Long March of the Chinese Communist Party. Korea's attempt at reversal was delayed by the Japanese colonization of Korea, and started only after 1945.

As of the end of the Second World War, all three countries were still playing a secondary role in the modern world-system. The United States had now become the hegemonic power of this world-system. It had overwhelming economic advantage. It was the strongest military power in the world. Its only serious military and ideological rival was the Soviet Union. To keep the peace, something advantageous to both powers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union made a tacit deal, called metaphorically Yalta. They agreed to divide the world into two segments, and agreed to keep the boundaries of these two zones intact. They further agreed to go their separate economic ways (in effect the Soviet Union autonomously withdrew from the exchanges of the world-economy). And they agreed to engage in a rhetorical, but rigorously non-violent, struggle called the Cold War. The function of the rhetoric for each side was less to change the geopolitical status quo than to preserve it by each thereby keeping its allies and satellites in line.

The four times the Yalta arrangement was tested - the Berlin Blockade, the Korean War, the Quemoy-Matsu quarrel, and the Cuba crisis - each ended in a truce at the line of departure. The Yalta arrangement seemed to be working well. And then suddenly it got into trouble. Two major developments undid Yalta and thereby undid U.S. hegemony. The first was the remarkable economic rise of western Europe and Japan. By the mid-1960s, the U.S. had lost its economic edge over the productive enterprises of these two zones. They could not merely compete well with the U.S. in their home markets, but even in the U.S. market as well as in the rest of the world. Western Europe and Japan were no longer dependent economically on the goodwill of the U.S. government. They had become major economic rivals and therefore might aspire to political autonomy.

The second change was the unwillingness of some major countries in what had come to be called the Third World, or the South, to accept the status quo arrangements of Yalta. The first was China in which the Chinese Communists, defying Stalin, marched on Shanghai and established their rule. But China was not the only rebel. Cuba, Egypt, Algeria, but above all Vietnam all challenged the U.S.-dominated world order. In doing this, they did not have really have the support of the Soviet Union, which usually limited its role to rhetoric and a little money. But nonetheless Vietnam, a small country, was able not only to resist the United States but actually defeat the U.S. in war, an incredible feat that transformed the world-system.

It was at this point, in the early 1970s, that we can observe the beginning of the slow but persistent decline in U.S. power, the end of its true hegemony. The story of the next thirty years, 1970-2000, was the story of the attempt of the United States to slow down its loss of power in the world-system. For East Asia, this was a period of enormous economic growth, first in Japan, then in the so-called four dragons (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore), and then in mainland China.

The advent of George W. Bush to the White House, and the attack of September 11 which gave the neo-cons in the Bush administration the legitimacy to carry out their program of unilateral military interventionism culminated in the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. This invasion has turned out to be a major fiasco for the U.S. - diplomatically, politically, economically, and even militarily. The intention of the neo-cons was to strengthen the U.S. position in the world-system and restore its hegemony. The result has been exactly the opposite. It has accelerated Europe's drive for political autonomy. It has quickened the pace of nuclear proliferation, most notably in North Korea and Iran. And it has deeply hurt the political and moral credibility of the United States.

Geopolitically, what we may expect in the next twenty years is the emergence of both Europe and East Asia on the world scene acting independently of the United States. But what form will this take in East Asia? Economic cooperation and coordination between the three countries is the least of the problems. They are all already strong loci of capital accumulation and it can be expected that they will become stronger in the decades to come. Working together, they could probably become the principal motor of the world-economy. They have everything to gain by economic integration and very little to lose. They will probably move in this direction decisively.

The principal difficulties are political. The three countries have historic grievances with each other which are still very important in their continuing relationships. Korea still remembers its colonization by Japan. China still remembers the Japanese occupation of most of the country in the 1930s and 1940s. And Japanese nationalism is still fueled by a sense that, over the millennia, they were culturally looked down upon by China and Korea. The second great political problem is that both Korea and China are still divided countries, and their reunification remains a prime and urgent concern. The third great political problem is the question of the form and extent of military power each will assume, and in particular the development of nuclear weapons.

If East Asia is to play the economic role that is possible for it, it must resolve these political problems. Neither China nor Japan will be able to fulfil its economic potential without the other. And I would add even China and Japan together cannot do it without Korea. This means that a major intra-East Asian political negotiation must occur, of the kind that occurred in western Europe over the last half century. And this is of course where the uncertainty lies.

Should all three countries be able to put historical grievances behind them (not really an impossible idea), should Korea and China find the formulas that will permit political reunification of their countries, and should the three countries make clear decisions about their military build-up and perhaps military collaboration, then East Asia will be a formidable force in world politics in the twenty-first century.

They will then have three major policy decisions to make: (1) how they relate to the United States; (2) how they relate to the countries in their near perimeter (specifically, southeast Asia) and in their outer perimeter (south and southwest Asia); (3) what position they will take in the North-South struggle in the coming decades. It should be noted that these are exactly the same issues that are facing Europe in the coming decades (although the perimeters are different).

For the last fifty years, struggles and debates in the world-system have been defined and constrained by the United States (and its collusive pseudo-opponent, the Soviet Union). In the next fifty years, we shall all find ourselves in a truly multi-polar world. We also shall all find ourselves in transition from a world-system that is a capitalist world-economy to some other kind of world-system, as yet undecided and undefined. East Asia will be a central part of that process, but it will not be alone.

Immanuel Wallerstein

[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315]

An introduction to the 150th anniversary edition of The Communist Manifesto

by Slavoj Zizek

(excerpts): [1].[of 4].[of 10].[Chapter 01]:

The first, automatic reaction of today's enlightened liberal reader to The Communist Manifesto is: isn't the text simply wrong on so many empirical accounts, with regard to the picture it gives of the social situation, as well as with regard to the revolutionary perspective it sustains and propagates? Was there ever a political manifesto that was more clearly falsified by subsequent historical reality? Isn't The Communist Manifesto, at best, an exaggerated extrapolation of certain tendencies discernible in the 19th century?

So let us approach The Communist Manifesto from the opposite end: where do we live today, in our global "post..." (postmodern, postindustrial) society? The slogan that is imposing itself more and more is that of "globalization": the brutal imposition of a unified world market that threatens all local ethnic traditions, including the very form of Nation-State. And, in this situation, is not the description in The Manifesto of the social impact of the bourgeoisie more actual than ever? -

"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninter rupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new -formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and con sumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature."

Is this not, more than ever, our reality today? Think about Ericsson phones which are no longer Swedish, about Toyota cars manufactured 60% in the usa, about Hollywood culture that pervades the remotest parts of the globe... Yes, this is our reality - on condition that we do not forget to supplement this image from the manifesto with its inherent dialectical opposite, the "spiritualization" of the very material process of production. That is to say, on the one hand, capitalism entails the radical secularization of social life - it mercilessly tears apart all aura of authentic nobility, sacredness, honour, etc.:

"It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."

However, the fundamental lesson of the "critique of political economy" elaborated by the mature Marx in the years after The Manifesto is that this reduction of all heavenly chimeras to the brutal economic reality generates a spectrality of its own. When Marx describes the mad self-enhancing circulation of capital, whose solipsistic path of self-fecundation reaches its apogee in today's meta-reflexive speculations on futures, it is far too simplistic to claim that the spectre of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction, and that one should never forget that, behind this abstraction, there are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources the capital's circulation is based and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. The problem is that this "abstraction" is not only in our (financial speculator's) misperception of social reality, but that it is "real" in the precise sense of determining the structure of the very material social processes: the fate of whole strata of the population and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the "solipsistic" speculative dance of Capital, which pursues its goal of profitability in a blessed indifference to how its movement will affect social reality. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than the direct pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their "evil" intentions, but is purely "objective", systemic, anonymous. Here we should recall Etienne Balibar who distinguishes two opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in today's world 3: the "ultra-objective" ("structural") violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism (the "automatic" creation of excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the unemployed), and the "ultra -subjective" violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious (in short: racist) "fundamentalisms" - this second "excessive" and "groundless" violence is just a counterpart to the first violence.

The fact of this "anonymous" violence also allows us to make a more general point about anti-Communism. The pleasure provided by anti-Communist reasoning was that Communism made it so easy to play the game of finding the culprit, blaming the Party, Stalin, Lenin, ultimately Marx himself, for the millions of dead, for terror and gulag, while in capitalism, there is nobody on whom one can pin guilt or responsibility, things just happened that way, through anonymous mechanisms, although capitalism has been no less destructive in terms of human and environmental costs, destroying aboriginal cultures... In short, the difference between capitalism and Communism is that Communism was perceived as an Idea which then failed in its realization, while capitalism functioned "spontaneously". There is no Capitalist Manifesto.

Chapter 3 >>

La precarizzazione nei contratti di lavoro di Giovanna Fullin

Negli ultimi anni si è assistito, in Italia come in altri paesi, ad un aumento della frammentazione e della complessità delle caratteristiche del mercato del lavoro. In particolare, accanto al lavoro dipendente a tempo indeterminato, si sono progressivamente diffuse prestazioni d'opera e forme di lavoro atipiche, subordinate e non, autonome ed eterodirette. Da un lato, infatti, a partire dagli anni '80, è costantemente aumentato il peso dei lavoratori indipendenti, al cui interno si trovano sia imprenditori veri e propri, sia ex lavoratori dipendenti diventati (più o meno volontariamente) titolari di partita IVA, sia collaboratori coordinati e continuativi che lavorano per uno o più committenti. Dall'altro lato, grazie a misure di politica volte a favorire l'occupazione, si sono diffusi in modo crescente contratti di lavoro subordinato diversi da quello standard a tempo indeterminato come i contratti a tempo determinato, stagionali, di formazione lavoro, di apprendistato e, negli ultimi due anni, anche i contratti di lavoro temporaneo.
In particolare, la legge Treu[1] (n.196/1997) non solo ha reso legale il lavoro interinale (temporaneo) anche in Italia, ma ha ampliato anche i limiti di età per l'utilizzo dei contratti di formazione e ha esteso l'uso dei contratti di apprendistato a tutti i settori di attività, favorendo l'accesso delle imprese a forme flessibili d'impiego della manodopera e contemporaneamente riducendo le protezioni dei lavoratori di fronte all'instabilità del lavoro e del reddito.
La perdita di centralità del lavoro subordinato standard e la diffusione delle forme di lavoro "atipiche" produce trasformazioni di segno contrastante all'interno del mercato del lavoro. Da un lato, infatti, l'utilizzo di contratti di lavoro più flessibili può incentivare le assunzioni da parte delle imprese, facilitare l'ingresso nel mercato del lavoro e favorire tutti quei lavoratori che sono in grado di muoversi autonomamente - gestendo rapporti con diversi committenti o assicurandosi per via informale un flusso continuo di commesse. Dall'altro lato, tuttavia, la deregolamentazione del mercato del lavoro pone dei seri problemi alle fasce più deboli di lavoratori come i collaboratori con un solo committente o i lavoratori assunti con un contratto a tempo determinato (sia esso temporaneo, stagionale, di formazione); essi, infatti, sono privi di una fonte di reddito sicura e non hanno tutte le garanzie offerte invece ai lavoratori subordinati standard. In particolare, il problema dell'incertezza relativa alla continuità del rapporto di lavoro nel tempo va considerato con attenzione in quanto può tradursi in instabilità del reddito e delle condizioni di vita del soggetto e della sua famiglia.

[per leggere tutto il saggio: http://www.intermarx.com/temi/GFullin.html ]