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MARCH 8, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

Old Lesson Learned Anew: Cross-Border Capitalism Doesn't Deter Wars

As Bob Kuttner has frequently noted (including today), the myths of
capitalist globalization have been shattered.

Among the terrible casualties of Russia's war on Ukraine, there's
one-and so far as I can see, only one-that deserved to die: the myth
that cross-border economic integration (or, more accurately, the
creation of a global capitalist order of production, trade, and
consumption) will deter wars. As my colleague Bob Kuttner wrote
in his

**Prospect**column today, that idea has been violently dispelled in the
past two weeks, much as it was in the summer of 1914.

As Bob also noted, the belief that the creation of cross-border European
investment and culture in the first decade or so of the 20th century
would deter future wars was profound. Norman Angell's 1910 book

**The Great Illusion**made that case very compelling to Europe's
elites. I'd stress, however, that it's usually elites-those who
either gain from cross-border investments, or those in a position to
access the best of different nations' cultures-that buy into this
myth. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Wagner's operas were
viewed as a defining high point of European culture, notwithstanding
their German nationalism and antisemitism. Indeed, as cultural historian
Carl Schorske documented in his terrific history

**Fin-de-Siècle Vienna**, it was Theodor Herzl's love-not hate-of
Wagner that helped inspire him to lead the Zionist cause. Just as
improbable, the first production of Bernard Shaw's

**Pygmalion**-on, among other things, the class basis of differences
in British speech-took place in 1913 in Vienna in German translation,
one year before it first opened in English in London. (In later years,
Shaw noted that it had been impossible to translate

**Pygmalion**into Swedish, because Sweden's economic egalitarianism
had obliterated class differences in speech.)

But then, cosmopolitanism and select cross-border cultural appropriation
has historically been more of an option for the wealthy-note how
Tolstoy's Russian aristocrats speak French. As the 20th century
progressed, that option spread among the well-educated and, in the 21st
century, the well-wired. Today, the gap between more prosperous and
cosmopolitan cities and more impoverished, provincial, and nationalistic
rural areas increasingly defines politics throughout the world.

That said, the belief that we're on the brink of some war-deterring
global harmony has been, first and foremost, a claim made by
international investors and their advocates, who also insisted that the
coming of capitalism to Russia and China would mean that those nations
would ipso facto become democracies. Whether the Wall Street bankers who
most assiduously promoted this myth actually believed it or just felt it
was politically necessary remains a somewhat unsettled question. By dint
of their universal opposition to unions, none of them seem inclined even
to tolerate a smidgen of democracy within the workplaces they control.

But a different species of globalization has also grown over more recent
decades, as a common culture has taken root, chiefly among the urban
young. Some of it is merely an immersion in capitalist consumer culture,
but some of it is also a belief in liberal and democratic norms, which
we see displayed among the anti-war demonstrators who keep coming out to
the Red Squares of Moscow and other Russian cities despite their
knowledge that they risk imprisonment. The globalization we have yet to
see, alas, is the one that Marx called for in the closing line of the

**Manifesto**, that of the workers of the world. Capital can easily
cross borders, which has also become increasingly the case in recent
decades for professionals. But once the production workers of Pittsburgh
were pitted against the production workers of Shenzhen in the absence of
global work standards and global worker rights, a proletarian
we're-all-in-this-together sensibility wasn't likely to emerge. And
it isn't, so long as workers aren't protected against the
transnational arbitrage that is the very heart of global capitalism.

And now, as in 1914, we learn again that global capitalism not only
facilitates a nationalist reaction among workers, but also is no
deterrent to wars. So much for the Peace of the Action.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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The End of Globalism
The world economic and financial system will never be the same. BY
ROBERT KUTTNER

Putin's Invasion and the Privatization of Political Power

Rather than pressuring oligarchs to get Russia to stand down, we must
look at the system that props up oligarchical power. BY KELLY GROTKE

Why Is Biden Pushing People Back to the Office?

How about converting our depopulated downtowns into affordable housing
instead? BY DAVID DAYEN

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