The Seven Loose Pieces of the Global Jigsaw Puzzle

[Translator's note: In June of 1997 the following analysis of neoliberalism appeared in a European publication. Cecilia Rodriguez of the NCDM]

Neoliberalism as a puzzle: the useless global unity which fragments and destroys nations

"War is a matter of vital importance for the State, it is the province of life and death, the path which leads to survival or annihilation. It is indispensable to study it at length".

-The Art of War, Sun Tzu.

Modern globalization, neoliberalism as a global system, should be understood as a new war of conquest for territories.

The end of the III World War or "Cold War" does not mean that the world has overcome the polarity and finds its stability under the hegemony of the victor. At the end of this war there was, without doubt a loser (the socialist camp), but it is difficult to say who was the victor. Western Europe? The United States? Japan? All of them? The fact is that the defeat of the "evil empire" (Dixit Reagan and Thatcher) signified the opening of new markets without a new owner. Therefore a struggle was needed in order to possess them, to conquer them.

Not only that, but the end of the "Cold War" brought with it a new framework of international relations in which the new struggle for those new markets and territories produced a new world war, the IV. This required, as do all wars, a redefinition of the national States. And beyond the re-definition of the national states, the world order returned to the old epochs of the conquests of America, Africa and Oceania. This is a strange modernity that moves forward by going backward. The dusk of the 20th century has more similarities with previous brutal centuries than with the placid and rational future of some science-fiction novel. In the world of the Post-Cold War vast territories, wealth, and above all, a skilled labor force, await a new owner.

But it is a position of owner of the world, and there are many who aspire to it. And in order to win it another war breaks out, but now among those who call themselves the "Good Empire".

If the III World War was between capitalism and socialism (lead by the United States and the USSR respectively) with different levels of intensity and alternating scenarios; the Fourth World War occurs now among the great financial centers, with complete scenarios and with a sharp and constant intensity.

Since the end of the Second World War until 1992, there have been 149 wars in all the world. The results are 23 million dead, and therefore there is no doubt about the intensity of this Third World War (Statistical source: UNICEF).

From the catacombs of international espionage to the astral space of the so-called Strategic Defense Initiative (the "Star Wars" of the cowboy Ronald Reagan); from the sands of Playa Giron, in Cuba, to the Mekong Delta in Vietnam; from the unbridled nuclear arms war to the savage blows of the State in the tormented Latin America; from the ominous maneuvers of the armies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to the CIA agents in the Bolivia which oversaw the assassination of Che Guevara; the badly named "Cold War" reached temperatures which, in spite of the continuous change of scenery and the incessant ups-and downs of the nuclear crisis (and precisely because of that) ended up sinking the socialist camp as a global system, and diluted it as a social alternative.

The Third World War showed the magnanimity of the "complete war" ( in all places and in all forms) for the victor: capitalism. But the scenario of the post-war was profiled in fact, as a new theater of global operations. Great extensions of "No man's land" (because of the political, social and economic devastation of Eastern Europe and the USSR), world powers in expansion (The United States, Western Europe and Japan), a world economic crisis, and a new technological revolution: the revolution of information. "In the same way in which the industrial revolution had allowed the replacement of muscle by the machine, the information revolution replaced the brain (or at least a growing number of its important functions) by the computer." This "general cerebralization" of the means of production (the same as occurred in industry as in services) is accelerated by the explosion of new telecommunications research and the proliferation of the cyberworlds." (Ignacio Ramonet "La planete des desordres" in the "Geopolitique du Chaos" Maniere de Voir 3. Le Monde Diplomatique (LMD), April of 1997.)

The supreme kind of capital, financial capital, began then to develop its strategy of war towards the new world and over what was left of the old. Hand in hand with the technological revolution which placed the entire world, through a computer, on its desk and at its mercy, the financial markets imposed their laws and precepts on the entire planet. The "globalization" of the new war is nothing m ore than the globalization of the logic of the financial markets. The National States (and their leaders) went from being directors of the economy to those who were directed, better said tele directed, by the basic premise of financial power: free commercial exchange. Not only that, but the logic of the market took advantage of the "porosity" which in all the social spectrum of the world, provoked the development of telecommunications and penetrated and appropriated all the aspects of social activity. Finally there was a global war which was total!

One of the first casualties of this new war was the national market. Like a flying bullet inside an armored room, the war begun by neoliberalism bounced from one side to the other and wounded the one who had fired it. One of the fundamental bases of power in the modern capitalist State, the national market, was liquidated by the shot fired by the new era of the financial global economy. International capital took some of its victims by dismantling national capitalism and wearing it out, until it disabled its public powers. The blow has been so brutal and definitive that the national States do not have the necessary strength to oppose the action of the international markets which transgress the interests of citizens and governments.

The careful and ordered escapade which the "Cold War" handed down, the "new world order" quickly became pieces due to the neoliberal explosion. World capitalism sacrificed without mercy that which gave it a future and a historic project; national capitalism. Companies and States fell apart in minutes, but not due to the torments of proletarian revolutions, but the stalemates of financial hurricanes. The child (neoliberalism) ate the father (national capitalism) and in passing destroyed all of the discursive fallacies of capitalist ideology: in the new world order there is no democracy, liberty, equality, nor fraternity.

In the global scenario which is a product of the end of the "Cold War" all which is perceptible is a new battleground and in this one, as in all battlegrounds, chaos reigns.

At the end of the "Cold war" capitalism created a new bellicose horror: the neutron bomb. The "virtue" of this weapon is that it only destroys life and leaves buildings intact. Entire cities could be destroyed (that is, their inhabitants) without the necessity of reconstructing them (and paying for them). The arms industry congratulated itself. The "irrationality " of nuclear bombs could be rep laced by the new "rationality " of the neutron bomb. But a new bellicose "marvel" would be discovered at the same time as the birth of the Fourth World War: the financial bomb.

The new neoliberal bomb, different from its atomic predecessor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, did not only destroy the polis (the Nation in this case) and imposed death, terror and misery to those who lived in it: or, different from the neutron bomb, did not solely destroy "selectively". The neoliberal bomb, reorganized and reordered what it attacked and remade it as a piece inside a jigsaw puzzle of economic globalization. After its destructive effect, the result is not a pile of smoking ruins, or tens of thousands of inert lives, but a neighborhood attached to one of the commercial megalopolis of the new world supermarket and a labor force re-arranged in the new market of world labor.

The European union, one of the megalopolis produced by neoliberalism, is a result of the Fourth World War. Here, economic globalization erased the borders between rival States, long-time enemies, and forced them to converge and consider political unity. From the National States to the European federation, the economist path of the neoliberal war in the so-called "old continent" would be filled with destruction and ruins, one of which was European civilization.

The megalopolis reproduced themselves in all the planet. The integrated commercial zones were the territory where they were erected. So it was in North America, where the North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, the United States and Mexico is no more than the prelude to the fulfillment of an old aspiration of U.S. manifest destiny: "America for Americans". In South America the path is the same in terms of Mercosur between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. In Northern Africa, with the Union of Arab States (UMA) between Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, Libya and Mauritania; in south Africa, in the Near East, in the Black Sea, in Pacific Asia, etc., all over the planet the financial bombs explode and territories are re-conquered.

Do the megalopolis substitute the nations? No, or not only. They also include them and reassign their functions, limits and possibilities. Entire nations are converted into departments of the neoliberal megacompany. Neoliberalism thus operated DESTRUCTION/DEPOPULATION on the one hand, and RECONSTRUCTION/REORGANIZATION on the other, of regions and of nations in order to open new markets and renovate the existing ones.

If the nuclear bombs have a dissuasive, coercive, and intimidating character in World War III, in the IV global conflagration the financial hyperbombs play the same role. These weapons serve to attack territories (National States) DESTROYING the material bases of national sovereignty (all the ethical, judicial, political, cultural and historic obstacles against economic globalization) and producing a qualitative depopulation on their territories. This depopulation consists in detaching all those who are useless to the new market economy (as are the indigenous).

But, in addition to this, the financial centers operate, simultaneously a RECONSTRUCTION of the National States and they REORGANIZE them according to the new logic of the global market ( the developed economic models are imposed upon weak or non existing social relations).

The IV World War in rural areas, for example, produces this effect. Rural renovation, demanded by the financial markets, tries to increase agricultural productivity, but what it does is to destroy traditional economic and social relations. The results: a massive exodus from the countryside to the cities. Yes, just as in a war. Meanwhile, in the urban zones the market is saturated with labor and t he unequal distribution of salaries is the "justice" which await those who seek better conditions of life.

Examples which illustrate this strategy fill the indigenous world. Ian Chambers, director of the Office for Central America of the ILO (of the United Nations), declared that the indigenous population of the world, estimated at 300 million, live in zones which have 60% of the natural resources of the planet.

Therefore the "MULTIPLE CONFLICTS DUE TO THE USE AND FINAL DESTINATION OF THEIR LANDS AS DETERMINED BY THE INTEREST OF GOVERNMENTS AND COMPANIES IS NOT SURPRISING(...)THE EXPLOITATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES (OIL AND MINERALS) AND TOURISM ARE THE PRINCIPAL INDUSTRIES WHICH THREATEN INDIGENOUS TERRITORIES IN AMERICA" (interview with Martha Garcia in "La Jornada". May 28, 1997). Behind the investment projects comes the pollution, prostitution and drugs. In other words, the reconstruction/reorganization of the destruction/depopulation of the zone.

In this new world war, modern politics as the organizer of National States no longer exists. Now politics is solely the economic organizer and politicians are the modern administrators of companies. The new owners of the world are not government, they don't need to be. The "national" governments are in charge of administering the businesses in the different regions of the world.

This is the "new world order", the unification of the entire world in one complete market. Nations are department stores with CEO's dressed as governments, and the new regional alliances, economic and political, come closer to being a modern commercial "mall" than a political federation. The "unification" produced by neoliberalism is economic, it is the unification of markets to facilitate the circulation of money and merchandise. In the gigantic global Hypermarket merchandise circulates freely, not people.

As in all business initiatives (and war), this economic globalization is accompanied by a general model of thought. Nevertheless, among so many new things, the ideological model which accompanies neoliberalism in its conquest of the planet is old and moss-covered. The "American way of life" which accompanied the Northamerican troops in Europe during World War II, and in Vietnam during the 60's and more recently, in the Persian Gulf War, now goes hand in hand (or hand in computers) with the financial markets.

This is not only about material destruction of the material bases of the National States, but also (and in a very important and rarely -studied manner) about historic and cultural destruction. The dignity of indigenous history of the countries of the American continent, the brilliance of European civilization, the historic wisdom of Asian nations, and the powerful and rich antiquity of Africa an d Oceania, all the cultures and histories which forged nations are attacked by the model of Northamerican life. Neoliberalism in this way imposes a total war: the destruction of nations and groups of nations in order to homogenize them with the Northamerican capitalist model.

A war then, a world war, the IV. The worst and cruelest. The one which neoliberalism unleashes in all places and by all means against humanity.

But, as in all wars, there are combats, winners and losers, and torn pieces of that destroyed reality. In order to construct the absurd jigsaw puzzle of the neoliberal world many pieces are necessary. Some can be found among the ruins this world war has left on the planetary surface. At least 7 of these pieces can be reconstructed and can fan the hope that this world conflict not end with the death of the weakest rival: humanity.

Seven pieces to draw, color, cut, and arrange, next to others to form the global jigsaw puzzle.

The first is the double accumulation, of wealth and poverty, at the two poles of global society. The other is the total exploitation of the totality of the world. The third is the nightmare of the migrant part of humanity. The fourth is the nauseating relationship between crime and Power. The fifth is the violence of the State. The sixth is the mystery of megapolitics. The seventh is the multi-forms of pockets of resistance of humanity against neoliberalism.