Do we defend globalisation, with its laissez-faire allowance of the exploitation of cheap mobile labour (see the construction workers shipped in with no rights and horrible pay to work on the building projects in Dubai for an extreme example), because of a liberal hang-wringing urge to shout about racism and xenophobism?
This is not nationalism, it is about the fair treatment of labour, whether the underpaid mobile labour from abroad or the passed over local workers at home. The only people winning in the stinking rat race of globalisation are the multi-nationals who get to treat people like slaves to make a cheap buck off their backs.
Welcome back to Victorian Britain, Mk II.
Internationalism versus Globalisation:
“While internationalism would celebrate the achievements, struggles and creativity of the poor, and the equal rights of all peoples of the world to develop in dignity, sufficiency and security, globalisation and global capitalism requires the humiliation of hundreds of millions of people and keeping them in constant insecurity, pitting them against one another in a competitive struggle for survival.
We are all globalisers now. The insistence on globalisation has eclipsed and usurped internationalism; indeed sometimes masquerades as if it were the same thing. It is time to rescue what internationalists have always worked for from the clutches of a rapaciously expansive and ultimately, colonising, globalisation.”
Update:
Just read this comment on the Guardian CIF:
Ex 3/ Burj Dubai built with imported “en masse” Indian and Filipino workers who live in same conditions, and have passports removed so they can’t go on strike and can be deported, and are typically not paid on time, while Dubai residents go skiing in their enclosed “Green” refrigirated ski run.
This is not “free movement of capital and labour”. This is the cynical tactic of “divide to rule” to break the rights of workers everywhere by shipping in foreign workers “en masse” and creating “closed systems”. This enables two birds to be killed with one stone: a) the imported workers are lost in a foreign environment, can’t communicate locally on the job market, and are frightened to assert their rights as human beings, and b) this enables workers protected in the UK to be conveniently circumvented.
(Written by Klendathu)
