[dukeluke]

In a global economy, workers have no leverage. If a group tries to form a union, the work goes elsewhere. Globalism exploits the fact that there are people willing to work for $1/hr, and leads to many of the problems of capitalism predicted by Marx and friends in the early 1900s. As long as globalization is allowed to continue, inequality within the US will just grow worse.

[Sone7]

Globalization is not the enemy. Centralised globalization with a handful of megacorps dominating the global economy is fucking awful however.

Protectionism is at best a short term solution that comes with a host of other problems.

The major threats to our existence are global problems like climate change and nuclear arsenals. Fighting against all globalization will only divide us.

I believe that the best leverage workers of the world can have is the ability to live a decent life without the threat of starvation or extreme poverty. This dream is attainable, and worth planning for and building towards as a species.

We have near instant communication, the ability to translate between languages is developing rapidly, and automation can potentially, realistically, make it so that work is truly optional. Fighting against all globalization and protecting US interests above all others is, I would think, very much not what 'Marx and friends' would have had in mind.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Globalization is not the enemy.

The problem is there are two kinds. The classic one, and the one you can easily defend, was just eliminating tariffs. Don't discriminate against foreign businesses; treat them the same as local businesses.

But there is another one that generally gets called "harmonization", and that's the one that kills everything. Because what it means in practice is the undemocratic international enforcement of regulations created via regulatory capture. You enforce the same rules everywhere, those rules are created by megacorps to give them an advantage and the predictable result obtains.

[nercht12]

>> I believe that the best leverage workers of the world can have is the ability to live a decent life without the threat of starvation or extreme poverty. This dream is attainable, and worth planning for and building towards as a species.

What do you mean by "ability"? Opportunity? I don't see how any particular economic status of anyone can be guaranteed with regards to what you're saying.

How I see it: The rich get richer and the poor, poorer. Once the rich have all the wealth, they go elsewhere with it. Corporations move to Singapore to save money. Automation will only benefit those who own it. Once things are automated, most people will lose their jobs and won't be able to afford even the things that are produced by automation. The rich aren't going to share, and if they do, they do it with strings attached so they can manipulate the spending and promote their own agendas (which is what they do now anyways).

The biggest problem is simply human selfishness. Because of it, there will never be peace. There will always be people seeking more than they need, always seeking their own survival over that of others, always seeking to crush others to give themselves a boost physically/economically/egotistically/etc. There will never be world peace as long as people are selfish, which basically makes world peace a pipe dream. Sorry to step on toes, but that's life.

[yummyfajitas]

Meanwhile, global inequality has gone down, because desperately poor Indians and Chinese have grown significantly wealthier.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/content.washingtonexaminer.biz/web-...

I feel so bad for those rich westerners with a house, running water, 24/7 electricity, free schools, etc.

[DarkKomunalec]

> I feel so bad for those rich westerners with a house, running water, 24/7 electricity, free schools, etc.

Yeah, until western countries have fallen to the level of the worst parts of Somalia, we really shouldn't complain.

[mistermann]

The fact that living conditions improving for people in the 3rd world makes you feel better maybe doesn't do as much for "rich westerners" whose jobs have moved overseas.

[simonh]

In terms of driving down third world poverty and lifting hundreds of thousands of people out of hand-to-mouth existences globalization is unbelievably effective. A large fraction of the rural poor in China are now skilled workers. Factory laborer wages in China have rocketed in the last 15 years just as the number of such laborers has also shot up. The massive expansion of IT companies in India is sucking huge amounts of money into the Indian economy while driving down the costs of services in the West.

So it depends on what you think is most important. Yes many manufacturing jobs have moved out of the West, yet overall unemployment in the Western world is not particularly high. In the US it's fallen by half in the last 5 years to historically fairly low levels and job vacancies are at an all time high because businesses are having difficulty finding skilled or experienced workers. the real problem in the actual jobs market is training and education, not de-industrialization.

The anti-globalization narrative is utter claptrap peddled by a 70's soviet-era industrialist view of the world where all we had to do was put everybody in factories and we'd everything would be fine. Actually, it wasn't true back then either, hence the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The globalization equation has nothing to do with transfers of wealth from Western world labour to Western world fat cats. It's mainly about transfers of wealth from Western world labour to eastern world labour. The solution isn't to reverse that trend and impoverish foreigners. It's to climb our economies up the value chain and capture more global wealth. We have been doing that, but we're just not doing it fast enough.

[bobwaycott]

Small nit: Marx worked and predicted these issues in the mid-1800s. He died in 1883.