Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine – A Grim Reminder of the Limits of Globalisation?

The Russian State’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine is both a grim reminder of the power of nation states and local/ ethnic politics, but also an illustration of how even Russia isn’t immune from increasing globalisation. Maybe the later point offers us some hope of an early end to this war?

The very fact that Putin can amass an army of hundreds of thousands to invade a country the size of Ukraine reminds us that he military industrial basis of society has remained an important aspect of global power relations even in an age of increasing globalisation.

Russia has used its military force in Syria, Georgia, Crimea so far this century, all of which most of us in the West have managed to ignore because they are far enough away from Europe for us to not worry about, but Ukraine borders with Poland and Romania, and that makes it feel a lot closer to home.

We might like to think we’ve been progressing towards a more cosmopolitan society with more democracies opening up, and the European Union expanding, but Russia’s invasion of Ukrain maybe reminds us that there are limits to globalisation – Russia’s governance relies on a very different, autocratic model.

Something else to ask yourselves is how important the media and social media especially are in this conflict – Russians are hearing a very different story about the invasion of Ukrain – the state media there is spinning it as ‘liberation from a Nazi regime’ (despite the fact that the Ukrainian president is Jewish?) and censorship of free-media has increased in Russia since the invasion.

I’ve no idea what the average Russian individual thinks of this invasion BTW, but it seems that those who protest it are being arrested.

It is interesting to contrast Russia’s approach to increasing censorship to the way that the Ukrainian president and other celebrities are masterfully using the media (including social media) to gain support for the defence of their country, although as the Russian forces penetrate further into Ukraine it’s difficult to know how far these messages are being heard by the Ukrainian people.

A test of the type of Globalism we’re living in?

First off, the fact that Russia is still a member of the United Nations and that it has invaded Ukraine demonstrates that any notion of us living in age of what we might call ‘political gloabliastion’ is a joke – clearly we live in a segregated world. It also reminds of us how powerless the UN is!

NB the existence of NATO also shows us this – Putin is responding to what he says is a perceived threat of NATO expansion and NB given that American has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq this century, there is EVIDENCE that the West can be the aggressors too.

Russia is still as dependent on global trade and financial flows and the main thrust of Europe and America’s response to this unproved war has been to impose economic sanctions on Russia – preventing ordinary Russians access to financial services (Russians abroad have been unable to access some of their banking services), and cutting of trade in Russian oil.

Some Wester companies, such as Mcdonalds have also stopped operating in Russia.

However, will restricting economic globalisation be enough to bring an early end to this war?

The answer is probably not – there are plenty of other trading partners – Africa and China and India for example, and possibly in the short term all these sanctions are doing is hurting ordinary Russians rather than the Russian State, and whether that puts pressure on Putin is difficult to say when Putin has control of the Russian media.

At the end of the day I think out hopes rest on a combination of the power of decentralised forms of global social media to get the non-Russian version of the invasion of Ukraine out to ordinary Russians, to the mothers of the Russian solders dying in a war neither they nor the Ukrainians want, for example, and then we might start to see some sustainable grass-roots movements for change in Russia, I think that’s what it’s going to take.

This all just seems so pointless, dying over territory in the 21st century?

But this, it seems, is where we are at!

The Role of Transnational Corporations in Development

A few criticisms of  the role of Transnational Corporations in International Development 

Criticisms of Coca ColaTransnational Corporations are one of the primary agents of Global Capitalism and many have been criticised because of the social and environmental harms they cause in the pursuit of profit. In this blog I outline some case studies of Corporations exploiting workers.

My main inspiration for writing this blog is ‘The Corporation’ (1) (2). However, although this blog does draw on this excellent resource, it also provides more contemporary examples of corporate harm than this 2004 documentary.

Examples of Corporations exploiting workers

Probably the best known criticism to be levelled at well known Corporations such as Nike, Addidas and Primark is that they profit from ‘sweatshop labour’ – with the workers who manufacture their products working extremely long hours in poor conditions and for extremely low wages.

In chapter 5 of The Corporation, one researcher calculates that workers at one of Nike’s factories in Indonesia were earning 0.3% of the final selling price of the products they were making. Now, I know there are middle men, but in classic Marxist terms, this is surely the extraction of surplus value taken to the extreme! The anti- sweat shop campaigns are years old now, but still ongoing –

Of course sweat shop labour is not limited to the clothing industry – the BBC3 series ‘Blood Sweat and T shirts/ Takeaways/ Luxuries’, (3) in which young Brits travel to developing countries to work alongside people in a wide range of jobs, clearly demonstrates how workers in many stages of the productive process, including rice sowing, prawn farming, gold mining, and coffee packing, suffer poor pay and conditions. Many of the goods focussed on in this series end up being bought and the sold in the West by Transnational Corporations for a huge mark up, and it is extremely interesting to see the Brits abroad struggling with the injustice of this.

Apple SweatshopsThe Daily Mail recently conducted some undercover journalism in a Chinese factory that makes the i-pad – where the report they ‘encountered a strange, disturbing world where new recruits are drilled along military lines, ordered to stand for the company song and kept in barracks like battery hens – all for little more than £20 a week.’ Apparently workers have to endure shifts up to 34 hour s long, and the factory has been dubbed the ‘i nightmare factory’ (4)

Even worse conditions are to be found at some of Coke’s bottling factories in Columbia according to the killer coke campaign. Campaigners have documented a ‘gruesome cycle of murders, kidnappings and torture of union leaders involved in a daily life and death struggle’ at these plants. The bosses at some of Coke’s factories in Columbia have contacts with right wing paramilitary forces, and use violence and intimidation to force unionised labour out of work, and then hire non unionised labour on worse contracts for half the pay. There have been more than 100 recorded disappearances of unionised labour at Coke’s factories. (5) (6)

Now the Coca Cola Corporation is obviously not directly to blame for this, as Columbia is one of the more violent countries on the planet, and this culture of violence and intimidation is widespread. The company is, however, responsible for making the conscious decision to choose to invest in a region well known for such practices, and failing to either pull out or protect its workers.

See http://www.nosweat.org.uk/ for more details of Corporate Complicity in sweat shop labour and Union Busting (7)

(1)  http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FA50FBC214A6CE87 – All the chapters of the Corporation on youtube – although you should really show your support by purchasing this documentary!

(2)  http://www.thecorporation.com/ – The web site of The Corporation.

(3)  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00s6103 – The BBC web site for the recent ‘Blood, Sweat and luxuries programme which has an interest blog of comments and a ‘what can you do to help’ link.

(4)  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1285980/Revealed-Inside-Chinese-suicide-sweatshop-workers-toil-34-hour-shifts-make-iPod.html

(5)  http://www.killercoke.org/pdf/KCBroch.pdf – a link to the main campaign leaflet of the ‘killer coke’ campaign.

(6) http://www.staticbrain.com/archive/killer-coke-coke-is-the-drink-of-the-death-squads/ – featuring a video of the song ‘Coke is the drink of the Despots’ – sing along if you like!

(7)  http://www.nosweat.org.uk/files/New%20general%20leaflet%2009.pdf – A link to the most recent nosweat leaflet which has some nice ‘sweatshop sums’ peppered throughout which provide facts such as ‘Children as young as 10 were found working in a shop for Primark – Primark made sales of 1.1 billion in the sixth months to March 2009.’

The Golden Arches Theory of Decline – This 2016 post by George Monbiot argues that Transnational Corporations such as Mcdonalds are undermining democracy and that a global system which concentrates power in the hands of a relatively few TNCs is not compatible with the democratic will of the people of Nation States – hence why Trump won in the USA – he’s one of the few political candidates to have promised to limit the power of TNCs.

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