by Kerry Bolton
Such modernist music has from the start been a means by which a ‘global culture’ can be imposed from above, whilst simultaneously making large profits, and breaking down cultural and ethnic barriers among the generations of youth, until everyone has become ‘detribalised.’ In more recent years we have witnessed the phenomenon of the young, right down to toddlers, being targeted by corporate advertising as consumers in their own right. Masses of youth since around the rock ’n’ roll era of the 1960s—when Negro rhythms started being introduced to White youth—gyrate to discordant beats like some African tribal frenzy, and a nebulous global youth has been formed largely around the promotion of subcultures that have been made not only mainstream but predominant by the global music corporations. This is the ‘globalisation of culture’ recommended by Perlmutter to undermine ‘nationalistic culture.’ As will be seen below, the United States has a strategy of using multiculturalism to undermine the national identities of Europe.
Professor Perlmutter, who became director of Wharton School’s Emerging Global Civilization Project,[17] had since the 1970s worked on an ideological basis for globalisation. Note that the programme he directed refers to a ‘Global Civilization.’ Since Perlmutter has been concerned throughout his professional career with the role of the global corporations as agents for change, the ‘global civilisation’ for which he works can be none other than the cultural prop for the global shop and the global factory.
[1] Brunson McKinley, director general of the International Organization for Migration, ‘Viewpoints: Should borders be open?,’ BBC News 13 April 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3512992.stm#Khadria.
[2] Bolton, ‘New Left from Old,’ Revolution from Above, 144–200.
[3] Sam Dolgoff, ed., Bakunin on Anarchy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 282–83.
[4] Volin, ‘What Had people Got Against Bakunin?,’ libcom.org, 5 April 2005, http://libcom.org/forums/thought/what-have-people-got-against-bakunin.
[5] David Rief, ‘Multiculturalism’s Silent Partner, It’s the Newly Globalized Consumer Economy, Stupid,’ Harper’s Magazine, August 1993.
[6] Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Muller, Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), 77.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid., 19.
[9] Ibid., 62.
[10] Ibid.
[11] G. Pascal Zachary, The Global Me (New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 2000).
[12] Barnet and Muller, Global Reach, 31.
[13] Ibid., 58.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid., 106.
[16] Ibid., 113–14.
[17] ‘Howard V. Perlmutter, The Wharton School, http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/125anniversaryissue/perlmutter.html.
The Global Me
Perlmutter taught that in order for business to expand it must act and think globally, and this means rejecting national and ethnic bonds as outdated, and the old idea that a corporation is part of the home country, whether ‘American,’ ‘British,’ ‘French’ . . . As alluded to above, the answer to national cultures and states is a ‘global civilisation,’ according to this doctrine. In a paper published in 2001, Perlmutter cites the previously quoted Jacques Maisonrouge of IBM in regard to what is called a ‘geocentric company’:
The first step to a geocentric organization is when a corporation, faced with a choice of whether to grow and expand or decline, realizes the need to organize its resources on a world scale. It will soon or later have to face the issue that the home country does not have a monopoly of either men or ideas . . .
I strongly believe that the future belongs to geocentric companies . . . what is of fundamental importance is their attitude of the company’s top management. If it is dedicated to ‘geocentricism,’ good international management will be possible. If not, the best men of different nations will soon understand that they do not belong to the ‘race de seigneurs’ and will leave the business.[1]
One of the key elements of a ‘geocentric’ company is that its employees can be shifted about anywhere in the world in the interests of the company.[2] One’s loyalty is therefore first to one’s corporation, without roots to any locale or ethnos; a modern type of global freebooter. Perlmutter cited a Unilever chairman’s board statement as an example of this trans-national, trans-ethnic, trans-cultural new corporate man: ‘We want to Unileverize our Indians and Indianize our Unileverans.’[3] The employees have even been given a new identity as ‘Unileverans.’
The obstacles towards the ‘geocentric’ corporation, according to Perlmutter, include:
Political and economic nationalism,
Lack of an international money system,
The interference of the state in corporate decisions,
‘Nationalistic tendencies in staff,’
Linguistic and cultural differences.
What can be seen from the above is that globalism, which transcends the ‘geocentric corporation’ today, is pushing for the development of nothing less than a new form of humanity: where anyone can be uprooted and placed around the world, without the bonds or boundaries of language, culture, and nation. Ideally, family bonds could be eliminated as an impediment to such a globalised humanity also, which might be why such U.S. agencies as the CIA, and the tax-exempt foundations of global corporations have long avidly funded and promoted feminism and the role of women as corporate employees rather than as mothers.[4] The ideal Homo globicus will be raceless, sexless, and stateless.
Perlmutter states of such a corporate figure:
The geocentric enterprise depends on having an adequate supply of men [and women] who are geocentrically oriented. It would be a mistake to underestimate the human stresses which a geocentric career creates. Moving where the companies need an executive involves major adjustments for families, wives and children. The sacrifices are often great and, for some families, outweigh the reward forthcoming—at least in personal terms. Many executive find it difficult to learn new languages and to overcome their cultural superiority complexes, national pride and discomfort with foreigners.[5]
Perlmutter stated that corporations had not yet solved the difficulties of relocating humans as corporate needs dictate; what he called ‘the human costs of international mobility.’[6] Furthermore, a major obstacle is ‘building trust between men of different nationality.’ Perlmutter ends by describing the corporate executives as likely to be ‘the most important social architects’ for the creation of ‘our evolving world community.’ He sees global commerce as the key to peace.[7] Peace might indeed ensue when—in the name of globalised humanity—everyone surrenders all concepts of identity other than to the one-world economic and political system. Whether this is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depends on what price one puts upon the higher things in life than the strictly economic. Others, including this writer, believe that economics should serve rather than enslave humanity. So far, the pursuit of the ‘peace’ of a globalised humanity has seen the bombing into submission of every regime and every state that resists some aspect of globalisation, such as Serbia’s reluctance to privatise and globalise the mineral wealth of Kosovo. As will be considered in due course, bombs and debt are not the primary means of maintaining the globalist hold over humanity. The primary means is to change the ways of living—the culture—of every individual. The way this is being done is via immigration and consequently multiculturalism, as a dialectical stepping-stone to a global monoculture in the service of commerce.
The transnational corporation serves as the primary agent of social and cultural change, or as Howard Perlmutter stated it, corporate executives become the ‘most important social architects’ of our time, reforging their employees to become what are often called ‘world citizens,�
�� lauded with the usual smokescreen of idealism that generally hides schemes for exploitation and domination.
An ideology of the globalised, rootless corporate employee has been developed, arguing that such a being is actually the next step in human evolution, and by implication all those who oppose this ‘progress’ are reactionary and have malign intent toward ‘humanity.’ Those who object that herding humanity into a ‘one world, one race’ nebulous mass at the behest of money-shufflers might not be such a benign objective, are quickly silenced by the corporate media and lackey politicians as ‘racists’ and ‘xenophobes’ and ‘Nazis’; as nothing other than human anomalies—like the Afrikaners—in the modern world. The ‘global me,’ as G. Pascal Zachary termed the corporate model for the next stage of humanity, is the employee who has no roots of family, race, nation, or culture that world prevent him form relocating anywhere in the world that his corporation requires. Zachary, a financial journalist, has taken up the reigns of Professor Perlmutter whose qualifications were—interestingly—in both engineering and psychology—as the intellectual advocate for this new corporate humanity, although Zachary is pitching to a wider audience.
In a book review of The Global Me for The Atlantic Monthly, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang wrote of his and his family’s own hybridity as the ideal of corporate globalism, referring to the multicultural character of a playground at Silicon Valley; ‘just what one would expect in Silicon Valley, which is a magnet for engineers, designers, managers, and other professionals from all over the world.’[8] While many of the families of these different nationalities maintain ties to their homelands and cultures, there is ‘no commonly accepted term’ for Mr. Pang and his family and others of mixed descent. Mr. Pang proceeded to laud the merits of rootlessness for the global economy; the theme of Zachary’s Global Me:
. . . our lives cross too many boundaries—racial, ethnic, national—that are usually (and erroneously) regarded as fixed and all-important. Call us hybrids—or, a cruder term, mongrels. Hybrids today are growing in numbers, public prominence, and economic importance: they jump-start regional and national economies, give industries a critical edge, strengthen states, and diversify the intellectual capital of corporations. Indeed, according to G. Pascal Zachary’s new book, The Global Me, hybridity is the modern philosopher’s stone, the key to economic vitality among global corporations and advanced nations.[9]
Mr. Pang alludes to such cross-ethnic, cross-cultural interchanges as not being unique in history, especially in terms of trade, and the benefits migrants bring to London and other financial capitals. It might be added that Jews have been a catalyst for globalisation in the past due to their unique international connections; a factor emphasised by the Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel to Oliver Cromwell in seeking the readmittance of the Jews to England. Appealing to ‘profit as the most powerful motive, and which all the World preferres [sic] before all other things,’ the Rabbi recommended the Jews as agents of global economic expansion because,
the Nation of the Jews is dispersed throughout the whole world . . . Now this dispersion of our Fore-fathers flying from the Spanish Inquisition, some of them came to Holland, others got into Italy, and others broke themselves in to Asia; and so easily they credit one another; and by that means they draw the Negotiation wherever they are, with all of them marchandizing and having perfect knowledge of all the kinds of Moneys, Diamants, Cochinil, Indigo, Wines, Oyle, and other Commodities, that serve from place to place; especially holding correspondence with their friends and kins-folk, whose language they understand . . .[10]
It is with remarkable clarity and without recourse to ‘anti-Semitism’ that we can see the beginnings of what has become globalisation and the globalist ideal of a new race of ‘hybrid,’ sojourning the world without the restraints of nationality, tradition, religion, or language, in this letter from a 17th-century rabbi.
Today ‘We Are All Jews Now’ can be an added dimension to the ‘We Are All Africans Now’ in the pursuit of a globalised humanity. Whether the usury and new business practices that broke free from the ethical restrictions of the Church by these cross-cultural exchanges with Amsterdam, London, Paris, and New York have been a blessing or a curse to humanity is a matter of opinion, but it is from here that the road to our present globalisation has proceeded. However to proceed with Mr. Pang’s review of Zachary’s Global Me, in regard to the cross-cultural exchanges of prior centuries:
What’s different today is the degree to which such mixing produces a new kind of people, and to which hybridity’s benefits translate into significant economic advantages. Many factors now favor hybrids, who are more numerous and visible than ever: transnational, interracial, and multi-ethnic marriages are at an all-time high. Civil-rights activism over decades has created an atmosphere in many advanced nations in which discrimination is discouraged (if it hasn’t been eliminated) and mixed social identities are possible. Transoceanic telephone service, e-mail, and international flights have made it easier to maintain strong, real-time ties around the world. Disney and Nike are global commodities, but so are Hong Kong action films, African music, and Brazilian soap operas (this kind of globalization has been accelerated by the Web). Transnational careers and reverse migration are more common. Finally, a greater consciousness of the ‘invention of tradition’ has made it easier for people to see conventional ethnic and racial categories as resources, not restrictions, and to define themselves not just by what they ‘are,’ or what others say they are, but by work, passionate interests, and experiences. Such people aren’t rootless cosmopolitans or eternal outsiders, Zachary argues; it’s now possible to have both ‘roots’ and ‘wings’—to develop meaningful affiliations without renouncing one’s origins.[11]
Other than bankrupt and indebted English aristocrats intermarrying with the scions of wealthy Jewish merchants[12] and, later, American heiresses over the past one to two hundred years, hybridity was limited and there were few of any class who intermarried with what were once colonial subjects. Since decolonisation, the former colonial subjects have been welcomed into former imperial states as ‘citizens,’ the result being mass immigration of the former colonial races into England, France, Spain, Netherlands, Portugal, etc., while the European Union has facilitated further migrations across the Occident. The ex-colonial subjects have become the occupiers of their former master-states.
Mr. Pang alludes to ‘civil rights activism’ as a factor in assisting with globalisation. Such ‘activism’ has, like much else served malign interests while posturing with benign aims, like ‘human rights’ and ‘equality.’ The same situation pertains to the destruction of apartheid South Africa, which will be considered specifically in a subsequent chapter. Few ‘civil rights activists’ would realise that what they were marching for and screeching about, was not ‘human rights’ but the corporate rights for an integrated mass labour force; what Professor Chomsky, previously quoted, refers to as ‘interchangeable cogs’ in the economy.
Mr. Pang lauds the new world culture that is emerging; a culture that he accurately describes as consisting of ‘global commodities.’ Concomitant with this is what he calls the ‘invention of tradition’ where elements of culture are seen as economic ‘resources.’ Supposedly one can become part of a nebulous mass of producers and consumers without ‘renouncing one’s origins.’ It is the old canard used by corporate apologists that it is the shareholders who run a company, not the executives. The apologists for corporate globalism are claiming that it is the new citizens of the world who shape their own future, and who are now free to pick and choose from an international ragbag of cultures, to recreate themselves as whoever they wish to be. It is the myth of what is also called ‘consumer choice.’ On the other hand, perhaps there is no real ‘consumer choice,’ no real opportunities to reinvent oneself by becoming whatever one wishes to be: once we are detached from out traditions life becomes transient and shallow, and what emerges is a mass glo
bal monoculture that opens up better opportunities for mass marketing throughout the world. Hence, culture becomes a commodity like any manufactured goods. The best way to gain quick profits is to have a quick turnover of goods with a very limited lifespan. Hence, ‘pop’ music, ‘rap,’ etc., can be churned out and sold at speed in comparison to Classical or Baroque. The impulsion of this mass global consumer culture is to market the ever-new of mediocrity rather than the enduring and great. This is what Pang and Zachary brazenly call ‘global commodities’ without any indication that they feel uncomfortable with calling the arts ‘commodities.’ The result of commoditising and globalising culture is to drag it down to the lowest denominator for the sake of gaining the largest number of consumers. The corporation is after all in the business of profits, not artistic excellence. The best way to optimise profits is to create global consumer with the same tastes by breaking down traditional cultures. The most efficient way of creating this global monoculture is via the stepping-stone of multiculturalism, leading to the ‘invention of tradition,’ not by the individual, with a bogus ‘freedom,’ but by the corporations that dictate trends whether in fashion, music or food, etc.