Interview on globalization and its economic and social implications
with Augusto Fantozzi, former Minister of Foreign Trade of the Republic of Italy, and Edoardo Narduzzi, economic journalist, co-authors of the book "The Global Market - the New Challenges of Capitalism and the Role of Europe", Mondadori 1997.
" Global capitalism is the real challenge of the new millennium for the peoples of the world. It is a challenge which individual governments have been approaching without really appreciating its implications. But global capitalism, like all mankind's achievements, needs to be properly understood and managed if it is to become progress for all those involved. And that, undoubtedly, is the real challenge facing international civil society in the next century."
" We should not think that everything is moved and controlled by economics, or the needs of the economy. One should not seek only the economic dimension behind globalization, motivated by the need to increase profits, to maximize the return on investment, to conquer new markets. Economics, with greater force in the last three centuries compared with the past, certainly drives men in new directions, influences their social structures and thus their politics. Economics alone, however, cannot be isolated as the driving-force for everything. Globalization should be interpreted as a vision which transcends economics, which is not just driven by the economic dimension. People do not participate just for the sake of profit or greater benefits. Behind the road to globalization other forces, other movements in human society are pushing it in the right direction and at the right pace. Apart from economics, global change involves men and women with their own passions, their own aspirations and institutions, with their own ideal, just and equitable social models. Also behind globalization are the eternal forces of human change: religion, culture, and technology. Any assumption that everything happens because the economy demands it is not just simplistic, it is wrong."
" It is said that globalization has brought about a state of crisis for the nation state. Progressive consolidation of the free trade area and the enshrinement of free movement of capital, according to some, would have undermined the socio-political base on which the concept of the nation state was built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Weakened from above by the high level of internationalization and from below by the resurgence of local aspirations for new forms of autonomy, nation states would be destined to amble slowly like elephants into old age.........Much more realistically, I believe that nation states will not disappear. Less traumatically, they will carve out a new and visibly less cumbersome role within the new world order."
" There will be changes in the role of national institutions, the conflict between interests of domestic groups, control over financial flows, cultural autonomy, particular forms of social and market models, relations with everything outside the national territory.
What is more important is that a new model of capitalism is being drawn up. It is a break with national capitalism, now disappearing, and a rising world capitalism, as suggested in the report of the Lisbon Group published in 1994. For convenience, we can call it global capitalism. It is a unitary model of the market economy in which we will be living when the process of globalization is complete, not so many years from now."
" The question we must try to answer in order to understand what global capitalism will look like is simple: is the face of global capitalism, with its distinctive features, already visible in the current context? Well, the gears that will drive and channel change are already before our eyes. There is not even any need to make any particular intellectual effort. They are:
the stateless dimension of capital and saving;
the growth in the incidence of unemployment, destined, in time, to extend even to recently industrialized countries;
the transcending of geo-political boundaries by the communication media, amplified by the provision of personalized information with less and less intermediation;
the restructuring and repositioning of the role of the nation state;
the cohabitation of increasingly fluid groupings within social bodies due to openness and international dialogue between them;
the assertiveness of smaller enterprises in response to the individual needs and the need to restructure large enterprises;
the final overthrow of totalitarian political ideologies able to block or control relations between individuals or between more or less informal groups.
All this has turned today into an open scenario. Reforms only seem to belong to the rationale of the action of individual States or individual national communities. In reality it is a continual reaction with the outside. And this interaction, obviously, will be reflected in the approach of global capitalism. Moving towards global capitalism therefore involves domestic changes but also the need to adopt appropriate international policies for action."
" National states are in no position to control globalization. However, governments will have the not so easy task of adapting international institutions to the new reality that has arisen in the meantime."
" At every moment of the day and in almost everything he does, man grapples with the demands of communication technologies. And he must be able to manage it himself if he wants to be a protagonist. It is the same phenomenon, on a larger scale and developing more rapidly, as when Gutemberg invented the printing press. A colossal technological literacy process is taking over humanity so as to allow it to enter the world of communications. Thus technology becomes the true universal language which you cannot reject without excluding yourself from the game. Moreover, hundreds of millions of people already speak, perhaps without realizing it, the same computer language. Just as the illiterate had no career prospects in bourgeois society, the basis of a bureaucratic state, in the same way the new illiterates have no chance of participating in the frenetic evolution of contemporary society. But in the first case, the knowledge required to catch up was, in fact, relatively static over time, while the latter, on the other hand, is constantly changing."
" I cannot imagine a global environment as an exclusive club with an elite few who reproduce themselves by passing on the baggage of knowledge. That is why corrective measures are needed by governments. The situation, once again, is not very different from that which existed between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth in relation to the ability to read and write. Universal compulsory schooling was the response of the time to extend participation in progress and economic development as well as political choice. The spread of the knowledge required by the global society should be today's response to the risk of a fragmented community. It will be television and other systems of communication that will help to achieve this ambitious objective. In this way, television as a means of entertainment will become, at least in part, an instrument of education and training thanks to the proliferation of channels."
" The consolidation of robotics and technical progress has already led to a constant change of the active labour force. To this can be added increased productivity, also improved thanks to technical advances made available to employees. Mass unemployment, a phenomenon which now affects even the rich countries, is the most important socio-economic fact of the end of the second millennium and many agree that unemployment, despite the astronomical figures, more than thirty million in 1993 in the OECD countries alone, will go on rising. The International Labour Office (ILO), in its report on unemployment up to 1995, offers a numerical presentation of a decline in the rate of employment growth experienced in all industrialized countries for the period 1991-1994 compared with the previous period. Employment is hardly growing at all in the European Union and in Canada, and less than in the past in Japan and the USA. What the market offers is a surrogate for traditional employment, employment resulting from the industrialization that dominates human life. In the second half of 1993, statistics provided by the Canadian Institute of Statistics show in simple terms how the labour market is changing: compared with not a single full time job being created in the last five and a half years, there was an increase from 320,000 to 2,150,000 part time jobs. The lack of employment growth cannot be written off as just a major or minor problem of the labour market, or simply as a problem of specific economies. True, there are countries where unemployment is aggravated by specific factors related to the labour market, but no economy can feel safe from the erosion of the employment base caused by technological change and changes in the economy in general. Seventy-five per cent of workers are still engaged in repetitive and simple tasks. For economists, the advent of electronics will be reflected in a contraction ranging from 25 to 75 per cent of all office work, the activity that includes the largest proportion in contemporary employment."
" It will be necessary to come to terms with a mass of unemployed or partly employed people who will have to be retrained, in an "education for life", in the words of Keynes. It will be necessary to explain that people are not expected any longer to work for most of their life and educate them to accept this new social dimension. Rifkin is certainly convinced of this, when he writes in his latest book: "in the future, a growing number of people, all over the world, will spend less time in their place of work¼. Instead, we will see a more enlightened course, allowing workers to benefit from increased productivity by shorter working hours and by adjusting incomes accordingly, people will be able to enjoy more leisure than ever before in history".
Global capitalism, therefore, will establish a different relationship with work. "
" Culture and education, tourism, entertainment and sport could become the four main "industries" in the world. People will divide most of their time between the services offered by these sectors.In addition, relations with others will change, within the so-called civil society and the non-profit sector with its many organizations will develop
This is perhaps the most interesting aspect from a social point of view. Behind the profile that we have just sketched, indeed, there is the immense seam of the social economy, in which a growing number of people will find employment, of a more or less casual nature. It will be up to these non-profit organizations themselves to offer the majority of people a substitute employment in place of traditional jobs" .
" In the United States, more than 15 service occupations are generated by social enterprises or non-profit activities. According to the American Government's Labour Statistics Office, it is estimated that by 2005, the sector with the most employment growth will be home health care services, employing some 428,000 new staff in the United States alone.The economy of altruism, after the end of the factory and the abolition of the traditional work place, will be the most widespread institution of global socialization. The threads of this mixture of altruism and collective consumption of time will transmit new tastes, new social fashions, new ways of participating in community life."
" Social economy will produce a significant income flow, essential to build the new socio-economic equilibrium. The case of Italian social co-operatives should be mentioned in this connection. Social co-operatives are a special form of co-operative society in which the members must possess certain individual characteristics. They must be disabled, mentally ill, drug dependents, ex-prisoners, long-term unemployed and suchlike. In a nutshell, they must belong to the so-called disadvantaged members of the social fabric, those who have the greatest difficulty in finding a place in the traditional labour market. As an incentive to such co-operatives, the law provides special treatment, including tax incentives. The legislative framework is recent, contained in the provisions of 8 November 1991. However, the latest available data show a capacity for growth and job-creation, traditional or otherwise, by some impressive social co-operatives. At the end of 1995, there were more than two thousand non-profit organizations of this type with a paid labour force estimated as more than 40,000 employees."
" It is not even remotely possible to conceive a situation in which part of the world enjoys a stable social equilibrium and widespread welfare, while the other part of the planet, numerically larger, languishes in a life of poverty accompanied by non-employment and absence of social services. Not even the most sophisticated barriers or the most draconian police measures would be able to prevent mass migration from areas of poverty to regions of plenty and peace."
" In the global capitalist equilibrium, there will still be a need to transfer resources. The government levy via taxation will, however, change radically compared with industrial capitalism. We will probably see an adjustment to the principle of the capacity to contribute to the new social and economy situation. The primary targets of taxation will be consumption of technology and non-essential goods (luxury or optional goods such as travel) and incomes of knowledge professionals, automated enterprises and financial investments. The remaining human relations will develop in practice outside the market, and could ultimately escape the burden of taxation ".
" International organizations will have to be able to safeguard the precarious social equilibrium. To achieve that objective, they will continually interact with local communities in seeking greater redistribution of resources and activating more non-profit bodies . But above all, they will have to ensure proper relations between countries where there is a relative lack or total absence of professional knowledge....In order to meet this challenge in the most effective way, international organizations will have the far from easy task of ensuring equal participation of the peoples of the planet in the development of knowledge. In two ways: by ensuring free circulation of the bearers of knowledge and, thus, avoiding the formation of enclaves of knowledge to which only a small elite have access; and by guarding against the secret hoarding of knowledge.
As you can see, the new guardians of the international order, rather than armed troops, will need technical specialists and experts in the various branches of human knowledge."
" In order to function properly, global capitalism must be based on a single, thus global, morality. This morality must ensure that in every corner of the world, human beings have the same civil rights and enjoy comparable respect for their dignity. This does not mean that the people of a particular country may not be paid less than others, but simply that their rights must be respected the same as others'. The illusion of being able to advance in different ways along the road to globalization is false, because you cannot ask someone whose most basic rights are not respected under the rules of the market to respect global rules of free trade and peaceful use of resources.
That is another reason for global capitalism having a single lay morality. As we have seen, society in the near future will be governed by increasingly delicate balances. Technical advances will constantly challenge the positions achieved. In this possible scenario, only a mankind strongly committed to a sense of community will be in a position to confront it. If anyone, for example, could see in biogenetics the chance to compensate for centuries, decades of prevarication or, worse still, a sure way of asserting racial superiority, then it is clear that the delicate balance would collapse. Only a common cooperation based on shared values can make the globalization era manageable. But there should be no illusion that this will happen by itself. It can only happen if the governments of the countries of the world, especially those of the wealthiest, and international organizations play an active part in overcoming the current discrimination against some of the actors in global capitalism."
" Global capitalism will have a universal morality, and it will be the result of centuries of achievement in terms of individual freedom, political rights, respect for the needy or less fortunate. It is on the best of the past that mankind has always built its future and it is logical that it should do it again. "
Interview of Augusto Fantozzi, former Minister of Foreign Trade of the Republic of Italy,
by economic journalist Edoardo Narduzzi, co-authors of the book "The Global Market - the New Challenges of Capitalism and the Role of Europe", Mondadori 1997, on the subject of globalization and its economic and social implications.
The computer and telecommunications revolution has opened up, and practically linked up, individual markets and individual national communities. Can we already talk about global capitalism?
In one sense, we certainly can, because global capitalism is the real challenge of the new millennium for the peoples of the world. It is a challenge which is getting closer and closer for individual governments and social entities which do not yet fully understand its implications. But global capitalism — and this has been true of all mankind’s positive conquests — needs to be properly understood and managed if it is to become a progress in which all can take part. And that, without any doubt, is the real challenge facing international civil society in the next century.
And yet, one gets the impression that globalization, like the industrialization and service revolutions that preceded it, is for a happy few.
Yes, of course. We are analysing this "revolutionary" phenomenon from a privileged Western point of view and we naturally expect to steer the change and take a full part in it. Seen from the viewpoint of a citizen of black Africa, for example, the scenario of the globalization of humanity raises fears and presages perhaps an even more penalizing role than now. The fear of being consigned for ever to the sidelines, far removed and irreversibly excluded from development does certainly not spring only from the imagination of those who already feel out of the game. On the contrary, the recent ethnic and political crises in Rwanda, and then those in Burundi and Zaire, showed most explicitly the real danger of exclusion which threatens an entire continent. As long as control of the world was based on an ideological counterbalance between two philosophies, crises like these could never be left to themselves by the international community. Each individual block, each individual country had its own function on the chessboard of international confrontation whether communist or capitalist. A political crisis, or the imminent danger of one, would set off a whole series of decisions to consolidate one’s position or stake out a new one. One thing, however, was certain: someone would take steps to intervene in the crisis. Today, the end of the ideological stand-off leaves entire regions of the planet abandoned to their fate. The still fragile international community, in search of effective practical procedures, cannot find the strength to intervene in issues when major economic interests or delicate political implications are not at stake. If the only issue is human suffering, it is more likely that no one will do anything and the calls to action by the moral authorities will be of little use. People get used to living with the images of death and privation regularly broadcast on television and come to understand that opportunities for business in those regions are becoming less and less attractive. In this way, however, the gulf between areas of the world widens, and globalization integrates only parts of the planet, while the rest of mankind lives increasingly precariously.
It is certainly not a very reassuring scenario.
I would look at the phenomenon in another way, because it is clear that globalization is usually analysed in terms of Western man. Reflections on changes in the structure of society, industry, labour and even political relations brought about by the globalization of the economy are normally reflections of a Westerner faced with interpreting global change. The analyses and ideas proposed would certainly be different, very different, if they were drawn, for example, from a South American perspective.
Why?
In the latter case, the thrust of globalization is superimposed on recent, barely consolidated progress, such as democracy, and a process of redistribution of wealth and resources which is still open to criticism and far removed from European standards. Seen from Lima or a Rio slum, globalization can take the appearance of yet another monster serving the interests of the rich of the world, with little or no relief from suffering for those who have little or nothing.
Can globalization marginalize some even further? Can inequalities increase? Does it really only serve the interests of a happy few?
It isn’t at all easy to answer such questions. What is certain is that Western citizens enjoy a privileged position at the dawn of the global economy, just as they did in the industrial revolution and the post-industrial era. But it is a relative privilege, because the West is less protected than in the past, and especially because its leadership is being challenged by the emerging societies of the East. A degree of convergence can be foreseen and is desirable between those who benefit most from globalization, but one should still be aware that in the next few decades, the world’s centre of gravity will increasingly shift towards China and the countries of that region, and the European should begin to realize this.
Does globalization rhyme only with economics, or rather, with economic change?
We should not think that everything is moved and controlled by the economy, or the needs of the economy. One should not seek only the economic dimension behind globalization, the need for increased profits, or the need to maximize returns on investment or to conquer new markets. Economics, with greater force in the last three centuries than ever before, certainly drives men in new directions, influences their social structures and thus their politics. Economics alone, however, cannot be isolated as the driving force for everything. One must look beyond economics to interpret globalization. People do not take part in it just for the sake of profit or greater well-being. Other forces, other movements in human society are pushing it in the right direction and at the right pace. Apart from economics, there are men involved in global change, men and women with their passions, their aspirations and institutions, with their social ideal, just and equitable or not. And behind globalization there are the same forces of human change as ever: religion, culture, and technology. Any assumption that it all happens because the economy will have it so is not just simplistic, it is wrong.
The economic dimension of globalization is impressive, though, isn’t it, at least in terms of world trade statistics?
Statistics on the growth of international trade confirm the speed at which the planet’s economy has integrated. Between 1950 and 1994, world trade in goods and services, according to the First Annual Report of the World Trade Organization, grew fourteen-fold in real terms. Over the same period, global GDP grew only five-and-a-half times in real terms. In fact, since the war, there has been an average annual increase in the volume of international trade of 6 per cent, compared with an average 4 per cent for world production. Since 1960, the ratio of exports to GDP of OECD countries has more than doubled, rising from 9.5 per cent to 20.5 per cent. And increasingly complex products and technology are being traded. By the end of 1994, food products represented only 9.3 per cent of world exports, the remainder, over 90 per cent, being accounted for by goods and services. The year 1995 closed with an increase of 19 per cent in the value of goods exported, accompanied by a 14 per cent increase in the trade in services. In 1995, world exports of goods amounted to 5,033 billion dollars and imports 5,170 billion dollars, and in 1994, exports of services were worth 1,100 billion dollars and imports of services a little less, 1,060 billion dollars. Overall, that now brings global annual trade to a dizzying total of over 12,000 billion dollars.
These are the figures for trade in goods and services, but alone they do not reflect the globalization of the economy as a whole, since investment should be added to this picture, shouldn’t it?
Indeed, and foreign direct investment (FDI) has not grown any less. In 1994 alone, it amounted to more than 220 billion dollars. From 1985 to 1990, total foreign direct investment rose four times faster than the growth in world production and three times faster than the growth in world trade. About 80 per cent of such investment can be attributed to American, Japanese or European multinationals.
Who is going up and who is going down in this classic theory of global economics?
The scene is certainly not static. While in 1950, the USA and the United Kingdom could still boast 32.7 per cent and 20.5 per cent respectively of total world exports, these figures had fallen to 21.1 per cent and 8.4 per cent in 1987. Meanwhile, Japan rose from 1.9 per cent to 13.4 per cent and Germany almost tripled its share of the export market, rising to 14.4 per cent. In addition, the volume of exports relative to the type of goods traded has changed over time. Since 1970, only Japan has significantly increased its position in terms of its share of high-technology exports, which rose from 13.2 to 21.1 per cent, while Germany, in the same period, saw its share fall from 17.7 to 16.2 per cent. Italy, on the other hand, saw an improvement in its export of low-technology goods and services, from 8.5 to 12.8 per cent, but suffered further loss of share in the world high-tech market.
What is happening to the nation-states that were born of the industrial revolution and the consequent emergence of national capitalism?
It is said that globalization has brought about a state of crisis for the nation-state. Some people think that progressive consolidation of economic free trade areas and the legitimation of free movement of capital have irreversibly undermined the socio-political foundation on which the nation-state took shape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Weakened from above by internationalization and from below by the resurgence of local aspirations for new forms of autonomy, nation-states are destined to amble slowly like elephants into old age. A convinced proponent of such an inescapable development is Keinichi Ohmae. We would see John Nasbitt’s paradox of globalization reproduced, albeit in a different context: the greater the influence of the international community, the greater the influence of the small entity. It would be the local community, then, with its typical traditions and the industrialization models it would have implemented, such as industrial districts, which would manage relations between individuals and a world without frontiers. That would be like passing straight from Mantua to the United Nations or from Barcelona to the headquarters of the African Development Bank in its Abidjan skyscraper. In theory, there are no technological problems in having a huge and even unlimited number of contacts and, therefore, states. In reality, however, it is policy and the practical requirements of managing interests which suggest forms of development other than those currently proposed: it is hard to imagine management of global capitalism resting on some democratic combination of the beliefs and practices of a multitude of region-states. There would be a high risk of permanent stagnation or inability of the international community to have a real political presence in managing change.
So what then?
Much more realistically, I believe that nation-states will not disappear. Less traumatically, they will carve out a new and visibly less cumbersome role for themselves within the "new world order".
There is still the issue of whether globalization, as some maintain, will end up awarding the prize to a single model of capitalism.
Yes, some people see a danger of one model of market economy prevailing to the detriment of others. For them, it is the Asian development model which would prevail over the Western model — the overthrow, in a way, of a capitalism which was weak, or too inclined to sociality, by market models which more efficiently seek improved productivity and innovation. According to this reading, globalization would cease to be a simple process of facilitating the exchange of goods, capital and people, and it would become more confrontational. Globalization would be a tool to attain a new economic equilibrium, a supranational rather than national equilibrium. The opening up of individual national markets would become the only way humanity could continue along the path of progress and greater welfare. But this would lead to a number of conflicts, some more violent than others, some better organized than others, whose protagonists would be individual centres of "unfair privilege", the foretold victims of globalization. The fact that it is precisely the conflict theorist who holds forth this hypothesis doesn’t mean anything other than that the process of globalization, if it is not properly managed, could yield much less pleasant results than commonly believed.
The most important fact is that there is no unanimity of view on the potential effects of globalization. But the possible effects by themselves are not much help in really assessing the situation. One must look at the objectives, one must look carefully at the way things are going, and if they start to go the wrong way, then they must be brought back into line. It is a matter of applying a political force to the natural dynamics of the situation; otherwise one might just as well analyse the process, identify its features, and leave things there. But that is not sufficient. Globalization needs to be fully understood so that it can be properly steered.
Let’s try and do some stock-taking of globalization. What changes will there be in the future as a result of economic integration?
The role of national institutions will change, the conflict between interests of domestic groups will change, control over financial flows, cultural autonomy, the particular characteristics of different social and market models, relations with everything outside the national territory — all this will change. What is more important is that a new model of capitalism is taking shape. Right now there is a break between national capitalism, which is disappearing, and a rising world capitalism, as the 1994 report of the Lisbon Group points out. For convenience, we can call it global capitalism. It is a unitary model of the market economy in which we will be living when the process of globalization is complete, not so many years from now.
Perhaps it would be useful to explore this concept of global capitalism a little more deeply. Let us start from the beginning, with national capitalism.
Certainly. There is still a widely-held idea that different models of capitalism live side by side in today’s economy. This diversity, which stems from the adaptation of an original model to concrete social and political situations leads to different economic performance in individual countries and an ability which a country may or may not have to succeed globally in the long term. Michel Albert’s famous analysis, in "Capitalism versus Capitalism", of the distinctive characteristics of German capitalism versus Anglo-Saxon capitalism, is perhaps the best known of all attempted reconstructions of alternative models of capitalism. According to Albert, the German fortress is more competitive than the Anglo-Saxon one, because it is better able to ensure social tranquillity and is less distracted, thanks to the solid participating relations between banks and enterprises, by the effects of short-termism, typical of "financialized" capitalism.
And which is the winning model, if there is one?
There is a conviction in all studies of capitalism that one model is better than the others, and that that one model is inevitably bound to take over in the long run. The syllogism on which this vision is based is simple: if a select model is the best for a whole series of reasons, then it means that, in the end, even those market economies which still insist on taking a different direction will tend to adapt to its canons. It is an important conviction, in both its ability to single out the optimal, and its consequences. Differences in contemporary market economies exist, and that is an indisputable fact. They are the result, according to Rostow’s analysis, of the different ways in which different geographical areas of the planet have followed the road of industrialization, then post-industrialization and, more recently, entered the era of the information economy. The combination of economic assets, social demands and political structures has meant that capitalism has adapted to the specific needs of the local community. Indirectly, the mere fact that alternative forms of capitalism continue to be discussed proves right those who claim that economic behaviour depends on the context in which it is adopted and is thus not simply the result of rational choices of supply and demand by the interested parties.
If different forms of capitalism exist, then, it is because there are different societies. And the rules of the market have had to accommodate this diversity.
How long will this diversity of context and models last?
It cannot be assumed that social differences are to last forever. Data on patterns of consumerism, and statistics — especially in those countries which until a few years ago had a planned economy — on savings behaviour patterns, along with the homogenization of traditional social schemes, especially as a result of the media, show an increasingly less diversified international society. Tastes and consumption patterns are becoming increasingly uniform, as they become increasingly based on world production. But above all, it is the change in the economic scene that is playing an important role. The information economy decides and acts in a way and with a rapidity that are quite different from those of the industrial era. A new product nowadays has a short shelf-life and needs a suitable advertising campaign, applicable in different countries, and widespread marketing in order to sell. Even a sophisticated product of mass consumption like software now has a life cycle of not more than three years, as witnessed by Microsoft’s strategy in renewing its most successful product, Windows. During the whole of the nineteenth century, however, industrial products were either standardized or customized. Totally unknown was the concept of mass production which only became the norm after Ford’s decision to launch production of the legendary Model T. Initially, consumers adapted to the product, then later, the products were adapted to the consumer, until we reach the contemporary situation in which all are adapted to the demands of communication and direct trade.
Parallel to the internationalization of the economy, therefore, there is a corresponding effect on society. Put in more explicit terms, this means that the underlying causes of the differentiation of capitalism in the take-off phase and, later, as it matured, have been steadily disappearing. The social-national stage of capitalism is giving way to digital capitalism. The former adapted to the demands and characteristics of the individual community, while the players who wish to remain and compete in the frontierless market have to adapt to the latter.
There still remains the knotty question of what global capitalism will look like?
The question we must try to answer in order to understand what global capitalism will look like is simple: is the face of global capitalism, with its distinctive features, already visible in the current context? Well, the gears that will drive and channel change are already before our eyes. To see them, there is not even any need to make any particular intellectual effort. They are:
· the stateless dimension of capital and savings;
· the growth in unemployment, destined, in time, to extend even to recently industrialized countries;
· the transcending of geo-political boundaries by the communication media, amplified by the provision of personalized information with less and less intermediation;
· the restructuring and repositioning of the role of the nation-state;
· the cohabitation of increasingly fluid groupings within social bodies due to openness and international dialogue between them;
· the assertiveness of smaller enterprises in response to the individual need for fulfilment and the downsizing of larger firms;
· the final outmoding of totalitarian political ideologies able to block or control relations between individuals or between more or less informal groups.
All this is happening in an open scenario today. Reforms only seem to belong to the sphere of action of individual states or individual national communities. In reality, there is continual interaction with the outside. And this interaction will obviously continue as we approach the capitalism of a global society. Moving towards global capitalism therefore involves not only domestic change but also the need to adopt appropriate international political action.
Industrialization and the social process that accompanied it profoundly changed the balance of society. Could the same thing happen with globalization?
There is no doubt that industrialization deeply marked the decades of human history which followed, like the period of shift to a service-oriented and post-industrial society, and had ideological implications as well. The conviction that the change was only to the benefit of some, the capitalists, and that it was thus necessary to make corrective economic adjustments, gave rise to the school of thought that was to become the most universally disseminated credo after religious ones. For social-Marxism, industrialization concealed dangerous puppetmasters who, if not suitably restricted, would appropriate most of the benefits produced by the change. Hiding behind industrialization was a group of utilitarian manipulators only interested in accumulating wealth. Industrial capitalism thus came to its appointment with history looking like a clique of a propertied few who threatened to be the sole leaders of the game.
For a long time now, however, the idea of a mankind in the pockets of a few has given way to a more realistic picture. The confrontation between different forces and interests, which have become more numerous and widespread with time, steered the development of society in a direction which was quite different from that which had been feared. This does not mean that there are no problems of excessive concentration of wealth or too much of a gap between the economic emancipation of different geographical areas in the world. It simply means that the process developed differently.
And today, who or what is driving the change?
No one and nothing in particular. The engine of change is the unstoppable course of technical and technological progress, its rapid and widespread dissemination and the ease with which capital can be moved without any kind of hindrance. The combination of these characteristics simply leads to a constant search for the best possible conditions for the use of the resources that are available. But with a fundamental difference from the past. This time there are no physical persons behind the decisions to invest or expand production, no capitalist condottieri. The reins are held by pension funds, asset management funds, investment funds, and the decisions of the top management of individual companies concerned. What is certain is that it is no longer a matter of arbitrary choices or the availability of the single individual investor willing to put in the necessary capital. A form of pluralism, to a greater or lesser degree, characterizes the potential beneficiaries of investment choices (thousands or tens of thousands of shareholders or savers) as much as the decision-makers. In this context, it is not realistic to think that it would be possible for a limited, exclusive group of persons to drive change or benefit from it. The doubt or rather the fear of a puppetmaster controlling the strings of global capitalism is, thus, unfounded.
We seem to be witnessing humanity’s triumphal march towards definitive freedom from want: but what role will national policies play?
Maybe not even nation-states will be particularly involved in the process. Throughout the twentieth century, international political decisions, and economic and financial ones as well, came about as a result of treaties signed between individual countries to encourage peace in the world, or to create free trade areas, or for human rights and so on. In order to ensure the proper application of the rules contained in the treaties, it was envisaged that ad hoc organizations would play the role of overseer of the parties in managing their functions. Thus the tasks were defined by the nation-states, and just how far the international powers would extend as well. Now the scenario is completely reversed. The globalization of capitalism is taking place without the initiative of the states. There is a widespread conviction among heads of government in individual countries that the powers of decision and intervention which they now enjoy will undergo a profound change. The experience of the European Union is a very significant example of the role of national policies in supranational institutions. Already individual ministers of European countries are no longer able to represent the interests of their own countries directly but must rely on the mediation of the commissioner in charge. And the effects of the single currency on countries’ room to move in their national economic policy will also cut into the room for action of national governments. Unfortunately for the politicians, the process is not in anyone’s hands, but in a combination of the forces mentioned above. Thus states are not directing globalization, even if they will have the not-so-easy task of adapting international institutions to the new reality that will have arisen. But that will be the result of change and not a cause.
We have said that globalization does not affect everyone in the same way. Does that mean that some will benefit more than others?
While it is true that there will be no puppetmasters pulling the strings of globalization, that does not mean that everyone affected will draw the same benefits from it or that all individuals will be equally well placed to profit from the change. There is a risk that the differences between rich and poor countries or, to put it another way, between the hemispheres of the world, will be further accentuated. During the first phase of industrialization, the knowledge required by people to participate in the change was within reach of almost everyone because work required a minimum of specialization. Not even with the subsequent change, which led to a precise segmentation of production, did the technical requirements extend beyond the walls of the enterprise. It was possible to be highly specialized in the world of work and interested only in operative relations in private life. Using a washing machine or a television, for example, requires technical adaptation but only in an operative sense. People’s action and technological involvement stopped at the factory gate and only entered into everyday life at an operating level.
Today, however, things have become quite different. The interaction with technology is everywhere and involves every moment of a person’s life. Knowing how to use a means of communication does not just have operative value in the sense that it allows the person to make better use of it. There is also a participatory implication, since having more or less of the knowledge required means being more or less able to participate in the life of the global village. A PC requires knowledge of a language in order to use it. It is not enough just to switch it on or press a button to set it in motion. To interconnect with the network and open up a dialogue with the outside, you need to master other sophisticated equipment. The era of double-track technology has now been superseded.
Thanks to the communications revolution?
Exactly. At every moment of the day and in almost everything he does, man comes up against the demands of communication technologies. And he must be able to manage them himself if he wants to be an actor. It is the same phenomenon, on a larger scale and developing more rapidly, as when Gutenberg invented the printing press. There is a colossal job to do to achieve technological literacy so as really to enter the communications society. Thus technology becomes the true universal language which you cannot reject without excluding yourself from the game. In fact, hundreds of millions of people already speak, perhaps without realizing it, the same computer language. Just as the illiterate had no career prospects in the bourgeois society governed by a bureaucratized state, in the same way the new illiterate has no chance of participating in the frenetic evolution of contemporary society. But if in the first case the knowledge required to catch up was, in fact, relatively static over time, in the latter it is constantly changing.
Still, it cannot be denied that the relationship with technical evolution is not the same around the world. Does that mean anything?
It means many things all at once. The fact that the relationship with technology has become universal does not mean that everyone experiences it in the same way. The level of personal involvement obviously depends on each individual’s ability to interact in the new environment. At the same time, there are various levels and distinct ways of participating in the communications game. But only those who have the necessary knowledge can enjoy the advantages of the new dimension and are encouraged to remain hooked up to the change. A deep gulf is growing between those who are educationally equipped and the culturally weakest part of the population. Only the former have the resources to fully profit from the opportunities available to them through innovation and to finance the required investment in permanent education. An elite, comprised of those not with the specialist technical knowledge needed to produce, but with the knowledge needed to make the world market function and play a part in it, has become the mark of social change. And interaction, for those in a position to participate in the globalization of relations, is continuously evolving.
Those are undoubtedly a privileged group of individuals. They are the only ones in a position to fully benefit from globalization. They share in innovation and at the same time in production. They are more and more autonomous in relation to the external world and in a position to control their own future. They are the feudal lords of the present age who, rather than owning land, possess the knowledge required to compete.
As the Director-General of the World Trade Organization said at the organization’s first ministerial conference in Singapore in December 1996: knowledge, the water of the third millennium.
Everything will increasingly revolve around knowledge, skills and their application. To have an idea of what the market for knowledge is already today, you only have to think of the role of the consultancy company. McKinsey, for example, perhaps the best known consultancy company in the world, employs 3,800 full-time professional experts in 69 offices around the world for an annual turnover of almost 2 billion dollars. They analyse and study everything for any requirement anywhere in the world. This is already real global management of the resource of knowledge, a market which until a few decades ago simply did not exist.
What, then, is the future for someone who does not have a "competitive" skill?
This is the part of the population which has only a passive relationship with the "globalized" world. They are the consumers — acting on almost exclusively operative decisions — of the world’s products and services, which they can access only superficially. (They can move about or communicate more easily.) In fact, it is at the very margins of the world that this group is forming and integrating, penalized by its limited knowledge. These are the effects of a society in the grip of ever faster technical change. Anyone who has managed to equip himself with a baggage of knowledge is an actor on the global scene, but the others are not even aware of what is happening.
A worrying scenario which sets a few lucky ones against many unlucky ones. Is that it?
Logically, it should be like that. But I don’t think we can really imagine a lasting global environment as an exclusive club with an elite few who reproduce themselves by passing on their baggage of knowledge. That is why corrective measures are needed by governments. The situation, once again, is not very different from that which existed between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth in relation to the ability to read and write. Universal compulsory schooling was the response of the time to extend participation in progress and economic development as well as in political choice. The spread of the knowledge required by the global society should be today’s response to the risk of a fragmented community. It will be television and other systems of communication that will help to achieve this ambitious objective. In this way, television as a means of entertainment will become, at least in part, an instrument of education and training, and the proliferation of channels will help in this sense.
Another subject which is generally linked to the problem of globalization is that of the labour market, and the implications of globalization for the organization of labour and its distribution inside and outside states. What about the impact of globalization on traditional work?
First of all, before answering the question, it may be useful for us to look at the subject from a different angle. If traditional labour, not only traditional farm work but also more modern factory or service employment, is tending to disappear, how are people in the global society going to occupy their time? This would appear to be a question for those who like to engage in the debate on which came first, the chicken or the egg. But it is the real question which humanity has to face. The consolidation of robotics and technical progress has already led to a substantial change in the workforce. To this can be added increased productivity, also improved thanks to technical advances made available to employees. Mass unemployment, a phenomenon which now faces even the rich countries, is the most important socio-economic fact of the end of the second millennium and many believe that unemployment, despite the already astronomical figures, more than thirty million in 1993 in the OECD countries alone, will go on rising. The International Labour Office (ILO), in its report on world employment in 1995, offers a numerical presentation of a decline in the rate of employment growth experienced in all industrialized countries for the period 1991-1994 compared with the previous period. Employment is hardly growing at all in the European Union and in Canada, and less than in the past in Japan and the USA. What the market offers is a surrogate for traditional employment, that is the kind of employment resulting from the industrialization that has dominated human life. In the second half of 1993, statistics provided by the Canadian Institute of Statistics show in simple terms how the labour market is changing: compared with not a single full-time job being created in the preceding five-and-a-half years, there was an increase from 320,000 to 2,150,000 of part-time jobs. The lack of employment growth cannot be written off as just a problem of stricter or looser regulation of the labour market, or simply as a problem of specific economies. True, there are countries where unemployment is aggravated by specific factors related to the labour market, but no economy can feel safe from the erosion of the employment base caused by technological change and changes in the economy in general. Seventy-five per cent of the workforce is still engaged in repetitive and simple tasks. For economists, the advent of electronics will be reflected in a contraction ranging from 25 to 75 per cent of all office work, the activity that constitutes the largest proportion of contemporary employment.
So there is a "non-labour" global economy on the way?
The features of that non-labour economy can be seen more and more clearly on the backcloth of globalization, or rather the features of that economy with a different model of employment, as Keynes already foresaw in a speech in Madrid in 1930, which he suggestively called "Prospects for our grandchildren". The great foresight which the most famous economist of this century showed with regard to changes which the capitalist economies driven by factors of production would undergo, deserves to be recalled in the same terms as he pronounced in June 1930 in Madrid. Seventy years ago, long before the emergence of the computer revolution, Keynes showed that he had very clear ideas about the future of mankind. Liberation from work was at the gates, energies could at last be directed to non-economic ends. But a general conversion of people from "education for work" to "education for life" would become necessary.
Then we are very close to the coming of a society without work in which machines completely take over from people, as Karl Marx feared?
No, something different is likely to happen, and there will not be a class of humans exploited by the capitalists. More surprisingly, it will be necessary to come to terms with a mass of unemployed or partly employed people who will have to be culturally retrained, in an "education for life", in the words of Keynes. It will be necessary to make clear that people are not expected any longer to work for most of their lives, and educate them to accept this new social dimension. Rifkin is certainly convinced of this, when he writes in his latest book, "...in the future, a growing number of people, all over the world, will spend less time in their place of work¼If instead, we follow a more enlightened course, allowing workers to benefit from increased productivity by shorter working hours and by adjusting incomes accordingly, people will be able to enjoy more leisure than ever before in history."
Global capitalism, therefore, will for the majority, or a significant proportion of humanity, be an age of non-employment, in the historical use of the term, and of a different relationship with work. The final result, then, and this is what matters, does not change: more leisure.
It seems that humanity should be preparing to deal with a new era of abundant leisure and little programmed time in standardized employment.
In broad terms, that is quite right. Humanity has before it an era of leisure, but perhaps it has not yet realized this. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, by 2005, tourism will have created 144 million new jobs in the world, with an expected annual growth in the sector of 6.1 per cent.
The fact that many more people will travel, in theory, is not very significant, because someone who is unemployed has plenty of leisure and does not travel, while someone with a job, although he has less leisure, allows three weeks of holiday travel a year. In other words, it could be that the growth in the world economy is what will lead to greater consumption of tourism. However, the fact that it will be mainly Asians (some 112 million new jobs will be in Asia) who feed the growth in the tourist market suggests that the boom will be closely connected with a change in lifestyles: an approach less obsessed with production. And the diversification of the product offered will be impressive. Consumers of leisure will have a choice of all kinds of possible travel, from adventure holidays to luxury cruises in floating cities with tennis courts and all kinds of entertainment, from gastronomic to ecological and nature discovery holidays. In this way, considering that the possible destinations become global, there will be a subsequent internationalization of human and economic relations, as well as progressive convergence to homogeneous patterns of consumption.
Does more tourism mean more consumption of culture?
Consumption of culture in general will also grow, whether through the mass media or through personal education. The latest United Nations Human Development Report tells us that in 1992, and the figures will be much higher today, there were 349 radios and 151 television sets per thousand of the population. This figure becomes 1,480 radio sets and 533 cathode ray tubes if the analysis is confined only to the 105 countries classified as industrialized and including Belarus, Albania and Turkmenistan. In the USA, for example, every thousand people own 2,118 radios and 815 television sets, and in the 57 most highly developed countries, also in 1992, 49 books were published for every 100,000 of the population and 41.5 metric tonnes of printed paper per one thousand people. This varied mass of communication channels includes the frontierless cultural consumption of the information economy. More and more people own television sets and parabolic antennae and subscribe to cable channels, and more and more people every day watch the programmes offered. It is a situation which is in total transformation, exposed as it is to the multiplier effects of generational exchange. The great consumers of the media and televised products in the last fifteen or twenty years have been children and adolescents who, when they grow up, will form a wholly original category of television viewers. Television has changed their childhood and youth and, most likely, their whole life in terms of consuming what is offered over the air in their leisure time or for purposes of work. A new dimension is opening up to mankind.
In this scenario, the management or rather the use of leisure time is bound to become a business with an impressive turnover. What will the consequences be?
Leisure will gradually become a business of increasingly gigantic proportions. Soccer is a business with such staggering figures that it has led the German magnate Leo Kirch to spend 2,360,000 dollars to obtain the television rights outside North America for the World Cup in 2002 and 2006. Sponsorship, television rights, cable television, stadiums transformed into living-rooms and the potential global audience have turned soccer into the business with the highest return per employee: there are 22 players and any one of those sportsmen generates billions of lire in every match. Behind this great economic professionalization of sport, there is another historic change in the labour market: more and more people in the world make their living by performing sports. This is a consequence of the new importance of leisure. At the beginning of the century, there were practically no professional sportsmen. Today, however, tens of thousands of people in the world have an income from tennis, athletics and even cricket. As the consumption of sports on television has grown, so has the number of people employed full time in the sports arena. It is a classic case of employment in the modern era, as these people can work for only a short part of their lives and live comfortably off the income for the rest of it. In the years ahead, there will be more and more people playing sports and more and more professional sportsmen. The consequence of mass leisure will also be the creation of new professions.
What has been and what will be television’s role in all this?
Television culture has already prepared us for the new age. The main characters in television serials or in the best known programmes usually do not work. Sometimes they are policemen; most often they will be drug traffickers or smugglers of other goods. There are no mass or universal television or cinema images that have normal workers as their leading characters. The idols of the airwaves or the cable channels dance, sing, have fun on the beach or in other desirable places, play sports, go back to school or take up other cultural activities and, above all, they spend a lot of their time making love. It is a culture of non-employment that insinuates itself into the individual unconscious and personality. Even children’s and teenage television is dominated by people who are champions in everything except work — heroes of dangerous deeds and sporting contests, but certainly not workers or employees and, even less, company managers with all the problems they face. Viewers are slowly becoming accustomed to living with a television society which is also the one in which they would like to live, because it is more exciting and less stressful, where everyone gets what he deserves and no one has to do too much to succeed. In the television melting pot, competing for success is almost unknown, for the simple reason that there must be an image of a world which contents the masses and in which almost everyone can recognize himself. The fact is, with television consumption being so high, that the reality of pleasure offered by television parallels that of the real world. For now the two live side by side, but soon they will be almost superimposed. But there is no doubt that television has played and plays a leading role in preparing humanity culturally and socially for the era of non-employment.
The popularization of leisure is a new factor in tomorrow’s society. Is there not a danger that the management of this change gets out of hand?
There is no doubt at all that the real novelty, which will profoundly change habits, lies in mass non-employment, and the popularization of leisure. The opportunity to travel or listen to classical concert music may become choices within everyone’s reach. Already, museums have been stretched by the popularization of culture. Tens of thousands of visitors each year use museums and, in particular, compel curators to ever more watchful protection of the works of art to avoid their being ruined by excessive temperature or too high humidity as a result of a higher than normal concentration of visitors. The limits of an era of mass leisure, that is an era when everyone is free the entire day simply to consume, have already been pointed out by Fred Hirsch in his book "The Social Limits to Development". For the economist, there used to be obvious social limits to development, reflected in a congestion in the consumption of natural goods the stocks of which are limited. An exotic island is very valuable if hardly anyone can go there and enjoy it, but if it becomes the destination of crowds of tourists, aroused by sun and beer, organized in prefabricated hotels, much of the beauty of the place and the pleasure of being there is lost. The same effect of congestion has reduced the quality of life in large cities, jammed with motor cars that have become a consumer good within the reach of all.
Of course, it is not easy to imagine a global society in which billions of people have abundant leisure. Looking quietly at all this, one can always think that not even the mass industrialization of the last decade was imaginable at the end of the eighteenth century. English farmers and artisans thought that they could continue to work along in the same way for decades. Radical, mass changes are a part of human history. Today, however, there is an important new factor: the pace of change is much faster. Someone has talked of turbo-capitalism to give a true portrayal of the speed with which novelty is imposing itself in today’s scene. But that is only worrying up to a point, because up to now, man has demonstrated an enormous capacity to manage and adapt to change and there is no particular reason to think that the same ability to respond to change will not continue in the coming decades. Thinking only in terms of catastrophe does not help you to a true understanding of the issues. At best it allows you to renew a well-established tradition of pessimistic predictions which are later disproved by events.
There will not be a mankind unable to live with liberation from work. Of course, people and their means of socialization will change in two ways: the progressive indoctrination in work and efficiency will no longer be the foundation stone of people’s entire social experience. During their lives, individuals and the institutions in which they live will have to be able to adapt to changes in the world of production and the professional skills required by that, as well as to the new demands of an increasingly global social life. The almost absolute monopoly of work, or rather the work environment, in social relations will cease.
How will the change affect the lives and behaviour of individuals?
There will be a profound revolution in people’s lifestyles. Industrialization forced men to respect time differently, and made them adapt to the demands of meticulously organized work. Entry into the factory and even merely engaging in economic relations with companies coincided with the end of life as regulated by the agricultural cycle. Seasons and related rests or periods of work gave way to production, theoretically round the clock, every day of the year. Despite all the understandable resistance by workers, the frenzy of work became a powerful force in people’s lives. Even today in industrialized countries, employees work for about 1,800 hours per year, rising to 2,164 in India and 2,374 in Sudan. And despite the fact that in recent decades there has been a steady decline in the working week, in particular in industrialized countries, the working day is still very regulated and it conditions people’s other social activities. It will not be easy to adapt to a dimension in which there will be practically no external relations to impose how much and how to produce or work. The time for clocking in or claiming a pension after long years of methodical and highly repetitive work will be over.
People will become masters of their own time again. They will be able to decide how they would most like to arrange their day, a day which, moreover, will gradually cover the whole twenty-four hours. The difference between day and night, already shaken by the invention of the electric light, may collapse once and for all with the advent of global communications. In the middle of the night, if you want to, you will be able to study, work or simply chat with any part of the world. Telephone traffic, for example, is now growing in annual percentages that run into double figures, 10 to 15 per cent. In the United States alone, the fax market was estimated in 1996 at 157 million dollars. World-wide, there were more than 30 million fax machines in operation, and the volume of traffic doubles every three years. In the 25 most highly developed countries, those heading the hypothetical development scale devised by the United Nations, there were 11.7 telephones per thousand of the population at the end of 1991. From 1990 to 1992, there was an average annual per capita consumption of international telecommunications of 224 minutes in Brazil, 91 in Botswana and 47 in Cameroon. More and more, people want to communicate anywhere with anyone. In countries such as Sweden, there are almost four fax machines for every hundred people and just under 70 telephones. If you include the statistics for mobile phones, you find that in the most industrialized countries, the threshold of one hundred telephone lines per 100 people is now close to being crossed. In the near future we will always be accessible and will be able to transmit anything from anywhere.
Two characteristic trends of the information economy and global capitalism are apparent in this explosively growing communications market. First, turnover increases but employment declines, as the public was traumatically reminded by the massive job cuts decided by AT&T and celebrated by a splendid rise in the share price on Wall Street. Second, giant companies of staggering dimensions are born, as witnessed with the recent 23 billion dollar merger between MCI and British Telecom, the greatest take-over ever of a United States company by a foreign company.
The global world, then, is going to be very different from the one we have known during the twentieth century.
Exactly so. Culture and education, tourism, entertainment and sport could become the four main "industries" in the world. People will most likely divide most of their time between the services offered by these sectors.
In addition, relations with others will change, within the so-called civil society. With the closing of the era of relationships dominated by the demands of work, in which even the choice of tennis partner or bridge party was influenced by professional proprieties, people will behave differently towards others. Non-economic relations will predominate, which means those dictated by affection or just relations in general. Partners and companions in different experiences will be chosen on the basis of cultural affinity or a common interest in specific issues. At stake, no longer the need to earn, but the much more pleasant interest in personal enrichment. And where the individual must become richer, not his bank account.
And thus the doors open on to the social economy, the non-profit sector with its many organizations with their non-lucrative aims.
This is perhaps the most interesting aspect from a social point of view. Behind the profile that we have just sketched, indeed, there is the immense goldmine of the social economy, in which a growing number of people will find employment, of a more or less sporadic nature. It will be the non-profit organizations themselves which will offer the majority of people a substitute employment in place of traditional work. The growth of leisure services will accompany the growing demand for private social services, due also to the increase in the average life span and thus the number of fully active elderly people and the change in the size of the welfare state. Moreover, in many cases, the two demands will melt into one single demand. Tourism, for example, might offer therapeutic cures and cultural consumption at the same time, and something similar might occur with sports — even today, sports and ecotourism, or "ecoleisures", are frequently linked.
All this will take on a social and economic dimension which would have been quite unimaginable a few years ago. Moreover, it will be a global wind, blowing simultaneously all over the planet, or rather all that part of the planet involved in globalization. In the United States, more than 15 per cent of service jobs are generated by social enterprises or non-profit activities. According to the American Government’s Labour Statistics Office, it is estimated that by 2005, the sector with the highest employment growth will be home health-care services, employing some 428,000 new staff in the United States alone. The economy of altruism, after the end of the factory and the decline of the traditional work place, will be the most widespread global socialization institution. The threads of this mixture of altruism and collective consumption of time will weave new tastes, new social fashions, new ways of participating in communal life. Thus, the social economy, alongside the information network, will constitute the most important human-relations exchange mechanism. If, in the industrialization era, salaried work dominated human relations, in the global era, relations will take on a completely new, informal dimension: they will no longer be driven by commercial exchange.
And how will all this be reflected in human relations?
This is another very important element that underlies the affirmation of the global village of civil society. In the brief history of capitalism, economic and non-economic relations have followed different paths. The former, despite the diversity of situations and context in which capitalism has operated, have been influenced by the rules of the market. Supply and demand and maximization of profit have consistently modelled the behaviour and choices of economic actors throughout the world. Non-economic relations, however, have had a more or less uniform history. In some countries, the government has been the prevailing presence, in others the voluntary sector, and in yet others, a varying mix of both. This means that non-economic relations have operated on the coat-tails of market relations, serving as a response or solution to problems which the market, following its own rules, could not solve. It can also be said that there has been a hierarchy of values in which the market ranked at the top. With the breakdown of the classic scenario of economic production and the liberation of hundreds of thousands of people from the temporal chains of production, non-economic relations are ascending to a new social role. But, above all, they will become more uniform at international level, thanks to the constant exchange of experiences and direct sharing in problem solving. And the desire to copy the reality that is seen as the best will do the rest in terms of the continual evolution of civil society. The competition to copy the best solutions, hitherto an almost exclusive privilege of the market, will also extend to human relations. The only difference will be the fact that the measure of comparison will no longer be revenue, but other values that have less to do with prices and profits, like a sense of personal satisfaction, fulfilment and involvement.
The labour market has most recently been showing a marked divarication between well-paid work and work which is losing purchasing power. Do you not think that there will be, even if seen from another point of view, a problem of redistribution of wealth?
While it is true that individuals have before them a future of "liberation" from work, it is also true that achieving this requires a radical change in the way society is organized. Individuals may be able to adapt quickly to the new dimensions of non-employment or the do-it-yourself mode, but the means whereby all will share in the new society will still have to be found. The problem of redistribution of wealth, which even today has reached the limits of acceptability both in international relations and internal relations within states, will embrace new areas. Even in the richest country in the world, the United States, the social gap between various categories of workers is growing. The Federal Census Office has recorded that, from 1973 to 1992, a span of twenty years, the remuneration of the best-paid quintile, that is 20 per cent, of full-time workers had increased by 10 per cent, while for all other workers, there was a loss of purchasing power. The real wages of the worst-paid 20 per cent of full-time workers decreased by 23 per cent, and it was not much better for the next quintile which in two decades had lost 21 percentage points. The 20 per cent of the American labour force identified with the educated classes receives income of 1,755 billion dollars a year and has seen the real value of its income increase in value by 2 to 3 per cent per year.
It thus becomes essential to evaluate the degree to which globalization is compatible with a fair and just society. It will be necessary to determine how everyone can share in the global game. But this is not as difficult to achieve as it might seem.
Why not?
Let us look at it step by step. Firstly, everyone, in a context such as the one we have assumed so far, will be more self-sufficient in managing his or her own life. People can decide how many years they want to work and any pauses between one employment and another. Of course, they could get into difficulties. In situations, for example, in which they do not have enough to live on and at the same time are not able to find a supplementary source of income. It is the crisis in paid employment that exposes people to that risk. In such cases, many will move to other sectors of part-time or less strictly regulated employment.
In any case, individuals will have very important additional information available to them to programme their work cycle: namely, ever more precise knowledge of their life expectancy. This is a factor that is normally omitted in social analyses, while it is a significant new element. Until the onset of the affluent society, that is the market economy backed by a high level of education, and capable of providing people with efficacious social services, people had little certainty about their life expectancy. War apart, which was however a recurrent factor of collective danger, mass disease, very high infant mortality, and difficult and unfavourable living and working conditions meant that individuals did not live long. And they did not know, with a sufficient degree of probability, how many years they had before them. Certainty about one’s life span, albeit relative, belonged only to a restricted social elite. The rest of humanity lived in prolonged uncertainty. Since the Second World War, the long period of peace enjoyed by the rich countries and the widespread improvement in standards of living and health have had two important results. The average life span has increased steadily and people have been able to plan their lives with relative certainty, in a way that was never possible in the past. Moreover, the management of risk connected with new community life in the technological age has already reached a very high level. In countries like Italy, in the three years 1990-1993, only 299 people per one hundred thousand were killed or injured in road accidents. In countries with a better road network, this figure fell sharply: 73 killed or injured in Holland, 122 in Finland. The improvement in safety has been even more rapid in industrialized countries that have made the change to a service economy rapidly. In Italy, ISTAT forecasts that the mortality rate will stabilize by 2105, at a rate of only 1.7 units per thousand, while in the same period the ageing index will rise from 109 to 156. The population will thus, on average, grow older and older but this will not be reflected in a higher mortality rate.
What does this mean, more concretely?
Today people can use their lifetime in any way they like, since risk is much diminished. People will not only live longer, but they can count on a high survival rate. In other words, people will have the opportunity to plan their lives with a minimum of uncertainty. All this means not just having a population with an ever greater number of old people, but that new fields and activities open up. There is no doubt that the gradual realization of this additional benefit, this greater life expectancy, will lead people to reorganize their existence. For the moment, we haven’t yet seen the effects on a large scale, because the dominance of the industrial-manufacturing culture has meant that, once they have reached retirement age, or the age of non-employment, most individuals live the period as a one-way experience. They have reached the finishing line, seen as the achievement of a real social goal in its own right, through too many sacrifices to start thinking about other activities in the time they now have available. But this attitude will only apply to the first generations of pensioners of the affluent society, those who have known at first hand the hardships of industrialization and standardized production. When the turn of the post-industrial pensioners comes, those who have lived the transition from an industrial to a service economy, the tune will be quite different. In a longer period of time, the pension dimension as such will fade away, and human life will become an extended collection of diverse activities which people will have lived and shared in fully, and which will not have depended on their age. Even an eighty-year-old, who might so wish, will be able to decide to become a micro-entrepreneur, purveyor of knowledge, and re-enter the market. The social mentality that saw retirement exclusively as non-activity will disappear.
Does the prolongation of the average life span not have other effects on society as a whole?
Of course, there are other implications related to the extension of the average life span and greater certainty of life. There will be less social layering of life according to one’s strict biological age. Marriage between people of widely differing ages and couples who are no longer young having children will become more and more common. The savings cycle itself will be significantly influenced. As long as "retirement age" remains a sort of myth, men will continue to behave in a predictable manner with regard to savings. They will partly forego consumption during their earning lives to transfer it over time and finance the non-activity of their retirement. But when the average life span becomes longer, as has indeed already happened, a new factor comes into play: the sizeable number of pensioners, an increasing percentage in the affluent society, modifies its economic behaviour patterns. Knowing, with relative certainty, how many years we still have in front of us, and being able to rely on good physical health, we show an increased propensity to consume, and a lesser propensity to save. Taken overall, this means that there is a lesser amount of savings from the elderly and greater demand for consumption, which is in part new, moreover, since it is linked to the growing number of senior citizens. The change is not at all insignificant in the overall economic picture, for two specific reasons. (a) As they can count on a longer working life, not linked to a single occupation or specialization, workers will be led to save less when they are young in order to consume when they are old. This is because they can decide to go on working, even part time, until an advanced age, since they can remain in good physical condition as they get older. (b) Once retired, or rather not employed, and the culture having subsided that for their entire working lives set pensioners apart from society, people will be led to consume more and save less as the result of a real cultural change linked to the end of the sharp distinction between working life and retirement. The industrialized countries will be the first to feel the effects on the propensity to save, when life is no longer compartmentalized. It is, however, difficult to imagine that the cumulative aggregate level of savings of a single person throughout his life will change much. More realistically, it will be distributed differently.
But in the near future there will be other changes in the picture as well. With the retirement myth fading away, people will be able to plan their lives with total freedom, as has already been said. The choice between saving and consuming will thus become much more cyclical and less predictable than before. The lifestyle cycle will adapt to the new opportunities; people will have to choose quietly whether to consume more when they are young, for example to prolong their studies, or at some other time in their life, and consume less when they are old. Furthermore, because of the volatility of earnings, more people will choose to work full time for only a part of their lives. They will also consume what they earn, planning their consumption in a rational manner for the remainder of their lives. Consumption and savings will also be much less stable over individual lifetimes because compulsory pension provision for all will end. All this will obviously have an impact on personal investment choices.
Then there is the non-profit aspect that has already been mentioned.
It is another source of income. In time, the volunteer system will be replaced by a non-profit organization which produces and sells services like a normal profit-making enterprise (and thus also remunerating the human capital employed). In this way charities become another reservoir of flexible employment, numerically much larger than the professional category of consultants, knowledge managers and the like, termed "symbolic analysts". In the non-profit or charity sector, people can work on a daily or flexible basis, with widely differing working hours, for a few months or for a whole lifetime. This lung of the social economy will produce a significant income flow, which is essential to bring about a new socio-economic equilibrium. The case of Italian social co-operatives should be mentioned in this connection. Social co-operatives are a special form of co-operative in which, to qualify as members, people must be disabled, mentally ill, drug addicts, ex-prisoners, long-term welfare recipients or similarly disadvantaged members of the social fabric, those who have the greatest difficulty in finding a place in the traditional labour market. As an incentive to such co-operatives, the law provides special benefits, including tax incentives. The legislative framework is recent, contained in the provisions of 8 November 1991, but the latest available data for these social cooperatives show an impressive capacity for growth and job creation, traditional or otherwise. At the end of 1995, there were more than two thousand non-profit organizations of this type with a paid labour force estimated at more than 40,000 employees. Obviously, the average cost of labour is lower than for traditional employment: 17 million lire per capita. The lesson to be drawn from the social co-operatives, which are likely to grow further in the next few years, is quite a simple one. There is already a labour market alongside the traditional one; regulating it and allowing it to operate with flexibility, without excessive bureaucratic barriers, it can create jobs and added value. If it were not for the social co-operatives, in fact, the sector’s 40,000 employees would be lengthening the list of welfare recipients, and the community as a whole would dispose of a much less qualified and diversified supply of goods and services. People and families, therefore, will earn their living both as actors in small businesses or in the above-mentioned traditional occupations, and in social enterprises.
Will globalization succeed in finally liberating mankind from its eternal problem of poverty or marginalization?
On this question, we need to be quite clear. The greatest paradox of the contemporary age is certainly the trade-off between economic growth and redistribution of wealth. The more world income grows, the greater the gap between well-off countries and those which are destitute. North and South are growing closer and closer in terms of communications and information, and ever further apart in terms of available resources. If you look closely and attentively at global statistics from this point of view, they are appalling. Some billion and a half people in 100 countries are living in the nineties on incomes lower than in the past. Apart from the OECD countries, only in China, the rest of Asia and in India is there any actual improvement in living standards. If in the more developed countries the average life expectancy is 73.8 years, the index falls to only 56 years for the less developed countries, and it is only 39.2 years in Sierra Leone. And where the inhabitants of the 57 most developed countries had a real per capita GDP, that is for each inhabitant, of 14,922 dollars in 1993, in the same year the people of the 48 least developed countries earned on average only 1,241 dollars, which fell to only 420 in the case of Ethiopia and 530 for Mali. In the third world, moreover, only 32 per cent of the population have sanitation, and fewer than 70 per cent have drinking water. In developing countries as a whole, even today, 790,000 individuals do not have health care and 1.28 billion do not have drinking water. On top of all this is the fact that the poorest countries must cope with the cost of repaying the debt incurred to finance development.
It does not look reassuring. How can it be improved?
Probably no one harbours the illusion that such a situation can last peaceably for long. The efforts by international organizations on behalf of the poorest countries already constitute a starting point.
The problem is that the same duality is occurring with equal rapidity in affluent societies as well. It is the emergence of the knowledge-based society, with the consequences that we have already analysed, which is mainly responsible for "third world features" in wealthy societies. In these countries, growing pockets of poor people and of professionals who can afford anything now live side by side, in an atmosphere of increasing indifference. American statistics, for example, show that in 1992 36.9 million Americans could be classified as poor and 40 per cent of them were children. The United Kingdom is the country in which the ratio between the incomes of the wealthiest 20 per cent of the population and the poorest 20 per cent is almost ten to one. Only in post-communist Russia, among the most highly developed countries, is the gap between rich and poor greater: 11.4 to 1. In Italy, the same figure, based on data for the period 1980-1993, is six to one. But not even a country with a generous welfare system can conceal the impoverishment that exists. The tragedy is that the situation will tend to worsen. With the ending of employment, the numbers of new poor will become ever and ever greater. For European culture, accustomed to the social achievements of socialist and Catholic culture, all this may seem an exaggeration. So exaggerated as to reach the point of suggesting a kind of police state, well equipped and financed, to ensure the separation sine die of human beings from the hopeless.
Whatever your opinions about human relations, the fact remains that the future opens the gates to a context which would have been unthinkable a few years ago. In the hungrier world, the world of pure survival, where drinking water counts as a luxury, the end of traditional farming could aggravate the situation. According to some experts, a new generation of computerized robots could take over the last remaining manual farming tasks, turning farms into "automated open-air factories", while the advance of biotechnology offers laboratory products instead of natural ones. All this points towards the non-employment of millions of individuals who will thus pass from the pre-industrial age to the global information age, practically without realizing it. For many countries, entry into the age of global capitalism will coincide with the end of monocultural agriculture and the desperate attempt, through this strategy, to achieve economic development. For other countries, however, coming into dock alongside the global market economy wharf will mark a turning in communal behaviour as radical as industrialization.
And then?
For smooth development, it will be necessary to be able to ensure a flow of income to those who find themselves without. Not an easy task, considering that those potentially in need of assistance will be more numerous than they are today.
For many decades of national capitalism, people looked for a perfect and accomplished solution to the problem of the needy. Proponents of laissez-faire were for the introduction of a negative income tax, that is an exemption on taxable income. Others believed in giving the state an active role in redistributing income. Awareness of the needs of others has enabled national capitalism to operate in a much more acceptable social climate than the gloomy prognoses of the nineteenth century. But the redistribution happened by individual delegation. The amounts and the means have been fixed by governments and national parliaments, while citizens have continued their individual paths towards enrichment, career development and productivity. With a well-governed state, this interplay between solidarity and individual productivity can continue for a long time without undue problems. If, however, the majority of individuals are diverted from careerist and money-making thinking, then the balance changes fundamentally. People who are freer and less busy have more of a wish to be involved in solidarity than did the stereotyped worker of the industrial revolution. Only in this way can participation in social life be restored when it has been lost on the occupational front. In practice, it is the end of the nearly total delegation to government of decisions on social solidarity.
You seem to be saying that globalization opens the gates to a new model of solidarity.
Global capitalism will mark the end of traditional solidarity for another reason, too, having to do with the coexistence of very wealthy and very poor countries. It is frankly unlikely that the knowledge-based professional class will spread and develop in developing countries. Professionals of the knowledge-based economy, the symbolic analysts, may go to Gabon or Madagascar on one of the many tourist trips in their lives, but they would have trouble deciding to live in those places. Not because of technical limitations, because they could equip themselves to work in the two African locations with a minimum of cost. But if they move too far away from the community in which advanced ideas take shape and circulate, they run a serious risk of rapidly becoming professionally obsolete. And as long as they are pursuing a career, they will not wish to run that risk. Contact, exchange and face-to-face meetings between people will remain an important channel in forming new knowledge. Because travelling and moving around will be extremely simple, it is very likely that the symbolic analyst and the knowledge professional will stay and work in the more advanced countries. This means that for a large number of countries and for many individuals, global capitalism will involve the formation of a completely different civil society. Thus the social organization of both the so-called rich countries and the less well-off countries will have to open itself up to a new order.
How?
With the contraction of the role of the state, the solution to the new social problems will have to be sought elsewhere. The restoration of the primacy of individual initiative will mean, above all, developing a network of organizations capable of involving people and allowing them to put their will to participate into practice. The real paradox is that the global era will see the birth of a solidarity and a society that is much more at the service of the individual.
The new frontier of this period will be represented precisely by the non-profit organizations, that multi-faceted and diversified world which includes pure volunteer work and social organizations. The majority of workers under global capitalism will be engaged or employed in these charities, with total flexibility in terms of working hours and jobs. Thus a new human dimension, in terms of geographical spread and involvement, will materialize. This will produce all those alternative goods and services for the market that will be needed by people with longer and safer lives, and more and more leisure time. Affective and relational goods will be exchanged, even for short periods, in the non-profit system. Ultimately, it is a return, adapted to the requirements of a more complex and open society, to the old rules of the first Christian communities where the individual was closer to his fellow in need.
The non-profit network will also constitute a substantial source of income, as well as employment, for the non-workers of global capitalism. Thanks to donations and transfers of monies from those who can afford it, i.e. the symbolic analysts and knowledge managers, who will always have an interest in living in a human environment with a contained level of tension, and thanks to the profits coming from the provision of services, social enterprises will become an important plank of global capitalism. It will thus be possible to provide a significant number of individuals with a kind of social salary, enough to allow an adequate lifestyle and active participation in community life. Government intervention will decline steadily to the point where it virtually disappears. This is provided that the knowledge professionals and the monied understand the importance of upholding the civil economy by appropriate financial transfers. That is the price that they will have to pay to live in a society free of instability.
What about a solution to the case of the poorest countries, whose chronic under- development will be compounded by the end of traditional farming or mining and metal-working?
In these cases, too, only the creation of a new social environment will make the change manageable. We cannot even remotely consider a lasting situation in which part of the world enjoys a stable social equilibrium and widespread welfare, while the other part of the planet, numerically larger, languishes in a life of poverty accompanied by non-employment and the absence of social services. The most sophisticated barriers could not stop those in desperate search of a place to go, nor could the most draconian police measures prevent mass migration from areas of extreme want to regions of plenty and peace — only a non-democratic equilibrium, as suggested by some, could manage such an environment. Moreover, the governments of impoverished countries would no longer have any valid reason to prevent an evolution of that kind, since they would have nothing to offer their own citizens.
The solution, once again, will come from the non-profit sector. Only by supporting the formation of sound, stable non-profit organizations that, even in less wealthy countries, can create a civil network of relationships to serve people’s needs, will it be possible to avoid the collapse of the South. The mission will largely fall on the non-profit organizations in the countries of the North and on international organizations. By transferring knowledge, experience and resources to the so-called third world, non-profit organizations in rich countries will be able to assist and direct the formation of a similar network of social relationships in those countries as well. It will then be possible for a true civil society, similar to that in rich countries, to be formed in the South. In this way, the reduced availability of financial resources will not result in an actual social collapse. Private social organizations and enterprises specializing in the provision of personal services for payment, especially tourism, will generate wealth and services for the social fabric of the planet’s southern hemisphere. The absence of the symbolic analyst will not mean the advent of a society of violence and desperation, because even the southern countries of the world will be able to access the communications economy which is available almost free of charge to all, thanks to advertising. The citizens of Mombassa or Guatemala alike will be able to consult and use information networks. What counts is to make sure that the people of the southern hemisphere remain full citizens.
But all this does require economic resources: where and how will they be found?
In the global capitalist equilibrium, there will still be a need to transfer resources. The government levy via taxation, however, will have to change radically compared with that of industrial capitalism. The principle of taxation whereby taxation levels are set according to the taxpayer’s capacity to contribute will probably have to adapt to the new socio-economic reality. The primary targets of taxation will be consumption of technology and non-essential goods (luxury or optional goods such as travel), earnings of knowledge professionals and automated enterprises, and revenues on financial investments. The remaining human relations will develop in practice outside the market, and could ultimately escape the burden of taxation.
The level of taxation will ultimately depend on the actual need to finance remaining state expenditure and transfers in favour of national and supranational solidarity. In any case it will be much easier to impose a high level of taxation on those who will still have to pay taxes. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the earnings of those who produce ideas will be much more substantial across the global market than those of traditional professionals and businessmen today. Secondly, the existence of a social equilibrium, and thus of a civil society which is actually able to satisfy people’s needs, will be the condition on which will depend that society’s ability to fully reap the benefits of the communications economy. Only in a social environment free of widespread or deep-seated conflicts will global capitalism be able to operate to the benefit of all. And to achieve this equilibrium, it can be assumed that people will be prepared to give up part of their income. Ultimately, we are talking about an investment similar to the investment a person makes, for other reasons, when he or she takes out an insurance policy — here, too, we are talking about covering a risk that it would be better not to see materialize.
The future you have just described will certainly not be easy to manage. Will international organizations be able to play a part and, if so, how?
International organizations will have to be able to safeguard the precarious social balances. To achieve that objective, they will continually interact with local communities in seeking greater redistribution of resources, activating more non-profit bodies, organizing cultural exhibitions and so on. But above all, they will have to ensure proper relations with countries where there is a relative lack or total absence of the knowledge workforce. Which means between countries that will live progress indirectly, or by reflection.
In order to meet this challenge in the most effective way, the new international organizations will have the far from easy task of ensuring equal participation of the people of the planet in the development of knowledge. In two ways: by ensuring free circulation of the bearers of knowledge and, thus, avoiding the formation of enclaves of knowledge to which only a small elite have access; and by guarding against the secret hoarding of knowledge.
As you can see, the new guardians of the international order, rather than on armed troops, will need to be able to rely on technical specialists and experts in the various branches of human knowledge. These specialists will be called on to arbitrate in disputes or to initiate, ex officio, investigations to check that what happens in individual sectors is appropriate. Deterrence, therefore, will no longer be achieved by commercial decisions or force. The danger of exclusion from the international community, which would be unaffordable for any knowledge professional or company, will replace direct interventions on the ground by representatives of the international community.
However, the technological revolution is not easy to control.
Of course, the greatest danger in this scenario is the speed of the advance of knowledge which ultimately could become greater than the capacity of controllers to keep up with innovation. If you imagine a community with millions or tens of millions of hyperspecialized professionals of knowledge, it is relatively easy to imagine, at least in certain sectors, the possibility that progress outrun the knowledge of the watchdogs. Even if there are thousands of experts keeping watch, the controllers could find themselves faced with a situation that is beyond their comprehension. In such cases, only the sharing of a common sense of morality will prevent dangerous deviations. That is the morality of global capitalism.
And what morality will global capitalism need to win the challenges awaiting it?
Up to now, globalization has adjusted to the letter of capitalist morality, in the sense that it has been a perfect instrument for maximizing earnings. The end of national markets, or the opening of their borders, has permitted international planning of production and, thus, conditions more conducive to production anywhere in the world. For a significant proportion of industrial activity, that has meant that things which it is no longer convenient to produce in countries with a mature capitalism, because of rights acquired after decades of struggle, are produced in countries with cheaper labour, more willing to accept the working conditions of the past. The mass relocation of some production from G7 countries to countries such as India, "Taiwan, China", Korea, Eastern Europe or Latin America, is witness to the uneasy cohabitation between capitalism and globalization.
In what way uneasy?
Uneasy, not because the decisions on the geographical relocation of economic activity are negative or wrong, or because these mass transfers of investment conceal a new form of exploitation, but because one can see an overwhelming and undisciplined prevalence of the one capitalism over any other capitalism. The exploitation of Pakistani or Brazilian children is certainly a two-sided coin. On the one hand, we see the unacceptable treatment to which child workers are subjected. On the other, we have to face the fact that they do not have many alternatives. This does not mean, however, that a better balance is not possible, a solution which better reflects the systems of values to which men have had to adjust down the centuries, especially in the advanced countries. It is unthinkable that the argument can be settled with the banal observation that it is better to have economic exploitation, which at most will last a few decades, than poverty and illegality. In reality, the issue conceals much more complex considerations on the desirability of there being markets which exist side by side operating under very different moral rules. And, mind you, there is no suggestion here that we support the thesis that the more favourable treatment should be extended to all the workers of the world. If such a hypothesis could work in practice, then it would mean that we had solved the problem of India and all developing countries. All that would be needed would be a law establishing that the same economic conditions should apply to Indian and to Swedish workers. The discussion clearly revolves around another aspect.
Which?
The origin capitalist morality has been bridled in the most advanced countries through a series of rules of different kinds that have allowed for greater justice in the sharing of the wealth produced, and working conditions that show greater consideration for human dignity. This did not occur spontaneously, however. First, over the years, we witnessed a fierce ideological confrontation between religious morality, Catholic morality in particular, and that of the market, and then came the birth of a new lay philosophy, opposed to capitalism, known as Marxism. This genesis should under no circumstances be forgotten, because we should have the courage to recognize the universal importance of what has happened in mature capitalist countries. It is unthinkable that everything could be globalized, from industrial products to savings, leaving just a few countries of the planet the benefit of living under a morally fair capitalism.
In order to function properly, global capitalism must be based on a single, thus global, morality. This morality must ensure that, in every corner of the world, human beings have the same civil rights and enjoy comparable respect for their dignity. This does not mean that the people of a particular country may not be paid less than others, but simply that their rights must be respected the same as others’. The idea of being able to advance in different ways along the road to globalization is wrong, because you cannot ask someone whose most basic rights are not respected under the rules of the market to respect global rules of free trade and peaceful use of resources.
That is another reason why there must be a single lay morality for global capitalism. As we have seen, society in the near future will be governed by increasingly delicate balances. Technical advances will constantly challenge the positions achieved and, ultimately, may reach the point where they involve man as a biological, non-artificial product. Only a mankind strongly committed to a sense of community could be in a position to confront this possible scenario. If anyone, for example, were to see in biogenetics the chance to compensate for centuries of prevarication or, worse still, a sure way of asserting racial superiority, then it is clear that the delicate balance would collapse. Only a common involvement based on shared values can make the globalization era manageable. But there should be no illusion that this will happen by itself. It can only happen if the governments of the world, especially those of the wealthiest countries, and international organizations play an active part in overcoming the current discrimination against some of the actors in global capitalism. In any case, there is no choice, even if we look at the issue bearing in mind our earlier considerations on the expansion of the non-market area of human activity in the near future. With fewer and fewer people employed in industrial production and in traditional services (the time is not far off, for example, when aircraft will fly without crews, piloted entirely from the ground by computer; and probably, even if the cost is very high, it will be possible to run an extensive underground railway network, like the London underground, without drivers, controlling traffic by means of a computer programme), the need for a globally accepted scale of values which can be shared becomes all the more impelling. The change will in fact be the natural result of evolution, but it will still have to be accepted. And to make change acceptable to a majority, there must be something in it for everyone, in this case the "something" being equal conditions and the possibility of activities hitherto reserved for a minority. Above all, this means that a capitalism of multiple moralities, with varying degrees of respect for individual freedoms, political rights or the rights or others — as some might fear — could never happen. The economic crisis of the Asian champion, Japan, shows that development has a profound impact on social equilibrium. For this reason, the alignment can only be on western values, on values that have the greatest respect for political and personal freedom. There are no other moral "codes" which can impose a global equilibrium on a humanity less bound to the demands of production and increasingly enriched with leisure. The Asians have restricted personal freedom because they were able to compensate this deprivation with economic benefits. Greater economic productivity was demanded in return for high and stable incomes, no doubt an irresistible offer to people who had lived without wealth for centuries. The Americans have been able to abandon their concern for others, leaving millions of people to drift dispossessed through the great cities, because the prevailing conviction was that the important thing was an open society which offered opportunities for emancipation to all. But for both Asians and North Americans, the picture is changing. Human productivity in the machine era is no longer a mark of success; thus individuals can recover the freedom that they exchanged for better economic treatment. It is the quality of available human capital and civil cohabitation that make the difference.
In conclusion, how would you sum up the global morality?
Global capitalism will have a single morality, and it will be the result of centuries of achievement in terms of individual freedom, political rights, respect for the needy or less fortunate. It is on the best of the past that mankind has always built its future, and it is logical that it should do so again.