Rethinking the international division of labour in the context of globalisation

Abstract

constrains all regions and states to adjust to transnational capital. The global transformation now underway not only slices across former divisions of labour and geographically reorganises economic activities, but also limits state autonomy and infringes sovereignty. In a notable attempt to explain vast changes in the global political economy, Karl Polanyi held that the socially disruptive and polarising tendencies in the world economy were generated by what he called a self-regulating market, not a spontaneous phenomenon but the result of coercive power in the service of a utopian idea.' He traced the tendencies in the world economy that caused the conjuncture of the 1930s and produced-out of a breakdown in liberal-economic structures-the onset of depression, fascism, unemployment and resurgent nationalism, collectively a partial negation of economic globalisation, leading to world war. Like the global economy of the 1930s, the contemporary globalisation process represents unprecedented market expansion accompanied by widespread structural disruptions. While escalating at a world level, globalisation must be regarded as problematic, incomplete and contradictory-issues to be taken up below. By globalisation, I mean the compression of the time and space aspects of social relations, a phenomenon that allows the economy, politics and culture of one country to penetrate another.2 A hybrid system, globalisation intensifies interactions among, and simultaneously undermines, nation states. Although globalisation is frequently characterised as a homogenising force, it fuses with local conditions in diverse ways, thereby generating, not eroding, striking differences among social formations. Fundamentally an outgrowth of the bedrock of capital accumulation, this structure embraces and yet differs in