10.4.25

For worse - united


The rich become objects of universal adoration.

What is acclaimed today as "globalization" is geared to the tourists' dreams and desires. Its second effect - a side-effect, but an unavoidable one - is the transformation of many other into vagabonds.

Capital no longer needs labour (while its most emancipated, most advanced highttech avant-garde needs hardly any labour, mobile or immobile). And so the pressure to pull down the last remaining barriers to the free movement of money and money-making commodities and information goes hand in hand with the pressure to dig new moats and erect new walls.

Polarization of the world and its population is not an external, alien, disturbing, spoke in the wheel interference with the process fo globalization; it is its effect.

The poor do not inhabit a separate culture from the rich, they must live in the same world that has been contrived for the benefit of those with money. And their poverty is aggravated by economic growth, just as it is intensified by recession and non-growth. Indeed, recession spells more poverty and fewer resources; but the growth ushers in a still more frantic display of consumer wonders and thus augurs a deeper gap yet between the desirable and the realistic.