Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy (Global Issues) [Hardcover]

Walden Bello (Author)

Book Description

Series: Global Issues | Publication Date: October 21, 2005

This is a short and trenchant history of the organizations--the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and Group of Seven--that have promoted economic globalization and which are now trying to manage the unmanageable. Walden Bello points to their manifest failings, seen in recurrent financial crises, the ever widening gulf between developing and industrialized countries, the persistence of gross inequalities, and mass poverty. He examines new ideas for reforming world economic management, and argues that a much more fundamental and radical shift of direction is required.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for the first edition:
"Walden Bello is the worlds leading no-nonsense revolutionary. With plainspoken history and compelling evidence, he ruthlessly exposes the opportunism, plunder, and backroom bullying that passes for global capitalism. But this is more than a critique: Bello's expert diagnosis is that the patient is sicker than we think, and the time to act is now."--Naomi Klein, author, No Logo
"Bello's analyses and suggestions for action are refreshingly clear and direct, and he gives a valuable account of the re-subordination of the South over the last quarter-century. Deglobalization is to be recommended above all for the invigorating energy with which it sets out an oppositional agenda."--New Left Review
"Whatever subject he tackles, Walden Bello is always thoughtful, trenchant and constructive. He's also an authentic hero of the global justice movement."--Susan George
"Deglobalization is a superb dissection of contemporary capitalism's multiple crises, a powerful indictment of the US's brutal re-subordination of the global South in the interest of its MNCs and banks, an unanswerable demonstration of the unreformability of the IMF and its sister institutions, and a stirring call to arms for the movement for economic justice by one of its major theorists and organizers."--Robert Brenner

About the Author

Walden Bello is the founding Director of Focus on the Global South, a policy research institute based in Bangkok, Thailand. His many books include A Siamese Tragedy (with Cunningham & Li Kheng Poh, Zed Books, 1999) and Global Finance (with Bullard & Malhotra, Zed Books 2000).

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Zed Books; Revised edition (October 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1842775448
• ISBN-13: 978-1842775448
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,033,039 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Trade über alles, September 19, 2006

By 

Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy (Global Issues) (Paperback)

For Walden Bello, globalization is the accelerated world integration of capital, production and markets, driven by the logic of corporate profitability. It is a synonym for `trade über alles' or trade above equity, justice, environment, solidarity and community.

The main headways for this globalization are the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO, who are dominated by the USA and the West and its inherent private interests, and whose policies exacerbate economic stagnation, widen inequalities and deepen poverty around the globe.
For the author, genuine solidarity forces have to step in rapidly, for the alternative is a world of terrorists, demagogues of the religious and secular right and purveyors of irrationality and nihilism.

His proposed remedies are drastic, revolutionary and for me at least partly utopian. They will be extremely difficult to implement: turning the IMF into a research agency with no policy powers; disempowering the World Bank by boycotting (!) its bonds; halting the WTO or reversing its mandate for liberalization of trade.
On the positive side, Walden Bello wants to see a reorientation of national economies from production for export to production for the local markets, a redistribution of income and land, a global economy functioning not on market mechanisms but on democratic choice and a complete abolition of transnational corporations.

Elimination of market mechanisms, a return to national autarkies, and democratic choice (permanent?, a planned economy?, giving the political and economic power in one hand?) are not very subtle solutions seeing the historical results of these policies.
Drastic policy and power control changes, not reorientations, of international institutions and redistribution of wealth are more obvious choices.

In this short but thought provoking book, where emotions are sometimes running very high, Walden Bello defends tooth and nail the poor and the needy against the mighty few.

I also highly recommend the author's `Dilemmas of Domination'.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Flawed critique of capitalism, July 20, 2009

By 

William Podmore (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy (Global Issues) (Paperback)

Blair talked of `bring the fruits of globalization and free trade to the many' - an admission that it benefits only the few. As one World Bank study admitted, "globalization appears to increase both poverty and inequality." Another showed that poverty grew in Eastern Europe, South Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa - wherever IMF policies had been followed. Another found that most World Bank projects failed.

In 1997, the IMF imposed contraction on East Asia's tiger economies, resubordinating them to the USA. Obediently, they removed limits on foreign ownership and privatised state enterprises. The effect was `to create new business opportunities for US firms', as the US trade representative boasted. The IMF did the same to Argentina in 2001, imposing brutal public spending cuts.

Since 1998, the IMF has promised to reform, and changed its talk to `poverty reduction', but with the same neoliberal policies and the same Swiftly Accelerating Poverty programmes. Capitalism uses the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation, the EU and the G8 against democracy, against national sovereignty, against the workers of the world.

The alternative to capitalism's absolute decline is deglobalisation. We need to dismantle the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation, the EU and the G8; and we need to strengthen the democratic role of the UN General Assembly.

Countries want and need to reorient their economies from producing for export to producing for their local market. They want and need to shift from short-term portfolio investment and short-term loans in stock markets and real estate to long-term direct investment and long-term loans into industry and infrastructure.

They want and need capital and trade controls, not just for crisis relief, but as legitimate tools of trade and industrial policy aimed at national industrial development. They want and need to subordinate the market to the human values of security, equity, social solidarity, democracy and national sovereignty

Bello acknowledges that no ruling class will submit peacefully to challenges to its power. He cites the pro-capitalist Thomas Friedman of the New York Times: "The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist."

Yet Bello believes that the `anti-globalisation movement' can somehow shame our rulers out of power! He ignores trade unions, the institutions that workers created to survive capitalism. And he stupidly caricatures and dismisses Marxism and Leninism, the tools workers need to defeat capitalism.