[psacawa]

> The current backlash is not against globalization per se, but against: ...

I cannot speak about the UK, but in general this isn't all that people are dissatisfied with about globalization. Very many are angry about the loss of a sense of home. If you examine the situation in purely material terms, you won't observe or measure those feelings. For others, the loss of home extends to a loss of community, which extends to a loss of self.

Educated tech people can be software engineers first and English second, while the lower classes are, in my experience, English first, and their profession second. The loss hits harder for them.

I haven't seen media discuss the identitarian dimension of globalisation. I suppose that has to do with media being populated primarily by one social class. Yet I feel that by ignoring them they have been burying nuclear waste for decades.

I don't mean to tell you whether these emotions are "abhorrent racism" or "valid", I just mean say that they are to me the elephant in the room in any discussion of globalisation.

[_3u10]

A rig worker in the arctic explained it succinctly to me, I don’t care how many people it’s lifted out of poverty I care whether it’s better for me and my friends and family and right now it isn’t.

For software engineers globalization is wonderful for many in the economy it isn’t.

[peoplefromibiza]

> I don’t care how many people it’s lifted out of poverty I care whether it’s better for me and my friends and family and right now it isn’t.

Except that:

- the same rig worker will gladly buy consumer products cheaply manufactured in some developing or non-free Country thanks to globalization and will immediately stop buying them if the prices go up due to un-globalization (it's actually happening in UK, newspapers are full of articles similar to UK Shop sales slow as consumers shift spending toward essentials)

- there are billions of people who don't care about the rig worker, they care about their own families. By virtue of how the democratic process works - majority wins - and how social evolution works - survival of the fittest form of society -, the rig worker either adapts to the new environment or will go extinct.

Third option is the west goes to war against developing countries, trying to set the clock of history back and exploit them again, but this time I'm not sure the west could win.

Point is: without solidarity among workers of the same class (I don't care about them, I care about me), the rig workers of the World will be ignored because they have literally no power other than their complains.

I too don't care about 'em, why should I? if they don't care about anything else than themselves? They surely don't give a flying f*ck about me and how the globalization helped me and my family to live a better life.

This is one of those things that a bit of global socialism could make better, but the solution, according to the rig worker, is the exact opposite: close the stable door when the horse has bolted, i.e. more nationalism, tarifs, walls, which will in the end work against the rig worker, not in their favour.

p.s.: you can agree or disagree, but expecting that a small country with 80 million people should be more important than 4 billion people living in the developing World is simply delusional.

Comply or die isn't that funny when it works against you, am I right?

[_3u10]

He was driving a Ford and I was driving a Toyota. All of his tools as far as I could tell were top quality stuff that if not still made in the US / Canada were at one point. (He was helping me change out a wheel bearing)

I’d say for the most part this guy walked the talk as far as I could tell.

My point was not to validate / invalidate his point of view but to show what the POV is for anyone who hopes to get more people on the globalization train.

[peoplefromibiza]

> but to show what the POV is for anyone who hopes to get more people on the globalization train.

It's impossible to get more people on the globalization train, because we all are on it already.

It's like saying "we should get more people on board with climate change"

It is happening, whether we like it or not, whether we agree or disagree about it.

What we should and can do, is to ask better questions.

instead of asking ourselves what is the cause of some personal condition, pat ourselves in the back and blame the foreigners (it's always the foreigners, of course) why don't we ask who left the rig workers of the story in the dust?

Was it a worker coming from the Philippines trying to have a better life for their children and great children, or was it the same corporations than now blame globalization because they are finding harder and harder to exploit developing countries that also stolen their job and have become as good as them to produce the same stuff?

How much of the wealth that Apple generated exploiting cheap Chinese labour, bowing to China just to enter their 1.5 billion people market, have come back to the US economy and actually helped the working class and our friend the rig worker (not the tech class)?

It's not globalization the problem, it's this capitalism.

The point is: corporations have to start giving back to the people in the form of very high taxes, that's the solution to the issues (some of them are real) of the globalization. Privatize the profits and socialize the costs is not a good idea, we see it, we all agree that it's not working, paradoxically it's been worse in richer countries, because social programs are shit there, they have always relied on having a lot more money to spend than the others. Still we avoid to give the right name to the problem. We have to even if in many Countries they prefer to die than talk about social welfare state, but it's a red pill, blue pill, situation.

But if we don't and corps wanna keep looking for workers everywhere in the World, we also have to let people do the same, in the opposite direction.

Tertium non datur.

Because tertium means we try'n'stop them and they will come anyway, but this time without asking.

[cs702]

That's a really good point. I missed mentioning it in my post above. That "sense of loss" is definitely an issue. That said, I do wonder whether people would be experiencing such a "sense of loss" if market power, political clout, and economic gains hadn't become so highly concentrated. That is, if more people in rich countries felt that their lives have changed for the better, they'd probably want more economic integration, not less.