INDEED it is capitalism’s inherent tendency to go global. The early mercantile expeditions and colonial conquests played a key role in the development of capitalism in the metropolitan countries, and in a different way, in the colonies as well. Marx and Engels were categorical in their recognition of the expansionary thrust of capital. In the classic words of the Manifesto, “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” “The historic task of bourgeois society”, wrote Marx a decade later, “is the establishment of the world market, at least in its basic outlines, and a mode of production that rests on its basis.”

Certain features that we currently associate with the drive towards globalisation have indeed been even more pronounced during certain previous phases of capitalist development.

Inter-country and even inter-continent migration of labour, if only in the form of indentured labour under colonial framework, was probably more widespread in the nineteenth century.

The trade-GDP ratio for many countries was also higher at the turn of the previous century than it is today. Indeed, it can be argued that the world economy was globalising at quite a high speed before the First World War intervened. Yet it will be stupid on our part to miss the enormously changed context and scale of contemporary international economic integration and cross-border production and circulation of commodities.

Let us first note the following major points.

1.     The first thing that obviously strikes us is the tremendous advance in science and technology, particularly the remarkable shortening of distance through incredibly faster systems of communication and tele­communication. Ironically, true to the parasitic nature of capitalism, and despite all talks of a computerised ‘new economy’ this has revolutionised speculation much more than production.

2.     The mind-boggling volume of finance capital that circulates around the global economy in unthinkable speed, the mysterious dynamics of share markets, bouts of drastic decline in currency values and share prices leading to overnight wiping out of enormous amounts of paper wealth, sudden flight of capital at the hint of a crisis — in short, the mad and mysterious world of speculative finance marks another distinguishing feature of present-day globalisation.

3.     The all-pervading global reach of mega companies called MNCs/TNCs is another hallmark of contemporary capitalism. In the year 2000, out of world's top 100 economies, 54 were corporations and 46 were countries. The corresponding figures in 1998 were 51 and 49. In the year 2000, the combined revenues of top 500 corporations ($ 140,64,960 million) were 170 per cent of the combined GDP of all but the top ten high-income countries. The MNCs are engaged in a mad scramble for merger and acquisition resulting in unprecedented levels of concentration and centralisation of capital. The trend toward the development of monopolies and formation of cartels discussed by Lenin in his classic work on imperialism continues unabated with a few oligopolies controlling huge chunks of market share in every major line of production of both goods and services.

4.     The vice-like grip of the institutional network of IMF, World Bank and WTO on the economies of the developing countries is another central feature of globalisation. The first two organisations came up as part of the post-War drive for economic reorganisation while it took another fifty years for the WTO to take shape. A move to launch an International Trade Organisation (ITO) together with the IMF and WB (its actual name is the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development or IBRD) was aborted by the developed countries, the US in particular, which preferred protectionism to the so-called doctrine of free trade. Instead of a full-scale ITO they opted for a relatively piecemeal approach under the banner of GATT. The recent transformation of GATT into WTO reflects a more desperate attempt on the part of the powerful economies to control world trade, as much as a response to the success stories of export-led growth as an urge to establish early control over the rapidly burgeoning service sector and what has come to be known as the knowledge economy.

5.     The ongoing globalisation of the world capitalist economy is happening in a largely post-colonial context. Formally speaking, the phase of national liberation struggles is more or less over, a few residual struggles for self-determination notwithstanding. Yet what we are witnessing everyday is a constant trivialisation of this formal independence, a growing mockery of national sovereignty, something which was brilliantly anticipated by Lenin in his classic “Imperialism”.

6.     Finally, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and what was formerly known as the Soviet Bloc, the ground has been cleared for a single integrated world capitalist economy. Whatever resistance individual nation-states are extending does not amount to anything like a parallel bloc. Alongside this geo-political expansion of capitalism we also see an unprecedented intensification of commodity production reflected primarily in the burgeoning growth of the service sector.