Generic Globalization, Capitalist Globalization, and Beyond: A Framework for Critical Globalization Studies

Abstract

The distinction between a generic sense of globalization & capitalist globalization is argued to need to be confronted in theory & research in order to have any grasp of the contemporary world & the prospects for alternative forms of globalization. The best prospect for ending capitalist globalization with its crises of polarization & ecological unsustainability are located in the globalization of economic & social human rights, & through the spread of genuine democracy. Competing approaches to globalization are differentiated by the fundamental unit of analysis that range from the state centrist approach, the globalist approach & the transnational approach. The central features of all the approaches agree that contemporary problems cannot be studied at the level of nationstates, but need to be theorized in terms of globalizing. The author defines generic globalization, global systems theory & the transnational capitalist class (TCC). Despite the fatalism characterizing much globalization literature, the path out of capitalism is described as moving from capitalist globalization through cooperatives at democracy to socialist globalization at the at the strategy of the gradual elimination of the culture ideology of consumerism that is replaced of the culture ideology of human rights. References. J. Harwell