POLITICS OF GLOBAL COMPETITIVENESS

This essay gives a general outline of the politics of global competitiveness, which is the logic of global capitalism and the all-embracing world market, advocated and practiced by its apologists and identified with all its contradictions in Marx's critique of political economy. Writing in the early 1840s, on the basis of their observation of the industrial revolution, Marx and Engels predicted that if capitalism, or as they called it, the bourgeois mode of production, was not overthrown it would develop on a global scale, obliging every nation to adopt it and transforming societies in the process. This is what Marx later described in a notebook early in 1858 as the ‘universalising tendency of capital, which distinguishes it from all previous stages of production'. Capital must ‘conquer the whole earth for its market,' he wrote, ‘and annihilate space with time, or reduce to a minimum time spent in motion from one place to another'. In the same place he added, as a kind of shorthand..