Globalisation as a deliberate policy by the Empire All systems sustain themselves primarily on the basis of an ideological construct. Force, or the exercise of state power, is used mostly in the periphery of society, and mostly to suppress social dissidence. For the large part, the marginalised sections of a society (and this applies equally to national and global societies) accept their situation either because they are made to believe that it is part of the most “natural” or “inevitable” order of things, or because they believe that they have a “chance” or an “opportunity” to benefit from the system, or because they give up trying to challenge the system. Thus, for example, globalisation is fronted by its ideologues as “inevitable”, or, like gravity, as a part of the “natural” order of things.

But globalisation is not what its apologists like us to believe it is. It is one of the principal means for the system of capitalism to get itself out of its recurrent cyclical and systemic crisis of profitability. One of the clearest manifestations of this crisis is the inherent tendency within capitalism to replace labour with capital (i.e. capitalisation of production), which has a twofold effect. The first is that it leaves millions of people unemployed; capitalism is not the answer, at the global level, to the crisis of unemployment that is built within the system itself. The second effect of this tendency is that since capital forms a larger and larger proportion of production in relation to labour, there is a continuous downward pressure on profits per unit of capital.

Globally, capitalists seek to contain this downward pressure on profits through several measures, some in their own countries, such as dismissing workers or through mergers and acquisitions, but a very large part of the "corrective" actions against declining profits are taken in relation to the countries of the South. The dominant capitalists use their control of global production and marketing to pry open the markets of the South in order to conquer those markets for their own goods and services using the power of the dominant states and rule-making bodies such as the IMF and the WTO. They also use these agencies to liberalise capital markets so that their capital can move freely, unhindered by restrictions that the formerly colonised countries might want to introduce to generate indigenous growth.

The battle in the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF is all about markets for goods, services and investment capital. In the process, the dominant capital, the dominant states and the multilateral rule making and rule-enforcement agencies seek to limit the freedom of the countries of the south and constrain their policy options. Their aim is nothing short of bringing the countries of the South (that had gained a degree of independence from the 1960s to the 1990s by serving global capital) back to the domain of the rule of global capital.