[.ca] Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century (ISBN 1856499391)

Everything you already knew but were too cynical to ask:
I didn't get a lot out of this book. I imagine there are plenty of young people who don't know what imperialism is and don't know it's history, so there is a need for such material. But I don't know if this would be the best vehicle for explaining this. It was good to get some of the facts, financial data and so on, but these are doubtless available in many books. Altogether, it was a bit like going to a Rod Quantock comedy show or a good singing of The Internationale, preferably in Spanish. It makes the Left feel better, but it doesn't actually address the issues or change anyone's mind, if they didn't already know they were right all along. In 175 pages, there was the mention of a strike in Belgium, a general strike in France and a street demonstration in London, within lists of "Third World" movements, plus an observation that foreign employees of NGOs would be better to go back to their own country and fight their own employers, but otherwise, the only politics discussed was in the "Third World" - the "victims" of imperialism. The implication is that the workers of Europe and the US (and Australia) are going to be rescued by movement of landless peasants in Columbia, or wherever, or not at all. Given that the whole issue of "globalisation" came into public consciousness in the West as a result of Seattle, i.e., a movement by US citizens, not as a cheer squad for Third World revolutions, but on their own behalf, and not against the state, but against corporations, it is not really good enough to say: "Nothing has changed (except "quantitatively"), this is the same old imperialism that we all had demos against in the '60s and '70s. It's all a lot of globaloney! Regis Debray was right all along." Of course, the book does not primarily present itself as a book about "how to fight imperialism" but rather to "unmask" the rhetoric of "globalisation" as a lot of baloney. But the political prescriptions that it concludes with, confirm that the writers actually haven't noticed anything new since the 70s, and their program at the end is for Third World movements to take governmental power and lead a revolution from above within the borders of their own country. The value of this, of course, is to say to citizens of such countries that their governments do have a choice, they do not have to be pliant tools of imperialism. OK, but it's so unconvincing, that altogether, the result is likely to be negative.