Unique, individual, fragile, amazing human beings are disempowered and devalued within the system of Globalization. Transnational corporations, not subject to any one nation's labor protection rights, flow to where they can find the cheapest, most easily exploitable labor. Guy Debord presciently described the current situation in his book Socieyt of the Spectacle:

"Workers do not produce themselves: they produces a force independent of themselves. The success of this production, that is, the abundance it generates, is experienced by its producers only as an abundance of dispossession. All time, all space, becomes foreign to them as their own alienated products accumulated. The spectacle is a map of this new world - a map drawn to the scale of the territory itself. In this way the very powers that have been snatched from us reveal themselves to us in their full force." (p. 23)

As citizens in industrialized nations that are the markets for products produced by cheap, often exploitative, labor practices elsewhere, it is often difficult to avoid being complicit in this system since we often don't know where many of the products that we use daily are made, nor do we know where to obtain things we "need" from sources with fair labor practices.

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Unlike the products they produce, people cannot easily cross national borders through em/immigration. Jael Silliman, describes this situation as it applied to the United States in the introduction to Policing the National Body, a book of essays that raises the question whose security are we protecting through limits to our personal freedoms like the Patriot Act and militarized, often unsupervised, border guard:

"Whereas the prison and policing system are supposed to protect the nation from dangers within, the military, Border Patrols, and INS are ostensibly designed to protect the public from danger and threats that emanate from outside the national body… Immigrants in the United States are constructed as a source of danger. This threat has been used to justify the allocation of billions of dollars to the enforcement of programs of the INS that patrol the nation. At present, the INS has more armed agents with arrest-power than any other federal law enforcement agency. Mandatory detention provisions have made immigrants the fastest growing incarcerated population in the United States. Stringent controls and border security forces are positioned at strategic places along the United States-Mexico border. Military-style tactics and equipment result in immigrants undertaking more dangerous, isolated routes to cross over where the risks of death, dehydration, and assault are exponentially higher." (xx)

Contrastingly, people who have the resources to use current communications technologies, i.e. the internet, find themselves in a virtual world without borders and even body. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in their book Empire, explain that this tangible, physical freedom from the limits of our bodies does not free us from the oppressive systems of capital:

"In an earlier era workers learned how to act like machines both inside and outside the factory. We even learned (with the help of Muybridge's photos, for example) to recognize human activity in general as mechanical. Today we increasingly think like computers, while communication technologies and their model of interaction are becoming more and more central to laboring activities… Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves. The anthropology of cyberspace is really a recognition of the new human condition." (291)

Finally, in the current era of Globalization, individuals are sacrificing their lives to a war between Islamic fundamentalists, who believe they are protecting their homes from Americanization, and American democracy-fundamentalists who believe, or claim to believe, they are furthering the cause of freedom by intervening in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ryszard Kapuscinski, a journalist famous for baring witness to 27 revolutions in the Global South, raises an interesting point in his book Shah of Shahs:

"Oil kindles extraordinary emotions and hopes, since oil is above all a great temptation. It is the temptation of ease, wealth, strength, fortune, power. It is a filthy, foul smelling liquid that squirts obligingly up into the air and falls back to earth as a rustling shower of money. To discover and possess the source of oil is to feel as if, after wandering underground, you have suddenly stumbled upon royal treasure. Not only do you become rich, but you are also visited by the mystical conviction that some higher power has looked upon you with the eye of grace and magnanimously elevated you above others, electing you its favorite." (34)

REFERENCES:

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Zone Books, 1995.

Hardt,Michael and Negri, Antonio. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2000.

Kapuscinski,Ryszard. Shah of Shahs. Vintage International, 1992.

Jael Silliman and Anannya Bhattacharjee, eds., Policing the National Body: Sex, Race, and Criminalization. South End Press, 2002.