Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism’s Nature

he end of a millennium is a time that invites speculations about the future as well as reckonings with the past. In his Confessions, Saint Augustine sug-gested that it is only at the end of a life that one can apprehend its meaning. The current fashionable talk about the end of History, of socialism, even of capital-ism—or at least the long-announced demise of its familiar industrial form and the birth of an era defined by the dominance of information and services rather than material production—suggests that the close of the millennium is generating fan-tasies inspired by a similar belief. In a striking coincidence, the end of the millen-nium has also marked the victory of capitalism over socialism after a protracted confrontation that polarized humanity during much of the twentieth century. Its triumph at this time makes capitalism appear as the only valid social horizon, granting it a sacralized sense of finality that conjures up what Sylvia Thrupp iden-tified as the millennial expectation of a “perfect age to come ” (1970: 12). As an expression of this millennial fantasy, corporate discourses of globaliza-tion evoke with particular force the advent of a new epoch free from the limita-tions of the past. Their image of globalization offers the promise of a unified humanity no longer divided by East and West, North and South, Europe and its Others, the rich and the poor. As if they were underwritten by the desire to erase 35