Globalization and Deindustrialization: A City Abandoned.

The article focuses on globalization and deindustrialization. The older globalization consisted of a world system of Western nation states and a set of peripheral regions undergoing the first agonies of modernization. The new globalization, by contrast, encourages economic and political elites in Metropolitan centers to slough off those formerly powerful sentiments of national identity and purpose, even as it encourages subaltern classes to celebrate patriotism and sacrifice for their respective nations. Hence, in the name of a "new internationalism," the multinationals are free to pursue communally destructive forms of "flexible accumulation" and speculative gains wherever they find them, while the working class is rendered powerless to fend off these new forces of communal devastation. In each case, the stabilizing cultural conventions and social contracts that once allowed workers some relative sense of security are being dismantled and replaced by a lean set of postmodern social relations that are more in keeping with the new forms of time and space compressions characterizing the emergent New World Order.