Revisiting Globalisation

’Capital’ has engulfed all other social constructs exalting the institutionalisation of property relations to its zenith to render capitalism its singular ubiquity. Conventional theories, including those of post-modernism or the notions of ‘social capital’ or ‘social business’, appear to be inadequate to grasp or assuage its antagonistic relations, rules and rationality. Capitalism acquired its current stature thriving first on autochthonous articulation of the economy and then harnessing ‘other economies’ to its own dynamics. This involved increased exploitation and appropriation of nature and labour necessitating increased subsumption of spatial loci and economies as ‘medium and soil’ and holding them in ‘uneven and combined development’ along with diverse modes of ‘militarism’. With global expansion and gargantuan accumulation, lately capitalism came to be designated as ‘globalisation’. Besides this benign appellation, earlier the ‘highest stage’ of capitalism was expounded as ‘imperialism’. Bangladesh, India or the South Asian subcontinent altogether, were a crucial part of this whole development though its current stance and impact is more diverse and even disconcerting for them owing to differential nature and/or degree of assimilation with globalisation. This article briefly examines globalisation in general and as it concerns Bangladesh in particular with some of its contemporary ramifications for the people and polity.