There is a vast literature both on slavery and globalization. However mostly both these are being dealt separately and are rarely interlinked. Same is true for audio visuals in documentary genres. Both “No Logo and “The Corporation” takes the stand of an anti-globalization campaign and view globalization as more evil than good. “No Logo” looks at branding, which itself is a highly globalized term, as production and not as mere promotional tool. In fact, it takes into its domain, the practice of advertising. The film which is based on a book by the same name argues that branding makes the product or a service secondary while placing the image or the idea in the minds of the customer as primary. It further discusses how branding has taken ways the sense of public and has placed high level of control in the choices that customers make today. This is done through systematic bombarding of messages through different media. This has taken the public’s freedom to maintain public spaces and sustain public institutions like public libraries. As a result of this highly controlling communicative mechanism called branding, global economy has disengaged itself from human rights and environmental concerns. The corporation works on a different level. It sees corporate a global force that controls the global resources. And hence the most visible between No Logo and the corporation is that the first’s theme is an intangible process called branding whereas the second’s theme is an entity which exist with all physical tangibles , and it’s called the corporation. First theme, however, is the need of the second. Both films looked at globalization as a process and its two evil products. But they excluded slavery. Another work that took the similar anti-globalization stand was John Pilger’s book called Globalization: The New Rulers of the World. This book draws lot from an audio-visual by the same title –Globalization: The new rulers of the world, written and directed by John Pilger.
Both, the book and the documentary investigates how control is being used by financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank to gain new markets in Indonesia at the cost of creating immense exploitation, economic, political and social, through extending support to a violent regime being headed by an oppressive dictator. As a result of this oppression and an unfair deal between an oppressing head of the head and the oppressing financial institutions, the result was the people working under extreme conditions. Conditions such as 40 degrees workplace temperature, 36- hour shifts with no breaks, income almost 50% of the legal minimum
wage without any rules or regulations. Despite all such investigations, neither the book nor the corresponding audio visual related such oppression and its slave-like results with slavery. It completely excluded the notion of slavery.
Two monumental works of Kevin Bales, one of which was translated into an audio visual, are probably the only reliable and extensive work that connects globalization and its manifestations in slavery. The book Disposable People (and an article extracted from it called Expendable people, both by Kevin Bales), which was also used as the basis of the audio visual documentary called Slavery; The Global Investigation traces the role of globalization in slavery. Additionally, the other two books by Kevin Bales, New Slavery 2000 and Ending Slavery: How we free today’s slaves, 2007, explores slavery in the new globalized world. However in the description thereof, despite fine investigation and analysis of slavery, the author restricted the presence of slavery in its “one person enslaves another one” form. It almost excludes the possibility that one nation or a group of nations can use all the tools of slavery to enslave another nation or a group of nations. Undoubtedly, the work of Kevin Bales has provided a new insight into the world of globalization by navigating the threats of slavery but it did not investigate the role of one state as an individual, trying to enslave another state. This was the void that I recognized and if, indeed this void is proven to exist, it would require a new investigative study to look at state(s) as an ‘institutionalized slave master’ trying to enslave another institutionalized state.
George Ritzer’s the McDonaldization of the Society provides the basic framework to understand the application of Max Weber’s theory of rationalization and how it could be used to exercise control by the use of an assembly line and mechanisms of bureaucracy. Ritzer argued that that corporations like McDonalds’ homogenized the systems thereby building simple models with higher efficiency, effectiveness, lower costs, higher profits and minimal liabilities. All of these are also the characteristics of a modern day slavery, which is deliberately and strategically being used by the organizations that Ritzer mentions in his work.( including, but not limited to McDonalds’ and Ford Motors) Slavery also involves the employment of similar tools to achieve results that Ritzer mentions like high efficiency, least liability and instant disposability. I, therefore, found the exclusion of slavery amongst the grossly negative manifestations of globalization which was not recognized. However, wherever it was, like in the case of Kevin Bales’s work, it was only seen as ‘one to one’ and not as ‘group’ (nation or corporation) to ‘group’ (nation or corporation)
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