Global community: responsibilities in excess of exchange and essence

Abstract

This thesis proposes that in the contemporary economic, political and social context of globalised capitalist production and exchange, there is a lack of, and subsequent necessity for an emerging tradition of global community. The necessity for such a tradition arises from within the dynamics of this in many ways still new and developing mode of global production. Firstly, because the development of global capitalism has with it meant the development of new and pervasive networks of social and material relationships that are themselves global. And secondly because, in this context where capital has itself developed into a particular and dominating form of social, moral, and above all metaphysical 'tradition', these increasingly pervasive relationships and emerging networks of interdependence are materially and ideologically organised in such away that we are prevented from seeing their existence and significance as real and implicating social relationships. Informed initially by the work of Karl Marx and Slavoj Zizek, the thesis works firstly to present the tensions inherent within the emergence of these conditions of global relationality, and to subsequently define the nature and possibilities of the question of global community.