This article takes globalization out of mainstream economics’ market-integration, efficiency, and mutual-gains centred frame and reconstructs it through the conceptual vocabularies of Marxist, dependency, Polanyian, post-Keynesian, development, feminist and ecological economics. It first identifies the core assumptions of the mainstream globalization narrative and argues that this framework systematically renders class relations, core–periphery hierarchies, social reproduction and ecological limits invisible. It then shows how Marxist and dependency theories conceptualise globalization as an expanding regime of capital accumulation and as unequal exchange, while the Polanyian literature situates it within the dialectic between the fictitious commodification of labour, land/nature and money and the social counter-movements that arise in response. Post-Keynesian and development economics discuss the constraints that financial liberalization and external openness impose on effective demand management, industrial policy and policy space; feminist economics foregrounds global care chains and the invisible burden of social reproduction; and ecological economics focuses on the biophysical limits of globalization through ecological unequal exchange, ecological debt and the climate crisis. In the comparative synthesis, the article juxtaposes the mainstream’s singular, efficiency- and aggregate-welfare-oriented path narrative with the critical literature’s plural and conflictual narratives centred on class, space, bodies and ecology. It concludes that globalization should be rethought not as “more trade” but as a historical terrain of conflict at the intersection of regimes of capital accumulation, patterns of social reproduction and ecological limits.
Burak Baş (Thu,) studied this question.