Community Globalization and its ultimate effects on the world community has been considered to one of the most debated, controversial and pivotal topics of the contemporary social science. Analysts and sociological scholars have variously argued that the dynamic increase in economic, social, technological exchange in the long run will result in boundless prosperity and consumer overall satisfaction (Ohmae, 1991). Simultaneously, many historians and political economists claim that globalization brings harmful and destructive consequences for modern community, though it has not yet ultimately changed nations, cultures and other fundamental features of the world. Although from sociological perspective globalization is considered to be a relatively contemporary issue, elements and forms it contains can be embedded into the frameworks of classical political economists and sociologists, in particular K. Marx, M. Weber, etc. Simultaneously, important contributions to this contested dilemma made by contemporary sociologists should be taken into consideration, specifically those, which regard to economic prospective opportunities of globalization. Writing in the era of imperialism, Marx’s primary concern was with distribution and the class relations implicit in and derived from the ownership and use of the means of production. In this regard, he never asked questions about the reasons and determinants of technology and the mode of production - and this for the very simple reason that he did not think there was anything to explain. However, as Wheen justly points out “Marx did predict that under capitalism would be relative – not absolute - decline in wages” (Wheen, 300). Further, Wheen continues that if a firm experiences twenty per cent increase in surplus it will hand over the value in the form of twenty per cent pay rise to the workforce (Wheen, 300). Thus, in contemporary context, the pursuit of productivity is a perfectly natural effort to enhance relative surplus, thereby increasing the rate of exploitation and promoting the accumulation of capital. Besides, for Marx, technological innovation is typically the work of science, and as such, the gratuitous fruit of what he called social labor. Modern capitalist is a taker. “It is, therefore, gener¬ally the most worthless and miserable sort of money-capitalists who draw the greatest profit out of all new developments of the universal labour of the human spirit and their social application through combined labour” (Marx, 103). Wheen indicates that Marx theory of capital accumulation is very crucial in terms of its projection into modern conditions. Citing Marx’s thesis regarding accumulation of capital, Wheen points out the contemporary trends in the world distribution of wealth: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole, therefore at the same time accumulation of misery, torment of labor, slavery, ignorance, brutalisation and moral degradation at the opposite pole” (Wheen, 301). Specifically, Marx raised the issue of the eco¬nomic consequences of imperialism and likened the workers of colonial countries (what we now call Third World coun¬tries) to an external proletariat exploited by the capitalists of imperial states. This anal¬ogy, which offered polemical advantages in the attack on the old order, had the addi¬tional merit for some Marxists of explaining in politically congenial terms such evidence of improvement, as they were willing to con¬cede in the standard of living of workers under capitalism. The argument ran that the capitalists were buying off their own workers and thereby buying peace at home by squeezing these outsiders - in effect, by draining their surplus. At the same time, the imperial powers were said to be deliberately holding back these subject countries, block¬ing their industrial development for the ben¬efit of capitalists at home. Of course, this is a condensed, homogenized version of a diverse literature. Marxist critiques of imperialism range from simple land-drain arguments, which constitute a system for growing the cash crops and emptying the mines with cheap, forced or semiforced labor of a kind one could not employ at home, to conspiracy theories about cap¬italist unwillingness to help colonies develop industri¬ally in competition with the mother country (Lipset, 30). When the wider body of Weber’s work is examined, in particular his diverse writings on capitalism, the problem of class is introduced in a different conceptual space. The pivotal dilemma is the relationship between the concept of class and the broad theoretical and historical problem of rationalization of social relations. Repeatedly Weber emphasizes a threefold distinction in the sources of power that individuals use to accomplish their goals: social honor, material resources, and authority. Each of these can be developed within social interactions in highly rationalized forms or in relatively nonrationalized forms. Thus, class establishes highly rationalized social relations that govern the way people get access to and use material resources. From the critical point of view, Weber’s model of sociological rationalization would advocate contemporary globalization trends, as those having objective rational basis. Simultaneously, Weber considerations in regard to rationality are juxtaposed in the dilemma of economic benefit of globalization and its consequences as the process intensifies. Within Marxism and Weberian systems, the problem of globalization would probably be embedded between two important aspects – exploitation of labor and economic efficiency. Although tradition established by Marx locates the problem of exploitation within constraints of normative concerns centered on the interests of workers, it recognizes that increasing exploitation is “efficient” from the point of view capitalist economic organization, but the conceptual framework constantly brings to the foreground the ways in which this imposes harms on workers, hence community. Created in the imperialistic period, Karl Marx’s theory of capital accumulation, distribution and wealth concentration finds its expected continuation in terms of post-imperialistic globalized modern world. In the context of past centuries, imperialism can be perceived as a global political and economic trend. Being displayed in many different forms and bringing multiple consequences, the essence of imperialism can be compared to such modern trends as globalization and international integration. Notable feature of imperialism was striving or world major powers to expand their relative power and at the same time provide for their people. The world transformation became a logical outcome of that global issue. Marx classification of society implies the differentiation between bourgeoisie and labor force or proletariat, enrichment of the former and impoverishment and exploitation of the latter. Wheen applies Marx’s lecturing to justify this classification: “…What the working man sells is not directly his labour, but his labouring power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist” (Wheen, 302). However, in complete sense Marx’s classification could not be applied to contemporary society, because of two main reasons: 1. Tremendous difference among various social stratas; 2. Constrains in classification imposed by intellectual labor and property. However, Marx theory does find its fulfillment in global classification, namely differentiating capitalistic countries and the developing world. Moreover, Marx developed the premises of such classification in the time of imperialistic trends. Therefore, considering contemporary context Marx classification could be transformed into the world of wealth and world of poverty, social struggle for survival and globalization trends. Moreover, in overall perspective there are only two reasons for that, namely imperialistic and globalization expansions. In particular, during the period of imperialism, many African economic and social traditions were destroyed. As colonial cities grew because of globalization, some families moved to the cities, hoping to improve their positions. Others were forced to take jobs in European-owned factories in order to pay taxes (Beers, 27). As a result, the close-knit village, once the center of African life declined. People no longer had the same concern for helping one another as they had in the past. In contemporary context, the changes brought by world globalization and capitalism into African social structure are drastic. For instance, West Africa can be considered to be a microcosm of modern world trends: the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war. It consists now of a series of coastal trading posts, such as Freetown and Conakry, and an interior that, owing to violence, volatility, and disease, is remaining “blank” and “unexplored.” Fifty-five percent of the Ivory Coast’s population is urban, and the proportion is expected to reach 62 percent by 2005. The yearly net population growth is 3.6 percent (Beers, 39). This means that the Ivory Coast’s 13.5 million people will become 39 million by 2025, when much of the population will consist of urbanized peasants. In Guinea, as in the Ivory Coast, as in Ghana, most of the primary rain forest and the secondary bush are being destroyed at an alarming rate. When Sierra Leone achieved its independence, in 1961, as much as 60 percent of the country was primary rain forest. Now six percent is. In the Ivory Coast the proportion has fallen from 38 percent to eight percent (Beers, 46). The deforestation has led to soil erosion, which has led to more flooding and more mosquitoes. Virtually everyone in the West African interior has some form of malaria. Consequences of European imperialism and modern globalization expansion can be found in Europe itself and near its frontiers. The Balkans became a powder keg for nation-state war at the beginning of the twentieth century, and remains to be powder keg for cultural war at the turn of the twenty-first: between Orthodox Christianity represented by the Serbs and a classic Byzantine configuration of Greeks, Russians, and Romanians and the House of Islam. Yet in the Caucasus that House of Islam is falling into a clash between Turkic and Iranian civilizations. The world’s most secular Shiite Muslims, see their cultural identity in terms not of religion but of their Turkic race. The Armenians, likewise, fight the Azeris not because the latter are Muslims but because they are Turks, related to the same Turks who massacred Armenians in 1915. Turkic culture (secular and based on languages employing a Latin script) is battling Iranian culture (religiously militant as defined by Tehran, and wedded to an Arabic script) across the whole swath of Central Asia and the Caucasus. The Armenians are, therefore, natural allies of their fellow Indo-Europeans the Iranians. From the critical point of view, capitalism has always been viewed as a global economy - the first integrated international or world economic system. Although not agreeing on a single formulation for a globalization hypothesis, contemporary globalization theorists point to a series of recent developments that combine to create a particular type of globalized economy, specifically one that is alleged to constrain national economic and social policy making far more than did earlier international economic regimes (Ohmae, 1991). These developments include: 1) increasingly internationalized financial markets; 2) a telecommunications revolution that makes world wide communication instantaneous and complex economic transactions transcending multiple national boundaries possible; 3) transnational corporations with the technological and financial resources to create world wide chains of production so that they contain a global work force and internalize a global division of labor which is readily adjustable to opportunities for cheaper labor in other countries; 4) a related shift among transnational corporations from Fordist mass production to “leaner” more flexible production techniques that enable more rapid adaptation to a world economy in which transnationals and nations compete furiously for position; 5) increased incorporation of the Third World into the trade, investment and labor flows of the world economy; 6) a world economy so highly integrated that no country can opt out and international competitive success provides the only route to successful domestic economic performance. As the massive literature on globalization reveals, there are debates about the existence and prevalence of these various and presumed related “globalizing” tendencies in trade, production and finance. The better part of wisdom and evidence suggest caution. For example, trade interdependence today is not much higher than it was on the eve of the First World War (Wade, 71). Only in 1994 did the level of world trade as a percentage of world gross domestic product exceed its prior highest level - 15.996 reached in 1913 (Fligstein, 12-13). In 1996, world trade was 16.9% of world gross domestic product. Since two world wars disrupted international trade, post-World War II international trade increases appear impressive only when they are not evaluated against pre-World War II economic history. Similarly, incorporation of Third World countries into world trade is not new, and today, as in 1913, most world trade is among OECD countries (Fligstein, 13). The point is not that today’s world trade is too small or insufficiently world wide to make for a world market, but that trade interdependence already was considerable at the beginning of the twentieth century and even earlier. Scholars only recently have begun the hard work of analytically separating and supplying precision to diverse globalization arguments, whether about trade, production or finance. Similarly, they only recently have begun to systematically assess their arguments’ factual validity, and to attend to the arguments’ varying applicability to different parts of the world. Debates about the political consequences of economic globalization are not and cannot be divorced from assessing what is myth and what is fact about globalization and the international economic trends themselves. This is especially so with respect to the debated causal links between change in the quantity and quality of cross-border capital flows and such other economic conditions as within- and between-country income and wealth inequality, industrialization, deindustrialization and unemployment, labor productivity, economic growth, and business organization. Bibliography 1. Wheen, Francis. Karl Marx: A Life, London, England: Routledge, 1989 2. Beers D., Burton F. World History: Patterns of Civilization. Needham, MA, Prentice Hall. 2003 3. Marx, K. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume III, F. Engels ed., London 1986 4. Lipset S. Neoconcervatism: Myth and Reality. Society: July-August, 1988, 29-37 5. Fligstein, Neil. 1997. Is Globalization the Cause of the Crises of Welfare States? American Sociological Association. Toronto, 1997 6. Wade, Robert. 1996. “Globalization and Its Limits: Reports of the Death of the National Economy are Greatly Exaggerated”. Pp.60-88 in S. Berger and R. Dore. National Diversity and Global Capitalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 7. Ohmae, Kenichi. The Borderless World. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.