Re: Creating People-Centred Economics

["Patrick Bond" <pbond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From:          "AIxO1â HenryC.K.Liu
> Patrick,
> You are correct that about the low "socialist/marxist content."
> Yet we must remember the progressive role economic nationalism can play in
> opposing neo-imperialism (globalization).

I'd like to take this up, Cde Henry, not just in abstract terms
(whether agricultural and petty commodity production systems can be
led by that [mythical?] patriotic national bourgeoisie), but by
looking at what's actually happening in world politics at the
moment. If you allow (and I hope you won't find it too flippant),
here's my own excerpted rap on the topic as part of a general
balance-of-forces overview which I presented at that Bangkok
conference. You have to forgive my hostility to what we understand
in southern Africa as "nationalism," which in reality boils down to
comprador-neoliberalism plus occasional radical rhetoric. (Below, I
locate nationalism as one of five contending currents in global
poli-econ ideology/practice today, and hurry from this section
onwards to the left social/labour/environmental movements)...

***

Third World Nationalism. While China and India
are forthrightly resisting financial liberalisation and
Russia formally defaulted in August 1998 (if only
temporarily--but in the process avoided seizure of
assets by creditors), it is in rather different
nationalist regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America
that we can identify more radical discourses of
opposition to the Washington Consensus. From Malaysia
(Mahathir) to Zimbabwe (Robert Mugabe) to Venezuela
(Hugo Chavez), IMF-bashing is back in style, even if the
rhetorical flourishes have different origins (one
Muslim, one self-described socialist, one simply
populist). Yet self-evidently, the trajectory chosen in
these three cases, amounts, at best, to attempting to
join the system, to play by its rules and, having
discovered that the game is set up unfairly, to adjust
these rules somewhat in the Third World's favour.(1)
More typical of a tamed nationalism was the offhand
remark by Nelson Mandela at the July 1998 Mercosur
meetings of South American elites, that "Globalisation
is a phenomenon that we cannot deny. All we can do is
accept it."(2)
     Not even reflective of the 1970s call for a New
International Economic Order, this strain faded badly
over the subsequent two decades. Most leaders and
political parties of Second and Third World societies
who at one point (at least momentarily) carried the
aspirations of a mass-popular electorate(3) rapidly
reversed allegiance, imposing ineffectual and terribly
unpopular structural adjustment programmes. In the cases
of Mahathir, Mugabe and others, "talking left" also
entailed repression of public interest groups and trade
unions (and women and gay rights movements), which was
less publicised in 1998-99 but just as chilling to
democratic processes as the arrests of a high-ranking
Malaysian politician (of the Washington Consensus
ideological ilk) and of several Zimbabwean journalists.
     Not just a problem of Third World nationalism,
selling out the poor and working classes on behalf of
international finance was also the general fate of so
many labour and social democratic parties in Western
Europe, Canada and Australia. Even where once-
revolutionary parties remained in control of the nation-
state--China, Vietnam, Angola, and Mozambique, for
instance--ideologies wandered over to hard, raw
capitalism. And yet, too, the very universality of
financial crisis would necessarily allow counter-
hegemonic voices to emerge.(4)

NOTES

1) Mohamad Mahathir, `The Future of Asia in a Globalised
and Deregulated World,' Speech to the conference `The
Future of Asia,' Tokyo, 4 June 1998. In a spirit
mirroring Mahathir's, other rulers of two formerly free-
market Asian countries defended themselves from
speculators in September 1998; the Hong Kong state
prohibited the short-selling of local stock market
shares and also bought $14 billion in shares to prop up
the Hang Seng index, and Taiwan outlawed what were
described as illegal funds-trades by Soros hedge funds.
     For background to Mugabe's hate-love-hate relations
with the IMF and World Bank, see my Uneven Zimbabwe,
Chapters Eleven-Twelve. There was a confused flurry in
early 1999 when Mugabe sought funding elsewhere than the
IMF. See, e.g., `Zimbabwe Severs Ties with the IMF,'
Wall Street Journal, 12 April 1999 and AP Worldstream,
`We Won't Cut Ties with IMF, World Bank, says Zimbabwe,'
12 April 1999; for a more skeptical view of Mugabe's
updated `socialist' rhetoric, see my `Zimbabwe's
Political Reawakening,' Monthly Review, 50, 11, May
1999. The IMF's Zimbabwe objectives were
straightforward: Mugabe must reverse the only two
progressive things he had done in a long time, namely
the imposition of a luxury import tax in 1997 and of
price controls on staple foods in mid-1998 in the wake
of IMF riots. According to a blunt Michael Nowak, IMF
assistant director for Africa, `There are two issues
outstanding and these have stopped the IMF from making
the [$53 million] standby credit available to the
country. These issues are, one, we want the government
to reduce the tariffs slapped on luxury goods last
September, and secondly, we also want the government to
give us a clear timetable as to when and how they will
remove the price controls they have imposed on some
goods' (see Abel Mutsakani, `IMF says Tariffs, Price
Controls Last Hurdles to Aid,' Financial Gazette, 12
March 1999). Later in 1999, the IMF agreed to increase
the loan amount to $200 million, but according to an IMF
official, yet more conditions emerged, namely, access to
classified Congo war information and a commitment to a
fiscally-responsible source for any new war expenditure:
`The Zimbabweans felt offended, shocked, but they all
the same agreed to give us the information, we got all
the clarification we wanted. They had no choice... We
have had assurances [that] if there is budgetary
overspending, there will be cuts in other budget
sectors_ (Agence France Press, `IMF Agrees to Lend
Zimbabwe 200 Million US Dollars: IMF Source,_ 20 July
1999).
     Chavez is more complicated. In early 1999 it
appeared that he had surrendered to the Washington
Consensus. The main controversies associated with the
honeymoon period following his impressive 1998 electoral
victory--on an anti-poverty campaign platform--were
whether the falling world oil price (leading to an
estimated 4 percent decline in Venezuelan GDP in 1999)
would force budget and real wage cuts, and how quickly
Chavez would carry out his threat to impose a state of
emergency. Within a month of taking office, he cut the
budget by 11 percent (denying he was already an IMF
devotee), notwithstanding some extra spending on public
works programmes. While unions demanded a 50 percent
wage increase to keep pace with inflation, Chavez
offered only 20 percent in a national tripartite
bargaining forum, and when that broke down imposed the
negative real wage deal on public sector workers (see
Reuters, `Venezuela not Negotiating, just Talking to
IMF,' 3 March 1999; Associated Press, `Venezuela faces
Severe Recession,' 4 March 1999). However, Chavez's
popular-democratic instincts were consistently bolstered
by left-wing allies, and by mid-1999 it appeared he was
temporarily retreating on certain macroeconomic fronts
so as to buy space from international financial markets,
so as to conduct a more thorough-going reorganisation of
the corrupt Venezuelan state and to more forcefully
attack the country's terribly-hedonistic national
bourgeoisie; the jury remains out.

2) Mandela's televised comment is cited in my `Global
Financial Crisis: Why we should Care, What we should
Do,' Indicator SA, 15, 3, 1998. This was not atypical.
Jonathan Michie and Vishnu Padayachee are right to
conclude that `In the South African context,
globalization has become a synonym for inaction, even
paralysis, in domestic economic policy formulation and
implementation.' (Jonathan Michie and Vishnu Padayachee,
`The South African Policy Debate Resumes' in J.Michie
and V.Padayachee [Eds], The Political Economy of South
Africa's Transition, London, The Dryden Press, 1997,
p.229.)

3) Very different circumstances prevailed, amidst very
different ideologies, but this fate befell, amongst
others, Aquino (Philippines), Arafat (Palestine),
Aristide (Haiti), Bhutto (Pakistan), Chiluba (Zambia),
Dae Jung (South Korea), Havel (Czech Republic), Mandela
(South Africa), Manley (Jamaica), Musoveni (Uganda),
Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Nujoma (Namibia), Ortega (Nicaragua),
Perez (Venezuela), Rawlings (Ghana), Walensa (Poland)
and Yeltsin (Russia). In 1999, Megawati (Indonesia) was
preparing to follow the pattern, with Chavez (Venezuela)
wavering.

4) Thus there was talk within South Africa's ruling
African National Congress of potential interlocking
interests of major Southern Hemisphere nations, which
would potentially reflect renewed muscle in the Non-
Aligned Movement, Group of 77 and various other fora of
revived nationalisms. Such cooperation is not without
foundation--for example, a October 1998 ANC-Alliance
document (`The Global Economic Crisis,' Discussion
document, Johannesburg, p.5.) explicitly asked, "Can we
forge a Brasilia-Pretoria-Delhi-Beijing Consensus in the
absence of any Washington Consensus?" (though cynics
would rebut that if the global establishment looked
fragmented at that point, so too did Brazil's crisis-
ridden liberal-corporate regime, the ANC's neoliberal
proto-Africanism, Hindu nationalism and Chinese
bureaucratic-Communism-cum-rampant-capitalism). That the
South African government, during 1998-99, occupied a
host of crucial positions--head of the Non-Aligned
Movement, president of Unctad, head of the Commonwealth,
head of the Organisation of African Unity, host of the
Southern African Development Community, UN Security
Council member, holder of a director position at the IMF
and World Bank--meant that while ANC economic policy was
without question still loyal to the Washington
Consensus, nevertheless the kinds of questions raised by
South African political leaders were potentially very
important for change in the wider world.

***

(full paper available from pbond@xxxxxxxxxx; another
version including a marxist crisis riff is at
http://csf.colorado.edu/wsystems/jwsr.html , v.5#2)