As
we meet today (the 30th of November 1999), the mass demonstrations
in Seattle – protesting against the discriminatory policies of the World Trade
Organisation – are in full swing. Understandably, because the general design of
the US dominated WTO is to perpetuate the structural inequalities of the
capital system, justifying it in the name of the apparently unchallengeable ‘sovereignty of the global market’. In
the past decade we heard incessantly the triumphalist propaganda of how
capitalist globalisation is in the course of solving our problems, spreading
everywhere the universal benefits of the ‘free
market’, ignoring that in reality the situation was getting worse for the
overwhelming majority of humankind. The ‘free market’ was a fiction even at the
time when the great classical political economists were first singing its
praises; but in the twentieth century its advocacy has become an obscene
propaganda device. But even that kind of cynical misrepresentation was not
enough for the apologists of the system. Thus this morning, true to form, the
Trade and Industry Secretary of the British ‘New Labour’ Government, Steven
Byers, had to top up in a radio interview the ‘free market’ message of
mystification with the hypocritical slogan that there is a complete harmony
between ‘free trade and fair trade’.
In this way, in perfect tune with the words Pangloss kept repeating in
Voltaire’s Candide: ‘we live in the best of all possible worlds’.
If
we examine our situation with our eyes wide open, we find that even in the
capitalist West the notion of 'market sovereignty' must be treated with more
than a pinch of salt. There used to be many political jokes told in the East,
which took the form of questions addressed to a fictional 'Yerevan Radio'. One
of them ran like this: 'Is it true that luxurious American motor cars will be
given away on Saturday afternoon on Red Square?' The answer came: 'Yes,
comrade, it is perfectly true; with three qualifications. 1.) They won't be
American, they will be Russian; 2.) They won't be motor cars, they will be
bicycles; and 3.) They won't be given away; they will be taken away.' Somewhat
similar qualifications must be made about our 'sovereign markets' and their
'perfect competition'. For three main reasons:
a.) We find ever-greater monopolistic developments in every
capitalist country, on a continuing basis. You cannot open your daily papers
without finding a headline announcing some monopolistic take-overs, by now on a
mind-boggling scale. It is enough to remember two recent ones in Britain: the
two Scottish banks (rivals) ‘hostile-take-over bid’ for the Westminster Bank
(around £30 billion) and Vodafone’s likewise ‘hostile bid’ for the German
Mannesman conglomerate, for the sum of well over £80 billion. Evidently, all
such monopolistic moves are not enhancers
of ‘market sovereignty’ but, on the contrary, they represent a domineering interference with it,
tending to undermine and ultimately endanger the market in any meaningful sense
of the term. It is also important to note that all such monopolistic takeovers
go hand in hand with so-called ‘down-sizing’ through which great numbers of
workers are thrown out of their jobs – in the case of the Westminster Bank
takeover it has been already announced that whichever Scottish bank succeeds,
it will sack at least 18.000 workers, making thereby the workers directly pay
for the massive sums involved. And the workers as casualties of the ‘free and
fair market’ are ‘lucky’ if they can find some ‘flexible’ job later. Thus the
reality of ‘free market sovereignty’ in this respect is the unholy triad of monopolistic development – unemployment –
casualization (or ‘precarization’) of the
labour force.
b.) Our 'sovereign markets'
are characterised by the massive protective
involvement of the state. It ranges from immense subsidies for 'common
agricultural policies' to 'export guarantees', and from huge research funds put
at the disposal of capitalist enterprises free of charge, to the astronomic
sums given over to the 'military industrial complex'. Also, this process is
often coupled with the most cynical manipulation of public opinion. Thus, to
take only one example, the fraudulent give-away privatisation of the British
railways was justified in the name of the private companies ‘investing massive
sums’ for the ‘modernisation’ and improvement of the system. The reality turned
out to be the opposite: a worsening of the conditions of travel (trains often
cancelled and delayed; commuting passengers packed like sardines; major railway
accident with fatalities, etc). The ‘massive private investment’ totally failed
to materialise. Indeed, the last ‘Panorama’ TV documentary revealed (on 29th
November 1999) that the fraudulently gold-mining private railway companies will
receive an additional £47 billion for
any future improvement, on top of the massive subsidies which they received and
receive from general taxation (double of what the publicly owned British
railway used to get).
c.) 'Transnational globalisation', in accordance with the prevailing power relations, distorts enormously the
economic market relations, in favour of the hegemonic superpower, the United
States. Robert Reich, President Clinton's former Labour Secretary, did not
hesitate to spell out in his book (The
Wealth of the Nation: A Blueprint for the Future) in the clearest terms,
that the US will enforce with every means at its disposal its 'positive economic nationalism' [1]. Even the closest ally of the United
States, and a major industrial power in its own right, Great Britain, is forced
to suffer the impact of these grossly iniquitous power relations. Thus one of
the most prominent members of Margaret Thatcher's government, Michael
Heseltine, had to protest — though, characteristically, only in his resignation
speech — against the negative consequences for Britain of US 'technology
transfer regulations, American protection laws, extra-territorial controls
co-ordinated through the Pentagon and protected by Congress', and against the
practice of 'funds channelled into the largest and richest companies on earth
in such a way that, if the ongoing process continues unchecked, it will buy its
way through sector after sector of the world's advanced technologies'.
It
seems, then, that our industrial and political leaders, and especially the
Americans, have been born followers of Yerevan Radio's wisdom of how to qualify
the 'sovereignty of the market'.
Paul
Baran already in 1957 described the other former colonial powers as ‘junior
partners of American imperialism’. Since that time the international power
relations have shifted even more strongly in favour of the US. The global
pecking order of capital is now completely dominated by the United States as
the hegemonic superpower, asserting its objectives with brutal openness. Thus
at a recent conference at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (October
1999) US Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbot, warned Europeans not to
question ‘US global pre-eminence’.
Just like in the domain of economics, where the ‘positive economic nationalism’
of the US is forcefully asserted in theory and unceremoniously imposed in
practice, in the same way in the field of international relations US national
‘pre-eminence’ constitutes the rule, coupled with exhortations to submit to
‘globalism’ and to accept the ‘anachronism of the nation states’ as far as the
rest of the world is concerned, inviting thereby everybody to be happy with the
permanent domination of world affairs by the US. However, what is important to
bear in mind in this context is that the nation states constitute the reality of capital's most comprehensive
political command structure. For there is no such thing as the global state of the capital system as such; only particular
states, however strong or weak.
This
is a tremendous contradiction, which becomes particularly acute in our own
time. And there can be no way of overcoming it, notwithstanding the fact that transnational globalisation itself
arises from the irrepressible logic of capital, and therefore cannot be brought
to an end before it plays itself out. The implications of this state of affairs
are grievous. We have witnessed two devastating world wars in the twentieth
century, as a result of one of the big national states attempting to make its
own state formation prevail over the others. Today, when globalisation is in
full swing, the imperative to make the most powerful capitalist state impose
itself as the 'globally pre-eminent' state over against all of the others is
that much greater, and the dangers of a new conflagration are also accordingly
greater.
Moreover,
capital’s misplaced triumphalism and its fantasies about establishing a stable
‘world government’ are also nourished by the fact that with the implosion of
the Soviet system the United States became the one remaining military
superpower. It maintains its military bases in 69 countries, totally dominating
NATO — at the last NATO summit redefined as a self-legitimating aggressive
force — as well as the far eastern military alliances, especially the 'US-Japan
security treaty': now similarly redefined as a 'legitimately offensive force',
in total violation of the Japanese Constitution which renounces war. All this,
however, cannot be considered an enduring solution. For US global domination is
dense with potentially explosive antagonisms, even if for the time being they
are simmering under the surface, given the now still prevailing – most iniquitous – relation of forces.
It cannot be emphasised strongly enough
that the contradictions between the triumphalist propaganda of ‘globalizing
capital’ and the profound crisis of our historical reality could not be
greater. The most fundamental of them is that — notwithstanding all capitalist
triumphalism — half of the world's
population does not reproduce its conditions of existence according to the
rules of the 'sovereign global market' and its mythology of ‘free and fair
trade’. This must be brought again and again to the attention of people. Think
in this respect of the great majority of India's vast population; or of 1000 million
plus of China's 1250 million people. In China one can speak of relatively small
capitalist enclaves only, and even
those under the overall political control
of the non-capitalist Chinese state. To all this we must add a major part
of Africa and South-East Asia (for instance, many millions of people who are
subsistence-farming in Indonesia, and therefore all talk in front of them about
‘the sovereign global market’ would sound like a joke in very bad taste
indeed). And we should also remember a far from negligible part of Latin
America which has nothing to do with the ‘free and fair trade’ of the
fictionalised ‘sovereign global market’.
Even in Russia, 15 years after Gorbachev's
ill-fated attempts, we find the failure
to restore capitalism, except in the Mafia-ridden big cities. Millions of
Russian workers do not receive their wages for months; many of them for as long
as one year and a half. Remarkably,
it came to light during the recent elections in the Ukraine that countless
numbers of workers failed to receive their wages for as long as six years. Now try and run a 'market
economy' on a wageless basis, so as
to accomplish the propagandised miracles of the ‘sovereign global market’.
In all these respects we have to face the great historical failure of the capital
system to complete itself, as a global system, in its properly capitalist form.
Moreover, it is inconceivable — for a number of grave reasons, including the prohibitive ecological costs implicit in
the capitalist developmental process — that 'advanced capitalism', with its
'sovereign market', could globally complete itself in the future.
The overwhelming majority of the world
population lives under conditions of abject poverty, and the shocking figure of
half of the world’s six billion
people live in conditions which the World Bank calls ‘absolute poverty’, defining it as less than one dollar per head per day. How obscene it is, thus, to
triumphalistically boast about the great success and historical
untranscendability of a system which produces results like this.
The
apologists of the capital system – including the reformist and ‘parliamentary
socialist’ wing of the labour movement – have been preaching for a century that
we live in an ‘age of equalisation’ and the ‘merging of the classes’ into a
happy ‘middle class’ – one could only wonder: the middle of what? In reality, social polarisation in our time is
greater than ever before, making a mockery of the old social democratic
expectations of eliminating — or at least greatly reducing — inequality through
'progressive taxation'. As things turned out, we saw the diametrical opposite.
Those
who believe that although the ‘underdeveloped world’ has problems, the
‘advanced capitalist’ countries are the model which will be followed through
‘modernisation’ by the rest of the world, should think again and try to notice
the growing inequality also in the world of plenty. Let me give you just two,
very recent, but greatly revealing examples:
1.) According to the Budget
Office of the US Congress (no 'left-wing exaggerator', for sure), the income of
the top one percent in the most
advanced capitalist country of the world is equivalent to that of the bottom one hundred million people, i.e. nearly forty percent of the population. Twenty
years ago it was 'only' one percent
against 49 million, i.e. less than twenty percent of the US population.
Some 'equalisation' and 'merging of the classes into one another'!
2.) In England child poverty
trebled in the last twenty years, and
continued to be aggravated under the 'New Labour' government in the last two
and a half years. The 'New Labour' government preaches the vacuous 'third way' sermon, and practices with ever greater severity the politics of anti-labour
measures, imposing even such policies which Mrs Thatcher did not dare to
introduce, cutting the Welfare State in every possible way, including even the
precarious livelihood of the handicapped. Only a fool can assume that this can
go on forever.
Thus
the actual conditions of existence even in the capitalistically most advanced
parts of the world today are in the sharpest possible contrast to the
self-mythology of capitalist triumphalism, not to forget the rest of the world.
In truth we live in the age of the
historically unprecedented structural
crisis of the capital system: a crisis now extended well over three
decades. Nonetheless, there are still people, even among labourite ‘third way’
ideologists and politicians, who continue to reassert their belief in the
coming positive ‘long cycle’, insisting that the present ‘long downturn’ will
be necessarily followed by the ‘long expansionary cycle’ of capitalist economic
development, conforming thus to the ‘normality’ of this historically
unchallengeable system.
As we know, the present crisis – erupted
toward the end of the 1960s – followed the Keynesian postwar expansion (the
‘go’ phase in the real normality of capital’s ‘stop/go’ logic) which lasted
approximately two decades. The quite unusual length of the postwar expansionary
cycle – and even that only in a handful of capitalistically advanced countries
– was largely due to the favourable conditions of postwar reconstruction and to
the dominant position assumed in it by the overwhelmingly state-financed
military/industrial complex. On the other hand, the fact that the
corrective/counter-acting ‘stop’ phase had to acquire the particularly harsh
and callous form of ‘neo-liberalism’ (and ‘monetarism’ as its pseudo-objective
ideological rationalisation) – already under Harold Wilson’s Labour Government
– was due to the onset of capital’s (no longer traditionally cyclic) structural crisis, embracing a prolonged
historical epoch. This is what explains the exceptional duration of the
neo-liberal ‘stop’ phase – in contrast to the fanciful notion of a ‘normal long
downturn’ – by now much longer in fact than the postwar Keynesian ‘go’ phase, with
no end in sight at all, perpetuated under the watchful eyes of Conservative and
Labourite governments alike. In other words, both the anti-labour harshness and
the frightening duration of the neo-liberal stop phase, together with the fact
that neo-liberalism is practised by governments which were supposed to be
situated on the opposite sides of the parliamentary political divide, are in
reality intelligible only as the manifestations of capital’s structural crisis.
All the more so because the savagery of neo-liberal economic ‘solutions’
continue their course, completely unchallenged by accommodated labour. And we
are now running out of the years predicated even by the wishful notion of the
coming ‘positive expansionary long cycle’, as theorised by capital’s labourite
apologists.
In conclusion, a word of caution is
appropriate here about the expectations of countering capital’s misplaced
triumphalism through the good services of ‘parliamentary socialism’. A strategy
which has been with us by now for well over a century, without accomplishing
its promises and ending up, instead, in the capitulatory blind alley of ‘New
Labour’. The fate of this line of approach can only remind us of Aesop’s fable
about the Fox and the Crow, where the
crow with the abundant chunk of meat in his mouth stands for capital, and the
hungry fox barking up the tree represents labourite parliamentarism. As we know, in Aesop’s fable the fox
wins, because the crow in his vanity cannot resist the fox’s adulatory
invitation to ‘show how beautifully he can sing’, and drops the meat to the
ground the moment he opens his mouth. In the same way, labourite parliamentarians
have been hopefully addressing capital/crow for a whole century, expecting the
meat to drop into their lap. But it never happened. Not because capital/crow
would have taken the time-consuming trouble to read Aesop’s ‘grand narrative’.
He hired, instead, a ‘post-modernist’ research assistant who duly condensed
Aesop’s fable into a ‘little récit’, which put it all in one short sentence:
‘Master, don’t open your mouth because the fox will catch the falling meat’.
And so an ending quite different from Aesop’s fable came about, thanks to the
post-modernist ‘little récit’. Capital/crow gulped down the great chunk of meat,
and the only thing he dropped down on parliamentary-labourite fox’s head was
what came out at the other end.
The
morale of the updated fable is that the fox has been outfoxed. For only a mass socialist movement can successfully
counter capital’s misplaced triumphalism and bring about a radical alternative.
István
Mészáros
Footnotes
1. Due to the dominant position of the US in the world economy, thanks to a significant extent to the Dollar as the privileged world currency, the US can get away with its astronomical indebtedness: by now amounting to almost six trillion dollars. At the same time the countries of the so-called ‘Third World’ continue to suffer for their incomparably lower indebtedness. They have paid back in interest four times what they have borrowed, but their debts have multiplied four times despite the repayments. The US dominates all of the international organs of the world economy, from the IMF to the World Bank and to the World Trade Organisation. The attempts to impose MAI (the authoritarian Multinational Agreement on Investment) so far failed, but they will be no doubt tried again. The protests against the WTO in Seattle are the manifestations of the irrepressible contradictions between the US and the ‘junior partners of American imperialism’ on the one side, and the most severely exploited parts of the world on the other. Those who championed capital’s misplaced triumphalism will have to find out that such protests can only intensify in the future.