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Tyranny, Empire, and the End of the World as We Know It? (Part 1) |
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"As it is a feature of democracy that to all appearance the people does almost exactly what it wishes, men have supposed that democratic governments were the abiding-place of liberty: they confused the power of the people with the liberty of the people."
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Introductory Remarks This essay attempts a political sketch of the present world by making a set of closely related observations. For most readers of a journal like this, the observations themselves are unlikely to be new. Only my way of organizing and connecting them might be. My aim is to draw out some of the cumulative implications of seemingly diverse military, economic, political and ideological trends. Compartmentalization and partial analysis hides the big picture from us, as it gets increasingly monstrous. In the following section I summarize the observations. The rest of the essay is an elaboration of the points made there. They are to be read in a sequence since, taken together, they make up an argument. Readers may find themselves familiar with some of the material, in which case they can skip over those sections and proceed to the succeeding ones. I have reiterated certain key facts in order to clarify the overall argument. Some of the observations and their elaborations are of a somewhat broad-brush and speculative nature, meant to provoke dialogue to clarify ideas, as much as to keep the discussion on a huge theme finite. They are based on the limited information that is available to the author. In some cases the substantiation of the points made is theoretical, though, given enough time, it should be possible to adduce the necessary evidence to support them. Further clarification of the observations and ideas is surely possible, and definitely necessary, but would take us beyond the scope of an essay. The Argument 1. A country’s foreign policy is a reflection, howsoever indirect, of its domestic institutions, priorities, ideologies, and way of life. An openly aggressive foreign policy is a sign of growing tyranny within the country. 2. Democracies, unless they are scrupulously vigilant, have a pronounced tendency to degenerate into tyranny. 3. The tendency towards tyranny, inherent in a democratic system, is aggravated by capitalism, at its core a despotic economic system, incompatible with economic, and ultimately political, democracy. 4. The relationship between democracy and capitalism is entirely coincidental, a happenstance of the history of the modern West. Increasingly, we will be called upon to choose between the two. 5. The ruling goals of imperialist foreign policy have been shaped by the imperatives of capitalist accumulation on a global scale since the era of European colonialism. 6. Colonial forms of economic exploitation have mutated into subtler, more intensified forms, instead of having vanished in the post-War period. 7. Globally, since the end of the Cold War, we are in an era of an attempted transition from a world of nation-states to what will, in effect, be a transnational corporate superstate, headquartered in Washington, whose sole aim is and will be to accumulate wealth and power. This is the political meaning of corporate Anglobalization, approaching Huxley’s Brave New World. 8. War and insecurity are profitable. Peace and security are not. This is the underlying reason for the globalization of the military-industrial complex and the perceptible expansion of security industry worldwide. If war is the regulated market in weaponry and murder, terrorism is the free one. Terrorism is nothing but the privatization of war and murder. 9. Might is not right: given the mistaken ease with which conquering cultures appropriate and monopolize public morality and universal values on behalf of their narrow projects, it is more than likely that we will see civilization carry out many more wars and genocides in the future, doubtless on way to noble goals like peace, justice, freedom, and not least, prosperity. Fear, greed and cultivated ignorance will ensure that educated humanity tolerates, even abets, such mass deceit. 10. Power is not the same as freedom. Thanks to colonialism and technology, the West is powerful. Thanks to its obsession with power, it is not free. And thus, nor is the rest of the world. Unless massive social and political movements force governments to change course radically, American tyranny, global empire, and ultimately, planetary environmental collapse are the shape of things to come. As You Are, so You Appear A country’s foreign policy is a reflection, howsoever indirect, of its domestic institutions, priorities, ideologies and way of life. An openly aggressive foreign policy is a sign of growing tyranny within the country. As the case of Germany in the 1930s demonstrates, the nature of power is such that tyranny within the borders of a modern industrialized state bodes ill for the world beyond its boundaries. When it is allowed to develop into a massive, impregnable structure within a country, and continues to gather force, power does not rest on its laurels. It wishes to extend the scope of this power beyond its boundaries. Imperialism is almost always founded on a concentration of power in a small number of hierarchical political institutions within the country. Opposition, unless it is irrelevant or token, is ignored if possible, and ultimately eliminated if necessary. Smarting under the defeat and reparations after World War I, Germany rearmed after Hitler was reluctantly appointed Chancellor by elected President Hindenburg in 1933. The Nazi Party being the largest party in the Reichstag, Hitler seized the opportunity presented by the death of Hindenburg in 1934, declaring himself Fuhrer, and began the secret rearmament of Germany, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, persecuting or liquidating political opponents (like the Communists) as he went along. German nationalism peaked in the Nazi era, Hitler calling for an expansion of the lebensraum (living space) of Germans. A greater German nation had to be built. Towards this cause, Austria was annexed in 1938 and Sudetenland (Czechoslovakia) and Poland were invaded soon after, setting off World War II. These countries were also valuable for the resources, manpower and infrastructure which German war plans required. German military aggression was rooted in the fascism of National Socialism, the official ideology of the Nazi party. According to this, Jews, gypsies and others were declared racially inferior. The Nuremberg laws were passed against them. The economy, facing the crisis of the Great Depression, was restructured along racial lines, the Jews losing their jobs to the Germans and sent off to concentration camps to perform penal labour before being murdered in their millions. The charismatic personality of Hitler was the political glue which coordinated the whole effort. Ideologies of exceptionalism are central to imperial ventures. Such barbarity as was witnessed in the 1930s and 1940s did not come out of the jungles of Africa or the backwaters of Bengal, where, supposedly, civilization had not reached. It came out of the cultural heartland of what is erroneously still regarded by so many as the most advanced civilization known to humanity. Nazi Germany, as much as the British and French empires, believed that it somehow represented, in one form or another, "the chosen people". This exceptionalism allows the rulers and their domestic subjects to prosecute wars and barbarism on other peoples with a clean conscience, continuing to regard themselves as "good, decent people". In 1919, when the British were trying to consolidate their control over Iraq, Winston Churchill, as Secretary of State at the War Office, told the Royal Air Force not to be "squeamish" about putting down "recalcitrant Arabs" (who were in fact Kurds) by spraying them with poison gas since it will cause "a lively terror" among "uncivilized tribes." After the use of the gas was successful, he was pleased with the "excellent moral effect" it had had on the natives. One way to civilize them. [1] We see similar exceptionalism being mouthed, or assumed, today by American leaders and their media mouthpieces in defence of what are unconscionable wars and war crimes. A few years back, then Secretary of State Colin Powell was quite unabashed in claiming that the number of dead Iraqi civilians did not interest him very much. There is nothing new in this of course. Back in the 19th century, similar ideas of Manifest Destiny, for instance, were deployed to defend the violation of treaties, seizure of land and killing of hundreds of thousands of American Indians. However, the confidence with which American leaders have been using exceptionalist rhetoric has grown since the end of the Cold War, now that the Soviet challenge has melted away. Today, there is no shame in admitting to imperial ambitions on the back of the world. A view like that of the conservative historian Niall Ferguson, pre-emptively announcing himself as a "fully paid-up member of the neo-imperialist gang", is hardly atypical. On the contrary there are a growing number of recruits to what is, in effect, history’s richest and best organized mafia. [2] When US forces shot down a civilian passenger airliner in 1988, killing 290 innocents, George Bush Senior said, "I will never apologize for the United States. I don’t care what the facts are", putting the seal of American exceptionalism upon the world. [3] Up to a degree, as demonstrated by the example of the British Empire till the middle of the last century, imperialism may be consistent with a measure of representative, liberal democracy. And to the extent that the US has been a democratic society hitherto, it has not found it difficult to combine the formal procedures of a representative democracy with an imperialist foreign policy, the (corporate) consensus between the two main political parties on most matters of foreign policy aiding the process. However, in an age in which information and images travel across the world instantaneously, and the US is saddled with plenty of domestic economic problems, it is unlikely that further imperial forays into the world can be made without putting severe restrictions on civil liberties and democratic rights within the country. The state may not have a conscience (it typically doesn’t), but the public still does, howsoever muted its expressions in the media and the elections might be. If the state believed that the latter didn’t have a conscience, no censorship of news would be necessary. As the resistance to empire mounts in the world, and more acts of egregious hi-tech violence are perpetrated on innocents (who would have to be declared "terrorists" or at least "insurgents"), it will make it ever more essential to reign in democracy, or what’s left of it. After the signing of the Atlantic Charter in 1941, the American policy-making elite made a valiant effort to make it seem as though it was hell-bent on liberating the world from European colonialism and spread peace and prosperity everywhere. That is what, for instance, the brush with the British and the French during the Suez crisis of 1956, in which the US stood by Egypt in the UN, was all about. However, the priorities of foreign policy, judging from the selective interventions across the globe over the course of the past half-century, tell another story altogether. Dictatorships in Iraq and North Korea have bothered US administrations, not those in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (and let’s not even mention Apartheid South Africa or Spain under Franco’s tyranny, both US allies for the most part). A subsequent section of this essay argues that the main priority of US foreign policy has never been peace or freedom or even economic development for the peoples of the world. On the contrary, it has been to sustain and strengthen a global regime for the accumulation of American capital and eliminate any rivals and obstacles to that process. As many an American President has been led to remark, "the American way of life is not up for negotiation." And first and foremost, it involves material prosperity and economic growth. [4] Tyranny: The Rotten Fruit of Democracy? Democracies, unless they are scrupulously vigilant, have a pronounced tendency to degenerate into tyranny. Thanks to liberal historiography’s half-truths, this may seem counter-intuitive at first sight. But for those willing to think outside the boxes of prevailing ideologies, dictatorship and totalitarianism are not to be thought of as belonging to a different species of political life from democracies. On the contrary, they are possible if not likely outcomes of the accumulation of power within democratic systems. This is especially the case in modern times. There was no coup d‘etat that brought the Nazis to power. Hitler came to power in a democracy with a political structure hardly dissimilar to others existing at the time. The experience of Germany shows that majorities can be wrong, that true democracy is something more than and different from "majority rule." Majorities can tyrannize just like dictators. In fact, dictators cannot tyrannize without the complicity, if not consent, of the majority. Decades ago, Hannah Arendt gave us some of the reasons why democracies are so imperilled. She pointed out that modern societies, because of their multitudinous, mass character, tend to gravitate towards tyranny on account of the feeling of powerlessness bred by the isolation and apathy that results from living in large, urban concentrations (or, one might add, suburban dispersions). In order to rediscover lost identities and a sense of belonging to a community, people all too often fall prey to fascist ploys, which seem to lend their lives some meaning, howsoever ephemeral. Moreover, Arendt warned that "it is the obvious short-range advantages of tyranny, the advantages of stability, security and productivity that one should beware, if only because they pave the way to an inevitable loss of power, even though the actual disaster may occur in a relatively distant future." [5] All the three short-term advantages that she draws attention to, apply in the case of the US at the present moment of history. In addition, there is the enormous political inertia induced by unprecedented material prosperity for a significantly large minority. And then when you recall the mischief worked by such Thatcherite ideas as "there is no such thing as society", conditions of isolation are ripe for tyranny. Further, modern totalitarianism is made possible by the use of advanced technology. Authoritarianism has travelled far in this direction since the days of Hitler. Today, technologies of surveillance and means of commercial and state propaganda have grown into what would have been the dream of Goebbels. Government snoops can find out within minutes who your friends are, where and what you shop for, where you go on vacation, what books you read, what movies you watch and so on. In this sense we have all come to live in glass prisons of the sort imagined by Orwell in 1984 and by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, back in the 18th century, when he recommended such buildings for watching criminals and convicts. It is a claim of this essay that only a time-bound democracy of appearances survives in the West today. The deeper allegiance is now predominantly to the habits and conveniences of affluence and privilege rather than to those heroic traditions of the past which brought democracy, even if war has to be waged and the environmental prospects of future generations of humanity endangered in order to sustain and better current levels of prosperity. Anything else would disturb the sacred illusions that the giant corporations require for their continued dominance. "Democracy" and "human rights" are brought up as the necessary slogans in the kit-bag of public hypocrisies whenever domestic populations in the US and the UK have to be rallied for war and those lessons in political maturity have to be driven home to some recalcitrant society, or "rogue nation", sitting atop priceless oil reserves that the West needs. Leaders like Bush and Blair mouth such slogans as though their own ancestors had fought for the freedoms that exist in the West today, when in fact it would be nearer to the truth to suggest that they were won from their forefathers after long and bitter struggles by disenfranchised working people! Prevailing orthodoxies of mainstream liberal and conservative thought have today converged on the consensus view that democracy is a historically irreversible gain of the last few centuries, immune to the encroachments of power. Francis Fukuyama, for instance, argued that liberal democracy represented "the end of history." Yet, warnings have been issued by many a political philosopher since Plato, echoed in more recent centuries by, among others, Montesquieu and Tocqueville, in his peerless Democracy in America, that democracies have a terrifying capacity to degenerate into tyranny. Democracies and dictatorships may belong on the same continuum, instead of being in separate political compartments. Populist leaders may find that the only way to gain and maintain power is by whipping up religious, ethnic or nationalist hatred. Complacently affluent classes and wannabe-rich majorities can be offered bread-and-circuses, and when that does not work, they can be terrorized by the phantom threats of false enemies, into acquiescence by despotic rulers. Even unemployed workers, as the recent experience of some of the "red" states in the American union demonstrates, can be offered psychological relief – in the form of patriotic slogans or the need to defend moral values against "liberal assault" – to compensate for the loss of benefits and jobs that they have incurred in the wake of globalization. Plenty of "false consciousness" exists to allow the dispensations of corporate totalitarianism to prevail. In a prophetic chapter in his book, titled ‘What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear’, Tocqueville laid out his premonitions about the future of American freedom. He believed that it was imperilled by materialist preoccupations and bureaucratic routines, that it was "especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life": I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people. Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. Tocqueville was fiercely eloquent in issuing his warning: Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. [6] The prescient French philosopher, Bertrand De Jouvenel, exiled to Switzerland by the Nazis in 1943, added to this that "a society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves". [7] Tocqueville had concluded that the preservation of freedom in modern democracies can only be ensured by "democratic sentiments", which would need to be defended and practiced consistently against lesser values. Sounds familiar? Tocqueville, I submit, was describing America as we have known it, at least since World War II. De Jouvenel’s comment applies to America since 9-11. In times of crisis, the secrets of power surface and meet the public eye – if it is looking in that direction. It was thus that President Bush put all humanity on notice when he announced the doctrine of preventive war in his Axis of Evil speech in January, 2002. This was preceded and followed by a series of legislative acts designed to increase the power of the state at the expense of the people, for the ostensible purpose of securing the latter against "deadly enemies". As is being realized by more and more people, liberty has been sacrificed to security. The American government now has the right, by law, to get any particular person anywhere on the planet picked up on suspicion of being a threat to the national security of the United States. Governments that do not cooperate will be immediately labelled "rogue states" and due actions will follow, as per Bush’s "you’re either with us or against us" threat. Moreover, suspects do not have any recourse to traditional legal rights of habeas corpus or the 4th amendment to the US Constitution. Little wonder that Guantanamo and Abu-Ghraib can flourish in these times, and the American Gulag continues to grow without much resistance from the public or the media, the human rights groups not able to keep track of every major case of abuse. As of this year, the US government has also been named for wiretapping just about every phone call and email that transpires between people both within America and between Americans and people abroad. By comparison, Nixon was impeached for child-like offences. Montesquieu was one of the authors of modern democracy. Readers may remember that it was he who first proposed in the 18th century the separation of powers – whereby the judiciary, the executive, the legislature would constitute autonomous branches of government, the fourth estate (the media) of course being autonomous as well. This was expected to ensure that government of, by and for the people is preserved from the lurking danger of tyranny. This traditional separation of powers has been mocked by the effective usurpation of power in all the three major wings of the government by the Republicans in the US. And there is no opposition in the picture as Hilary Clinton tries to outdo her Republican rivals in her war cries. Congress, the agency which must approve any war, has recently endorsed the Iraq enterprise yet again. When you add to this the conformist alignments of the corporate media (the occasional expose or voice of dissent only serving to sustain illusions of a free press), the entrenched and expanding interests of the military-industrial complex and the rapidly growing trend towards the privatization of war and national security (as evidenced, for instance, by the massive use of mercenaries in Iraq and of privately run jails within the US), the unflinching support that Bush’s policies enjoy among the tens of millions of fundamentalist Christians in the Southern and Mountain states of the union, you are led to the conclusion that a political watershed has already been crossed in human affairs and the future that stares us in the face is carved in a rock of tyranny, something that has been so far out of Huxley’s Brave New World, but threatens to outstrip Nazi Germany in the museum of modern horrors it is likely to generate, for there has never been such an accumulation of destructive mechanical force in the hands of a putatively elected, legitimate government. The power of the state, always a matter of great concern, has never been greater. What we now live under in the Western world would be described by any experienced eye of the past as a "despotic" or "totalitarian democracy", with the adjective constantly threatening to consign the noun to oblivion. In fact, given the enormous role that corporations are directly or indirectly playing in the running of the state, one is led to adapt the recent term used for corporate bureaucracy, to describe this form of government: Corpocracy, government of the people, by the corporations, for the corporations. It is only a matter of time before the Constitution is suspended or radically altered and tyranny is formalized in the United States. The pieces are in place. The only thing required to mobilize them is an event on the scale of 9-11, something which will sow holy terror into the hearts of people. With the illegal cooperation of AT&T, the 15-odd intelligence agencies are working overtime to ensure accurate surveillance of the population. After the ousting of the independent-minded Porter Goss, the CIA is much more amenable to the manipulations of the government for domestic ends, a function that has traditionally been handled by domestic intelligence agencies like the FBI. The Detention Camps are empty and ready, Halliburton’s subsidiary KBR having seized the no-bid rights to construction earlier this year. What remains, barring the last rites of burial for democracy? A Boss Is Not a Leader: The Despotism of Capital The tendency towards tyranny, inherent in a democratic system, is aggravated by capitalism, at its core a despotic economic system, incompatible with economic, and ultimately political, democracy. Let us turn our attention to something which heightens the dangers of tyranny in the present global environment: the state-supported corporations that run the globalized economy. Several points need to be remembered here. Firstly, capitalism is of its very nature incompatible with economic democracy. Why? Because it is founded on a system of private property in the means of production. Private property must always be distinguished from personal property. The car I buy for my own use is my personal property. But if I run it as a taxi, employing someone to drive the car, it becomes my private property. I cannot command the labour of others with the help of personal property. But private property entitles me to do so. Now, a system of private property is also, at once, a system of propertylessness. Unless there are dispossessed people who are willing to work for me, my private property is of no use in commanding the labour of others. One reason why there is always some unemployment even in well-managed economies is that it is functional for the capitalist classes, who are thereby ensured a steady supply of labour, the wages kept in check by the extra workers. Imagine that a radical political regime is voted to office and redistributes property such that every family has some. The results would displease the erstwhile propertied classes who will have no one to work for them, assuming every family has been granted enough. Capitalism cannot run like that. It requires the many to be dispossessed so as to supply the labour that the minority elite needs for its businesses. If the instruments of state power are needed to ensure this unjust state of affairs, whereby wealth and property continue to remain unequally divided, they are deployed. The capitalist economy everywhere is run by a hierarchy of bosses in a system of private tyranny, in principle, if not in practice, accountable only to the board of shareholders of each business. However, a boss is not a leader. People at the workplace have bosses, not leaders. Leaders in democracies, unlike bosses in corporations, are accountable to the general public, in a manner that bosses are never accountable to workers in a firm. As the rules and norms of the corporation have gradually encroached upon those of public life, and as CEOs, managers and corporate lobbyists have conquered the public realm of politics with the help of public relations companies, there is room only for bosses, not leaders. Such bosses, because of underlying loyalties and commitments to corporate elite interests, routinely and necessarily abuse public trust for corporate and private gain, as was revealed in the Enron scandal which showed perhaps only the tip of "the cheating culture." [8] Even a casual glance at the business pages of dailies reveals what happens when unregulated decisions are taken at the top of private tyrannies. Everyone is aware by now of rapidly widening economic inequalities between elite and working classes in the US. The Economic Policy Institute in Washington DC reports that the average American CEO nowadays makes $11,000,000 a year, compared to the $42,000 that an average worker does. In other words, CEOs make more than 260 times the money that an average worker does. The CEO has to work just one day to earn what the worker does in working all year (260 working days). According to the EPI, this ratio was 24 in 1965! [9] Since Bush Jr. came to office in 2001, top executives have received huge tax breaks. Meanwhile the real wages of workers have remained mostly stagnant over the same period. Pensions and health benefits have suffered and jobs have become more insecure as globalization has made it possible for capital to move to locations like Mexico or China where labour is much cheaper. A survey of American MNCs conducted some years back showed that they preferred to invest in countries which were dictatorships rather than democracies. For instance, they preferred to operate in China than in the Phillipines. [10] This may also help explain why multinationals have been more reluctant to invest in India than in China, even if they can get cheaper labour and better environmental and other concessions from the government. India is a democracy and can potentially vote in a government which overturns the decisions of its predecessor. There are other reasons to believe that capitalism is profoundly incompatible with democracy. At the workplace, people have to take orders from their bosses. The same people have political rights to choose their representatives in the public sphere. The tension between the two existential predicaments is obvious: even if some people manage to retain a sense of political autonomy, habits of obedience and good behaviour at the workplace can’t not influence outcomes perversely in public politics. Also important to bear in mind is the factor of political apathy. Capitalist modern economies are tightly stretched by the constant pressure of competition. Bosses are eager to run "lean and mean" establishments. Managers want to outsell their rivals. Workers are keen to outperform their co-workers. The cumulative impact of this on mental, emotional and physical health is profound. The outcome of a competitive workaholic society is, understandably, fatigue. This easily translates into political apathy as working people, as per Tocqueville’s anticipation, are preoccupied with their material interests, when they are not recovering from stress. Moreover, the solidarity needed for effective collective action on matters of common interest is difficult to obtain in an atmosphere of competition. Less than one of eight workers in the US is unionized. Political isolation is a banal fact of life. Workers used to competing in the workplace to get or keep insecure jobs are unlikely to band together politically for their material interests under such conditions. The political energy and vigour needed to sustain a climate of "democratic sentiments" (that Tocqueville had spoken about) vanish and, in effect, you get a society inadvertently conformed to corporate interests and plans. Under prevailing circumstances, with the political process systematically shaped and manipulated by public relations companies, elections have become the business of choosing candidates in ways not too dissimilar to picking the desired brand of soap or shaving cream in a supermarket aisle. Norms of markets – allegedly "free" – are extended to the political sphere. Instead of active participation in democratic political processes which would consistently address issues of public concern even as they ultimately build candidates to stand for elections, citizens have become accustomed to passively opting for one or another of the two candidates in the fray, each sponsored by big money in a system in which campaign finance is anything but democratic. One of the world’s leading finance capitalists, George Soros, interestingly enough, pointed out "the capitalist threat" to freedom in an article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1997. [11] Arguing that the world had overcome the threats to freedom from communism and fascism successfully, he believes that the real threat now is capitalism itself! He attacked laissez-faire societies run along the lines of self-interest and "social Darwinism" as not merely unstable, unethical and unsustainable, but ultimately contrary to an "open society" which has freedom for its founding principle. The Unhappy Marriage of Capitalism and Democracy The relationship between democracy and capitalism is entirely coincidental, a happenstance of Western history. Increasingly we will be called upon to choose between the two. As a matter of fact throughout the history of capitalism, democratic movements have challenged its oppression. If we are not able to see this clearly today, it is because our eyes are clouded by the hegemonic influence of the ideology and propaganda of global elites in recent times. To the extent that the West is democratic, it is so on account of long and bitter struggles that have been fought by marginal, disenfranchised working people over the past few centuries. Even a brief overview of labour history under capitalism reveals important truths. From the Factory Girls Strikes in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts in 1834 (when women opened their mouths for the first time in public in the town) to the Air Traffic Controllers Strike in 1981 the history is a shameful and brutal one. During the first half of the 19th century, other than capitalist slavery in some quarters, workers and miners worked for 12, 14, 16, even 18 or 20 hours a day in much of Britain and the United States. [12] The first trade union in the world was the Mechanics Union of Philadelphia, which began the fight for a 10-hour working day in the 1830s. It took decades to achieve that in all the states of the union. Australia was the first country to allow its workers an 8-hour day, in 1856, the building trade workers pioneering the struggle. Nor was the 8-hour day handed out to workers on a platter. As a steel worker from Ohio puts it, "men and women marched, struck, went to jail, and were murdered for the 8-hour day." [13] May Day is celebrated every year in commemoration of the Haymarket massacre in Chicago in 1886, where workers demanding an 8-hour day were shot. In 1914, the infamous Ludlow massacre took place, whereby 20 people, including women and children of coalminers wishing to join the United Mineworkers Association were shot by the Colorado National Guard to terminate a 14-month strike against Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. As has been already mentioned, only a small fraction of American workers is unionized even today. This, in a country that preaches democracy to the world! No factory or mill-owner in England, since the time of Dickens, to take yet other instance of the point being made here, has voluntarily granted pensions or health insurance or reductions in the length of the working day or for that matter any of the large number of elements in the safety-net that workers have enjoyed since the first days of the welfare state, without resisting the change with all the means of violence available to privileged classes. Labour history is a tribute to the power of organized state violence to protect the interests of capitalists. In the more obvious political realm, the right to vote was tied to property ownership till late into the 19th century in Western democracies and was won after long and bloody struggles for justice. In the US the Voting Rights Act, granting African-Americans the right to vote, was not passed till 1965, American apartheid keeping blacks out of politics too. Despite Dr. King’s Gandhian tactics, the right was not conceded without plenty of violent state repression during the decade preceding the legislation. India had universal suffrage before the US did. The US has always been a "dollar democracy". The amount of political power effectively waged by people is proportionate to the money they have. So even if the political principle is "one person, one vote", the de facto reality is more like "one dollar, one vote". Elections have become a political market-place in which corporate selections are carried out through the intervention of lobbyists. Corporations are able to pre-select their own favored candidates because of the high cost of running a campaign. Campaign finance reform – a long overdue democratic measure – is still a pipe-dream. One could offer numerous other ways in which elections are rigged against the poor and the powerless, from the location of electoral booths far from poor communities to their disenfranchisement on flimsy grounds in hundreds of thousands, if not millions of cases, as was proved by the Florida fiasco in Bush’s 2000 election. 13% of black men (1.4 million out of a voting population of about 11 million) in the US are disenfranchised at present, a figure that influenced the outcome in Florida. One could go on. Nothing is more recent and fragile than the extension of democratic rights, even if the idea is centuries old. And what, other than the interests of privileged elites, has stood in the way of democracy? It is safe to say that democracy today is little more than the rhetorical defence of capitalism in its most cancerous stage yet. In truth, at the heart of things, the interests of capital can never be met without control of human freedom. This is, as argued above, because of the very nature of private property in the means of production. It can work if and only if there is a mass of property-less people to work for the owners of capital, a condition that surely militates against both economic and political democracy. It is a tribute to the power of the modern means of political and commercial propaganda that people – especially educated classes and intellectuals – have by now been taught to think that capitalism and democracy are, as it were, joined at the hip. In actual fact, it is more a case of the multiple demands of capitalist accumulation and global competition tearing the hips of democracy apart. If in the past, this truth has remained hidden it is because after the Second World War, the West, led by the US, managed to forge a global imperial system which made room for a labour aristocracy at home. This (domestic) capital-labour accord, as some economists termed it, yielded all the benefits of the welfare state and the privileges (like cheap oil) of neo-colonial exploitation, backed by military threats which were executed often enough to retain constant credibility. Since the ideological challenge of communism melted away with the decline of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, Washington has not felt any pressure to live up to the promises and pretences of the welfare state. Unsurprisingly, inequalities of income and wealth have been rising steadily since the Thatcher-Reagan years in both the US and Britain. Inequalities across nations (excluding, of course, rich comprador elites) have also been on the rise, thanks to the rules of international trade and finance being written and enforced in the favour of rich countries by such organizations as the IMF, the World Bank, GATT and the WTO. If any proof was needed that capitalism is, at its core, a despotic system, the success (and current envy in the Western media) of totalitarian China provides it in abundance. We know that the Soviet Union recorded historically high rates of economic growth in the 1930s under Stalinist tyranny. We also know that South Korea and Singapore experienced their most successful years of growth under authoritarian regimes in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the case of China since the late 70s outstrips every other case. It has sustained a growth rate of 8-10% over a period of almost three decades, a formidable record. How has it been able to do so? On the positive side, the massive investments in health and education under communist regimes over three decades laid the foundations of a modern industrial workforce. Instigating competition first within Chinese industry, and later beyond the borders of the country, has also played its part. State incentive policies for investment have been crucial. But equally significantly, China has not been constrained by labour, environmental and human rights standards that corporations and their representatives in public office in the West have had to heed. Its leaders have never had to worry about regaining office by going to the ballot-box every so many years. In other words, they have had a free hand in imposing long working hours, workweeks, low benefits and wages on the nation’s labour-force. The governments have also passed industrial and mining projects which would not pass environmental muster in the West. So you have an economy which is growing in much the same conditions as Europe grew in the 19th century, before ameliorating human standards had to be introduced to curb capitalist excesses for reasons of political viability and social survival. [14] The case of China should logically dispel all myths that the roots of democracy in the West lay in commercial freedom. To whatever extent Western societies have enjoyed freedom, it is on account of political compromises reached with social classes that suffered the ravages of industrial growth. Today this same freedom stands in the way of the West’s capacity to compete successfully with China without hurting its own people. The apprehensions in Europe and America are well-founded. At this juncture of history the tensions and contradictions between the requirements of global capitalism and the standards of equality, fairness and freedom that a democratic world must meet are approaching a climax. With the passage of time we will be called upon to choose between the two. If an active collective choice for democracy is not made, the "default settings" of consolidated corporate power will inevitably precipitate a global dictatorship of capital. Foreign Policy as Imperialism The ruling goals of imperialist foreign policy have been shaped by the imperatives of capitalist accumulation on a global scale since the days of European colonialism. They are aimed at spreading freedom, human rights or even economic development in the world to about the same degree as European colonial policies before World War II were actually aimed at civilizing the "barbarians" or spreading authentic Christian values. The ideology and rhetoric for the actual goals, however, have been furnished by resorting to the political achievements of democracy, something that present-day leaders and their ancestors, drawn as they are from the corporate establishment, have had little to do with. Why? Because if I want cheap resources like minerals, oil or natural gas from far-off lands for my industries, or I want to sell my products freely in overseas markets (while denying their products easy entry into mine), or I want to use the cheap skilled labour of others, I obviously cannot say that I am coming to conquer your lands and rob you. That would pass moral muster with no one, least of all with those who carry out the policies and seek public endorsement of them. Everyone in this world likes to believe that they are "good, decent" people. Therefore, I need "good, decent" reasons to influence and control your political and economic decisions. Just imagine what might happen if an oil-rich country (like Saudi Arabia or Nigeria) decided to opt out of the global system, became a democracy genuinely responsive to people’s needs and reached the conclusion that it did not wish to allow foreign companies to drill its lands for oil, because that is what the people prefer, and also heeded global calls for environmental sanity. Sanctions would not be enough. Very soon military intervention would be called for after due bad-mouthing and demonizing of the lawfully elected government of the country. (It’s happening with Venezuela which is actually violating the rules laid down by the rich countries far less!) Hence the hypocrisies of powerful (so-called) democracies are essential to the functioning of the present world order. The word "free" has been bandied about everywhere, as though free societies and free markets meant the same thing. The rich and complex notion of freedom needs to be reduced to the commercial freedom to buy and sell at will. In practice this is reducible to the freedom of corporations to invest and trade wherever they wish to, at a price that suits them. All other freedoms can wait or be destroyed. Ideologues like Milton Friedman are not alone in identifying the commercial freedom (of corporations) with the essence of freedom itself. As we have already seen, nothing is farther from the historical truth of rich countries themselves. In addition, such commercial freedom is typically bought at the price of the sovereignty of vulnerable nations (whose compromised rulers have to change their policies and standards to suit corporate convenience, release their resources in markets run by cartels of corporate buyers, open up their markets to "free trade" as defined by corporate interests or sell the labour of their women and children on the cheap). It is achieved by controlling and repressing the economic and political rights of workers and other marginalized groups everywhere. Entire ways of life across the ransacked planet have been destroyed or disrupted to make way for the commercial freedom of corporations. All this has less to do with democracy and more to do with conquest and upgraded forms of neo-colonial exploitation in which international doorkeeper organizations set up under US leadership since Word War II – the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO (earlier, GATT) – write and enforce the rules for trade and investment and allow egregious inequities and injustices, like those resulting from the US/EU-desired policy of allowing agricultural subsidies to persist and wreak havoc on millions of vulnerable people across the world. Free trade is for others. Western nations have the privilege to protect their markets. Free markets are one thing, capitalism quite another. One can be in favour of free markets, assuming they are, in fact, free, without endorsing capitalism. The textbook models of free markets are entirely compatible with an egalitarian distribution of property, everyone having some, no one necessarily having to work for someone else. There are no giant corporations in these models, actively lobbying governments, putting their men in public office to help shape state policies to their private advantage, getting easy concessions from competing governments on labour, human rights and environmental standards, setting prices in resource and product markets almost at will, making sure their currency is treated as the reserve currency, and so on. In fact, there is hardly a case (Switzerland and Netherlands being partial exceptions) of a country industrializing successfully under an external regime of free trade. Britain lifted the restrictive Corn Laws in 1846 only when its textile mills required cheap food for their workers, so as to be able to give them low wages. British rulers (often literally) killed off the competition to Manchester textiles from India by imposing heavy tariffs on Indian textiles. American industry grew under high tariff walls all the way till 1945. Japan protected its markets, much to the annoyance of the West for much of the late 19th and early 20th century. South Korea grew under protected markets with American blessings. China was autarkic till very recently. There is no such thing as successful free-market capitalism. All successful capitalism is state capitalism. All industrializing economies have needed massive state support to grow in their nascent phase. Ha-Joon Chang, whose recent book exposing the mythologies of free trade has destroyed many a reputation, argues, that rich countries are in effect "kicking away the ladder by which they have climbed to the top." Chang’s metaphor is borrowed from the 19th century economist Friedrich List, who wrote in 1841: "It is a very common device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him... Any nation which by means of protective duties and restrictions on navigation has raised her manufacturing power to such a degree of development that no other nation can sustain free competition with her, can do nothing wiser than to throw away these ladders of her greatness." [15] These "ladders of greatness" are thrown off by ("write it into the rules") policy where possible, and by gunboat diplomacy, regime change, or war, where necessary. It is this that makes empire necessary in the world. The lesson that has been learnt since the days of colonial trading empires is that the playing field cannot be kept uneven without the use of force. And without an uneven playing field you can’t always win. The complementarity between the empire and the corporations was never captured as succinctly as when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman presented his views quite candidly back in 1999. He wrote that "without America on duty, there will be no America online", that "the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist…The hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps…McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas." [16] I thought that "the invisible hand" of the market was supposed to achieve the good life for one and all on its own, without any flailing fists! Finally, it may be worth keeping in mind something well-understood, but rarely voiced openly, in public discussions of these matters: that multinational corporations are one and all locked in a global battleground of capitalist competition which forces them to grow ever larger and constantly aim at maximizing market shares, profits and growth, while minimizing costs. In practice they never have the option of growing up to a certain size and stopping at that. To survive in the world of cut-throat competition they need to want to always grow ever larger – than their nearest competitor. It is one of the best understood rules of the game, with disastrous consequences for poor countries and the environment. This is perhaps the most moral justification that can be offered for the ongoing corporate plunder of the planet. The Rich Man’s Burden: The Organized Subtleties of Neo-colonialism Colonial forms of economic exploitation have mutated into subtler, more intensified forms, instead of having vanished in the post-war world. What is new about the American empire, in comparison to all its predecessors, is that it is market-based. While other empires exploited humanity through outright conquest, loot and plunder, this has happened in the case of the American empire only on occasion, though recent imperial forays into Iraq and Afghanistan belie that rule. The American business-as-usual model of exploitation is implemented through a vast system of global markets architectured and engineered by the multiple arms of the US government, military, and the seemingly multilateral institutions, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO on behalf of multinational corporations who ultimately control markets. For them markets are free – by design. The erroneous view still holds sway in most quarters that colonial patterns of economic exploitation are things of the past. It is believed that ever since European powers were evicted from colonized countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the governments of these countries have had a free hand in guiding their political and economic destinies. After 4 or 5 decades of political independence, the jury is in. When one examines the evidence it becomes clear that the ex-colonized countries enjoy economic sovereignty only in name. Most poor countries have found, at best, limited success in overcoming poverty and underdevelopment. Indicators for health and education in the poorest countries show far less improvement than was expected or is desirable. Sub-Saharan Africa has suffered decades of stagnation, often negative growth. Wherever improvements have taken place, as for instance in Venezuela or Cuba, it has happened despite the official intervention of Western powers, not because of them. The problem has never been, as some have argued, that poor countries have not been integrated into the world economy. They are only too well-integrated. The problem is that they are integrated on the terms suitable to multinational corporations who harness the corruptibility of domestic comprador elites to meet their narrow goals with the help of governments in both rich and poor countries. Poor countries have continued to provide – at prices decided largely by Western MNCs – cheap resources, especially industrial and agricultural raw materials, to the metropolitan countries. They have served as pools of cheap labour, both skilled and unskilled. They have provided markets for manufactured goods and services from the West, usually at the cost of their own industry, agriculture and services. They have not been able to sell freely in markets in the West, which has always managed to exercise its economic and political muscle to protect its own industries. Poor countries have received limited technological support. Usually, outmoded techniques have been sold to the Third World. All these are typically colonial means of economic exploitation. When you add to this the damage done by "aid" policies (much of the aid returning to Western countries in the form of demand for their products, in addition to being used as a means of political leverage over Third World governments), commercial loans and the consequent accumulation of huge amounts of debt to Western banks and the IMF, the picture is perhaps worse than under European colonialism. Third World debt – aggressively pushed by loan-sharks in the 1970s because of the accumulation of Petro-dollars in Western commercial banks – has allowed the IMF and the World Bank to systematically intervene in the economic policies of countries throughout Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia. They have put severe conditions under which loans are offered to pay back the loans of commercial banks. The infamous structural adjustment policies – involving austerity measures like cutting off of public funds for social services, education, health, public housing and infrastructure in order to force governments to balance the budget – have caused havoc and raised levels of unemployment and poverty in all the affected economies. IMF-led devaluations of the currency, useful for rich countries importing raw materials at even cheaper rates than before, have brought high rates of inflation, raising the cost of living in many poor countries. No matter that the poor never saw the benefits of all the loans from abroad – only the rich politicians, military officers and businessmen got to enjoy the benefits of that, typically in the form of funds for speculation (often ending up on First World shores in the form of capital flight) or military weaponry or luxury consumption, which happily contributed to the profits of corporations in rich countries. The poor have certainly had to foot the bill. Thanks to such flawed policies, allowed, supported, or sponsored by Western governments, at the end of the day it is the poor who are transferring huge amounts of wealth to the rich countries. In return for the $70 billion that they receive as official aid from the West, annually, they send over $400 billion ‘back’ to the rich world in the form of return of outstanding loans and interest! The annals of colonialism can be searched to see if plunder was this extensive and official in the days of Clive or Columbus. "The time has come to end this charade," Columbia economist and UN consultant, Jeffrey Sachs says. "The debts are unaffordable. If they won't cancel the debts I would suggest obstruction; you do it yourselves." "Africa should say: 'thank you very much but we need this money to meet the needs of children who are dying right now so we will put the debt servicing payments into urgent social investment in health, education, drinking water, control of AIDS and other needs,'" he told the BBC's World Business Report. [17] In a perceptive article written after 9-11, the economist Robert Wade characterized the intentions of US policy in the post-war world in the following words: You want autonomy to decide on your own exchange rate and monetary policy, while having other countries depend on your support in managing their own economies. You want to be able to engineer volatility and economic crises in the rest of the world in order to hinder the growth of centres that might challenge your pre-eminence. You want intense competition between exporters in the rest of the world to give you an inflow of imports at constantly decreasing prices relative to the price of your exports. You want to invite the best brains in the rest of the world to your universities, companies and research institutes. You befriend middle classes elsewhere and make sure they have good reasons for supporting your framework. What features do you hard-wire into the international political economy? First, free capital mobility. Second, free trade (except imports that threaten domestic industries important for your reselection). Third, international investment free from any discriminatory favouring of national companies through protection, public procurement, public ownership or other devices, with special emphasis on the freedom of your companies to get the custom of national elites for the management of their financial assets, their private education, healthcare, pensions, and the like. Fourth, your currency as the main reserve currency. Fifth, no constraint on your ability to create your currency at will (such as a dollar-gold link), so that you can finance unlimited trade deficits with the rest of the world. Sixth, international lending at variable interest rates denominated in your currency, which means that borrowing countries in crisis have to repay you more when their capacity to repay is less. This combination allows your people to consume far more than they produce (and it periodically produces financial instability and crises in the rest of the world). To supervise the international framework you want international organisations that look like cooperatives of member states and carry the legitimacy of multilateralism, but are financed in a way that allows you control. [18] Furthermore, to add to such forms of neo-colonialism, poor countries have had to endure new forms of environmental imperialism, whereby the West has been dumping its pollutants and ‘dirty’ industries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, as per the recommendations of the ex-Chief Economist at the World Bank, and later Secretary of the US treasury, and President of Harvard University, Larry Summers. He had argued in an infamous memo in 1992 that it made a lot of economic sense for poor countries to absorb a greater share of the planet’s pollutants! [19] The US is one of the few countries which have not signed the Basel Convention (1989) which bans the dumping of toxic waste on other countries. [20] Moreover, any attempt to break out of the global system of unfair trade and finance is threatened with economic sanctions and possible regime change or outright military intervention by the West. It has happened in the case of Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Chile, Cuba, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Argentina, Brazil and many other cases. The recent confessional book by John Perkins, who served as an EHM (economic hit-man), for the US government and its sponsor corporations gives an account of how imperial interventions have been conducted over the decades since World War II. [21] In addition to the mechanisms of exploitation surveyed above, the less poor Third World economies have often been subject to the vagaries of speculators in financial markets. They have gambled with the currencies of middle-income countries like Mexico, Argentina, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea and others. Apart from the Argentine experience which led to the country ultimately boycotting the IMF, the most recent, memorable instance of a financial crisis precipitated by the actions of speculators in currency markets was the 1997 East Asian crash. Many economies of the region contracted by up to a quarter or a third of their previous size, putting millions of people out of work, causing many of them to commit what came to be called "IMF Suicides", thanks to the disastrous effects that policies of financial liberalization stipulated by the IMF had on these economies. The growing intervention of the IMF in the economic policy-making of middle and low-income countries has led to many countries, especially in Latin America, now boycotting IMF loans. In some cases Venezuela, flush with bubbling oil revenues, has bought the debts of other economies. A friend who works at the IMF disclosed to me recently that the institution is suffering a mild crisis of identity on account of the fact that no one wants to borrow from them! The irony is that John Maynard Keynes did not design the IMF in 1944 for the purposes it has been used for since the 1980s. It was never meant to be a lending institution. Its primary purpose was not to underwrite the loans made by commercial banks to poor economies, but to stabilize the balance of payments worldwide, in order to ensure stable currencies and trading relationships. If anything, its actions in recent decades have contributed to the precise opposite of this, as shrinking economies with uncertain currencies have had to be cautious about their foreign trade or have simply not had enough hard currency. The trend has been greatly aggravated by the fact that rapid improvements in electronic technology have multiplied cross-border financial paper transactions many fold. Volumes of money several times more than the volume of actual world output now routinely get traded in global stock, bond and currency markets every year, with often telling consequences for economic stability in many countries. History reveals its secrets with the passage of time. Intentions held in secret by men in power produce consequences that unfold over the decades and the centuries. Taking a bird’s eye view of the whole development experience since World War II, one can’t escape the conclusion that a whole ideology of development was spawned by the US policy elite in the 1940s to ensure that after the war was over, American corporations would have a pretext to gain access to cheap resources, labour and markets across the ex-colonized world. Institutions like the IMF, the World Bank and GATT were created to ensure that corporate goals were met. They have succeeded in that purpose, even as they have understandably failed to meet many of their stated goals. Decolonization began after World War II and Europe was forced by wars of liberation and independence movements in the colonies to retreat to its own shores in the decades after the war. Continued domination of the countries emerging from colonialism had to be justified by other means. The new emerging world powers were the USSR and the US, though the latter was miles ahead by any reckoning. The Atlantic Charter (1941), signed by Churchill and Roosevelt aboard warships on the ocean in the midst of the war, had taken an open stance against European colonialism, "affirming the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live". The Charter expressed the "wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them." It also offered nations "access on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity", something that sounds laughable today, after decades of experience with unfair trade and wars over resources. At the same time, Roosevelt, arguably the greatest American President of the past century, proposed that "minor children among the peoples of the world" be placed under the "trusteeship" of the "adult nations". [22] He had apparently inherited the paternalism of his British allies during the war. Small wonder that the Americans came up with a new moral idea to exercise influence and control in the resource-rich countries emerging from European colonialism: development. It now becomes clear what really happened on USS Augusta on August 14, 1941: the imperial baton was passed on from Churchill (as he realized Britain’s economic limitations) to Roosevelt (who, in turn, realized America’s historic opportunity). To the leaders themselves it was already quite clear who was going to be the paramount power in the world at the end of the war. It is noteworthy that we hardly hear of poverty and underdevelopment in the decades preceding World War II. After the war the IMF and the IBRD (World Bank) were set up and "development" arrived in the Economics profession as a new field. Funds were allocated to expand Economics departments in universities, seminars and conferences were organized, books and papers were published. A couple of Nobel Prizes were also awarded (Arthur Lewis and Theodore Schultz). The rage survived till the 1970s, when the oil crisis and stagflation hit the West. As political conservatism rose to ascendancy in Britain and the US, conservative paradigms of thought made a resurgence within the Economics profession. The monetarism of Milton Friedman won the day with Thatcher and Reagan. By the mid-1980s, when the enormous failure of the development project was obvious, the US government actually pronounced the death of development economics. Newsweek (May 13, 1985) reported the US representative to the Asia Development Bank as saying that "the United States completely rejects the idea that there is such a thing as "development economics"". In the words of economist John Toye development had become the "Orwellian un-thing". So much for the holy words signed by Churchill and Roosevelt in the Atlantic Charter in 1941. The era of using development as an ideology for domination of the Third World was over. Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War in 1990, Washington’s rhetoric for intervention in the affairs of other countries has shifted to spreading "democracy", "human rights" and, more honestly, "free markets" (for the corporations). The rhetoric masks the unfolding truths of growing poverty, malnutrition and hunger that capitalism in the era of accelerated globalization continues to bring to much of the world. Click here to read Part Two Aseem Shrivastava is an independent writer from India. He got his doctorate in Economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has taught Economics at US universities in the past. Most recently he taught Philosophy at Nordic College in Norway. He can be reached at aseem62@yahoo.com
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