By John Mohawk
The project of economic globalization is much more complex than many understand it to be. It is not merely the lowering of tariffs to make a level playing field for international commerce. It is, as practiced by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and U.S. foreign policy, a plan to coerce all nations of the world into behaviors which were once easily identified as markers of colonialism.
For example, "structural adjustment" is a term used to describe the kinds of measures debtor countries are encouraged, or forced, to adopt by the World Bank and the IMF. These amount to shifting resources away from public benefit programs such as food subsidies and health programs to concentrate on debt reduction. In other words, poor countries are encouraged - indeed coerced - into giving up food and medicine so they can use the money to pay debts owed to foreign banks.
Often the foreign debts were incurred when some regime borrowed money to build infrastructure - roads, pipelines, power lines - to facilitate natural resources extraction which was, in turn, being developed by foreign interests. Sometimes that money was diverted - as in embezzled, stolen, appropriated - by people in the regime.
There are many and complex ways countries get into debt, but the ideology behind globalization involves exploiting these debts to advance international capitalism and (mostly) American cultural hegemony. The advice that accompanies the conditions for loan extensions includes such things as encouraging people to speak English, the international language of commerce. The problem is, many poor countries have populations to which English is no advantage.
The debtor countries are encouraged to sell all assets, including natural resources such as gas or oil, forests or mineral rights, to outside investors. This is privatization to the advantage of foreigners.
Defenders of globalization like to point to the fact that in the search for the cheapest labor, corporations sometimes build plants which bring jobs to already desperately poor people who must now labor without unions, environmental protections, or any kind of legal rights. It is said, and in some anecdotal settings it is true, that some individuals are better off. But the costs are usually unemphasized, and the threats to the whole society are ignored in these accounts.
The mythology that surrounds capitalism is that it grew organically as production, demand and wages fluctuated according to the rules of the market. Historical globalization, as distinct from capitalism, was a product of the British Parliament in the 19th century during a period of military expansion and colonization. It was heavily subsidized, even ordered, by the state. This included the use of powers of enclosure at home and military coercion abroad. When those in power wanted something, they found a way to take it. Without the power of the state wielded in the interests of the investor class combined with overseas use of military coercion, the kind of globalization that emerged in the 19th century is quite unimaginable.
One aspect of this ambitious project was then, and is now, the privatization of the commons. The commons in England was rapidly turned over to men of commerce who built sheep ranches on land formerly used by peasants to grow food. The displaced English peasants were recruited to jobs overseas and in factories at home; and ever since then, historians and economic philosophers have asserted that this was a happy ending. (Let’s call this the British consensus on globalization and empire-building.) It also enriched the rich, impoverished the poor, and set into motion ecological transformations the world has come to regret. Workers benefited to the extent labor movements were able to demand better wages and benefits.
We are now seeing how this great contradiction of privileging the few at the expense of the many is played out in democracies. In Latin America, huge movements of the underprivileged are re-exploring versions of socialism that are defined as anything but the Washington consensus on globalization. The neoconservative vision that wealth can be created by reducing and/or eliminating social services while creating profitable investment opportunities for foreign investors - the kind of model imposed on Latin American countries in recent years - has proved both undesirable and impractical. Now that the United States is distracted by the war in Iraq, societies as different as Argentina and Venezuela are in full defiance of the Washington consensus because they understand it doesn’t work for them.
Indigenous peoples have led the way to roll back this war against the poor. The first, in this modern context, were the Zapatistas of Mexico. Mexico has been a particularly abused victim of neoconservative economics, and the Indians are among the most acute sufferers. It is no exaggeration to state that neoconservative economic policy has served to destabilize Mexico politically and the Zapatista movement was explicit in its assertion that globalization was at the root of Mexico’s problems. They were right. And in Bolivia, large grass-roots movements were energized when an American company tried to privatize all the water in a small city there. Since then, the mass movement has continued to be energized, and at the end of 2005 it helped elect an indigenous man, Evo Morales, as president.
American apologists are painting the Bolivia story as one dominated by cocaine, but it is also dominated by a globalization program which is threatening that country’s small farmers, just as it threatens small farmers in other countries and uses the powers of the state to force ”reforms” which will lead to the local farmers’ demise. Whatever its merits, one of the consequences of globalization, especially in democracies, is the rise of grass-roots movements opposing its imposition.
Three books, each from an author with a distinct perspective, can help those interested in the misguided dilemma of neoconservative economic policy and U.S. foreign policy. Richard Douthwaite’s The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth Has Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many and Endangered the Planet takes issue with the consensus in Western culture that economic growth, as measured by economists, is a desirable thing. Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in economics, worked in the Carter administration and served as chief economist at the World Bank, explains that the Washington consensus on globalization is not working in a landmark book, Globalization and its Discontents. John Gray, an important political thinker in the Thatcher administration and an intellectual of Britain’s New Right, argues that the globalization project has never worked for the betterment of societies, and won’t work now in an insightful volume, False Dawn : The Delusion of Global Capitalism.
The project of economic globalization is much more complex than many understand it to be. It is not merely the lowering of tariffs to make a level playing field for international commerce. It is, as practiced by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and U.S. foreign policy, a plan to coerce all nations of the world into behaviors which were once easily identified as markers of colonialism.
For example, "structural adjustment" is a term used to describe the kinds of measures debtor countries are encouraged, or forced, to adopt by the World Bank and the IMF. These amount to shifting resources away from public benefit programs such as food subsidies and health programs to concentrate on debt reduction. In other words, poor countries are encouraged - indeed coerced - into giving up food and medicine so they can use the money to pay debts owed to foreign banks.
Often the foreign debts were incurred when some regime borrowed money to build infrastructure - roads, pipelines, power lines - to facilitate natural resources extraction which was, in turn, being developed by foreign interests. Sometimes that money was diverted - as in embezzled, stolen, appropriated - by people in the regime.
There are many and complex ways countries get into debt, but the ideology behind globalization involves exploiting these debts to advance international capitalism and (mostly) American cultural hegemony. The advice that accompanies the conditions for loan extensions includes such things as encouraging people to speak English, the international language of commerce. The problem is, many poor countries have populations to which English is no advantage.
The debtor countries are encouraged to sell all assets, including natural resources such as gas or oil, forests or mineral rights, to outside investors. This is privatization to the advantage of foreigners.
Defenders of globalization like to point to the fact that in the search for the cheapest labor, corporations sometimes build plants which bring jobs to already desperately poor people who must now labor without unions, environmental protections, or any kind of legal rights. It is said, and in some anecdotal settings it is true, that some individuals are better off. But the costs are usually unemphasized, and the threats to the whole society are ignored in these accounts.
The mythology that surrounds capitalism is that it grew organically as production, demand and wages fluctuated according to the rules of the market. Historical globalization, as distinct from capitalism, was a product of the British Parliament in the 19th century during a period of military expansion and colonization. It was heavily subsidized, even ordered, by the state. This included the use of powers of enclosure at home and military coercion abroad. When those in power wanted something, they found a way to take it. Without the power of the state wielded in the interests of the investor class combined with overseas use of military coercion, the kind of globalization that emerged in the 19th century is quite unimaginable.
One aspect of this ambitious project was then, and is now, the privatization of the commons. The commons in England was rapidly turned over to men of commerce who built sheep ranches on land formerly used by peasants to grow food. The displaced English peasants were recruited to jobs overseas and in factories at home; and ever since then, historians and economic philosophers have asserted that this was a happy ending. (Let’s call this the British consensus on globalization and empire-building.) It also enriched the rich, impoverished the poor, and set into motion ecological transformations the world has come to regret. Workers benefited to the extent labor movements were able to demand better wages and benefits.
We are now seeing how this great contradiction of privileging the few at the expense of the many is played out in democracies. In Latin America, huge movements of the underprivileged are re-exploring versions of socialism that are defined as anything but the Washington consensus on globalization. The neoconservative vision that wealth can be created by reducing and/or eliminating social services while creating profitable investment opportunities for foreign investors - the kind of model imposed on Latin American countries in recent years - has proved both undesirable and impractical. Now that the United States is distracted by the war in Iraq, societies as different as Argentina and Venezuela are in full defiance of the Washington consensus because they understand it doesn’t work for them.
Indigenous peoples have led the way to roll back this war against the poor. The first, in this modern context, were the Zapatistas of Mexico. Mexico has been a particularly abused victim of neoconservative economics, and the Indians are among the most acute sufferers. It is no exaggeration to state that neoconservative economic policy has served to destabilize Mexico politically and the Zapatista movement was explicit in its assertion that globalization was at the root of Mexico’s problems. They were right. And in Bolivia, large grass-roots movements were energized when an American company tried to privatize all the water in a small city there. Since then, the mass movement has continued to be energized, and at the end of 2005 it helped elect an indigenous man, Evo Morales, as president.
American apologists are painting the Bolivia story as one dominated by cocaine, but it is also dominated by a globalization program which is threatening that country’s small farmers, just as it threatens small farmers in other countries and uses the powers of the state to force ”reforms” which will lead to the local farmers’ demise. Whatever its merits, one of the consequences of globalization, especially in democracies, is the rise of grass-roots movements opposing its imposition.
Three books, each from an author with a distinct perspective, can help those interested in the misguided dilemma of neoconservative economic policy and U.S. foreign policy. Richard Douthwaite’s The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth Has Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many and Endangered the Planet takes issue with the consensus in Western culture that economic growth, as measured by economists, is a desirable thing. Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in economics, worked in the Carter administration and served as chief economist at the World Bank, explains that the Washington consensus on globalization is not working in a landmark book, Globalization and its Discontents. John Gray, an important political thinker in the Thatcher administration and an intellectual of Britain’s New Right, argues that the globalization project has never worked for the betterment of societies, and won’t work now in an insightful volume, False Dawn : The Delusion of Global Capitalism.
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