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The Threat of Economic Why the Monterrey Consensus was an exercise in futility By Nat Weinstein The weeklong United Nations conference in Monterrey, Mexico, held last month was one of those cases in which “the mountain labored and gave forth a mouse.” Nonetheless, it provoked an examination by the American mass media of the terrible plight of hunger and miseries suffered by the great majority of the worlds peoples in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. “Central Americas Cities Grow Bigger, and Poorer,” is the title of an article that appeared in the March 17 New York Times. David Gonzalez, the reporter, paints a depressing picture of the human misery, the desperation, the hopelessness behind statistics such as the one indicating that nearly half of the people of the world live on less than $2 a day, and a fifth survive on $1 or less. (That doesnt include the scores of millions earning 3, 6 or 9 dollars a day in the neocolonial world and as much as 50 dollars a day in advanced industrial countries like the United States.) Severely compounding the misery of the poor in Central America is the fact that there has been a steady exodus from the countryside to already long overpopulated cities. Gonzalez explains that peasants “are abandoning the land because of civil wars, natural disasters and plummeting agricultural prices.” Agricultural prices have been driven down to the point that even a bare subsistence economy for peasants in Central America, and everywhere else for that matter, is excluded. Thus, they flee to the cities even when they know there are no jobs, no homes, and not even enough empty space to nail a few discarded crates, and cardboard boxes together to provide something in the way of shelter. The Times reporter gives us a glimpse of how the stark reality of their lives looks to the systems victims in Central American cities:
On the following day, March 18, the same newspaper followed up with a more generalized report, under the heading “World Leaders Rethinking Strategy on Aid to Poor.” More than 50 presidents and prime ministers along with representatives of the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and other such institutions and individuals were gathered together in a weeklong meeting organized by the United Nations and held in Monterrey, last month. The Times described the discussion at the UN conference as based on the general acceptance of the premise by all present that social disorder in the world today results from the fact that the rich nations are getting richer and the poor nations, poorer. Thus, Han Seung Soo, the president of the UN General Assembly, summed up the reason for the conference by quoting a line by the Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, who had correctly noted that the worlds richest nations could no longer afford to be “islands of abundance in an ocean of universal misery.” The Times report noted that some of the “most fierce critics of the wealthy world were its own leaders.” Thus, the prime minister of Belgium was reported to have said that “the collective selfishness of the rich world” has contributed to “the despair of hundreds of millions of peoplealone, dispossessed, powerless.” Whether or not these willing participants in the struggle to save capitalism mean what they say or why the say it is of no consequencethey are compelled to lift a corner of the curtain hiding the truth, and thats what counts. Even the Americans have been forced to give a dollop of lip service to the widely accepted connection between “terrorism” and poverty. Thus, even U.S. President Bush reportedly took some distance from his previous statements to the contrary by declaring to the assembled delegations: “We fight against poverty because hope is an answer to terror.” While the rich nations have agreed that each of the rich countries raise the amount of aid they contribute to the poor countries, the figure agreed uponan amount equal to 0.7 percent of their national economieswould not even put a dent in the misery of much more than half the worlds suffering masses. (Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, was reported to have “persuaded” the industrialized countries to promise to cut poverty in half by 2015, a goal he said would require $50 billion a year or more, including tens of billions from the United States.) Months passed before any response came from the United States government. However, just prior to the UN conference, President Bush broke the American silence. He pledged his administrations support for a raise in the U.S. contribution from 10 to 15 billion dollars annually by 2006that is, from 0.1 percent to 0.13 percent of its national productthat is, a little less than one-fifth the percentage pledged by the other rich nations. US budget: $15 billion to aid the poor, $437 billion for war Corporate America, for whom Bush speaks, showed that its claim to be the worlds foremost advocate of humanitarianism, amounted to pure, unadulterated hypocrisy when we contrast the U.S. pledge of $15 billion a year in aid (by 2006) to the worlds impoverished peoples with the $437 billion set aside in the U.S. federal budget for current direct military expenditures (planes, ships, guns and bombs, etc.) for fiscal year 2003! Thats 26 percent of the total $1,696 trillion federal budget for weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, another 20 percent of the U.S. budget ($339 billion) is allotted to pay for the cost of past wars (veterans benefits, interest on debts, etc.)1. Despite the entirely inadequate increase in aid pledged, when Bush arrived on the closing day of the conference, he demanded concessions from the poor nations before any aid is delivered. “Pouring money into a failed status quo,” he said upon his arrival, “does little to help the poor, and can actually delay the progress of reform. We must accept a higher, more difficult, more promising call.” (Emphasis added.) He proceeded to cryptically allude to these conditions saying that those countries that wanted aid must first make certain “political, economic and legal reforms.” By this is meant the removal of any remaining barriers to the penetration and takeover by imperialist banks and corporations of sectors of the economies of the poor nations not already under their control. And it is also a demand placed on the governments of the already poverty-stricken countries that they see to it that more “austerity” (i.e., reductions in living standards) be imposed on the people. In other words, Bush is demanding concessions from the poor countries that would more than pay for imperialisms so-called “aid.” In any case, only one of the governments of the poor countries (Cuba) has refused to sign the “Monterrey Consensus,” an accord misrepresented in the mass media as committing the rich nations “to the goals of doubling development aid to the poor and halving world poverty by 2015.” The key words here are “doubling development and halving world poverty.” But two times a little more than zero is still not much more than zero. The aforementioned Times report on the Monterrey conference notes further that “most people in Latin America, the Middle East and Central Asia are poorer than at the cold wars close Africans live no longer and have no higher incomes than they did 40 years ago.” And as the report suggests, since this has been the case since 1990, foreign aid by the five richest countries to the poorest will continue to be reduced and poverty will only get worse. So if poverty has deepened in the last decade, which was one of rapid expansion, what chance is there for poverty to be “halved by 2015” in the very uncertain period ahead? The very least that can be said is that even if a new period of expansion occurs, as has recently been projected, there is no reason to expect anything better than what happened in the 1990s. The Recession that Wasnt Lets take a look at the sudden discovery that the recession has come to an end. Whether or not it has indeed ended, however, it is the ever-present threat of global economic collapse and world capitalisms desperate efforts to forestall it, that serves to block its movers and shakers from mitigating the suffering of the great majority of the worlds peoples. And as we shall see, as rich as the advanced industrial countries are, any significant contributions they might make to help the worlds desperate poor, will have the effect of adding to the negative economic forces undermining global capitalist economic equilibrium. Thats why they cant and wont give meaningful aid to the worlds pooras will be shown in more detail below. It seems that capitalisms economic experts, closely monitoring the course of economic affairs in the United States, have concluded that the recessionwhich some bourgeois economists had been predicting might be longer than any since the end of World War IIwas suddenly declared to be overand some are saying that maybe it never was. Meanwhile, those downsized are still mostly without jobs and the global recession continues with the worlds poorest countries seeing their currencies fall in value and their debts steadily mounting. Ordinary mortals, however, no matter how expert they may be, have historically been unable to tell the precise moment that the enormously complex capitalist economic system can be said to have entered a period of expansion or contraction. Thats why the economic experts did not formally label the most recent economic contraction with the word “recession” until many months after it was determined to have begun. But suddenly, we have been told that the recession is over; based for the most part on events that had occurred during only a period of weeks. No less a curiosity is the decision by the congress last year to defeat a bill designed to spend the country out of the recession. This curiosity was made less curious on March 23 by a report in the New York Times by one of its writers on economic matters, Louis Uchitelle. He reported his discovery that at the time the bill to revive the economy was defeated in congress last year, President Bushs administration had used its executive powers to spend many more billions of dollars than were provided by the defeated bill. That undoubtedly created the “evidence” that the recession had ended. So what does it mean? Was there or wasnt there a recession; and if there remains any reasonable doubt about that, as is certainly the case, why the rush to judgment? We get a clue as to whats really going on when we take note that the bill to revive the economy that failed to be adopted last year was quietly enacted into law months later. The amount of spending to revive the economy was doubled with less risk of unnerving investors and consumers and thus be counterproductive. In other words, it happens that capitalists set great store in the role of psychology in determining the course of the economy. And there is indeed a grain of substance to that, but psychology can only play a very subordinate role in affecting the course of the capitalist economy. The tendency of capitalists to overweigh the need to manage the herd instinct of capitalist investors and many ordinary consumers is endemic. We see it a little more clearly when we look back at another time when the country faced a developing major economic crisis: A lesson from the Great Depression John Kenneth Galbraith, the highly respected bourgeois economist, closely examined the course of the Great Depression in his book, The Great Crash1929. As we shall see, capitalists are very sensitive to psychological effects upon the economy. Consequently, bad news tends to be concealed when the confidence of those who invest in the stock market and consumers in general has been shaken by any eventspolitical and military, as well as economicthat might give rise to economic pessimism. Listen to what Mr. Galbraith had to say about that:
In another section of his book, Galbraith deals with the role of speculation by large corporations, like Enron for instance. He notes that they tend to take ever-bigger risks when the economy and the stock market is booming. Describing the extent of speculation that was largely invisible during the boom of the 1920s, he makes this interesting observation that will no doubt be confirmed in the period immediately ahead of us today. Galbraith writes:
We have not yet experienced another Great Depression. And while the troubles of Enron and its auditor, Anderson, confirm Galbraiths observations to a tee, we are only at the beginning of a global economic crisis that is far from over. Once again, why capitalism cannot end world poverty We can now see a little more clearly why “all the kings horses and all the kings men” that are in charge of the banking and other financial institutions in charge of regulating the economy and preventing another major global economic, political and social crisis like the one that erupted some 73 years ago, cannot control the anarchic movement of many trillions of dollars that are circulated through hands of billions of independently operating individual human beings in the course of a year. They cannot ameliorate the terrible human social crisis plaguing the neocolonial world today, nor are they able to forestall or even moderate the coming of the second Great Depression. They cant because even the worlds richest countries cant afford to spend anything like the amount of money it would take to ameliorate the suffering of the great majority of the worlds impoverished masses. And if they did, the consequences for the future of capitalism would be even more deadly. That poses the further question, why not? Obviously they do have the wherewithal in terms of granting the so-called underdeveloped nations genuinely long-term low-interest loans that would permit them to develop a modern industrial economy. More importantly, their economic transformation from underdevelopment to an advanced industrial society would enable the borrowers to repay society as a whole by adding proportionally to the real wealth of its people. But the effect on society as a whole has nothing to do with the forces that move capitalist economic affairs. This is simply and plainly because the production of goods designed to satisfy human needs is not the force motivating and guiding the course of capitalist production. Thus, we now come to the heart of the matter. The economic crisis that is now threatening world capitalist equilibrium is already the result of too much industry, too much food, too much clothing, too much shelter, and so on and so forth. Any normally intelligent and knowledgeable capitalist understands, all too well, that helping the underdeveloped world enter the 21st century and self-sufficiency would guarantee the swiftest descent into the second coming of the Great Depression. Where would the advanced capitalist nations sell their abundance of commodities that already has every capitalist and every capitalist nation increasingly at each others throats? Witness the American champion of free trades recent decision to place heavy tariffs on imported steel. Why, because of two things: First there is too much steel being produced, more than the global economy can absorb. And second, the U.S. basic steel industry has become less efficient than that of its international competitorsincluding those in the semi-developed countries like Brazil. But this is only because Brazils labor costs (in terms of wages paid individual workers) are far below that of any of the advanced countries. There is one last important, but paradoxical, factor that helps explain why imperialist-financed aid to the neocolonial world is excluded and, in fact, imperialism has no choice but to do as President Bush has demanded in Monterrey last monthto impose conditions that increase, not decrease, the rate of exploitation by the rich countries of the poor countries. It is a direct consequence of world capitalisms desperate efforts to keep the rate of profit from taking a quantum leap down into the cellar. And this is what lies at the roots of the fatal contradiction driving the global capitalist economywilly-nillytoward economic disaster; we refer to the inexorable tendency of the worldwide average rate of profit to fall. The paradoxical dual character of commodities What we see in the workings of capitalism creates the false impression that technological developmentthe expanded use of machinery to take the place of human labor powerincreases the rate of profit. But the fact of the matter is that those technologically advanced enterprises that can produce more goodsautos, radios and televisions, food products, etc., with less human labor powerwhen measured by their use-values, do indeed produce greater wealth. But when measured in dollars, that is, their value in exchange, the source of the paradox (i.e., the contradiction) is revealed: The rate of profit for the individual capitalist is increased; but the average rate of profit for all capitalists everywhere decreases in inverse proportion to the individual capitalists increased rate of profit. And finally, just as rampant speculation by certain sectors of big business during economic booms increases invisibly, but only tends to become generally manifest at the end of each boom-bust economic cycle, so, too, is the tendency of the rate of profit hidden during booms and only becomes generally manifest during busts2! Thats why capitalism cant solve the problem of global hunger and misery and why another, even more destructive depression is unavoidable. And every measure utilized to postpone the inevitable is reduced in the final analysis to an increase in the already fantastic public and private debt. This is no secret to the most astute bourgeois economists, many of whom have actually studied Karl Marxs earth-shaking analysis of capitalist economy. They are well aware that debt has been mounting ever more dangerously since World War II. The best minds among the ruling capitalist class know that they will not emerge from the next global economic collapse unscathedif at all. Its because of this that a global war by U.S.-led world imperialism against the increasingly revolutionary masses in the neocolonial world that began toward the end of the Second World War went under the name of the Cold War. But now that the Soviet Union can no longer be used to justify the U.S.-led counterrevolutionary imperialist war, it has been renamed, the War on Terrorism. Even more ominously, American imperialism, first and foremost, has shown a capacity to risk the very existence of the human race in a desperate but hopeless effort to save their system and their privileges. That is, the American ruling class has clearly thrown caution to the winds in an effort to increasingly take up the slack in the economy by means of a steadily increasing war budget. And unfortunately for all of us, the logic of devoting 46 percent of the federal budget to war production and its subsequent costs leads to actual war. In short, the alternative before the human race is indeed as it was posed by Marxists long agoeither Socialism or Barbarism! Or, as the latter alternative was reflected in the title of the movie describing the horrors of the Vietnam War, either a world socialist society without borders and without capitalist inhumanityor “Apocalypse Now!” 1 Budgetary figures derived from War Resistors League, 339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY. 2 For a more detailed analysis of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, see the May 2001 edition of Socialist Viewpoint, Vol.1, No.1, “Is Global Economic Collapse Inevitable?” |
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