strategic factors in economic development, nicholas kaldor (1967)

(vii): economic constraints are critical (labour supply being central) -- not efficiency of management, what have you

(6): the major explanation for industrial take-off is going to be an economic one (response of supply to demand, response of demand to supply)

(7): fast rates of growth are centrally dependent on fast rate of growth of manufacturing (this characterizes the transition from 'immaturity' to 'maturity')

(12): it's not productivity or rate of technological change that explains why the secondary sector is central

(15): the fundamental reason is a dynamic relationship between changing rates of productivity and output (not static)

(21): mining and agriculture, on the other hand, are 'diminishing returns' industries -- growth of productivity outpaces growth of output

(22): services sector will also be insufficient [though reason given here is a bit hurried]

(23): sum

(29): three sources of demand, driving growth

1. real income/consumer demand -- the more consumers make, the more they'll spend on manufactured goods
2. capital investment -- growth of manufacturing sector generates own demand
3. changing structure of foreign trade -- here story of Phase I (where country substitutes home production in light industries, ISI) --> Phase II (where country starts exporting consumer goods) --> Phase III (where country starts to do ISI in capital goods) --> Phase IV (where country starts to export capital goods)

(33): two constraints on supply, inhibiting growth

1. domestically--when industrial sector grows, it needs to absorb goods and services; externally--will need increased imports, which can threaten balance of trade
2. manpower -- a country will need 'employment' growth, which in the early stages will come from the 'disguised unemployment' on the land.

(39): the labour-intensiveness in services means that productivity growth causes it to 'mop up' a significant proportion of the w-force

(41, 45): this can be a problem, if it prevents people from working for industry (because of decent wages in services), given manufacturing's centrality to growth (Kaldor using example of the UK)

(46): advanced vs. mature -- an advanced country is one in which the supply of labour to industry is elastic, whereas a mature country experiences a shortage of labour to industry when demand calls (all countries headed towards maturity)

(54): agriculture, even if highly productive, cannot drive growth (when highly productive it can only absorb a fraction of the working population)

(55): key--one general cause explaining underdevelopment is 'backwardness of agriculture' -- you can't grow secondary and tertiary sectors without an 'agricultural surplus'

(56): key--agricultural growth does not take 'external stimuli', but presupposed endogenous changes in the social framework of agriculture

(57): low productivity (despite low wages) make industrial development for many countries in age of 'free trade'

(59): key--the growth of domestic industry is dependent on the growth of internal purchasing power, which will demand robust growth in agriculture (suggestion that ISI was done in by the failure of the agricultural sector to respond to the stimulus adequately)

(61, 62): key-- it is important to keep developing unless one raises export potential by improving the growth of domestic output to be competitive--but this presupposes a robust internal market, which will help productivity rise to the point at which one can be competitive

(62-63): you cannot devalue/tweak exchange rates and become competitive. there is no substitute for productivity/lower costs

(65): advanced countries protect their industries, thus posing obstacles for underdeveloped countries

(66): protectionism as 'luddism'

(67): the existence of advanced countries has not been a 'bad' thing for underdeveloped countries, all things considered [hmm]

It was not entirely surprising. South Punjab is a region mired in poverty and underdevelopment. There are few job prospects for the youth. While the government has built airports and a few hospitals, these projects are symbolic and barely meet the needs of the area. It’s in areas like this, amid economic stagnation and hopelessness, that religious extremists find fertile ground to plant and spread their ideology.

Brenner makes two serious errors. He does not pay attention to class struggle outside of northern Europe. And he does not notice that what was happening in the non-European world after 1492 was class-based commodity production, not merely "commerce." Euro-Marxism no longer needs Brenner's theory, because Euro-Marxism no longer worries much about the Third World. Euro-Marxism is not entirely sure that the Third World exists (Harris, 1986; Young, 1990). It is not entirely sure that anything exists.

notes on capital
chapters 26-33: primitive accumulation

(873-874): worth flagging this page, as it outlines the contrast between Marxist and liberal positions on force/conflict within capitalist production.

(874-875): "so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production."

(875): Marx making explicit the normative consequences of the transition toward the "double freedom" of the proletariat: at once free from serfdom and the "fetters of the guilds" ["and it is this aspect of the movement which alone exists for our bourgeois historians"], and at the same time "robbed of all of their own means of production." Quite clearly, here, we are speaking of the dialectics and contradictions of historical progress.

(876): The last sentence contains all that is regrettable about Marx's "universalizing" of the British experience--by making Britain the "classic form" of expropriation of rural areas, he, quite unwittingly and against his more explicit instructions, inspired failed attempts to read quite different histories through this classic, universal lens.

(877): Feudalism finished by the fourteenth century--the vast majority of the population as "small peasants."

(878): FN #3, fascinating. reflections on Japan and liberal attitudes toward the Middle Ages, possibly hinting at a contempt for Whiggish interpretations of history's march that ought to dampen the spirits of crude Marxist modernizers.

(879): here Marx, in the manner of this entire book, leaves the question of the state-society interface open to history, without compromising the thrust of his class analysis.

(880): implicit in this is an appraisal of legislation's utility in the face of history's march. and, to be honest, marx is not very generous, especially if we're speaking of big sweeps. what this implies for agency, i think, is less clear, since these are cosmetic laws authored and implemented largely by kings at the behest of tradition. (see also 885). at the same time, it is important to stress that the identity between legislation and ruling class interests is not trivially true, in that--as one sees with the reports on proletariat health after the corn laws--a class can be economically ascendant but politically (and temporarily) relatively impotent. yet of course these are exceptions that can be assimilated into the rule.

(884): the theft of state assets at "ridiculous" prices--where have we heard that before?

(886): "the identity between the wealth of the nation and the poverty of the people" -- a not-so-indirect rejoinder to liberal triumphalism.

(887-888): "'Upon the whole, the circumstances of the lower ranks of men are altered in almost every respect for the worse.'" it should be clear, then, that we are not speaking of the Marx of the modernizers' imagination. or, at least, he does not share their totalizing fixation with the future, even if they would agree on policy forward. there is room, in other words, for a recognition of place.

(888): again, the non-identity between the "nation" and the "people" -- the bourgeois becomes the torch bearer for the "nation", a move which allows him to speak in the name of the people he dispossesses.

(889): dating enclosures: late 1400s to late 1700s

(892): hinting at the perpetual nature of primitive accumulation, much like harvey's position

(893): an interesting side-note to Marx on nature: here, in this portrayal of expropriation, the small farmer simply forms another part of the natural backdrop. he is dead to the bourgeois' history, precisely he--like all else that is "natural," precedes it. an alternative, very literal embedding of the "social" in the "natural."

(896): important passage, for two reasons: (a) prefigures the problems of the third world, in that the peasantry is being thrown onto a market that cannot properly absorb it (b) prefigures Foucault, in that the peasantry has to be disciplined into accepting an entirely new routine and set of values (cf. the listed punishments for vagabondage)--has to be "modernized." Lumpen activity is theorized in this context, and has to be done so in the contemporary Third World, as well (gangsterism, terrorism, etc.)

(899): "Even at the beginning of the reign of Louis XVI, the Ordinance of 13 July 1977 provided that every man in good health from 16 to 60 years of age, if without means of subsistence and not practising a trade, should be sent to the galleys."

(899-900): here Marx clearly seems to overstate his case, making normal a state of affairs that is highly idealized. against this passage, it is important to re-assert Harvey's reminder that primitive accumulation and the State are always important tools for the ruling class--in that sense, Marx's account is far too kind; the notion that this violence is transitional and particular to a specific epoch needs refutation.

(902): the first minimum wage, where before there were only maximum wages being proposed.

(903): the sordid history of bourgeois positions on trade unions, including the French Revolution's banning of them in 1791! liberty means, as it always has for the bourgeois, the liberty of a particular class. the timelessness of the worker's oppression, then, is here made clear.

(910): Marx's suggestion here, that observers are too ready to see the large-scale capitalist without also appreciating his dependence on a plethora of networks of smaller-scale production, resembles Arrighi's critique of the Euro-centrism of theories of the Big Corporation. We do have to ask what this means for theories of centralization/concentration--and it is not sufficient to say that it "opens them up to history", even if that is true and important.

(910-911): a further important point--expropriation is not simply important to the reconfiguration of structures of production, but it also is critical to reconfiguring consumption. it is only once the workers are divested from the right to produce their own means of subsistence that they become dependent on a market. (to this one can append Marx's Foucaultian moments--they have to be "taught" how to consume).

(915): "the author should have reminded himself that revolutions are not made with laws."

(916): Marx on violence, implicitly: "Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power."

(916-917): Marx on the colonies, hardly an apologist for empire.

(918): Marx here makes a critical chronological intervention, in stressing that colonialism (as commercial supremacy) is coeval with manufacture, and that it helps mature industry. In other words, colonialism was critical for industrial predominance. By the late 19th century, this has changed--one can only sustain commercial supremacy if industrial forces are already sufficiently matured. This is important in better understanding the changing nature of colonialism, itself.

(920): Arrighi's narrative is here being prefigured, as Marx recounts the shifting centers of the international credit system. But, I think, there is a clear need to make it more systematic than what is presented here, as Arrighi does.

(920): Capital as "the capitalized blood of children"--unforgiving, and absolutely correct.

(921-922): These passages are key to any comprehensive Marxist theory of the state. Especially if we are going to argue that primitive accumulation is a continuous feature of life in modern capitalism, then the State--as provider of "original" capital--has a continuous, protective role to play (in other words, the bailouts can be represented as a kind of primitive accumulation).

(923): Marx's re-telling of the historical crimes of capitalism makes for important reading. Why do liberals never have to "own up" to these crimes when endorsing this system of production, the way that commies in the case of their own beliefs? There is something to be said here about Walter Benjamin and the stealthy cloaking of past crimes in the narrative of present progress.

(924): "Liverpool grew fat on the basis of the slave trade"

(926): "...capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt"

(928): Though my own obsession with the normative implications of Marx's dialectics is important, it is also moot. Because Marx is, of course, not suggesting that we stop (or try to stop) history at any given stage of its advance. It is not a case of deliberating on the principles we find superior, and working to embody them in a world of our making. Rather, history advances quite in spite of our best efforts. We can observe dialectics, amidst all this (and the implications of that attentiveness for the bourgeois historians are important), but we cannot intervene.

(929): Why the proletariat? "...with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united, and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production." Might a close-reading of this passage be in order, especially concentrating on those three words, "trained, united, organized."

(929): This is important (and was argued on preceding pages, as well): when Capital mobilizes to argue that it defends the cause of private property, it falls to us to remind the ideologues that this is one kind of private property--or, rather, the private property of one class, in particular. what's more, in the process of primitive accumulation, this system has little problem in obliterating the private property of millions of small producers and peasants. (see also 931)

(932): speaking of the colonial imperative to transform structures of production in the colony, Marx invokes the schematics of uneven development: "In the interest of the so-called wealth of the nation, he seeks for artificial means to ensure the poverty of the people."

(932): absolutely foundational to this entire process is this point that Capital is not simply a wad of cash ready to be deployed, but a wad of cash ready to be deployed in a particular social relation: "property in money, means of subsistence, machines and other means of production does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if the essential complement to these things is missing the wage-laborer, the other man, who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will... capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things.

(938-939): excellent passages against which to develop a history of emigration--again, as always, this speaks of a Marx for whom theory is open to history, even if the framework's contours are established, as well.

from "the darker nations: a people's history of the third world" by vijay prashad (part IV)

(224): A hundred years after Columbus arrived on the island of Jamaica in 1494, the Arawak population of a hundred thousand dwindled to a handful. In time, the entire population was cleansed, and the island was peopled by English colonial officials and plantation owners as well as enslaved Africans and indentured Indians. Captive labor grew the sugarcane that provided the main economic resource of the island. Rebellions came over time, and these generated a strong consciousness of distaste for the brutality, and paternalism of colonial rule. It took centuries for independence to come, and when it did come in 1962, it was overdue.
(224-225): The new regime of Nelson Manley's People's National Party crafted a social development agenda to counter the chainless bondage of postcolonial life.... Economic policy generally drew from the import-substitution theory, and the government relied on targeted direct foreign investment, notably in the bauxite sector. The latter provided Jamaica with most of its foreign exchange earnings. Discovered in the 1940s, the bauxite reserves fell prey to Canadian and US firms starting in 1952. These firms have since dominated the extraction of the mineral, with Jamaica becoming the largest exporter to North America in the 1960s. But as with sugar and tourism, the Jamaican people did not benefit from their natural resources. The only return to Jamaica came in the way of modest taxes to the government, meager wages to the working class, and a small tribute to the Jamaican managers at the mines and plantations--for this reason, what Jamaica exported despite its fabulous resources was cheap labor, and what it gained for that was a pittance toward its grandiose development aims.
(225-226): Despite the decent rate of growth, Jamaica could not raise the funds to cover its import bill; over 60 percent of the goods used in the country came from abroad (including energy and consumer goods, but also about half its food). Unable to cover its import bill as a result of a failure to diversify its economy, the Jamaican government relied on foreign investment and tourism to balance its books. The erratic, but almost always low prices of its minerals (bauxite) as well as its plantation crops (bananas and sugar) meant that the balance of payments suffered from a chronic deficit.
(226): By the early 1970s, the government reactivated its efforts to break Jamaica out of its impoverished chrysalis at the nether end of global capitalism. Manley's son Michael ran a ferocious and successful political campaign against the global economic system that stacked the deck against countries like Jamaica. Once in power, Michael Manley promoted the construction of democratic socialism for Jamaica, but his regime did not try to disassociate itself from the world capitalist system... Keeping Jamaica hooked up to the infusion of foreign aid or investment meant that the government had to respond to the demands of the foreign money managers rather than the long-term developmental needs of the people of Jamaica.
(227): [DECLINING TERMS OF TRADE] Bauxite was not the only unprocessed commodity to experience a sharp decline in its price into the early 1980s. If the 1970s saw a marginal rise in the price of certain nonpetroleum commodities, by the 1980s there was an across-the-board drop in these prices. Single commodity export-dependent countries lost earnings of as much as $290 billion between 1980-1991 as a result of the decline in their terms of trade. For sub-Saharan Africa, the impact was gruesome. For much of the region, nonfuel primary commodity goods amount for about one-third of the state's export earnings. The decline in the terms of trade meant that these countries lost on average about 5 percent of their gross domestic product...
(229): [DEBT CRISIS] World inflation, high oil prices, and a drop in commodity prices affected the reserves, as it did those of most of the darker nations. In 1960, the total debt of the 133 states that the World Bank counted as part of the "developing countries" held a total public and private debt just short of US $18 billion. In ten years, the debt had escalated to $75 billion., and when Jamaica went into fiscal crisis, it was $113 billion. By 1982, the debt had reached the astronomical figure of $612 billion. While many scholars and commentators blame the oil crisis of 1973-1974 for the ballooning debt, this is a superficial argument. The rise in oil prices due to the action of the OPEC cartel only exacerbated tendencies that had already stymied the social development of the formerly colonized states. The distorted development agenda followed by most of the third World... and the imperialist pressure faced by these states produced a structurally impoverished international political economy. When the oil crisis hit, it provided the conjuncture for the Third World's structural rot.
(229): In 1974-1975, the nonpetroleum exporting states of the Third World had to come up with $80 billion to finance their external deficits. Of this, about $36 billion came from private sources. Commercial banks in the G-7 that found that the rate of return within the advanced industrial states declined as productivity rates grew flat, turned eagerly to fund the Third World states... But the banks would not dole out their capital without cover from the IMF. If the IMF sanctified the state with a short-term standby agreement, it provided a "seal of approval" for more funds. The IMF loans often fell far short of the amount needed, so the IMF acted as insurance for the private commercial banks... The money swept into the Third World, but not without a prospect of return. In 1975, Rothschild reports, "each of the five largest US banks made more than 40 percent of its profits from foreign operations. Chase was an extreme case. It earned 64 percent of its profits abroad, as compared to only 22 percent in 1970.
(230): How could the impoverished pay back these enormous loans?... The defaults did not come because the IMF, backed by the US government and the newly confident elites of the darker nations, strong-armed governments into the cannibalization of their resources to maintain the payment schedules. After the Mexican collapse of 1982, the US government proposed the Brady Plan (1989), which had two elements. First, the banks lent money to cover the debt if the country provided assurances to pay back the loan and the debt, and second, the IMF and the US Department of the Treasury sanctified the loan if the country entered a process of significant economic reform.
(231): [DEBT CRISIS AS TRIBUTE] By 1983, capital flows reversed, as more money came from the indebted states to the G-7 than went out as loans and aid. In other words, the indebted countries subsidized and funded the wealthy nations. In the late 1980s, the indebted states sent an average of $40 billion more to the G-7 than the G-7 sent out as loans and aid; this became the annual tribute from the darker nations. By 1997, the total debt owed by the formerly colonized world amounted to about $2.17 trillion, with a daily debt-service payment of $717 million. The nations of sub-Saharan Africa spent four times more on debt service, on interest payments, than on health care. For most of the indebted states, between one-third and one-fifth of their gross national product was squandered in this debt-service tribute. The debt crisis had winners: the financial interests in the G-7.
(231): During the first six months of 1974, when the fiscal effects of the oil crisis became clear,
the G-7 enjoyed a $6 billion surplus with the nonpetroleum exporting Third World states, but it suffered a $41 billion deficit with the oil exporting states. A year later, the nonpetroleum states owed $21 billion, whereas the G-7 owed the oil group $21 billion. The scale had been balanced.
(231): Furthermore, the oil states... held their profits largely in US dollars, which meant that as the US dollar abandoned the gold standard in 1971, its own standing in the global economy remained high because petrodollars kept it in demand. The rise in petrodollars allowed the United States to abandon the very macroeconomic restrictions it demanded of the Third World, and therefore run a deficit to strengthen its domestic economy and expand its already-considerable military.
(233): The IMF plan was rigorous. First, it called on the government to devalue its currency to discourage imports and increase its ability to export its products. The policy intended to shift the import-substitution thrust to an export-oriented economy. Second, the government had to discourage an increase in wages to keep down the need to import goods. Third, the IMF called for the reduction of the role of the state in the economy... Fourth, the state needed to sell off its public-sector assets and enhance the private enterprises. Finally, the state had to hamper the money supply and raise interest rates to induce "fiscal discipline."
(233): In Jamaica, the immediate effects of IMF policy fell on the rural and urban working class. Inflation soared as the Jamaican dollar faced significant devaluation and price of basic goods began to skyrocket (chicken up 74 percent, salt-fish 285 percent, milk 83 percent, flour 214 percent, and cooking oil 72 percent). The IMF austerity regime dropped real wages by as much as 35 percent in 1978 alone. By 1980, the unemployment rate in Jamaica soared to 30 percent or perhaps more. About 60 percent of Jamaican households began to rely primarily, if not exclusively, on the income of women, many of whom worked in unrewarding sweatshops in Kingston's free trade zone. In that zone, 80 percent of the employees were single mothers whose desperation to keep their families alive meant that three-quarters of them worked overtime.
(234): In 1990, a senior IMF economist studied the IMF-enforced stabilization measures from 1973 to 1988, the period when the structural adjustment bombed the Third World. His measured study found that "the growth rate is significantly reduced in program countries relative to the change in non-program countries." The IMF produced a patient with contracted economic activity, the destruction of the capacity for long-term economic growth, the cannibalization of resources (what is known as "asset stripping"), and a consequent return to being an exporter of raw materials. Much of this resulted in rising inequality in terms of class and gender, in addition to widespread environmental devastation.
(236): By the end of 1980, the per capita income in Jamaica fell by 40 percent.
(237): Marcos, Suharto, and Seaga [Edward Seaga, who succeeded Manley in 1980] mastered the art of political illusion: by a sleight of hand, they posed as efficient nationalists as they opened their countries to unregulated corporations. The national bourgeoisie, represented in Jamaica by Seaga, camouflaged their enthusiasm for "reform" by making the claim that there is no alternative and the IMF made us do it as well as by touting the amount of US and IMF money that flowed into the country as a result of the reforms.
(238): In 1981, the island's gross domestic product was $3 billion, but three years later it fell to $2 billion... IMF-driven globalization exacerbated the collapse of the Jamaican economy... The institutional impact of IMF-driven globalization was heavy. The new reforms pushed by Seaga's government resulted in a weakened responsive state. Between the mid-1980s and 1989, Jamaica's government fired about a third of its public employees, "both through privatization of public companies and through central government layoffs"... The national liberation state was disemboweled in this process.
(238): The neoliberal state now stakes itself more on repression than on responsiveness... From 1979 to 1986, the Jamaican police killed more than two hundred people per year... In the conditions of total social and economic collapse, gang violence or community protection against gang violence became the order of the day. Social anomie intensified alongside IMF-driven reforms, and the neoliberal state responded with the bullet.
(243): The G-7 dominated the IMF procedures and policies, and regarded its rules as being for the darker nations and not for the advanced industrial states. For this reason, the G-7 did not adhere to the IMF structural adjustment demands against budget deficits and subsidies. The G-7 broke the rules when it wanted to... The IMF served the G-7, and not the G-77... The statement showed that whereas almost a hundred Third World states accounted for less than 37 percent of the IMF's voting power, the five leading industrial powers controlled more than 40 percent, while the United States alone held 20 percent of the votes in the IMF.
(245): In the thirty years after 1960, the Tigers' total share of total world exports increased from 1.5 to 6.7 percent. Their share of total exports from the Third World rose from 6 to 34 percent, as their share of Third World manufacturing exports rose from 13.2 to an unbelievable 61.5 percent. Unlike most great leaps forward of this kind, the Tigers did not grow at the cost of extreme domestic inequality. By 1990, all the Tigers showed a substantial improvement in income distribution...
(246): Singapore... had the privilege of being the second most competitive economy in the world (after the US). The GDP of this small island grew from 1965 to 1990 by an average of 6.5% per year... The engine for this explosion was Singapore's exports of manufactures. In1960, only 7.2 percent of Singapore's gross domestic product came from manufactured exports, whereas by 1990 manufactured exports accounted for a little more than three-quarters of the gross domestic product.
(249): The sensation of Singapore and other other Tigers came in large part from a set of advantages exceptional to them. For one, the colonial experience of the Tigers was objectively beneficial. Seized by the British as commercial bases for their China trade, Singapore (1819) and Hong Kong (1841) inherited few of history's problems. There was little agriculture, and what there was soon vanished before the hunger for buildings... Both Singapore and Hong Kong thrived as duty-free ports for opium and other commodities. These were paradises of capital, where the problem of production (and hence workers) was shipped elsewhere. [SEEMS CONTRADICTORY, IN LIGHT OF LATER ADMISSION THAT COMMUNIST TRADE UNIONS PLAYED PROMINENT ROLE IN SINGAPORE] These were almost purely entrepots. Occupied by the Japanese, Taiwan and Korea experienced an assault on their landlord class and forced land reform. Feudalism disappeared at the butt of an Arisaka rifle. In addition, the Japanese colonial machine exported its zaibatsu-state complex for capitalist development.
(249): A brutal war between the British and the Communist Party ran from 1948 until Malaysia's independence in 1957.
(250-251): Politics interfered with the necessary work of development; the ideological framework developed by Lee for PAP secluded the work of development... The Tigers emulated each other on this score: two consecutive dictatorships (led by Park Chung-Hee and Chun Doo-Hwan) controlled South Korea from 1960-1988; in Taiwan, the Kuomintang ruled a one-party state from 1949-1996; and Hong Kong remained a British colony until 1997.
(251): Even as the Third World's bourgeoisie lavished praise on the East Asian miracle in the 1980s, during the 1950s and 1960s, the Tigers traveled a familiar route, albeit with better basic conditions (land reforms and institutions such as the chaebols for industrial organizations). Singapore's PAP, led by the charismatic Lee, followed Goh Keng Swee's advice on state intervention. The Development Plan (1960-64) adopted the import-substitution industrialization strategy. Whatever funds could be harnessed went into state-owned enterprises...
(252-253): [KEY BREAK WITH ISI--THIS WHOLE ACCOUNT IS SLIGHTLY WEAK, I THINK] When Singapore broke from Malaysia in 1965, it had to reassess the import-substitution strategy because now the small island alone did not have a sufficient domestic market to carry through the program. This specific event, the caesura from Malaysia, caused the cabinet to move the island state toward an export-oriented manufacturing plant... To transform Singapore into a major transshipment entrepot and manufacturing site required an enormous infusion of capital... The secret to the Tigers' sensation lies in this original infusion of capital, because only with it could their various institutional advantages shine. A large amount of the investement capital came from PAP's ability to capture domestic savings... Additional money came from US government aid, although this played less of a role in Singapore than in Taiwan ($13 billion) and Korea ($5.6 billion)... More than domestic savings and foreign aid, the Tigers in the 1960s relied on investment from transnational corporations. Lee Kuan Yew recognized early that his goal was "to make Singapore into an oasis in Southeast Asia, for if we had First World standards then business peple and tourists would make us a base for their business and tours of the region." To draw in tourists and finance capital required lenient rules and clean streets. Lee provided the latter through his authoritarian state; his government created the conditions for the former in haste. It worked: between 1960 and 1990, Singapore enjoyed the world's highest investment ratio... By 1973, Singapore abolished quotas and tariffs to create a free-trade port. It created EPZ's, which blossomed because the staet removed all income taxes and allowed them to function without regulation... [YET] The high rates of investment did not change the nature of the Singaporean economy; it produced low-end goods for the world market. Singapore needed to go after the high-end, high-value goods to hasten its development and break out of its dependency on foreign capital. Starting in 1979, PAP inaugurated a new targeted investment strategy. It gave immense incentives for foreign capital to invest in industrail manufacturing, tourism, trade, transport, and communication as well as "brain services" (medical and financial). This "Second Industrial Revolution" required and infusion of skill and a new kind of investment. The import of skill was not new to the Tigers. Because of Communist insurrection and insurgency, the well-educated and upwardly mobile professionals fled to Taiwan and Hong Kong (from China), South Korea (from the North), and Singapore (from China and Malaysia). These professionals brought with them mercantile and technical skills that came gratis to their host societies. In the early years, all the Tigers invested heavily in their human capital: state-funded and managed educational systems that stressed technical skills, and an enhanced social wage that drew and maintained populations... Singapore developed its high-technology firms, but structurally its economy remained dependent on foreign investment (mainly from transnational corporations and private portfolio investment). As Japanese investment dried up in the late 1980s, Chinese investment kicked in. China, boosted by the human capital growth of its socialist era and the EPZ performance on its coastal rim, generated investment for the East Asian manufactures...
(255): IN 1997, the Thai bhat failed, setting off a chain reaction across the rim until the Tigers had to go to the IMF with their hats in hand for a bailout. What had struck the rest of the Third World from the late 1970s onward, hit East Asia two decades later. While the Tigers' collapse appeared structural, as the dust settled it became clear that they had been the victims of financial speculators... China's sheer economic size allowed it to weather the storm, and its stability provided a lifeline for parts of the East Asian world. The commodity price drop explains not only the downturn but also the structural closeness of the Tigers to the rest of the darker nations.
(261): ...[M]ost of the Saudi royal family had enjoyed a pragmatic relationship with Wahhabism: they accorded it respect in public, but lived wilder lives in private (including during long sojourns to Europe). [Crown Prince] Faysal was different. He was a true believer.
(262): The reinvention of tribalism and other atavistic ideas is equally central. Joseph Desire Mobutu, raised in the Belgian Congo by European friars, led the coup against the left-wing prime minister Patrice Lumumba in 1960. Lumumba's Congolese National Movement Party took the newly freed Congo leftward and disadvantaged European capital... Mobutu, backed by the Belgians and the United States, overthrew and killed Lumumba... Within a few years, to consolidate his position, Mobutu conducted the Zaireanization of the Congo: he changed his name (Mobutu Sese Seko) and that of his country (Zaire), and insisted on a series of cultural returns to an idea of the pure cultural heritage of Zaire.... Mobutu stole an estimated $5.5 billion from his country at the same time as he tried to portray himself as a Zairean like any other.
(263-265): Oil came into the picture for Saudi society in the early years of ibn Saud's rule (1933). Hastily, ibn Saud signed concessions to US-British oil firms. The corporations flourished. The Saudis acted as sentries of a reservoir that holds a quarter or more of the world's oil, while the US and British governments offered security for the longevity of the antidemocratic regime... Saudi largess went toward the prolfligate consumption of the royal family and religious charity. By 1958, the oil-rich land was in debt by $480 million. Crown Prince Faysal, who exerted his own authority against his brother King Saud, went to the IMF in 1957, and earned some credits in lieu of a tighter fiscal policy and a devalued rial. The oil merchants thrived, but the Saudi people suffred... The stalled state expenditure exacerbated the population's already-diminished set of expectations. They were tinder for Nasserism, Third World nationalism, and Communism... In 1953, the workers at Aramco conducted an unsuccessful two-week strike to form a union. Then, in July 1956, when King Saud came to Dhahran mass demonstrations greeted him. The workers wanted basic rights, while the population wanted the removal of the growing military base... The year before, at the Taif Air Base in the western mountains of the kingdom, Saudi troops mutinied in Nasser's name. They were executed. In this context, Nasser arrived in Saudi Arabia in 1956... These Nasserite currents came to the fore in the early months of 1958... By March, Saudi frustration with Nasser had reached a high pitch. The crown tried to assasinated him as his airport approached Damascus International Airport The Nasserite threat was always greater than that of the Communists, who in Saudi Arabia numbered few. The Organization of Saudi Communists operated under the aegis of the National Renewal (later, Liberation) Front from 1954 onward. Only in the 1960s did peninsular Marxism make its mark--in Yemen and Oman. The 1962 nationalist revolution in Yemen provided a haven for the export of Third world nationalist and revolutionary ideas across the region... When the Marxists seized power in South Yemen in 1967, the Popular Front was renamed the Popular Front for the liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf. The Saudis, now much more militarily confident than they were in the 1950s, financed the resistance against South Yemen and that of the Omani government against the Popular Front. They were scrupulous in the extrication of the Left from the peninsula.
(265): Nasserism, like a virus entered the palace walls... Their leader was Prince Talal bin Abdulaziz, the "Red Prince"... Talal broached the idea of a National Council in 1958, and now the Free Princes moved to gain public support. They had no mass base., and since they did not have the support of their clans, they failed to penetrate Saudi society... Talal used the bulk of 1961 to create secular social institutions in Saudi society and ameliorate unemployment through public works. The Free Princes appeared to be on the road to accomplish a left-wing palace coup, to do what the Free Officers did without the use of the military. Then Faysal moved against Talal... Talal and his group withdrew to Beirut. The Free Princes were squashed...
(266): Not long after Faysal's coup de grace against the Nasserites and the Communists, he hosted the WML. Faysal had a senior partner in Aramco, and behind them was the US government. The US government gave "wholehearted support" to the WML as an instrument to roll back Third World nationalism and dent the USSR by appeal to its large Muslim population (perhaps 45 million)... US president Eisenhower held a summit in 1957 with the Saudis and enunciated his doctrine. The Eisenhower Doctrine was framed to contain Communism in general, but in the specific instance of the Middle East to promote the Saudis and monarchical forces (such as the Shah of Iran and the kings of Jordan and Iraq) as an alternative to Nasserism.
(269): [EVEN THIS ONLY WENT SO FAR--INJUSTICE CAN ONLY BE MADE SO PALATABLE, IN OTHER WORDS] IN 1979, a group of devout Muslim activists organized into the Movement of the Muslim Revolutionaries of the Arabian Peninsula laid siege to the Masjid al-Haram. They defended their actions as the only way to take back the holy shrines from the "drunkards" who "led a dissolute life in luxurious palaces." ... Simultaneously, but independently, the Shia of eastern Saudi Arabia came out in mass demonstrations (many of them were oil workers in Aramco's fileds). The National Guard crushed both the siege and the rebellion. The egalitarian noises from the Iranian Revolution (but no so much the Islamic republic that followed it) petrified the Saudi royals and indeed the entrenched elites across the Third World... The ulema in Saudi Arabia were quick to line up with the monarchy.
(269): The oil price rise after 1973 provided Saudi Arabia with the singular ability among the darker nations to buy off its citizenry. A few years of liquidity in the 1970s allowed the state to increase the social wage, although the monarchy did not fundamentally change the dependent basis of the Saudi economy. Saudi industry produced less than 2 percent of the gross national product, and dates remained the second-largest export item after crude and refined oil... In the fundamentals, Saudi society reflected the same problems as much of the Third World: a one-commodity economy, with a poorly developed industrial sector, a large state apparatus, a growing military (costing about 14 percent of the gross national product), and a languished population. At the whim of fickle oil prices, the Saudi economy went into a nosedive beginning in the late 1970s. The World Bank recommended that the Saudi state shore up its fundamentals, and the royal family conducted a self-directed structural adjustment during the 1980s... For a society with a young population and growing structural unemployment, the social and cultural consequences of austerity were great. As dissent and protest grew, the Saudis met this both through outright repression and an ideological campaign. In 1976, the Saudi royals welcomed the head of the religious police into the cabinet... Chauvinisms of various kinds were encouraged. The royals called for the "Saudiization" of the workforce as a means to turn the blame for unemployment on the five million foreign contract workers (almost a third of the total population).
(271): The IMF instituions prodded the post-colonial states in the 1970s to give up on the delivery of public goods such as education, health care, and relief services, and allow private or charitable entities to do the work. In Pakistan and Egypt, for instance, as the state slowly eroded its public educational system, the exponential growth of cheap Islamic schools provided opportunities for lower-middle-class and working-class youth.
(273): As Part of the Pakistan National Alliance, the Jamaat reaped the benefit of Zia's cutback in educational funding--money now came in from the WML, the International Islamic relief Organization, the Saudi and Kuwaiti Red Crescent, the Saudi General Intelligence Department, the Saudi royals, and other such private avenues. This money created a web of religious schools (madrassas): from nine hundred madrassas in 1971, the number swelled to eight thousand by 1988.
(274): As it undermiend the idea of nationalism, conservative social forces and various powerful social classes gathered together to offer an alternative vision of what it meant to be patriotic, indeed what it meant to be nationalistic. The secular-socialist nationalism of the Third World agenda withered before the rise of a cultural nationalism now deeply invested in racial, religious, and such atavistic differences... National liberation regimes had not been able or did not try to dethrone the old social classes and the older forms of social solidarity but they did create mechanisms to create national solidarity. Public schools, military service, voluntary labor, and other such institutions attempted to make equality a real social value and part of the experience of the citizenry. If the social classes do not mingle, there can be no real national solidarity. That said, once the state ceased to make this token effort, the significance o fht eolder, generally unmolested class bonds now attained a greater deal of purpose.
(275): Globalization and cultural nationalism are not opposites or irreconcilable doubles; they exist together, they feed of each other. Indeed, cultural natioanlism is the Trojan horse of IMF-driven globalization. The mecca of IMF-driven globalization is therefore in the ability to open one's economy to stateless, soullesss corporations while blaming the failure of well-being on religious, ethnic, sexual, and other minorities. That is the mecca of the post-Third World era.
(276): Debt hangs heavy for the bulk of the planet. In 1970, when the Third World project was intact, the sixty states classified as "low-income" by the World Bank owed commercial lenders and international agencies $25 billion. Three decades later, the debt of these states ballooned to $523 billion. An impoverished conversation on debt yields no agenda to combat this fundametnal ailment for the former Third world. These are not "poor" countires. Over the course of these three decades, the sixty states paid $550 billion in principle and interest on loans worth $540 billion. Yet they still owe $523 billion. The alchemy of international usury binds the darker nations.
(276-277): For there was a gradual realization that such progress as was made in the first three decades after 1945 did not imply any fundamental change in the status or real development prospects of Third World countries. Dependency was increasing rather than decreasing, poverty was persisting and the income gap between the Rich North and the Poor south was gettting wider. According to the World Bank, "In 1960 per capita GDP in the richest 20 countries was 18 times more than in the poorest 20 countries. By 1995 this gap had widened to 37 times." The divergence between the North and the South grew as the Third World fragmented. But even this spatial metaphor of the North and South is insufficient; it ignores the mature class hierarchies that had grown within each of the countries in the South and the North.
(281): The limitations of IMF-driven globalization and revanchist traditionalism provoke mass movements across the planet. The battles for land rights and water rights, for cultural dignity and economic parity, for women's rights and indigenous rights, for the construction of democratic institutions and responsive states--these are legion in every country, on every continent. It is from these many creative initiatives that a genuine agenda for the future will arise. When it does, the Third World will have found its successor.

"However, a majority of the people, who did not have even Rs. 20 a day for consumption, were not touched by this euphoria. At the end of 2004-05, about 836 million or 77 per cent of the population were living below Rs.20 per day," it said.

Those other “Singapore” issues (named after the site of a 1996 WTO summit) include investment protection (so future policies don’t hamper corporate profits), competition policy (to break local large firms up) and government procurement (to end programmes like South Africa’s affirmative action). These were removed from the WTO by African negotiators during the Cancun summit in 2003, but have re-emerged through EPA bilaterals.
According to Gyekye Tanoh of Third World Network in Accra, “The key thing for Mandelson is to gain exclusive preferential market access. Europe is gaining 80% of our markets in exchange for what is effectively just 2% of theirs.”
(...) Already, says Tanoh, “The effect of trade liberalisation on African agriculture is a disaster, with only one sector anticipated to grow: agro-processing. That’s the one that most easily invites European capital to scale up investments in joint ventures. Agricultural output would only increase by 1%, our studies show. But the big contradiction is in the export of cash crops, at a time of severe pressure on food products.”
(...) African farmers’ ability to sell on the local market will be undercut by rapid trade liberalisation that opens the way to surges of cheap, often subsidised imports. Women are most adversely affected.
(...) [delinking] As Walter Rodney observed, “It is typical of underdeveloped economies that they do not -- or are not allowed to -- concentrate on those sectors of the economy which in turn will generate growth and raise production to a new level altogether, and there are very few ties between one sector and another so that, say, agriculture and industry could react beneficially on each other.”
(...) Added Senegalese scholar Cherif Salif Sy, “Most of Africa has an electricity crisis, and yet to get economies of scale for European agro-processing companies if they locate in Dakar, they require vast amounts of electricity. And they come with the power to demand a lower price, which puts much more stress on our grid and causes the price to go up for local buyers, and the supply to be redirected.”
(...) African firms cannot compete in this sector, as they lack the brand names, skills and marketing structures that European companies enjoy. The same firms have also no access to EU support in the forms of straight subsidies, tax incentives, research and development funding or concessional credit.
(...) Rodney might agree, as he criticised “the minority in Africa which serves as the transmission line between the metropolitan capitalists and the dependencies in Africa ... The presence of a group of African sell-outs is part of the definition of underdevelopment. Any diagnosis of underdevelopment in Africa will reveal not just low per capita income and protein deficiencies, but also the gentlemen who dance in Abidjan, Accra and Kinshasa when music is played in Paris, London and New York.” (And now, with EPAs and the WTO, add Brussels and Geneva.)

africa and philanthropy:
In addition to providing raw materials, labor, and markets for finished products, Africa also cleanses the conscience of Africanist scholars, evangelists and missionaries, the rock and roll musicians who want to save Africa through orphan adoption, and philanthropists with Mother-Theresa complexes. But at the top of the pack – Western politicians. Occupy Iraq and Afghanistan but do not forget to rescue the African from the clutches of war-lords, poverty, corruption, and disease. Africa has become the continent where the guilt-ridden come to score quick moral points. And we let them.
(...) When Tony Blair intervened in Sierra Leone, it was heralded as an emblem of humanitarian military intervention (one of the five tenets of what became known as the Blair Doctrine). Yet, as Blair prepares to leave office, the reality in Sierra Leone is far different from the success story that will become part of his legacy. . Sierra Leone remains one of the world’s poorest nations. As the BBC reports on its website, 60 percent of its budget is met through foreign aid, life expectancy is 41 years and 70 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. Even with debt forgiveness Sierra Leone continues to import more than it exports – all testaments to a radical dependency and inequality in an otherwise resource-rich nation. This is a recipe for another civil war long after Blair is out of office.
(...)For Bush, as the United States foreign policy suffers defeat in the Middle East, Africa becomes the saving grace. Its working - the Washington Post recently applauded Bush for his War on AIDS. But according to Africa Action’s Salih Booker, since 2002 Bush’s AIDS Plan has been “more smoke than mirrors.” Instead of allocating the promised money through the Global Fund, he channels it through PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief which is “often influenced by restrictive and ideologically-based policy prescriptions, such as abstinence-only regulations.” Bush undermines his own efforts through what most experts understand as unworkable ABC programs (Abstinence, Being Faithful and as a last resort, Condoms).
(...) Worse is the AIDS-Industrial Complex. The US under Bush opposed the loosening of patent laws which would allow countries to manufacture or import generic drugs. Donated AIDS money is therefore being spent on expensive premium drugs. The pharmaceutical companies pocket the money then lobby against the loosening of patent laws. The system is locked into a cycle of profit making at the expense of the dying.
(...) In what other parts of the world call corruption, a study by Public Campaign found that in the United States, between 1999 and 2004 “health care related interests [have] contributed $162.3 million dollars to federal candidates and party committees.” In 2003 President Bush appointed Randall Tobias, CEO of Eli Lilly & Co (a large US Pharmaceutical company) to head the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator.
(...) To put things in perspective consider the following: Africa as a continent, with an estimated population of 680 million people receives 4.5 billion dollars from the United States while the country of Israel, with a population of 6 million, receives about 3 billion. And as Bush spends about 4.5 Billion a year on AIDS in Africa, for the fiscal year 2008, he has asked congress for $624.6 billion to be spent on the military.
(...) According to an Oxfam report, for every dollar given to Africa in aid, the donors get two dollars back. Oxfam also reports that a “one percent increase in trade for Africa would bring $70 billion into the continent – five times as much as Africa currently receives in aid and debt relief.”
(...) Because of the US 49 billion and the EU 93 billion on farmer subsidies, Africa, as a result of cheaper international prices, loses more than it gets in foreign aid. A United Nations African Renewal article shows Mali received 37.7 million in US aid in 2001, but lost 43 million dollars through cheap market prices. The US was taking more with one hand and giving less with other.
(...) But we as Africans also have to take a good share of the blame. Instead of policies that would once and for all break our dependency, our leaders trade our long-term livelihood for short-term gains. In 2003, according to Patrick Bond, a political analyst based in South Africa, the African elite had $80 billion sitting in Western banks. At the same time African governments owed these same banks $30 billion. Or in another startling statistic, between 1970 and 1996, Africa lost $285 billion as a result of capital flight while incurring a $178 billion debt.
(...)

on the chinese miracle:
If real wages and the share of wages in national income have fallen sharply in recent times, and if inequalities have risen dramatically at the same time, the answer to the riddle lies in this quiet accretion, cashed in on by China-based corporations who have set the pace. The logic of capital has inveigled the entire world into a race of totalitarianisms--which inevitably enrich the few and pauperize the many in every country.
(...) Democracy is a nuisance for capitalism. The success of China should demonstrate even to the most ardent of liberals that capitalism works most efficiently under despotic conditions. If capitalism coexisted with democracy in the Western world for some decades, the rise of China shows it up for what it was: a coincidence of history brought into relief by the fight for freedom and human rights by large sections of the working population of the West since the early days of 19th century British Chartism. The gains of working classes were consolidated by the institutionalization of the welfare state since Bismarck's Germany first brought in social legislation in the 1880s. They took a big step forward with the implementation of Roosevelt's New Deal in the US in the 1940s. Much of this was made possible, needless to say, by the spoils of war and imperialism, which enabled Western elites to maintain labor aristocracies within their own geographical boundaries. A prosperous domestic social peace was arranged on the ample backs of Third World super-exploitation of labor--and maintained internationally through arm-twisting "multi-lateral" agencies like the IMF, the World Bank, GATT and the WTO.
(...) What history is revealing now is something altogether different: that far from being the precondition for political freedom, capitalism may be the growing thorn in the flesh of democracy, a thorn that democracy nourishes in the very core of its body-politic, a juggernaut of tyranny, remorselessly hungry for power both within and outside the country, without which its appetite for profits, growth and expansion cannot be met. As capital has had to bare its fangs, the dove of freedom and democracy has flown out of the window.
(...) To subscribe exclusively to the growth imperative is to be necessarily forced to sideline all other social or political goals and sign on to the charter of (global) corporate tyranny. The private interest--the hunt for ever higher profits, justified by the promise to grow, invest and employ--is the public interest. No need to distinguish between the two any more. Thus, unsurprisingly, as the unfolding logic of capital has revealed its despotic character, even liberalism has lurched feebly towards a quiet grave.
(...) To keep the World Bank happy the government has to open the door to "development" projects of doubtful social value and destructive environmental effects. To find the ear of the WTO it has had to sell the rural poor down the river, allow subsidized Western imports of foodgrains, remove price supports for farmers and dismantle the public distribution system, thus (especially given the collapse of rural public investment in infrastructure, one of the consequences of IMF-diktat) making it ever more likely that more and more people will find agriculture an unviable option over a period of time--and will be willing to sell their land to corporations or the government.
(...) "When I expand, it is always in a capital-intensive, and not in a labor-intensive direction." - Dinesh Hinduja, to Edward Luce of The Financial Times.
(...) That employment in India was growing more rapidly in the 1980s, when the economy was growing much more slowly than it is today, is of little account. That the entire private organized sector of the economy has generated fewer than a million jobs during the past 16 years (and still employs less than 9 million people), when over 12 million people are getting added to the Indian workforce every year should make our policy-makers worried whether we will be a sustainable society at all in the future--whether we will not dissipate ourselves in a welter of frustrated social violence, the kind that Star TV had the misfortune of experiencing in Mumbai the other day. None of this seems to alarm them.
(...) 22-year-olds fed on the dreams of unabashed consumerism are not going to sit idly and watch the rich race past in their speeding cars. Thus, it was not surprising when an ex-Union Minister was so taken by a 2000 visit to Shenzhen, China, where a Special Economic Zone has generated huge amounts of unprecedented wealth during the past generation. 20-30% has been the annual rate of growth, sustained over a quarter century. Over 10 million people have found employment in an area the size of Jaipur. The city has generated 14% of China's exports. [BUT...] among Chinese economic planners, Shenzhen's recipe is increasingly seen as all but irrelevant: too harsh, too wasteful, too polluted, too dependent on the churning, ceaseless turnover of migrant labor. "This path is now a dead end," said Zhao Xiao, an economist and former adviser to the Chinese State CouncilAfter cataloguing the city's problems, he said, "Governments can't count on the beauty of investment covering up 100 other kinds of ugliness." As the limits of the Shenzhen model have grown more and more apparent, other cities in China's relatively developed east are increasingly trying to differentiate themselves, emphasizing better working and living conditions for factory workers or paying more attention to the environment. "Some inland cities have started to provide migrants social security, including pension and other insurance," said Wang Chunguang, an expert in class mobility at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. "In Chengdu, in Sichuan Province, residency controls are loosening up and education for migrant children is getting more attention."
(...) The province of Guangdong, where Shenzhen is located, recorded 10,000 protests last year--in what is known to the world as a totalitarian society.
(...) The answers are to be found in the peculiarities of the Indian situation and the utterly odd world in which our corporate and policy-making elites find themselves today. The economy has been growing at a internationally impressive 8-9% for about 5 years now. ... However, there is immense corporate frustration--still--right here at home in India. Some of the cheapest labor in the world is at their command. And yet, because of the inconvenience of democracy they can't be hired and fired in sync with the impulses of the business cycle, as it happens in China. Some of the most readily accessible natural resources are at their disposal. Except that there is the nuisance of bureaucracy in the shape of clearance of industrial projects by pollution control boards and the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests. They have firm control over the hearts and minds of politicians. But, from their point of view, there are still too many taxes to be paid. There is infrastructure in the country, but it is either in the city and already burdened or it is near fertile agricultural land (and must be somehow acquired: the reason that the conflict between agriculture and industry is arising in SEZ land acquisition in the first place). And so on.
(...) SEZs offer a relief from this entire nettle of hurdles. All that can't be attempted in the civilized world outside will be the norm in SEZs. American corporations routinely abuse labor and the environment in Shenzhen in ways unacceptable to the Western world (though no one seems to mind the cheap shoes and clothing). In India, SEZs will provide a profitable refuge from the Indian Constitution, an effective waiver from democracy. The Development Commissioner and the SEZ Authority will have overwhelming powers, making local, provincial, national and international laws all but irrelevant. "Little Chinas" and Shenzhens can be developed.
(...) What else does it mean? Recent concessions (like the liberalization of foreign direct investment in real estate), the rush of builders and developers to acquire SEZ land, the fact that only 50% of the area under an SEZ has to be dedicated to processing (whose definition is stretched liberally to include everything from mining to agriculture), the fact that industrialists are all too often being granted land well in excess of their production requirements (whether Tata in Singur or Reliance in Dadri) all point in the direction of an engineered real estate boom through SEZ growth. Huge amounts of capital are pouring into the real estate market, both from within India and abroad. Returns of 30, 40, even 100 per cent in many segments of the market are becoming common--making Indian real estate markets one of the most attractive places anywhere to invest for global finance capital.
(...) With private airports, luxury housing, super-deluxe hotels, world-class shopping malls and multiplex plazas, SEZs offer us a window into the world of corporate consumer dreams. They also portend the end of effective democracy in this country. The surrounding sea of human misery and squalor is bound to give rise to repeated and violent rebellions. Which is why the private armies of security guards are being trained and readied for approaching inevitabilities.
(...) There are a thousand alternatives to this impasse. But to discover them and forge the collective imagination and will to develop them in practice will require a thriving public culture of democracy--precisely that which SEZs are being created to undermine. Globalization, far from bringing freedom to the world, is taking it away--in the name of freedom.

china´s coal mines

articulating economies by disarticulating elsewhere:
The low prices enjoyed by shoppers at British supermarkets are paid for by poor wages, job insecurity and a denial of basic human rights for workers in some of the world's poorest countries, a report has concluded. The growing power of big supermarkets is the driving force behind a mode of doing business that is made possible by exploiting workers, particularly women, in developing countries, the report says.
(...) The document, produced by the development agency ActionAid, accuses the supermarkets, who take £7 out of every £10 spent on the high street, of using their vast market power to drive down prices at their overseas suppliers.
(...) ActionAid claims that shopping could become a "tool for poverty reduction" if supermarkets treat their suppliers better so that more of the millions of pounds spent every day on grocery shopping in the UK flowed back to the workers producing what Britons buy. "This is how development happens," it says. An investigation into how bananas are grown in Costa Rica found that workers' rights, pay and conditions have suffered from the intense price war that rages between UK grocers. Suppliers are forced to absorb the costs of the banana price battle because they need the business: supermarkets typically take between 70 per cent and 90 per cent of a banana supplier's stocks. [it´s the logic of the individual capitalist, mr. actionaid]
(...) In the Indian cashew growing industry, ActionAid found that for every pound shoppers spent on the nut in UK supermarkets just 1p went to the women workers who processed the nuts. Another 22p was shared between Indian farmers, traders, processing companies and exporters, leaving 77p for importers, roasters and supermarkets in the UK.
(...) Bindi, a 58-year-old mother of six, from Kerala in India, works for a large processing company that exports cashew nuts to the UK market. "I have severe pain in my toes and knees and sometimes back pain. But I have to work to fend for myself and my family," she said. Bindi's hands are covered in blisters. Asked why she does not wear protective gloves, she said: "We have to buy the gloves ourselves; the management does not provide us with gloves. Besides, I will only be able to shell five kilos if I wear gloves instead of the usual 10." She said: "The managers use malpractices and underweigh the shelled nuts." A survey found that 45 per cent of cashew workers experience respiratory illnesses, compared with 9 per cent of the wider population. "They will make us sit in the smoke-filled sheds where they fry the nuts and it causes suffocation," said Bindi. Cashew workers' main concern is their earnings and, in Kerala, most women want their unions to bargain for higher wages.