Monday, March 9, 2009
What is most galling, from a socialist perspective, is the dawning notion that capitalism may be leaving us with less than it found on this planet, about 400 years ago, when the capitalist mode of production began to take off. Marx imagined that industrial capitalism had potentially solved the age-old problem of scarcity and that there was plenty to go around if only it was equitably distributed. But industrial capitalism--with some help from industrial communism--has brought about a level of environmental destruction that threatens our species along with countless others. The climate is warming, the oil supply is peaking, the deserts are advancing and the seas are rising and contain fewer and fewer fish for us to eat. You don't have to be a freaky doomster to see that extinction may be what's next on the agenda.
According to a CBS News report last April, the head of mental health for the VA, Ira Katz, said the following in an internal VA email regarding suicide attempts by veterans:
Speaking on the record in November 2007, however, Katz told CBS News, "There is no epidemic in suicide in the VA." But if 1,000 veterans a month attempting suicide is not an epidemic, then what is? Katz's duplicity is chilling--not only for the veterans who are already enrolled in the VA, but also for soldiers who are being ordered to Iraq and Afghanistan today, and are likely to return home to a mental health system even more overburdened than it is currently.
Shh! Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?
Speaking on the record in November 2007, however, Katz told CBS News, "There is no epidemic in suicide in the VA." But if 1,000 veterans a month attempting suicide is not an epidemic, then what is? Katz's duplicity is chilling--not only for the veterans who are already enrolled in the VA, but also for soldiers who are being ordered to Iraq and Afghanistan today, and are likely to return home to a mental health system even more overburdened than it is currently.
“Jai Hoi” draws together the optimistic and comforting strains of the soundtrack as a whole into a final burst of euphoria. The lyrics are a jumble of sentimental images like “I counted the stars till my finger burned.” The music , too, is a heart-warming mix of world music flourishes, disco energy, buoyant synthesizer countermelodies, and full-throated crooning above yearning harmonic shifts. The final number is not simply a generic nod to Indian film traditions, and the fact that the filmmakers use the credits as a cover for what might superficially seem to be a sudden escape from the supposed imperatives of believability cannot disguise the truth about this movie and its music. The finale confirms what the screen has been telling our eyes and the music our ears for two hours: that even miserable poverty can be overcome by a bright lights and a techno beat and that redemption is always only one high-tech hymn away.
A serious economic crisis can force some rethinking of economic and political dogma. The current crisis is serious for most of the world: the IMF is projecting world economic growth of just 0.5% this year – the worst since the second world war – and this number could easily be revised downward.
(...) One of the first casualties of the current recession was the extreme fiscal conservatism that has plagued the country for decades. It seems like ages since the Clinton administration, facing projected budget surpluses of more than $5tn, decided that it needed to pay off the entire national debt before committing to any new social spending. President Barack Obama's proposed budget has a deficit for this year of 12.3% of GDP – twice the size (relative to the economy) of the next largest deficit in the six decades since the second world war. (That was Ronald Reagan's "military Keynesian" budget of 1983.) Like his successor George W Bush, Reagan never admitted that deficit spending was needed to pull the economy out of recession. Instead he pretended that he was just meeting "defence needs" and granting tax cuts where tax cuts were due (mostly to the wealthy).
(...) If the debt grows at the same rate or slower than the GDP (in nominal terms) it will not grow as a percentage of the economy. That is what matters, not the absolute size of the public debt – a big scary number ($10.9tn) that is often thrown around by conservatives.
(...) That is because the US dollar is overvalued, and this overvaluation has artificially stimulated our imports and reduced our exports for many years. The idea that the United States needs a "strong dollar" could be the next widely held economic misconception to bend to reality.
(...)
(...) One of the first casualties of the current recession was the extreme fiscal conservatism that has plagued the country for decades. It seems like ages since the Clinton administration, facing projected budget surpluses of more than $5tn, decided that it needed to pay off the entire national debt before committing to any new social spending. President Barack Obama's proposed budget has a deficit for this year of 12.3% of GDP – twice the size (relative to the economy) of the next largest deficit in the six decades since the second world war. (That was Ronald Reagan's "military Keynesian" budget of 1983.) Like his successor George W Bush, Reagan never admitted that deficit spending was needed to pull the economy out of recession. Instead he pretended that he was just meeting "defence needs" and granting tax cuts where tax cuts were due (mostly to the wealthy).
(...) If the debt grows at the same rate or slower than the GDP (in nominal terms) it will not grow as a percentage of the economy. That is what matters, not the absolute size of the public debt – a big scary number ($10.9tn) that is often thrown around by conservatives.
(...) That is because the US dollar is overvalued, and this overvaluation has artificially stimulated our imports and reduced our exports for many years. The idea that the United States needs a "strong dollar" could be the next widely held economic misconception to bend to reality.
(...)
After all, there is virtually no convergence between Hekmatyar’s Islamicist militancy based on the Leninist and elitist doctrine of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the obscurantist fundamentalism of the Taliban, nurtured in the Deobandi madrassas of Pakistan’s west.
(...) An Afghan political analyst and head of the affairs of the Middle East and African countries during the Taliban regime, Waheed Muzda while talking to journalists said, “The alliance between the Taliban and Hizb-e-Islami is impossible as they have differences over many issues. Gulbadeen Hikmatyar believes in democracy and elections but Taliban oppose it. They say such elections in which every person even corrupt people also take part are not justified according to the Shariah. Similarly, Hizb-e-Islami favors education and jobs of women whereas Taliban do not like it. Another different thing between the both groups is that Taliban are closely linked with al-Qaeda and their movement is separate from those of other Islamist organizations.
(...) It is not unreasonable to think that Hekmatyar, the most significant Pashtun power not beholden to al Qaeda muscle, would embody the hopes of Pakistan for a strongman to cut the Taliban down to size—or at least neutralize the Taliban on the battlefield and create a bloody stalemate.
(...) After all, although the Chinese role was never as highly publicized as the efforts of the United States and Saudi Arabia, China was a major participant in the mujahideen network sponsored by the ISI to battle the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The Soviet-backed government in Kabul accused the Chinese of providing $400 million in military aid, though it might be more accurate to say that the Chinese did $400 million in business, paid for by the CIA. When the covert campaign to supply the Afghan fighters, in particular Hekmatyar, got so big that the CIA had exhausted the traditional sources of clandestine weaponry, China happily took on the profitable duty of providing guns and bullets from its factories. China even provided mules to ease the famous transport shortage engendered by the flood of material.
(...) An Afghan political analyst and head of the affairs of the Middle East and African countries during the Taliban regime, Waheed Muzda while talking to journalists said, “The alliance between the Taliban and Hizb-e-Islami is impossible as they have differences over many issues. Gulbadeen Hikmatyar believes in democracy and elections but Taliban oppose it. They say such elections in which every person even corrupt people also take part are not justified according to the Shariah. Similarly, Hizb-e-Islami favors education and jobs of women whereas Taliban do not like it. Another different thing between the both groups is that Taliban are closely linked with al-Qaeda and their movement is separate from those of other Islamist organizations.
(...) It is not unreasonable to think that Hekmatyar, the most significant Pashtun power not beholden to al Qaeda muscle, would embody the hopes of Pakistan for a strongman to cut the Taliban down to size—or at least neutralize the Taliban on the battlefield and create a bloody stalemate.
(...) After all, although the Chinese role was never as highly publicized as the efforts of the United States and Saudi Arabia, China was a major participant in the mujahideen network sponsored by the ISI to battle the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The Soviet-backed government in Kabul accused the Chinese of providing $400 million in military aid, though it might be more accurate to say that the Chinese did $400 million in business, paid for by the CIA. When the covert campaign to supply the Afghan fighters, in particular Hekmatyar, got so big that the CIA had exhausted the traditional sources of clandestine weaponry, China happily took on the profitable duty of providing guns and bullets from its factories. China even provided mules to ease the famous transport shortage engendered by the flood of material.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
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.
(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.
from "the darker nations: a people's history of the third world" by vijay prashad (part III)
(154): The island of Bali lost about 8 percent of its population, or a hundred thousand people, in the assault on the PKI in 1965-1966.... The actual massacre came at the hands of the army and the activists of the right-wing, mainly theocratic, political parties. They had lists of names of activists and organizers of the PKI and its affiliated organizations. They used these lists to gather the victims for execution. Although the US and Australian governments neither instigated nor conducted the massacre, they encouraged the purge, fattened the lists of Communists for the army, funded the paracommandos, and supported the media effort to blame the entire genocide on the Communists.
(156-158): Moscow and Beijing remained mute. Since the 1920s, the USSR had an ambiguous relationship with Communist parties in the darker nations. On the one hand, the USSR had been the one state that gave enormous ideological, diplomatic, and material support to many independence struggles... From the early 1920s to 1935, [the Comintern] urged Communists in the darker nations to keep some distance between their activity and that of the nationalist groups in their regions... In China, though, the Comintern pushed the Communists into an alliance with the nationalist Kuomintang that ended in the disastrous Kuomintang 1928 massacre of the Communists in Shanghai... At the 1935 Seventh Comintern Congress, the Soviet Communists reacted to the development of fascism within Europe by telling Communist parties to work in a "popular front" with all patriotic social forces... While the strategy of the Comintern developed out of the German Communist Party's failure to stop the Nazi rise to power in 1933, that experience now came to dominate the work of Communists in far different settings... By the advent of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the class collaborationist line had substantially weakened the Communist parties in the Third World, and they became easy prey for attack by the CIA and the nationalist regimes... The concepts of the national democratic state and new democracy allowed Moscow and Beijing to accept noncommunist regimes and national liberation movements as sufficient for the nonindustrial world.... Nasser's Egypt, Qasim's Iraq, Boumedienne's Algeria, Indira Gandhi's India, New Win's Burma, Sekou Toure's Guinea, Ayub Khan's Pakistan, and Mobido Keita's Mali became part of the USSR's and the People's Republic of China's most favored states, even though most of these leaders suppressed their local Communist parties.
(158-159): By the early 1960s, the three largest Communist parties (outside a Communist state) in Asia, Africa, and the Arab lands were the PKI of Indonesia, Sudan's al-Hizb al-Shuyu'i al-Sudani (SCP), and the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), respectively. These parties commanded the respect of a large section of their societies... Within a decade, these three parties would be devastated when the national bourgeoisie (with the assistance of the United States as well as a blind eye from Moscow and Beijing) would call the military out of the barracks to exterminate them. If the USSR and the People's Republic of China had taken a strong stand in any one of these instances, they might have given courage to Communists elsewhere... Instead, the silence scared Communists into alliances with political forces that wanted to use and then destroy them. The Communists were useful. Sukarno needed the PKI for its program and cadre. When Brigadier Qasim overthrew the Iraqi monarchy (1958) and Colonel Jaafar al-Nimeiri rejected a corrupt military junta in Sudan (1969), both leaned on the strong Communist parties... A military coup has little institutional basis for legitimacy...
(159): [BAATH PARTY, SADDAM, THE SOVIETS AND THE ICP] When the ICP took advantage of the opening to revive its banned organizations... [it] grew to more than twenty-five thousand cadre members with an additional mass membership of a million (about a fifth of the total population of Iraq). The growth of the ICP and its social power terrfied the dictatorship of Qasim. Shortly after Qasim came to power, the founder of the Baath, Michel 'Aflaq, visited Baghdad from Damascus to promote his party over the ICP. "We represent the Arab spirit against materialist Communism"... The Baath had only three hundred members in Iraq, and would grow to only three thousand in the early 1960s. In May 1959, Husain ar-Radi, the ICP's first secretary, entered a politburo meeting and argued that the time had come for the party to make a move for power. He was outvoted. The Soviets had sent an envoy with a message not to provoke Qasim. The Baath took the initiative; the US backed it. The ICP defended the nationalist military regime when the Baath attempted a coup in October 1959... The Baath's way had been prepared, and it eventually captured the state in 1963... In 1968 Hussein came to power. The USSR became a major ally of Hussein, who cultivated a split in the battered ICP... [A] ppro-Soviet faction of the ICP joined hands with him. The anti-Baath group...felt the wrath of the Baath's militia... The ICP that remained within the government enabled Iraq's 1972 friendship treaty with the USSR, but as Hussein increased his hold on the country he began a campaign against the ICP itself. In 1978, Hussein had the "loyal" party members arrested, executed many cadre... Hussein's campaign against the ICP led to his enhanced stock among Washinton's policymakers, whose own alliance with him began in 1983. The remainder of the ICP's cadre either fled overseas or else remained within Iraq to continue the struggle, notably in the Kurdish regions (long a bastion of the Left).
(160-161): [SUDAN, NIMEIRI AND THE COMMUNISTS] In Sudan, Nimeiri came to power on a Nasserite agenda, and he, like Qasim, could not rule without the SCP. After the coup he banned all political parites, but allowed the SCP to continue its activities. Founded in 1944, the SCP was the onl political party with national standing because, unlike the sectarian and racialist parties, it recruited equally in the north and south, among Christians as well as Muslims. Nimeiri needed the SCP. In the typical formula, Nimeiri first went after his right flank. In 1970, he began an assault on the reactionary Umma Party... When that party had been substantially pacified, Nimeiri turned his attention to the SCP. The brutal repression of the SCP drove the Communists to attempt a coup of their own along with sympathetic army officers... When news of the events in Sudan reached the Soviet leadership, it tried to negotiate with the Nimeiri government, as well as with the Egyptians and the Libyans, for asylum to the SCP's leaders. Once rebuffed, it did not pursue the matter. It is not that Moscow felt nothing for its comrades in the tropics, but that the fortunes of the Communist parties in the Third World came second to the strategy mapped out by the USSR and the People's Republic of China. When the Nimeiri regime executed the SCP leaders despite the entreaty from the USSR, Moscow rewarded the dictator with economic and political treaties as well as a special honored place as a delegate to the Communist Party of the USSR's twenty-fourth Congress in late 1971.
(162): As Sukarno fell, no significant word of protest came from New Delhi, Belgrade, Rangoon, Cairo or Accra... Indonesia's Sukarno had played a crucial role in the creation of the political platform of the Third World, and Bandung had been its omphalos. Yet there was silence. The personal or political demise of the five major leaders of the progressive tendency in Bandung reveals much about the collapse of solidarity: Nehru died in 1964, Both U Nu and Nkrumah had been recently deposed by military coups, Nasser's role had been weakened by the collapse of his United Arab Republic, and Tito had begun a genial rapproachement with the USSR.
(163): At the 1977 NAM meeting in New Delhi... neither Iraq, Sudan, nor Indonesia were laughed out of the room--their pogroms against the Communists in each case became the sacrosanct "internal affairs" of each country. The major Third World powers accepted Indonesia, Sudan, Iraq, and others simply because they signed on to the basic principles of non-alignment, and because they shared a similar international economic analysis... The destruction of the left had an enormous impact on the Third World. The most conservative, even reactionary social classes attained domiannce over the political platform created in Bandung. As an adjunct to the military regimes, the political forces that emerged rejected the ecumenical anticolonial nationalism of the Left and the liberals for a cruel cultural nationalism that emphasized racialism, religion, and hierarchy.
(166): In 1920, the Karakhan Manifesto from the USSR repudiated the treaties between the Czarist regime and the Manchu Empire, with the statement that the Soviet Republic "renounces all the annexations of Chinese territory..." In the late 1950s, the USSR would rescind this statement and insist on territory that it had abrogated.
(167-168): Nehru's Congress Party did not expend foreign exchange on the import of foreign arms. The armed forces had to do with British remainders and whatever could be produced domestically. From 1951-1962, the Indian treasury spent less on arms than either the British government before it or the Indian governments that would follow the Sino-Indian war (1962). Despite the war with Pakistan in 1947-48, the Indian government reduced its military expenses to 2 percent of its total budget... After the war, the Indian government would not stint on its military to become the world's largest importer of weapons by the 1990s.
(168): [WHY 1962 WAR]: Another way to look at the Sino-Indian border war is to see it as a commonplace occurrence in the new postcolonial states that had, as far as the borders went, begun to adopt a more "European" notion of nationalism than their own previous anticolonial form... Indeed, the Himalays that run along the borders between today's states of Burma, Nepal, India, China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are home to people at high altitudes whose lives rely on transit across the mountain passes to the plains for trade or religious pilgrimages. The boundary is not in the interest of these people...
(170): Colonial powers based their borders on what they were able to conquer, and guarded these boundaries in terms of security rather than any other principle. The cartography of the Himalayas by the British had little to do with the needs and desires of the people who lived in the hills; it had everything to do with the creation of buffer states to protect their Indian empire from the threats by the Czarist Russians and the Manchu Chinese. In 1893, the British created the Durand line, which ran right through the homelands of the Pashtu speakers so as to maintain Afghanistan as a border territory between Russia and India, just as in 1914, the British fashioned the McMahon line to divide their Indian domains from those of the Chinese.
(173): [In the 3rd World, not military Keynesianism, but militarization by gutting of welfare state] WB President Robert McNamara's study of military expenditures in the darker nations found that states had quintupled that one line item between 1960 and 1988; military expenditure increased at twice the rate of per capita income.
(174): China's foreign policy wound its way from Bandung to a rapproachment with the United States and its impossible alliances with dictatorial regimes. As China began its new relationship with the United States, the Chinese government praised the Greek military junta (1972), took the side of Pakistan against the liberation of Bangladesh (1971), welcomed Niemeiri to Beijing after the dictartorship's massacre of its Communists (1971), sent emergency aid to the Sri Lankan government to defeat the left-wing Lanka Samaja Party's insurrection, and quickly recognized Pinochet's coup in Chile (it expelled the Chilean ambassador to China when he refused to support Pinochet). The Sino-Indian war compromised the credibility of India and China.
(178): In 1850, fossil fuels supplied only 6 percent of the world's energy needs, while humans and animals provided the rest. A century later, human and animal power had declined to 6 percent, while fossil fuel use accounted for the remainder.
(178): By 1950, the main energy corporations organized themsleves into seven conglomerates known as the Seven Sisters: Exxon, Shell, BP, Gulf, Texaco, Mobil, and Socal (or Chevron). Even though oil is a lucrative product, in its crude state it is nothing more than a raw material. To remove oil from the ground requires an immense capital outlay, both for exploration and extraction. This initial capital outlay is the carrot and stick used by the Seven Sisters. They came to the oil lands in the early years and staked out "concessions" for themselves... These seven firms, in 1950, controlled 85 percent of the crude oil production in the world outside Canada, China, the USSR, and the United States...
(178): The regimes that ruled over the oil lands could have used the rent paid by the oil companies to increase the social wage--to expand public education, health, transport, and other such important avenues for the overall advancement of the people. Instead, the oil rent went toward the expansion of luxury consumption for the bureaucratic-managerial or monarchal elite--the oligarchy in Venezuela or the Ibn Saud clan in Saudi Arabia--and to oil the military machine (the oil war of Bolivia-Paraguay, 1932-1935, was a preview of the 1967-1970 Nigerian civil war)...
(178-179): In 1957 alone the Seven Sisters made $828 million in Venezuela, whose regime allowed them to remit all their profits without restrictions... The United States supported the junta that came to power in the 1940s, whose goal was to maintain good relations with the oil cartel rather than pusrue social development policies... The oil wealth was not, therefore, reinvested for the overall development of the country. The junta reversed the land reforms of a decade previously, sold the land to private speculators, and moved Venezuela to become a net importer of food grains... In 1958 the new relatively progressive government led by Accion Democratica (AD) expressed an interest in recouping a larger share of the profits... Venezuela had been able to increase its share of the world oil market for serendipitous reasons. Mexcio used to be a major provider of the world's oil (25%). After the Mexican Revolution (1911), the new regime attempted to get a better handle on its oil profits... In 1934, after two decades of tussle, the general who had once guarded the oil region, Lazaro Cardenas, became the president... In 1938, Cardenas nationalized the oil industry... The Seven Sisters moved their focus from Mexico to Venezuela...
(180-181): In the late 1940s, Raul Prebisch complained about the low prices earned by the raw material producers because private cartels controlled international prices. Whether the crop is cocoa, sugar, rubber, or oil, the structure of the commodity cartel did not differ much... The declining price of raw materials over time meant that the Third World would never be able to earn enough from the sale of raw materials to effect both meaningful social development and industrial growth. Many of the formerly colonial states had a problem: they had either been carved out as one-commodity producers or else they had developed into one-crop countries. With no economic diversification, these states additionally had less power than the private corporate cartel. They had only one crop, and unless other countries that produced the same crop banded together, they had to accept whatever terms the private corporate cartel offered...
(181): Because of the low level of capital available in the darker nations, the regimes tried to stregnthen the one economic process that had already been perfected: the colonial crop. The regimes in the Third World relied on the singular colonial crop. They also had little capital to refine and process the crop to create some value before export. In other words, its raw material frequently left the old colonial rail lines and ports in its rawest form possible for transport, and brought a mediocre return to the former colony.... The low level of capital in the arsenal of the darker nations meant that they gave "reasonable" terms to the transnational conglomerates that worked in the private cartel, and had the funds to explore and excavate, cultivate and transport. The concessions given to these conglomerates meant that the regime frequently lost control over production, and would only be able to resrict the giants through licenses, increased taxation, and other minor irritations.
(181): By 1980, of the 115 "developing countries," according to UNCTAD, at least half remained dependent on one commodity for over 50 percent of their export revenues. Most of these countries had come to rely on petroleum exports.
183): [JUAN PABLO PEREZ ALFONZO] In April 1959, Nasser's Egypt and the Arab League hosted the first Arab Petroleum Congress... The congress gathered just as the Seven Sisters reduced the posted price for Middle East oil. Venezuela's representative, Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, was an experienced AD politician. Perez Alfonzo made his political mark in 1943 during a debate in Venezuela over the oil concessions enjoyed by the Seven Sisters... In 1958, Perez Alfonzo joined the AD government as the minster of mines and hydrocarbons. He led the charge against the Seven Sisters, earned the government 60 percent of the oil revenue, and established the notion that Venezuela had sovereignty over its subsoil so that the entire oil industry was a public utility.
(184): Exxon egged on the nationalists with another price reduction (this time, by 7 percent of the posted price). When the oil producers met in Baghdad in September 1960, a month after the decrease, they came with a purpose: to form a public cartel of oil producers. After a week of deliberation, the group created OPEC. The five charter members nominally controlled or at least produced 82 percent of the world's crude exports...
(185-186): A major disappointment in this was the failure of the OPEC nations to use their massive oil profits for the creation of such a fund to help stabilize other commodities. Not only did the OPEC powers refuse to contribute to a global fund to stabilize raw material prices but they also had a poor record int heir ad contributions to their neighbors... Despite its political origins, OPEC became an economic cartel as it fought to defend oil prices and do little else...
(187): [FAUX NATIONALIZATION] In sum, the nationalization of economic assets from transnational firms replicated the problems of political independence from colonialism; it was an advance, but it created an illusion of freedom. The Seven Sisters transferred the burdens of extraction on to the state, while it continued to enjoy the fruits of the industry. Furthermore, the state's newfound power over the fields and its ability to negotiate with the Seven Sisters over the prices and taxes moved it to bargain on two sides of the commodity cycle: with the oil workers for lower wages, and the Seven Sisters for higher prices. To raise the export receipt and increase the coffers of the state did not itself presage a strategy for the generation of equity.
(191): The announcement of socialism came alongside the recognition that its construction would not be easy in a formerly colonized state. Not only had the German and British colonial regimes stripped bare the economy of eastern Africa but they also left behind a state apparatus designed to exploit and not to liberate. The institutions of the state and the civil bureaucracy grew from a culture of imperial hierarchy, a value quite removed from the egalitarianism of national liberation... Hemmed in by pressures from the advanced industrial states, the aristorcratic rural classes, and the emergent mercantile classes, the new state had little time. Things had to change in a hurry. But socialism requires imagination and time. It cannot be made in a hurry. To create socialism in a hurry without mass support, and institutions that can channel this support, led many Third World states to disaster.
(192): Instead of foreign aid or commercial loans, the national liberation states developed a three-pronged approach to development: the nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy (finance, infrastructure, energy, crucial raw material extraction, and capital goods production), the development of the agricultural sector, and the encouragement of industrialization. The plan expected the capital for industrialization to come from the nationalization of finance and an increase in the agricultural surplus. Nationalization put financial decisions in the hands of the state rather than transnational corporations, and it arrested the hemorrhage of capital...
(193): The Third World agenda, for states such as India and Egypt, was not socialist as much as welfarist. The state centralized and nationalized the commanding heights of the economy to ensure that its dominant classes gained some purchase on a complex international economy... Tanzania under Nyerere's TANU attempted something more than the welfarism of India and Egypt. The Arusha Declaration drew from the socialist experiments: there was an insistence that the state must create equity among the population, and that this equity needed to be crafted at the level of production and not simply consumption.
(194): [BUT] [T]he state talked of the people, and yet it stoopd apart from them... The TANU regime came to power, abolished the trade unions, and collected the unions' personnel into one government-authorized union, the National Union of Tanganyika Workers (1964). The natural aliies of a socialist experiment were marginalized. There was no well-developed strategy for how the state planned to build power for its ideas. Instead, the state stood above the people, directing them, preaching "socialism from above."
(196-197): Tanzanian ujaama is quite of a piece with a vast number of examples of Third World development or Third World socialism in a hurry. Most of the Third World states hurriedly built industrial factories and dams, cleared forests, and moved populations. This labor came for many reasons, of which the most important was to rapidly increase the productive capacity of the new nation, to make a Great Leap Forward into a moment of propserity before the political capital of the liberation movements had been spent... The intentions of the leaership, by all accounts, were not malevolent. Yet its modernist dream--to adminster nature and society, and build vast industrial monuments without either a democratic governance structure or a mobilized population--led to the worst excesses of commandism and bureaucratism. In India, in the period from the late 1940s to the late 1980s, the state displaced some 25 million people, while in the same period, the Chinese shifted some 40 million people. These are the dramatic figures, because these states have substantial populations, but in small countries the percentage of the population that the state shifted by its bureaucratic commandism is staggering (in Tanzania, a fifth of the population was resettled).
(199): In 1961, after two five-year plans, India's Nehru rued the failure of his regime to tend to the sufferings of the population... Market socialism or the mixed economy was a socialism of consumption not production. In the attempt to industrailize and create agricultural change, there was only a muted effort to change the relations and methods of production. The process of industrial as well as agricultural production remained similar to that found in any advanced capitalist country: workers had no say in the process of production, which was run by a detached management.
(200): In 1932, the El Salvadorian rural elites engineered the massacre of twenty thousand peasants who occupied private land and opposed export-led agriculture.
(200): When India won its freedom, the Congress relied on rural power brokers to deliver the vote. It did not want to alienate the landowners who financed these agents of the party.
(200): In the Philippines, the Land Reform Act of 1955 froze land relations in plantation-like conditions...
(208-209): [In 1983] NAM came to New Delhi at a crucial time for Indira Gandhi... When Nehru died in 1964, Indira Gandhi took on a major role in the Congress Party. In 1966, she won elections and was prime minister until 1977. She returned to power in 1980 with a weakend mandate because of the excesses of the martial law (Emergency) regime she ran from 1975 to 1977. When NAM came to Delhi, the ciety was under siege... In Nellie, Assam, five thousand refugees were killed...
(209): Between the 1966 Tricontinental and the 1979 sixth NAM meeting in Havana, a number of important events transpired. A Marxist revolution in Ethiopia (1974) inaugurated a set of defeats for the imperialist bloc. In 1975, the National Liberation Front defeated the US in South Vietname and the Pathet Lao took Vientiane. That same year, five Portuguese colonies in AFrica seized their independence after the Salazar dictatorship ended in Lisbon. In 1978-1979, the Marxists seized control of Afghanistan, the New Jewel Movement took power in Grenada, and the Sandinista revolution prevailed in Nicaragua. Additionally, a number of African regimes (such as in Benin, Madagascar, Liberia, and Libya) adopted Marxism-Leninism as their official ideology. The mood in Havan was exuberant... The conflict between the capitalist and Communist worlds did not mean neutrality in that struggle. The Havana meeting raised the question of a formal anti-imperialist alliance between NAM and the USSR--a move pushed by Castro...
(210) [BUT] Between Havana and New Delhi, a great deal occured to dampen this enthusiasm. Ronald Reagan's forward policy extended the increase in military expenditure initiated by Jimmy Carter...
(215): By 1983, the NAM states produed less than a tenth of the worlds' industrial output, although transnational corporations controlled three-quarters of the industrial output in these states. Among the NAM states, five produced more than 80 percent of this total industrial output: Brazil, South Korea, India, Mexico, and Argentina.
(215): The changes in the general character of NAM were reflected in the changes within India. By the mid-1970s, India's economic agenda floundered. The long-standing failure to reconstruct agrarian relations, an excessive reliance on industrial development over any other sector, a burgeoning military sector... A dissatisfied population rose in a host of rebellions... The party of the freedom movement claimed to rule with the anticolonial nationalist agenda, but it adopted economic policies inimical to the vast mass of the population...
(217): Mexico, an oil-rich country, defaulted on $80 billion in public-sector debt in 1982. Forty countries joined Mexico in arrears, and a year later another twenty-seven had to restructure their massive debt. The total debt in the brusied nations was $500 billion, which at the time threatened the financial stability of the world market.
(218): The domestic elites were always a weak link for the national liberation agenda. When the benefits of import substitution produced a more aggressive and self-confident bourgeoisie, this class wanted to break the cross-class alliance. This class looked forward to a rearrangement of alliances, with a closer relationship with the "West" for economic gain and consumer pleasure. The erosion of the Third World state allowed this class to carry the standard of the First World. In India, by the early 1980s, this class was the size of the French population.
(218): [ANTICOLONIAL NATIONALISM BECOMES PAROCHIAL, AS ECONOMIC AGENDA IS DERAILED] With the demise of import substitution and no other plans for economic sovereignty on the table that appealed to the masses, the Congress Party lost its claim to anticolonial Third World nationalism. Its leaders knew this implicitly, because Indira Gandhi's clique immediately fanned the flames of ethnic and religious difference to reclaim their electoral majority. The appeal to the "Hindu" majority against the secessionism in the Punjab and Assam as well as against Muslims and oppressed castes opened the door for the corruption of the idea of anticolonial nationalism. The massacre at Nellie, for instance, was a result of this venal appeal. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Congress Party was met toe to toe on this line, and it was found wanting by a genuinely cruel cultural nationalist political force, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
(219): The great home of the bourgeois social imagination was that the international order be based on free markets and individual identities, and that the deracinated latter be able to benefit from the unhampered former. Rather than realize [this] dream, what manifested itself wa the simultaneous growth of IMF-driven globalization and parochially cruel nationalism. Sectarian nationalism in the formerly colonized world is not only an adequate form of globalization, especially as the socialist bloc collapsed later in the 1990s, but it seems to be the form that IMF-driven globalization has taken since the late 1970s.
(220): In 1972, the Third World expended $33 billion on arms, already a vulgar amount. A decade later, the figure totaled $81 billion. In 1977, the Cuban government proposed that $650 billion wasted on the worlds arms trade be transferred into a capital infusion into the Third World. The G-7 did not consider the proposal, the corporate media mocked it, and NAM did not give it serious attention...
(222): In the 1970s, the IMF shifted its three-decades old mission from the provision of short-term credit to countries with current account deficits (lender of the last resort) to the use of its crucial finances as a weapon to demand structural economic changes mainly in the bruised nations. In other words, the new IMF eroded the institutions of state sovereignty...
(154): The island of Bali lost about 8 percent of its population, or a hundred thousand people, in the assault on the PKI in 1965-1966.... The actual massacre came at the hands of the army and the activists of the right-wing, mainly theocratic, political parties. They had lists of names of activists and organizers of the PKI and its affiliated organizations. They used these lists to gather the victims for execution. Although the US and Australian governments neither instigated nor conducted the massacre, they encouraged the purge, fattened the lists of Communists for the army, funded the paracommandos, and supported the media effort to blame the entire genocide on the Communists.
(156-158): Moscow and Beijing remained mute. Since the 1920s, the USSR had an ambiguous relationship with Communist parties in the darker nations. On the one hand, the USSR had been the one state that gave enormous ideological, diplomatic, and material support to many independence struggles... From the early 1920s to 1935, [the Comintern] urged Communists in the darker nations to keep some distance between their activity and that of the nationalist groups in their regions... In China, though, the Comintern pushed the Communists into an alliance with the nationalist Kuomintang that ended in the disastrous Kuomintang 1928 massacre of the Communists in Shanghai... At the 1935 Seventh Comintern Congress, the Soviet Communists reacted to the development of fascism within Europe by telling Communist parties to work in a "popular front" with all patriotic social forces... While the strategy of the Comintern developed out of the German Communist Party's failure to stop the Nazi rise to power in 1933, that experience now came to dominate the work of Communists in far different settings... By the advent of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the class collaborationist line had substantially weakened the Communist parties in the Third World, and they became easy prey for attack by the CIA and the nationalist regimes... The concepts of the national democratic state and new democracy allowed Moscow and Beijing to accept noncommunist regimes and national liberation movements as sufficient for the nonindustrial world.... Nasser's Egypt, Qasim's Iraq, Boumedienne's Algeria, Indira Gandhi's India, New Win's Burma, Sekou Toure's Guinea, Ayub Khan's Pakistan, and Mobido Keita's Mali became part of the USSR's and the People's Republic of China's most favored states, even though most of these leaders suppressed their local Communist parties.
(158-159): By the early 1960s, the three largest Communist parties (outside a Communist state) in Asia, Africa, and the Arab lands were the PKI of Indonesia, Sudan's al-Hizb al-Shuyu'i al-Sudani (SCP), and the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), respectively. These parties commanded the respect of a large section of their societies... Within a decade, these three parties would be devastated when the national bourgeoisie (with the assistance of the United States as well as a blind eye from Moscow and Beijing) would call the military out of the barracks to exterminate them. If the USSR and the People's Republic of China had taken a strong stand in any one of these instances, they might have given courage to Communists elsewhere... Instead, the silence scared Communists into alliances with political forces that wanted to use and then destroy them. The Communists were useful. Sukarno needed the PKI for its program and cadre. When Brigadier Qasim overthrew the Iraqi monarchy (1958) and Colonel Jaafar al-Nimeiri rejected a corrupt military junta in Sudan (1969), both leaned on the strong Communist parties... A military coup has little institutional basis for legitimacy...
(159): [BAATH PARTY, SADDAM, THE SOVIETS AND THE ICP] When the ICP took advantage of the opening to revive its banned organizations... [it] grew to more than twenty-five thousand cadre members with an additional mass membership of a million (about a fifth of the total population of Iraq). The growth of the ICP and its social power terrfied the dictatorship of Qasim. Shortly after Qasim came to power, the founder of the Baath, Michel 'Aflaq, visited Baghdad from Damascus to promote his party over the ICP. "We represent the Arab spirit against materialist Communism"... The Baath had only three hundred members in Iraq, and would grow to only three thousand in the early 1960s. In May 1959, Husain ar-Radi, the ICP's first secretary, entered a politburo meeting and argued that the time had come for the party to make a move for power. He was outvoted. The Soviets had sent an envoy with a message not to provoke Qasim. The Baath took the initiative; the US backed it. The ICP defended the nationalist military regime when the Baath attempted a coup in October 1959... The Baath's way had been prepared, and it eventually captured the state in 1963... In 1968 Hussein came to power. The USSR became a major ally of Hussein, who cultivated a split in the battered ICP... [A] ppro-Soviet faction of the ICP joined hands with him. The anti-Baath group...felt the wrath of the Baath's militia... The ICP that remained within the government enabled Iraq's 1972 friendship treaty with the USSR, but as Hussein increased his hold on the country he began a campaign against the ICP itself. In 1978, Hussein had the "loyal" party members arrested, executed many cadre... Hussein's campaign against the ICP led to his enhanced stock among Washinton's policymakers, whose own alliance with him began in 1983. The remainder of the ICP's cadre either fled overseas or else remained within Iraq to continue the struggle, notably in the Kurdish regions (long a bastion of the Left).
(160-161): [SUDAN, NIMEIRI AND THE COMMUNISTS] In Sudan, Nimeiri came to power on a Nasserite agenda, and he, like Qasim, could not rule without the SCP. After the coup he banned all political parites, but allowed the SCP to continue its activities. Founded in 1944, the SCP was the onl political party with national standing because, unlike the sectarian and racialist parties, it recruited equally in the north and south, among Christians as well as Muslims. Nimeiri needed the SCP. In the typical formula, Nimeiri first went after his right flank. In 1970, he began an assault on the reactionary Umma Party... When that party had been substantially pacified, Nimeiri turned his attention to the SCP. The brutal repression of the SCP drove the Communists to attempt a coup of their own along with sympathetic army officers... When news of the events in Sudan reached the Soviet leadership, it tried to negotiate with the Nimeiri government, as well as with the Egyptians and the Libyans, for asylum to the SCP's leaders. Once rebuffed, it did not pursue the matter. It is not that Moscow felt nothing for its comrades in the tropics, but that the fortunes of the Communist parties in the Third World came second to the strategy mapped out by the USSR and the People's Republic of China. When the Nimeiri regime executed the SCP leaders despite the entreaty from the USSR, Moscow rewarded the dictator with economic and political treaties as well as a special honored place as a delegate to the Communist Party of the USSR's twenty-fourth Congress in late 1971.
(162): As Sukarno fell, no significant word of protest came from New Delhi, Belgrade, Rangoon, Cairo or Accra... Indonesia's Sukarno had played a crucial role in the creation of the political platform of the Third World, and Bandung had been its omphalos. Yet there was silence. The personal or political demise of the five major leaders of the progressive tendency in Bandung reveals much about the collapse of solidarity: Nehru died in 1964, Both U Nu and Nkrumah had been recently deposed by military coups, Nasser's role had been weakened by the collapse of his United Arab Republic, and Tito had begun a genial rapproachement with the USSR.
(163): At the 1977 NAM meeting in New Delhi... neither Iraq, Sudan, nor Indonesia were laughed out of the room--their pogroms against the Communists in each case became the sacrosanct "internal affairs" of each country. The major Third World powers accepted Indonesia, Sudan, Iraq, and others simply because they signed on to the basic principles of non-alignment, and because they shared a similar international economic analysis... The destruction of the left had an enormous impact on the Third World. The most conservative, even reactionary social classes attained domiannce over the political platform created in Bandung. As an adjunct to the military regimes, the political forces that emerged rejected the ecumenical anticolonial nationalism of the Left and the liberals for a cruel cultural nationalism that emphasized racialism, religion, and hierarchy.
(166): In 1920, the Karakhan Manifesto from the USSR repudiated the treaties between the Czarist regime and the Manchu Empire, with the statement that the Soviet Republic "renounces all the annexations of Chinese territory..." In the late 1950s, the USSR would rescind this statement and insist on territory that it had abrogated.
(167-168): Nehru's Congress Party did not expend foreign exchange on the import of foreign arms. The armed forces had to do with British remainders and whatever could be produced domestically. From 1951-1962, the Indian treasury spent less on arms than either the British government before it or the Indian governments that would follow the Sino-Indian war (1962). Despite the war with Pakistan in 1947-48, the Indian government reduced its military expenses to 2 percent of its total budget... After the war, the Indian government would not stint on its military to become the world's largest importer of weapons by the 1990s.
(168): [WHY 1962 WAR]: Another way to look at the Sino-Indian border war is to see it as a commonplace occurrence in the new postcolonial states that had, as far as the borders went, begun to adopt a more "European" notion of nationalism than their own previous anticolonial form... Indeed, the Himalays that run along the borders between today's states of Burma, Nepal, India, China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are home to people at high altitudes whose lives rely on transit across the mountain passes to the plains for trade or religious pilgrimages. The boundary is not in the interest of these people...
(170): Colonial powers based their borders on what they were able to conquer, and guarded these boundaries in terms of security rather than any other principle. The cartography of the Himalayas by the British had little to do with the needs and desires of the people who lived in the hills; it had everything to do with the creation of buffer states to protect their Indian empire from the threats by the Czarist Russians and the Manchu Chinese. In 1893, the British created the Durand line, which ran right through the homelands of the Pashtu speakers so as to maintain Afghanistan as a border territory between Russia and India, just as in 1914, the British fashioned the McMahon line to divide their Indian domains from those of the Chinese.
(173): [In the 3rd World, not military Keynesianism, but militarization by gutting of welfare state] WB President Robert McNamara's study of military expenditures in the darker nations found that states had quintupled that one line item between 1960 and 1988; military expenditure increased at twice the rate of per capita income.
(174): China's foreign policy wound its way from Bandung to a rapproachment with the United States and its impossible alliances with dictatorial regimes. As China began its new relationship with the United States, the Chinese government praised the Greek military junta (1972), took the side of Pakistan against the liberation of Bangladesh (1971), welcomed Niemeiri to Beijing after the dictartorship's massacre of its Communists (1971), sent emergency aid to the Sri Lankan government to defeat the left-wing Lanka Samaja Party's insurrection, and quickly recognized Pinochet's coup in Chile (it expelled the Chilean ambassador to China when he refused to support Pinochet). The Sino-Indian war compromised the credibility of India and China.
(178): In 1850, fossil fuels supplied only 6 percent of the world's energy needs, while humans and animals provided the rest. A century later, human and animal power had declined to 6 percent, while fossil fuel use accounted for the remainder.
(178): By 1950, the main energy corporations organized themsleves into seven conglomerates known as the Seven Sisters: Exxon, Shell, BP, Gulf, Texaco, Mobil, and Socal (or Chevron). Even though oil is a lucrative product, in its crude state it is nothing more than a raw material. To remove oil from the ground requires an immense capital outlay, both for exploration and extraction. This initial capital outlay is the carrot and stick used by the Seven Sisters. They came to the oil lands in the early years and staked out "concessions" for themselves... These seven firms, in 1950, controlled 85 percent of the crude oil production in the world outside Canada, China, the USSR, and the United States...
(178): The regimes that ruled over the oil lands could have used the rent paid by the oil companies to increase the social wage--to expand public education, health, transport, and other such important avenues for the overall advancement of the people. Instead, the oil rent went toward the expansion of luxury consumption for the bureaucratic-managerial or monarchal elite--the oligarchy in Venezuela or the Ibn Saud clan in Saudi Arabia--and to oil the military machine (the oil war of Bolivia-Paraguay, 1932-1935, was a preview of the 1967-1970 Nigerian civil war)...
(178-179): In 1957 alone the Seven Sisters made $828 million in Venezuela, whose regime allowed them to remit all their profits without restrictions... The United States supported the junta that came to power in the 1940s, whose goal was to maintain good relations with the oil cartel rather than pusrue social development policies... The oil wealth was not, therefore, reinvested for the overall development of the country. The junta reversed the land reforms of a decade previously, sold the land to private speculators, and moved Venezuela to become a net importer of food grains... In 1958 the new relatively progressive government led by Accion Democratica (AD) expressed an interest in recouping a larger share of the profits... Venezuela had been able to increase its share of the world oil market for serendipitous reasons. Mexcio used to be a major provider of the world's oil (25%). After the Mexican Revolution (1911), the new regime attempted to get a better handle on its oil profits... In 1934, after two decades of tussle, the general who had once guarded the oil region, Lazaro Cardenas, became the president... In 1938, Cardenas nationalized the oil industry... The Seven Sisters moved their focus from Mexico to Venezuela...
(180-181): In the late 1940s, Raul Prebisch complained about the low prices earned by the raw material producers because private cartels controlled international prices. Whether the crop is cocoa, sugar, rubber, or oil, the structure of the commodity cartel did not differ much... The declining price of raw materials over time meant that the Third World would never be able to earn enough from the sale of raw materials to effect both meaningful social development and industrial growth. Many of the formerly colonial states had a problem: they had either been carved out as one-commodity producers or else they had developed into one-crop countries. With no economic diversification, these states additionally had less power than the private corporate cartel. They had only one crop, and unless other countries that produced the same crop banded together, they had to accept whatever terms the private corporate cartel offered...
(181): Because of the low level of capital available in the darker nations, the regimes tried to stregnthen the one economic process that had already been perfected: the colonial crop. The regimes in the Third World relied on the singular colonial crop. They also had little capital to refine and process the crop to create some value before export. In other words, its raw material frequently left the old colonial rail lines and ports in its rawest form possible for transport, and brought a mediocre return to the former colony.... The low level of capital in the arsenal of the darker nations meant that they gave "reasonable" terms to the transnational conglomerates that worked in the private cartel, and had the funds to explore and excavate, cultivate and transport. The concessions given to these conglomerates meant that the regime frequently lost control over production, and would only be able to resrict the giants through licenses, increased taxation, and other minor irritations.
(181): By 1980, of the 115 "developing countries," according to UNCTAD, at least half remained dependent on one commodity for over 50 percent of their export revenues. Most of these countries had come to rely on petroleum exports.
183): [JUAN PABLO PEREZ ALFONZO] In April 1959, Nasser's Egypt and the Arab League hosted the first Arab Petroleum Congress... The congress gathered just as the Seven Sisters reduced the posted price for Middle East oil. Venezuela's representative, Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, was an experienced AD politician. Perez Alfonzo made his political mark in 1943 during a debate in Venezuela over the oil concessions enjoyed by the Seven Sisters... In 1958, Perez Alfonzo joined the AD government as the minster of mines and hydrocarbons. He led the charge against the Seven Sisters, earned the government 60 percent of the oil revenue, and established the notion that Venezuela had sovereignty over its subsoil so that the entire oil industry was a public utility.
(184): Exxon egged on the nationalists with another price reduction (this time, by 7 percent of the posted price). When the oil producers met in Baghdad in September 1960, a month after the decrease, they came with a purpose: to form a public cartel of oil producers. After a week of deliberation, the group created OPEC. The five charter members nominally controlled or at least produced 82 percent of the world's crude exports...
(185-186): A major disappointment in this was the failure of the OPEC nations to use their massive oil profits for the creation of such a fund to help stabilize other commodities. Not only did the OPEC powers refuse to contribute to a global fund to stabilize raw material prices but they also had a poor record int heir ad contributions to their neighbors... Despite its political origins, OPEC became an economic cartel as it fought to defend oil prices and do little else...
(187): [FAUX NATIONALIZATION] In sum, the nationalization of economic assets from transnational firms replicated the problems of political independence from colonialism; it was an advance, but it created an illusion of freedom. The Seven Sisters transferred the burdens of extraction on to the state, while it continued to enjoy the fruits of the industry. Furthermore, the state's newfound power over the fields and its ability to negotiate with the Seven Sisters over the prices and taxes moved it to bargain on two sides of the commodity cycle: with the oil workers for lower wages, and the Seven Sisters for higher prices. To raise the export receipt and increase the coffers of the state did not itself presage a strategy for the generation of equity.
(191): The announcement of socialism came alongside the recognition that its construction would not be easy in a formerly colonized state. Not only had the German and British colonial regimes stripped bare the economy of eastern Africa but they also left behind a state apparatus designed to exploit and not to liberate. The institutions of the state and the civil bureaucracy grew from a culture of imperial hierarchy, a value quite removed from the egalitarianism of national liberation... Hemmed in by pressures from the advanced industrial states, the aristorcratic rural classes, and the emergent mercantile classes, the new state had little time. Things had to change in a hurry. But socialism requires imagination and time. It cannot be made in a hurry. To create socialism in a hurry without mass support, and institutions that can channel this support, led many Third World states to disaster.
(192): Instead of foreign aid or commercial loans, the national liberation states developed a three-pronged approach to development: the nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy (finance, infrastructure, energy, crucial raw material extraction, and capital goods production), the development of the agricultural sector, and the encouragement of industrialization. The plan expected the capital for industrialization to come from the nationalization of finance and an increase in the agricultural surplus. Nationalization put financial decisions in the hands of the state rather than transnational corporations, and it arrested the hemorrhage of capital...
(193): The Third World agenda, for states such as India and Egypt, was not socialist as much as welfarist. The state centralized and nationalized the commanding heights of the economy to ensure that its dominant classes gained some purchase on a complex international economy... Tanzania under Nyerere's TANU attempted something more than the welfarism of India and Egypt. The Arusha Declaration drew from the socialist experiments: there was an insistence that the state must create equity among the population, and that this equity needed to be crafted at the level of production and not simply consumption.
(194): [BUT] [T]he state talked of the people, and yet it stoopd apart from them... The TANU regime came to power, abolished the trade unions, and collected the unions' personnel into one government-authorized union, the National Union of Tanganyika Workers (1964). The natural aliies of a socialist experiment were marginalized. There was no well-developed strategy for how the state planned to build power for its ideas. Instead, the state stood above the people, directing them, preaching "socialism from above."
(196-197): Tanzanian ujaama is quite of a piece with a vast number of examples of Third World development or Third World socialism in a hurry. Most of the Third World states hurriedly built industrial factories and dams, cleared forests, and moved populations. This labor came for many reasons, of which the most important was to rapidly increase the productive capacity of the new nation, to make a Great Leap Forward into a moment of propserity before the political capital of the liberation movements had been spent... The intentions of the leaership, by all accounts, were not malevolent. Yet its modernist dream--to adminster nature and society, and build vast industrial monuments without either a democratic governance structure or a mobilized population--led to the worst excesses of commandism and bureaucratism. In India, in the period from the late 1940s to the late 1980s, the state displaced some 25 million people, while in the same period, the Chinese shifted some 40 million people. These are the dramatic figures, because these states have substantial populations, but in small countries the percentage of the population that the state shifted by its bureaucratic commandism is staggering (in Tanzania, a fifth of the population was resettled).
(199): In 1961, after two five-year plans, India's Nehru rued the failure of his regime to tend to the sufferings of the population... Market socialism or the mixed economy was a socialism of consumption not production. In the attempt to industrailize and create agricultural change, there was only a muted effort to change the relations and methods of production. The process of industrial as well as agricultural production remained similar to that found in any advanced capitalist country: workers had no say in the process of production, which was run by a detached management.
(200): In 1932, the El Salvadorian rural elites engineered the massacre of twenty thousand peasants who occupied private land and opposed export-led agriculture.
(200): When India won its freedom, the Congress relied on rural power brokers to deliver the vote. It did not want to alienate the landowners who financed these agents of the party.
(200): In the Philippines, the Land Reform Act of 1955 froze land relations in plantation-like conditions...
(208-209): [In 1983] NAM came to New Delhi at a crucial time for Indira Gandhi... When Nehru died in 1964, Indira Gandhi took on a major role in the Congress Party. In 1966, she won elections and was prime minister until 1977. She returned to power in 1980 with a weakend mandate because of the excesses of the martial law (Emergency) regime she ran from 1975 to 1977. When NAM came to Delhi, the ciety was under siege... In Nellie, Assam, five thousand refugees were killed...
(209): Between the 1966 Tricontinental and the 1979 sixth NAM meeting in Havana, a number of important events transpired. A Marxist revolution in Ethiopia (1974) inaugurated a set of defeats for the imperialist bloc. In 1975, the National Liberation Front defeated the US in South Vietname and the Pathet Lao took Vientiane. That same year, five Portuguese colonies in AFrica seized their independence after the Salazar dictatorship ended in Lisbon. In 1978-1979, the Marxists seized control of Afghanistan, the New Jewel Movement took power in Grenada, and the Sandinista revolution prevailed in Nicaragua. Additionally, a number of African regimes (such as in Benin, Madagascar, Liberia, and Libya) adopted Marxism-Leninism as their official ideology. The mood in Havan was exuberant... The conflict between the capitalist and Communist worlds did not mean neutrality in that struggle. The Havana meeting raised the question of a formal anti-imperialist alliance between NAM and the USSR--a move pushed by Castro...
(210) [BUT] Between Havana and New Delhi, a great deal occured to dampen this enthusiasm. Ronald Reagan's forward policy extended the increase in military expenditure initiated by Jimmy Carter...
(215): By 1983, the NAM states produed less than a tenth of the worlds' industrial output, although transnational corporations controlled three-quarters of the industrial output in these states. Among the NAM states, five produced more than 80 percent of this total industrial output: Brazil, South Korea, India, Mexico, and Argentina.
(215): The changes in the general character of NAM were reflected in the changes within India. By the mid-1970s, India's economic agenda floundered. The long-standing failure to reconstruct agrarian relations, an excessive reliance on industrial development over any other sector, a burgeoning military sector... A dissatisfied population rose in a host of rebellions... The party of the freedom movement claimed to rule with the anticolonial nationalist agenda, but it adopted economic policies inimical to the vast mass of the population...
(217): Mexico, an oil-rich country, defaulted on $80 billion in public-sector debt in 1982. Forty countries joined Mexico in arrears, and a year later another twenty-seven had to restructure their massive debt. The total debt in the brusied nations was $500 billion, which at the time threatened the financial stability of the world market.
(218): The domestic elites were always a weak link for the national liberation agenda. When the benefits of import substitution produced a more aggressive and self-confident bourgeoisie, this class wanted to break the cross-class alliance. This class looked forward to a rearrangement of alliances, with a closer relationship with the "West" for economic gain and consumer pleasure. The erosion of the Third World state allowed this class to carry the standard of the First World. In India, by the early 1980s, this class was the size of the French population.
(218): [ANTICOLONIAL NATIONALISM BECOMES PAROCHIAL, AS ECONOMIC AGENDA IS DERAILED] With the demise of import substitution and no other plans for economic sovereignty on the table that appealed to the masses, the Congress Party lost its claim to anticolonial Third World nationalism. Its leaders knew this implicitly, because Indira Gandhi's clique immediately fanned the flames of ethnic and religious difference to reclaim their electoral majority. The appeal to the "Hindu" majority against the secessionism in the Punjab and Assam as well as against Muslims and oppressed castes opened the door for the corruption of the idea of anticolonial nationalism. The massacre at Nellie, for instance, was a result of this venal appeal. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Congress Party was met toe to toe on this line, and it was found wanting by a genuinely cruel cultural nationalist political force, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
(219): The great home of the bourgeois social imagination was that the international order be based on free markets and individual identities, and that the deracinated latter be able to benefit from the unhampered former. Rather than realize [this] dream, what manifested itself wa the simultaneous growth of IMF-driven globalization and parochially cruel nationalism. Sectarian nationalism in the formerly colonized world is not only an adequate form of globalization, especially as the socialist bloc collapsed later in the 1990s, but it seems to be the form that IMF-driven globalization has taken since the late 1970s.
(220): In 1972, the Third World expended $33 billion on arms, already a vulgar amount. A decade later, the figure totaled $81 billion. In 1977, the Cuban government proposed that $650 billion wasted on the worlds arms trade be transferred into a capital infusion into the Third World. The G-7 did not consider the proposal, the corporate media mocked it, and NAM did not give it serious attention...
(222): In the 1970s, the IMF shifted its three-decades old mission from the provision of short-term credit to countries with current account deficits (lender of the last resort) to the use of its crucial finances as a weapon to demand structural economic changes mainly in the bruised nations. In other words, the new IMF eroded the institutions of state sovereignty...
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