Solutions-Oriented Peace Journalism
It’s Not only Necessary to Develop an Alternative to
Globalization — It’s Entirely Possible
IN FOCUS, 24 July 2017
Walden Bello | Foreign Policy In
Focus – TRANSCEND Media Service
It was the left who diagnosed the
ills of globalization. So why is the right eating our lunch?
(Photo: StopFastTrack /
Flickr)
19 Jul 2017 – Free trade
and the freedom of capital to move across borders have been the cutting edge of
globalization. They’ve also led to the succession of crises that have led to
the widespread questioning of capitalism as a way of organizing economic life —
and of its paramount ideological expression, neoliberalism.
The protests against capitalism at the recent
G20 meeting in Hamburg may seem superficially the same as those which marked
similar meetings in the early 2000s. But there’s one big difference now: Global
capitalism is in a period of long-term stagnation following the global
financial crisis. The newer protests represent a far broader disenchantment
with capitalism than the protests of the 2000s.
Yet capitalism’s resilience amidst crisis must
not be underestimated. For trade activists, in particular, who’ve been on the
forefront of the struggle against neoliberalism and globalization over the last
two decades, there are a number of key challenges posed by the conjuncture.
Neoliberalism’s Surprising Strength
First is the surprising strength of
neoliberalism.
The credibility of neoliberalism, to which free
trade ideology is central, has been deeply damaged by a succession of events
over the last two decades, among which were the collapse of the third
ministerial of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999, the Asian
financial crisis in 1997-98, and the Global financial crisis of 2008-2009, the
effects of which continue to drag down the global economy.
Most of us in the field remember the time late
in 2008, when after hearing accounts of the Global financial crisis from an
assembly of orthodox economists at the London School of Economics, Queen
Elizabeth posed the question: “Why didn’t anybody see this
coming?” None of the dumbfounded economists could answer her
then — and last I heard, the queen is still waiting for the answer.
What one finds puzzling is despite this loss of
credibility, neoliberalism continues to rule. Academic economists continue to
teach it, and technocrats continue to prescribe it. The false assumptions of
free trade theory underlie the free trade agreements or economic partnership
agreements into which the big powers continue to try to rope developing
countries.
To borrow an image from the old western films,
the train engineer has been shot and killed, but his dead hand continues to
push down on the throttle, with the train gathering more and more speed. The
takeaway from this is that so long as there are interests that are served by an
ideology, such as corporate interests and knowledge institutions that have invested
in it, even a succession of devastating crises of credibility isn’t enough to
overthrow a paradigm.
Export-led Growth Is Still on Course
The second challenge is especially relevant to
developing countries. It is the persistence of the model of export-oriented
growth.
Now, this model of development through trade is
shared both by neoliberals and non-neoliberals — the difference being that the
former think it should be advanced by market forces alone and the latter with
the vigorous help of the state. Now, over the last few years, the stagnation of
the once dynamic centers of the global demand — the U.S., Europe, and the BRICS
— has made this model obsolete.
It was, in fact, the non-viability of this once
successful model of rapid growth in current global circumstances that pushed
China, under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, to push the country away from an
export-oriented path to a domestic demand-led strategy via a massive $585
billion stimulus program. They failed, and the reason for their failure is
instructive.
In fact, a set of powerful interests had
congealed around the export-oriented model — the state banks, regional and
local governments that had benefited from the strategy, export-oriented state
enterprises, foreign investors — and these prevented the model from being
dislodged, even given its unsuitability in this period of global stagnation.
These same policy struggles are going on in
other developing countries. In most cases, the outcome is the same: The export
lobbies are winning, despite the fact that the global conditions sustaining
their strategy are vanishing.
The Right Eats Our Lunch
A third challenge has to do with the fact that
when major changes in trade policy do take place, it’s not because of the
actions of progressive groups but of demagogues of the right. I think this is
clearest in the case of the United States.
It was Donald Trump who shot down the
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that had been the object of so much criticism
coming from the left. Trump may be a demagogue and his motives may be
opportunistic, but it was he who came through on one of the central demands of
U.S. labor — not the Democrats — with the consequence that he’s been able to
win over large parts of the white working class.
In Europe, working classes are moving to right
wing parties in significant numbers as well, not only owing to a racist
response to immigration, but also because these far-right parties are espousing
anti-globalization and anti-free trade rhetoric. As in the case with the
Democrats in the U.S., the Social Democrats in Europe are identified with
financialization and free trade, and this is a central reason for their loss of
credibility.
But it was the non-establishment left,
the left of social movements, that began and developed the critique of
globalization, neoliberalism, and free trade in the 1990s and the 2000s. But
for a variety of reasons, we weren’t able to translate our politics into an
effective movement. The extreme right, on the other hand, opportunistically
expropriated our message, rebranded themselves as anti-neoliberals opposed to
the center-right as well as the center-left, and now they’re eating our lunch.
The Alternative
The final challenge has to do with coming up
with a credible alternative paradigm.
My first two points stressed the importance of
powerful interests in sustaining a paradigm despite its loss of intellectual
credibility. But this isn’t sufficient to explain the continuing powerful
influence of neoliberalism. Our failure to move from a critique of neoliberal
capitalism to a powerful alternative model — like socialism provided to so many
marginalized classes, peoples, and nations in the 20th century — is part of the
problem.
The theoretical building blocks of an
alternative economic model are there, the product of the work of so many
progressives over the last 50 years. This includes the rich work that has been
done around sustainable development, de-growth, and de-globalization. The task
is to integrate them not only into an intellectually coherent model, but into
an inspiring narrative that combines vision, theory, program, and action, and
one that rests firmly on the values of justice, equity, and environmental
sustainability.
Of course, the work towards this goal will be
long and hard. But we must not only be convinced that it’s necessary but
also confident that it’s possible to come up with an
alternative that will rally most of the people behind us. Ideas matter. To
borrow the old biblical saying, “Without vision, the people perish.”
These are some of the central challenges
confronting trade activists. We cannot leave the field to a neoliberalism that
has failed or to an extremism that has appropriated some of our analysis and
married them to hideous, reactionary values.
A progressive future is not guaranteed. We must
work to bring it about, and we will.
__________________________________________
Walden Bello was, until
recently, a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines. He is
the author of many books and articles on U.S. political, military, and economic
relations with Asia. Bello is an expert on the World Trade Organization and
global trade, senior analyst at the Philippine think-tank Focus on the
Global South, and TNI fellow. He was the principal author
of A Siamese Tragedy: Development and Disintegration in Modern
Thailand (London: Zed Press, 1998). Bello did his doctoral dissertation
on the counterrevolution in Chile in 1970-73. He is currently senior research
fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies of Kyoto University.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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