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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 April - 3 May 2000 Issue No. 479 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 April - 3 May 2000 Issue No. 479
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Between angels and demons
By Sharif Elmusa *Are the protests in Seattle and Washington harbingers of a more enduring trend of opposition to global capitalism? I think so. While a mere three decades ago capitalism appeared to be on the defensive, and there was much talk about the "transition" to socialism, now ideologies and actors capable of rivaling capitalism have all but retreated. Capitalism today is the global system more than ever before, irrespective of the metonyms -- like free market and free enterprise -- that often are used to soften its historically harsh image. Its predominance, however, brings its own burden. What else but capitalism will be held responsible for delivering the goods on poverty or the environment, and even democracy (which many a liberal theorist claims is a political twin of capitalism)?
There is no other actor in town but capitalism, and the litany of the woes it brings is long and well-known. Out of six billion people, four billions are poor; the ozone layer is thinning out; the forests are being fast felled; the income gap is widening among and within countries; national and local cultures are threatened with homogenisation and extinction; and women's aspirations have yet to be realised in any palpable manner. It will hardly help capitalism to blame those woes on previous systems and policies. Its promise that there will be salvation in the long run offers little succor to those in distress. Nor can the system simply rest on the laurels of its success in the West, for immense economic growth alone would not have been worth celebrating, and may not even have been sustained, without the social welfare gains won by struggle and reform. These social gains have been eroded, yet they must be maintained if the system is not to face political crises. Because the woes cut across national boundaries, it is likely that rallies in the future will bring together people from many parts of the world. Because capitalism is global, social reform must be implemented on a global scale.
Nor are the protests only about things material. "People above profits," read one of the placards in Seattle; and "More world, less bank," in Washington. The trend is that more and more people everywhere will live increasingly under a heavy shadow of capitalist values: acquisitiveness, cut-throat competition, efficiency conceived of in machine terms, and unbridled individualism. The Czech émigré novelist Milan Kundera said, "If there is too much uncontested meaning on earth (the reign of the angels), man collapses under the burden; if the world loses all its meaning (the reign of the demons), life is every bit as impossible." The boundary between lack of contested meaning and loss of meaning is fine as a hair. Kundera was thinking of the crude totalitarianism of east Europe's communist regimes; but now the tables have been turned, and his dictum is apt for the world of capitalism.
Karl Polanyi, the late prominent political-economic historian, argued that what he called "19th-century civilisation" rested on four amoral institutions: the balance of power system, the gold standard, the liberal state, and the self-regulating market. It was, however, the market that was the centrepiece, as well as the institution responsible for the rise and collapse of both that civilisation and the subsequent outbreak of the two World Wars. He claimed that the idea of the self-regulating market was a stark utopia, and that it could not exist without eroding the core values of society and turning the physical environment into a wasteland.
History does not repeat itself, and the present world situation may not resemble that at the commencement of the 20th century. Nonetheless, the challenges facing capitalism are even more daunting than at that time, and their scope is wider, thanks to its very success in integrating ever larger numbers of societies and sectors into its fold. In the late 19th century, and during a good part of the 20th, there was a counter-ideology to capitalism: socialism with its many shades. The idea of socialism has been dealt a severe blow, if not a knockout, and there is a counter-ideological incoherence among those who want to reform capitalism.
Socialism appealed to millions of intellectuals, workers and disenfranchised masses across the globe because it promised to deliver on the ideals of justice, integrity and meaning. These ideals are an enduring constituent of the human condition. They are at the heart of current protests against capitalism and agitation for reform. Whatever labels are given to new, alternative socio-economic systems, they will be under-girded by these ideals, which have been deepened by the spread of contemporary ecological ethics, especially among the young. Unfettered capitalism could not deliver on these ideals before, nor will it be able to in the future: its logic of maximising individual and corporate profits, which gives it its powerful dynamic, has room for them only through deliberate, far-reaching intervention.
In the past, protests and demands to advance these ideals were directed at national governments and their institutions, representatives, and symbols. Now that governments are coming under the sway of global capitalism and its institutions, the protest is likely to switch to those institutions: multinational corporations, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.
The last three organisations have come to be perceived as the Trojan horse of the MNCs, rather than as the public servants of world societies. In their present form and outlook, they are ill-equipped to advance the humanist goals of achieving justice, conserving the environment and dealing gently with the rest of the planet's species. They prescribe the same pill to every disease; they keep stacking up debt; they assign Chinese to work on the Congo and Slavs to Thailand; they are too far from the sites they serve; they dispatch their staff on "missions" to which they arrive jet-lagged and in a hurry to depart; they disperse their funds swiftly so they stay in business; they are run, when it comes to making policy and important decisions, by First World professionals; they are staffed by technocrats who are not versed in the social and political dimensions of policy. They are what they do, not what they say; and their episodic successes are eclipsed by widespread failures. Structural adjustment is needed inside these institutions themselves, in the rules they have crafted, in their staffing and outlook, and in how they operate. Global institutions, indeed, matter.
The campaign to reform the institutions and rules of the world economy, apart from popular protests, requires that Third World governments act collectively. To be a credible and effective voice in the campaign, however, they themselves must become more accountable before their own people. In the meantime, what better target for protest than those wealthy financiers, corrupt officials and impressively paid bureaucrats, a typical sample and symbol of the world's elite, strolling down the corridors of five-star hotels and the glitzy headquarters of the World Bank, dining in fancy restaurants, transported -- but for the protesters' disruptions -- in long dark limousines, in the most politically powerful capital in the world, where the streets start with monuments and end in ghettos?
* The writer is associate professor of political science at the American University in Cairo.
