In My View

Irrelevant exertions

Four-fifths of the world population was not represented in Washington last week (15 November). Yet, 85 per cent of the global wealth was controlled by those who were present in the city that is popularly considered the power capital of the world. This enormous unrepresented population does not care about the fulminations on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank (WB). They do not care about the countercyclical measures the managers of the world economy adopted to beat the current downturn in their coffers. These five billion people (2006) are outside of the ‘market’ realm.

Economic cycles hold very little meaning when you are surviving on less than $ 2 a day. Financial derivatives and credit swaps remain beyond your pale when you remain off the charts of all credit managers of the world. Still, India’s Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh feels, “Economic performance in almost all developing countries has improved. In the process, attitudes towards globalization have begun to change and people all over the world have come to appreciate the enormous benefits that can be derived from global economic integration.” This is what he had said last week at Washington in the meeting of the well heeled.

Predictably, the meeting said nothing new. It iterated such deep seated homilies like, “We recognize that these reforms will only be successful if grounded in a commitment to free market principles, including the rule of law, respect for private property, open trade and investment, competitive markets, and efficient, effectively regulated financial systems.” In other words, it continued to extend the illusion that the market is inclusivist and thus all pervasive.

So what did this meeting propose as actions that could reverse the adverse fall-out of the current crisis? Leaders of the 20 most powerful nations of the world who could decide on matters of life and death, war and peace behaved as if they were fund managers of a mythical Wall Street firm that had under its aegis the resources of the world. So they talked about, “Strengthening Transparency and Accountability;” “Enhancing Sound Regulation;” and, “Promoting Integrity in Financial Markets.” In the process, they let it be known to all who cared that all this while they were sleeping on the job.

If transparency needed to strengthened in the financial markets, or regulation of the market needed to strengthened and integrity promoted, what were the leaders doing all this while? And if they had allowed this situation to come to such a pass without all these being undertaken in the financial markets all this while, should they be not held accountable for their acts of commission and omission?

The reason they flailed their arms so irrelevantly last week was because they did not want address the core issues. One of the most important core issues is whether Capitalism has only worked as a system of accumulation for a few, and failed to cater to the needs of the most. The rich men’s clubs this system of human development has spawned have become so anti-democratic and incestuous that they stopped noting even the warning signs of their own imminent collapse.

The most important philosophical entreaty of current times emerging from the West, that ‘greed is good’ has shown that the inherent predatory nature of the powerful, when not disciplined in time, can devour the very hand that feeds it. In effect, this thus nullifies the philosophical underpinning of contemporary Western societies.

This is not a moral issue. It is an issue that has shown how vacuous the overriding commitment of Capitalism for efficiency of allocation and accumulation truly is. This is an issue that can no longer be addressed by a countercultural argument based on the failures of the Soviet system of socialism. In any case, the success of the capitalist phase of Chinese socialism’s work-in-progress (it has raised roughly 300 million people above the poverty line in one single generation) has long overtaken the communist excesses of the Russian regime, as an attributive character of Marxian thought.

Marx’s words of 1875, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” do not call for a fundamental sublimation of human nature as supposedly ‘greed’ fosters. But on the contrary, it points at a higher purpose of life where the economic production system does not consume all of human endeavour in a cyclical process of consumption.

The egalitarianism this thus gives birth to is not conditioned by the managerial abilities of the political leadership. But instead it becomes the bedrock of human belief where the striving for better life transcends the limits of material wealth and opens the vista for higher aesthetics.

But it also has to be said that the world cannot prosper in any way under any system, be it Capitalism or Socialism, when four-fifths of its population have to encounter the dehumanising influence of poverty on a daily basis. From that perspective alone last week’s meeting is of no relevance to world as we know it.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in