Ian McDonald
We have not progressed at all. The ideology of world empires based upon the supposed superiority of each nation or race of empire builders was succeeded by the ideologies of communism and fascism which have been succeeded by a new, all-powerful ideology - the god of the marketplace and technology, its acolyte.
We are all being urged, browbeaten, into becoming believers in this new and morally vicious ideology. All are being harried into accepting its absurd but fashionable truisms. Love free trade. Embrace globalisation. Bless the market. Which public figure of any persuasion can stand up against these narrowly defined truisms without committing career suicide?
Consider one example. The concept of protectionism is considered economic heresy, and those practising it fit to be burnt at the WTO stake. But the historical evidence from countries that have sustained fast growth and those that have not suggests that trade protection can be one of a number of powerful instruments for nurturing new activities and higher valued-added processes in existing activities, provided it is brought down pari passu with the rise in producers' production and marketing capacities.
Trade liberalisation
Banana being prepared for the market, as seen on a farm in Jamaica. The new WTO ruling favouring the United States could further hurt Caribbean banana producers. - File
On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the people and capital released from activities knocked out by trade liberalisation are not always able to be recombined to make other products saleable in internationally competitive markets, whatever the exchange rate. They may well not be employed at all. Such unbridled liberalisation often spells the death knell of valuable home-grown enterprises.
We are being herded into acquiescence by the dominant ideology. Throughout history the standard reaction to any overwhelming ideology has been passivity. Pas-sivity, indeed, is one of ideology's most depressing effects. It is sad to see it happening all over again. The citizen is reduced to the state of a mindless subject, or even a sort of serfdom. With one stroke of a flawed intellectual argument the whole planet is put in its place.
The new ideology is defined and organised in the form of a modern corporatism whose dominant exemplar is the multinational corporation. Of these there are now upwards of 40,000 in the world with 200,000 affiliates accounting for perhaps one-third of total global production.
This corporate network is steadily becoming stronger than any government, even the most powerful. Increasingly, what it wants is what will happen. The philosophy is summed up in the words of Sam Weller in Charles Dickens' huge and marvellous novel, The Pickwick Papers: "Every man for himself and God for us all, as the elephant said as he danced among the chickens."
New ideological path
The world has gone dancing far along the new ideological path. Make a simple test by examining the health of the public good. There has never ever been so much money - actual money, disposable cash - in circulation as there is today, in absolute terms and on a per capita basis.
Look, for example, at the extraordinary growth of the banking industry and the even more explosive growth of money markets everywhere. Yet, there is ridiculously little disposable cash for the public good. In a corporatist system there is always a lack of money for the public good because the system is ideologically based entirely upon carefully measured self-interest. The general good is not a good which the new ideologues recognise.
The results are there for all to see if we were not blinkered by the dominant and acquisitive vision of others. Some 1,000 soldiers and 5,000 civilians are killed every day in ongoing and steadily escalating wars.
In the Third World there is more misery than there has ever been: 200 million children aged four to 14 are slaves in the workplace, one-third of the world's children are undernourished, 30 per cent of the adult able-bodied are unemployed, debt declines not in the slightest, and US$1.5 trillion is now owed by poor countries. Worldwide, in developed as in developing countries, the virulence and extent of corruption and violent crime is growing out of control.
If there is one thing that mankind should by now have learnt is that ideologies are not to be trusted. But ordinary men and women are all too easily argued or browbeaten or actually beaten into embracing the confident certitude that every ideology offers. Who dares contest what these great and knowledgeable people are claiming? But we should not succumb. What is happening is not inevitable, rather, it is of a temporary, and even incidental, nature.
Corporatism running wild
This new ideology - so largely based on the crude self-interest of a corporatism running wild - must be seen as ephemeral when measured against other perspectives which have been with us through the ages: Solon's ideas of public justice, the Socratic view of the citizen as irrepressible critic, Cicero's "The good of the citizen is the chief law," to name a few of these essential and infinitely more human perspectives.
We must draw upon that well of deeply human insights that the best human beings have worked out, so that we can confront and ridicule the crude and narrow perspective that claims pure economics lies at the heart of civilised life, and that we must therefore fling down or fling up the structures of society as the marketplace dictates, and that if we don't the marketplace will do it anyway, sooner or later.
It is time to stand up and be counted among those who do not believe that brutal vision of mankind's future.
Ian McDonald is an occasional contributor who lives and works in Georgetown, Guyana.
