Greed, pauperisation, and the free market

If you and I owe money to a bank or any lending agencies, any supplier of goods and services, credit company or outstanding mortgage and we default in our payments we know what to expect: threatening letters, last warnings, and advisory notes that are really last chance orders before the bailiffs, lawyers and auctioneers descend upon us.

It may be unfair but somehow we have been brainwashed by the capitalist ideology that there is no other alternative than to keep up with our payments unfailingly! The market, we are deceived into believing, is no respecter of anybody and its immutable logic will fix things. In the past three decades nations, social groups and communities have been destroyed, reduced to penury by structural adjustment policies across Africa, Asia and Latin America through supposedly market –led policies imposed by the IMF and World Bank, backed by the West and led by the USA. SAPs gave way to globalisation which is treated as a moving train in which the only option is to jump in; no opt-out option.

Imperialism was dressed up as new technology and ‘the market’ became the acceptable vocabulary for exploitation and greed. This god of the market is supposed to fix all things regardless of the fact that the market has never been a fair place. We do not enter it on equal terms while the hands of many are tied to their backs inside it. Triumphalist neoliberalism forced everyone behind its hegemony and loss of faith in religion and anti-capitalist ideologies were replaced by a new utopia: the market. Anyone who espoused a different world stressing people above profit was seen variously as a ‘conservative’, ‘old style state socialist’, or ‘illiberal’ and a relic of past ideological battles. Francis Fukuyama even declared an end to history with the West (meaning the US and the American way) as the victors. It seemed that our destiny was to be Americanised!

All these untruths became received wisdom until recently. What was thought to be a temporary wobble in the greedy halls of the Wall Street, City of London and other financial casinos across the world have become a real crisis whose magnitude is yet to fully unfold. The market could not fix itself as it was supposed to do for all things. Bankers, financial corporations, and mortgage lenders saw billions wiped off their paper trillions in a few weeks with stocks in free fall, as they face the market forces of their own greed. Yet instead of letting the market to sort itself out, the greedy plutocrats whose excesses led to the financial collapse turn to their friends in the White House for a bailout. Why can they not be allowed to chew the grass after swallowing the cattle? So it is alright for the state to bail out the rich but unacceptable for the state to protect the poor, the sick, the marginalised and those pauperised by the greedy capitalists. They are opposed to socialism after all, they just want it for the rich!

For decades we are told that the state is 'useless', 'inefficient', 'parasitic', and 'anti-enterprise', yet when the wheelers and dealers are in trouble they fall back on the same state to bail them out with freebies! The Right always talks about personal and individual responsibility yet are they not asking the greedy bankers to tackle responsibility for their actions instead of taxing everyone else?

It is instructive that the $700 billion Wall Street bailout plan pushed through by the Bush administration was being hammered out at the same time global leaders were assembling across the river at the UN General Assembly where two related high level meetings were taking place. One was on Africa’s development needs and the other was a renewed Call to Action on the MDGs. Both identified funding gaps between promises and pledges by African and global leaders on the one hand and delivery to the poor on the ground on the other. $72 billion annually for the next seven years will help all the poor countries to deliver on the MDGs, yet this could not be found almost eight years since the promises were made to achieve the MDGs by 2015! What is required between now and 2015 is far less than what Bush alone is prepared to throw at Wall Street immediately not to talk of more billions to come and what other richer countries in the EU and Japan are already throwing at their own greedy bankers.

There are a number of lessons for Africa in all this. One, we should not expect others to be our messiahs; we should be our own liberators. We cannot be continuously ridiculing ourselves by accepting every invitation to come and talk about our problems. We should say no to future invitations and stay at home and actively engage in development action instead of talking about it. Two, for many years our leaders have been behaving like zombies parroting neoliberal nonsense that ‘there is no alternative’ to the liberalisation and pauperisation of our peoples. Now their patron saints in America have shown that the state has to intervene when the market is failing. They have always used state power to protect their market; that’s what slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism and their recolonisation of other peoples through globalisation is all about. Three, Fukuyama is right but not in the sense in which he meant his end of history postulation. It is indeed
the end of the history of the market as god and hopefully the beginning of a more realistic development dialogue that should give political, policy and intellectual spaces for people desiring a different world and making it possible, beyond the market.

* Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is general secretary of the Global Pan-African Movement, based in Kampala, Uganda, and is also director of Justice Africa, based in London, UK.
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