Harry Targ
The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction-and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively (from The National Security Strategy of the United States, September 20, 2002).
…power, in an interconnected world, is no longer a zero sum game. …we will pursue engagement with hostile nations to test their intentions, give their governments the opportunity to change course, reach out to their people, and mobilize international coalitions….The belief that our own interests are bound to the interests of those beyond our borders will continue to guide our engagement with nations and peoples (from The National Security Strategy, May 2010).
The Globalist and Pragmatist Approaches to United States Foreign Policy
The United States emerged from World War II as the “hegemonic power” in the international system. This meant that international institutions and law, diplomatic practices, and the emergence of a global political economy were largely shaped by United States interests. Of particular relevance to global capitalism was the routinization of “free trade,” open doors to foreign investment, access to cheap labor, and the use of multi-billion dollar programs of economic and military assistance to further the penetration of friendly countries around the world. In our own day capitalist states including the United States have pursued the globalization of financial speculation.
The “golden age” of United States economic and military hegemony began to unravel with the quagmire of Vietnam, the oil shocks of the 1970s, and the rise of capitalist competitors to the United States. And, of course, throughout the period from the end of World War II to the present, popular resistance to capitalist hegemony spread from Southeast Asia, to the African continent, to Central America and the Caribbean, to the Middle East, and the Persian Gulf.
Each United States administration sought to maintain global hegemony in the face of growing challenges from the Global South, from Socialist states, and from capitalist competitors. But administrations adopted different strategies and tactics to achieve their hegemonic goals. No better comparison of the two primary programs of foreign policy action can be identified then examining the key foreign policy statements of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.
The former represents the “globalist” tradition in United States foreign policy. Globalists, alternatively referred to as “neoconservatives,” believe that the United States, based on its military superiority, can and must impose its institutions and policies on the world. This means acting unilaterally to maintain United States hegemony, whatever the reactions from friend and foe alike. This is no better illustrated than the Bush “doctrine of preemption.” The United States reserves the right to act unilaterally when it believes that an enemy, a nation or a people, may in some undetermined future time, threaten the United States.
Also, the globalist agenda assumes that unilateral military action replaces diplomacy as the primary tool of international relations. This rejection of diplomacy challenges the four hundred year tradition of international relations.
Therefore, globalists declare their hostility to alliances, international institutions and norms, and hundreds of years of international law. In other words, the globalist approach to foreign policy, much like the metaphor of the lone gunslinger of the Wild West, emphasizes unilateral action, force, insistence that others accept U.S. domination, and the “zero-sum” view of the world; that is nations and peoples are with the United States or they are with the enemy. Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy statement is a powerful reflection of this globalist stance.
In general the pragmatist approach to U.S. foreign policy regards diplomacy as an essential tool of a nation’s foreign policy. In fact, military means are used to achieve goals only when diplomacy fails. Diplomatic tools, dialogue and negotiation, may be effective devices in dealing with enemies as well as friends.
Pragmatists see alliances, international institutions and norms, and the selective obedience to international law as central to the pursuit of national interests.
Finally, the pragmatists are more likely to see international relations as a “non-zero sum” game; that is, through negotiations with adversaries both the United States and the other party or parties may be beneficiaries of negotiation.
National Security Strategy Documents: 2002 and 2010
The 2002 NSS document submitted as required to Congress generated enormous attention. Buried in the familiar language of promoting freedom, markets, and other “universal values,” the Bush administration announced that it reserved the right to attack targets, nations or groups, which were perceived to be possible threats to the United States. The NSS declared that this had always been United States policy; the unilateral declaration of the right to peremptorily attack any target. In other words, Bush declared, foreign policy in his administration had not changed from prior ones.
Progressive analysts agree that the United States has acted peremptorily many times. But they say that for the most part official declarations throughout the period since World War II claim that U.S. policy has been to deter possible aggression rather than to unilaterally launch military strikes on perceived threats (the Reagan administration being the exception rather than the rule). Therefore to the extent that the former policy of deterrence had been replaced by preemption, United States policy had changed significantly. In combination with other elements of strategy, using force not diplomacy, ignoring allies and international institutions, and seeing the world in terms of winning or losing, the 2002 NSS statement seemed dangerously militaristic.
The 2010 NSS document pays homage to freedom, markets, democracy, and American virtue, and identifies terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction as enduring problems. But much of the document suggests a foreign policy shift from the globalist lens on the world to the pragmatist one. The NSS 2010 document opens with a clear commitment to deterring aggression, not initiating it. It states that no single nation, no matter how powerful, can determine the destiny of the world alone. And it proclaims that “America must prepare for the future, while forging cooperative approaches among nations that can yield results.”
The document declares that the United States must work with others to achieve a world free of terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and repression. As to the latter, NSS 2010 even asserts that part of the path to a more secure world involves the United States living up to its own values at home. While tinged with Reagan’s view of the United States as the “city on the hill” the document significantly declares that:
"…the most effective way for the United States of America to
promote our values is to live them. America’s commitment to
democracy, human rights, and the rule of law are essential
sources of our strength and influence in the world. They too
must be cultivated by our rejection of actions like torture
that are not in line with ourvalues, by our commitment to
pursue justice consistent with our Constitution, and by our
steady determination to extend the promise of America to all
of our citizens. America has always been a beacon to the
peoples of the world when we ensure that the light of America’s
example burns bright."
As to relations with the rest of the world, the document declares firmly that it would be a mistake “to walk away” from the international system. It promises to work to strengthen international institutions and to galvanize collective action. “The starting point for that collective action will be our engagement with other countries.” Importantly, NSS 2010 adds that “power, in an interconnected world, is no longer a zero sum game.” And to promote engagement the United States will pursue it “…with hostile nations to test their intentions, give their governments the opportunity to change course, reach out to their people, and mobilize international coalitions.”
Do Words Matter?
NSS 2002 and 2010 reflect the similarities and differences of outlook, strategy, and tactics characteristic of United States foreign policy. For sure, the goals of United States have been in keeping with the needs of capitalism to expand. But different administrations have articulated what U.S. policy would be in different ways and to some degree would act in conformance with their descriptions. Also, some presidents would talk and act like both globalists and pragmatists, as circumstances dictated. For example, President Eisenhower made a powerful speech calling for the diminution of the Cold War with the Soviet Union in 1953. He followed it up with negotiations with the Soviet leadership later in the 1950s and warned before he left office of a rising military/industrial complex. At the same time his administration called for the “liberation’ of Eastern Europe and China from the yoke of Communism, overthrew freely elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, and began the long march toward disaster in Vietnam.
Candidate Obama excited Europeans, citizens of the Middle East, and even radicals in Latin America with his dramatic speeches calling for a new day in United States global relations. At the same time, the United States over the last 16 months has expanded its commitment to Afghanistan, launched a brutal drone war campaign against targets in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and backed away from the condemnation of the coup in Honduras and hoped for improved U.S. relations with Cuba and Honduras.
But the documents do reflect differences in tone and emphasis in United States foreign policy. After eight long years of globalist policy, elements of the NSS 2010 document seem refreshingly different. And while the new document does not and can not, renounce imperialism, it does offer guidelines for those who are working for a progressive foreign policy.
In the end when we march and lobby against wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, demand the end to high-technology drone murder, insist on an end to the blockade of Cuba, and cry out for an end to military and diplomatic support of Israeli brutality against the Palestinian people, we can use the words of NSS 2010 to defend our point of view.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Sunday, May 16, 2010
WAIST DEEP IN THE BIG MUDDY
Harry Targ
As has been expressed in a variety of ways over the years, the specter of Vietnam weighs as an albatross on the American body politic. President Truman began supporting French colonialism in Indochina in 1950, funding eighty percent of the French war effort as part of the globalization of Cold War policy. After the French were defeated, the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s created a dictatorial, unpopular, and corrupt South Vietnamese government which was aided by military advisers and massive U.S. financial support. President Kennedy pursued a policy of building a “non-communist road to economic development,” with the addition of thousands more troops. Lyndon Johnson launched a massive air war and counterinsurgency campaign leading to 540,000 troops in country by 1968. And the Nixon administration engaged in a brutal bombing campaign hitting targets throughout North and South Vietnam. Each strategy was to be the last. Victory was near. In the end, millions of Vietnamese people died and thousands of Americans.
And all indicators are that the United States is doing it again in Afghanistan. In the 1980s the U.S. committed more than a billion dollars to support religious fundamentalists fighting to overthrow secular Kabul governments it opposed. In the 1990s, the U.S. briefly negotiated with a Taliban government it found abhorrent, but which it felt might become a potential economic ally in the production of oil pipelines running through Afghanistan. Finally the George W. Bush administration made war on dubious grounds on the Taliban government in the twenty-first century. The immediate enemy, Al Qaeda, the alleged perpetrator of the crimes of 9/11, was not delivered to the U.S. by the Afghanistan government as “ordered” by the Bush administration.
Since 9/11 we have been engaged in a nine year quagmire in Afghanistan fighting what is left of a dwindling Al Qaeda and a vast population of people who resent being bombed and occupied by a foreign power. The White House last week hosted Afghan president Hamid Karzai, by numerous accounts corrupt and unpopular. The most troubling information about the encounter between Obama and Karzai was reported by Helene Cooper in The New York Times. According to her, President Obama promised to Karzai that “…the United States would remain in Afghanistan for the long haul, even as he vowed to stick to his timetable to begin withdrawing troops by July 2011.” Cooper surmised that the weeklong visit constituted an effort “… to reassure Mr. Karzai and his government that the United States will not abandon Afghanistan…”
In another New York Times story by Alissa Rubin, the author warns that the hardest fighting is still ahead even though “the biggest challenge lies not on the battlefield but in the governing of Afghanistan itself.” A near future expansion of the counter-insurgency campaign will confront, the “corrosive distrust” of the Karzai government. In areas such as Marja, the population resents influential power brokers such as Karzai’s brother, local police, and other government officials. Rubin quotes an aid to General Stanley McChrystal, architect of the new counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan: “People are tired of the Taliban, but they also don’t want cops to shake them down, they don’t want power brokers who are so corrupt they impact their lives and livelihood.”
Gareth Porter in an Inter Press Service article points out that the Obama administration has balked at the Karzai effort to dialogue with sectors of the Taliban despite the obvious possibility that negotiations could lead to the withdrawal of U.S. troops which would advantage the United States and at the same time bring peace to the Pashtun population of Southern Afghanistan. Porter quotes an administrative official: “Obama’s forceful opposition to any political approach to any Taliban leadership until after the counter-insurgency strategy has been tried appears to represent a policy that has been hammered out within the administration at the insistence of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and General McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan.”
Meanwhile, Middle East expert Juan Cole writes that Obama’s master plan for Afghanistan has involved a “massive counter-insurgency effort,” involving tens of thousands of troops and massive combat. Cole estimates that the strategy has about a 10 percent possibility of success.
Forty-six years ago Lyndon Johnson won an enormous presidential electoral victory against conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. LBJ ran as the anti-war candidate. He embarked on a campaign to get Congress to support civil rights legislation that would at last end Jim Crow in the South. He constructed a variety of programs to address poverty in America, activate community participation in the political process, and launched a program to expand access to health care for the elderly. He promised the American people “A Great Society.”
Much of the Great Society agenda was destroyed as the Vietnam War escalated from 120,000 troops in 1965, to over 400,000 by 1967, and 540,000 in January, 1968. By 1967 the United States had dropped more bombs on Vietnamese targets than were dropped on enemy targets during World War II. And President Johnson was forced to withdraw from the 1968 campaign for the presidency.
The Obama/McChrystal counter-insurgency strategy may not yield the magnitude of escalation reached in Vietnam. However, the combination of support for a corrupt regime, placing foreign troops among a hostile population, indiscriminant killing of local civilians, and refusal to negotiate with adversaries, as Juan Cole suggests, surely will yield a Vietnam-style failure in Afghanistan.
Along with the pain and suffering of the Afghan people, the counter-insurgency strategy of this administration will dash the hopes and dreams of all the young people who worked so hard in 2008 to get the candidate committed to progressive social change, Barack Obama, elected president. The parallels with the young who worked to elect the “peace candidate” in 1964 are stark.
As has been expressed in a variety of ways over the years, the specter of Vietnam weighs as an albatross on the American body politic. President Truman began supporting French colonialism in Indochina in 1950, funding eighty percent of the French war effort as part of the globalization of Cold War policy. After the French were defeated, the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s created a dictatorial, unpopular, and corrupt South Vietnamese government which was aided by military advisers and massive U.S. financial support. President Kennedy pursued a policy of building a “non-communist road to economic development,” with the addition of thousands more troops. Lyndon Johnson launched a massive air war and counterinsurgency campaign leading to 540,000 troops in country by 1968. And the Nixon administration engaged in a brutal bombing campaign hitting targets throughout North and South Vietnam. Each strategy was to be the last. Victory was near. In the end, millions of Vietnamese people died and thousands of Americans.
And all indicators are that the United States is doing it again in Afghanistan. In the 1980s the U.S. committed more than a billion dollars to support religious fundamentalists fighting to overthrow secular Kabul governments it opposed. In the 1990s, the U.S. briefly negotiated with a Taliban government it found abhorrent, but which it felt might become a potential economic ally in the production of oil pipelines running through Afghanistan. Finally the George W. Bush administration made war on dubious grounds on the Taliban government in the twenty-first century. The immediate enemy, Al Qaeda, the alleged perpetrator of the crimes of 9/11, was not delivered to the U.S. by the Afghanistan government as “ordered” by the Bush administration.
Since 9/11 we have been engaged in a nine year quagmire in Afghanistan fighting what is left of a dwindling Al Qaeda and a vast population of people who resent being bombed and occupied by a foreign power. The White House last week hosted Afghan president Hamid Karzai, by numerous accounts corrupt and unpopular. The most troubling information about the encounter between Obama and Karzai was reported by Helene Cooper in The New York Times. According to her, President Obama promised to Karzai that “…the United States would remain in Afghanistan for the long haul, even as he vowed to stick to his timetable to begin withdrawing troops by July 2011.” Cooper surmised that the weeklong visit constituted an effort “… to reassure Mr. Karzai and his government that the United States will not abandon Afghanistan…”
In another New York Times story by Alissa Rubin, the author warns that the hardest fighting is still ahead even though “the biggest challenge lies not on the battlefield but in the governing of Afghanistan itself.” A near future expansion of the counter-insurgency campaign will confront, the “corrosive distrust” of the Karzai government. In areas such as Marja, the population resents influential power brokers such as Karzai’s brother, local police, and other government officials. Rubin quotes an aid to General Stanley McChrystal, architect of the new counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan: “People are tired of the Taliban, but they also don’t want cops to shake them down, they don’t want power brokers who are so corrupt they impact their lives and livelihood.”
Gareth Porter in an Inter Press Service article points out that the Obama administration has balked at the Karzai effort to dialogue with sectors of the Taliban despite the obvious possibility that negotiations could lead to the withdrawal of U.S. troops which would advantage the United States and at the same time bring peace to the Pashtun population of Southern Afghanistan. Porter quotes an administrative official: “Obama’s forceful opposition to any political approach to any Taliban leadership until after the counter-insurgency strategy has been tried appears to represent a policy that has been hammered out within the administration at the insistence of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and General McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan.”
Meanwhile, Middle East expert Juan Cole writes that Obama’s master plan for Afghanistan has involved a “massive counter-insurgency effort,” involving tens of thousands of troops and massive combat. Cole estimates that the strategy has about a 10 percent possibility of success.
Forty-six years ago Lyndon Johnson won an enormous presidential electoral victory against conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. LBJ ran as the anti-war candidate. He embarked on a campaign to get Congress to support civil rights legislation that would at last end Jim Crow in the South. He constructed a variety of programs to address poverty in America, activate community participation in the political process, and launched a program to expand access to health care for the elderly. He promised the American people “A Great Society.”
Much of the Great Society agenda was destroyed as the Vietnam War escalated from 120,000 troops in 1965, to over 400,000 by 1967, and 540,000 in January, 1968. By 1967 the United States had dropped more bombs on Vietnamese targets than were dropped on enemy targets during World War II. And President Johnson was forced to withdraw from the 1968 campaign for the presidency.
The Obama/McChrystal counter-insurgency strategy may not yield the magnitude of escalation reached in Vietnam. However, the combination of support for a corrupt regime, placing foreign troops among a hostile population, indiscriminant killing of local civilians, and refusal to negotiate with adversaries, as Juan Cole suggests, surely will yield a Vietnam-style failure in Afghanistan.
Along with the pain and suffering of the Afghan people, the counter-insurgency strategy of this administration will dash the hopes and dreams of all the young people who worked so hard in 2008 to get the candidate committed to progressive social change, Barack Obama, elected president. The parallels with the young who worked to elect the “peace candidate” in 1964 are stark.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
WHO SHOULD WE BELIEVE?
“INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS,” “WESTERN DIPLOMATS,” “A SENIOR INTELLIGENCE OFFICIAL,” “A SENIOR MILITARY OFFICIAL,” OR “THE OFFICIAL WHO WOULD SPEAK OF THE INVESTIGATION ONLY ON CONDITION OF ANONYMITY?”
Harry Targ
I was reading The New York Times accounts, Friday, May 7, of the ongoing investigation of the attempted Times Square bombing by suspect Faisal Shahzad. I was intrigued by a variety of stories that turned speculation by various anonymous informed sources into complex analyses of Shahzad’s international connections, the transformation of the Taliban from a political force in Afghanistan to one also in Pakistan, the emergence of a variety of other Islamic dissident groups in Pakistan and their connections with Taliban and perhaps Al Queda.
The lead in the front page story on May 7 headlined “Pakistani Taliban Are Said to Expand Alliances” stimulated my curiosity: “The Pakistani Taliban, which American investigators suspect were behind the attempt to bomb Times Square, have in recent years combined forces with Al Qaeda and other groups, threatening to extend their reach and ambitions, Western diplomats, intelligence officials and experts say.”
The story indicates that the Pakistani Taliban have reached out to other militant groups, “splinter cells” (which sounds really scary), “foot soldiers,” and guns-for-hire.” The article continues with elaborations of nefarious early connections between the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Al Qaeda, and increasing numbers of Pakistani Punjabi militants. Faisal Shahzad may have received bomb training from one of these groups, a claim reiterated in another article quoting a senior military official who was not authorized to speak in public. The article reported that the leader of the Pakistani Taliban said that “the group had suicide bombers in the United States, who, he said would carry out their mission at an opportune time” while denying complicity in the Times Square bombing attempt.
Reading these stories and viewing a variety of claims about the causes and connections of the failed bombing reminded me of a short essay I wrote for an interesting volume of writings and graphic design images edited by Rebecca Targ titled “Lying,” in Fold: the Reader (http://www.foldthereader.net/ ). I wrote:
Foreign Policy Lies Lead to War
On August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese armed motor boats attacked two U.S. naval vessels off the coast of North Vietnam. The administration of Lyndon Johnson defined the attacks as an unprovoked act of North Vietnamese aggression. Two days later it was announced that another attack on U.S. ships in international waters had occurred and the U.S. responded with air attacks on North Vietnamese targets. President Johnson then took a resolution he had already prepared to the Congress of the United States. The so-called Gulf of Tonkin resolution declared that the Congress authorizes the president to do what he deemed necessary to defend U.S. national security in Southeast Asia. Only two Senators voted “no.” Over the next three years the U.S. sent over 500,000 troops to Vietnam to carry out a massive air and ground war in both the South and North of the country.
Within a year of the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incidents, evidence began to appear indicating that the August 2 attack was provoked. The two U.S. naval vessels were in North Vietnamese coastal waters orchestrating acts of sabotage in the Northern part of Vietnam. More serious, evidence pointed to the inescapable conclusion that the second attack on August 4 never occurred.
President Johnson’s lies to the American people about the Gulf of Tonkin contributed to the devastating decisions to escalate a U.S. war in Vietnam that cost 57,000 U.S. troop deaths and upwards of three million Vietnamese deaths.
Forty years later, George W. Bush and his key aides put together a package of lies about Iraq imports of uranium from Niger, purchases of aluminum rods which supposedly could be used for constructing nuclear weapons, development of biological and chemical weapons, and connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.
As the Vietnamese and Iraqi cases show, foreign policies built on lies can lead to imperial wars, huge expenditures on the military, economic crises at home, and military casualties abroad.
********************************************************************************
Are there any lessons to learn from the Vietnam and Iraqi cases sited above? I think so.
Two of the most damaging, indeed murderous, foreign policies of the United States were built on lies.
The record indicates that key policy-makers in both the Vietnam and Iraq eras made decisions with almost no knowledge of the political cultures of the two countries. In the Vietnam era not more than a handful of Americans had knowledge of the Vietnamese language or history.
In both cases, foreign policy decisions were shaped by frames of reference, or ideologies, that bore little or no relationship to the political reality in the countries targeted for war. The frame shaping Vietnam was the war on international communism; for Iraq it was the war on terrorism.
In both cases, decisions were made based on recommendations of parties interested in war, from Pentagon officials, to military contractors and arms merchants, to academic and think tank “experts,” to media outlets with stories to create, to journalists seeking to establish their careers, to liberal and conservative politicians seeking issues to shape their own quests for power.
Returning to the Times Square incident, we may never learn the truth. But we can assume with confidence that military, economic, academic, and journalistic interests will promote a scenario of a Pakistani Taliban/Al Queda connection to the failed adventure in New York. And we can expect that all these interests will promote the idea that such attacks, perhaps successful next time, can occur anyplace in the United States. We must live in terror of the terrorists.
Finally, we can be sure that “the cure” for perpetual terrorism will not include economic development, a just and humane U.S. foreign policy, ending drone attacks on Pakistani citizens, and stopping the demonization of peoples of color, in this case, those who embrace the Muslim religion.
Harry Targ
I was reading The New York Times accounts, Friday, May 7, of the ongoing investigation of the attempted Times Square bombing by suspect Faisal Shahzad. I was intrigued by a variety of stories that turned speculation by various anonymous informed sources into complex analyses of Shahzad’s international connections, the transformation of the Taliban from a political force in Afghanistan to one also in Pakistan, the emergence of a variety of other Islamic dissident groups in Pakistan and their connections with Taliban and perhaps Al Queda.
The lead in the front page story on May 7 headlined “Pakistani Taliban Are Said to Expand Alliances” stimulated my curiosity: “The Pakistani Taliban, which American investigators suspect were behind the attempt to bomb Times Square, have in recent years combined forces with Al Qaeda and other groups, threatening to extend their reach and ambitions, Western diplomats, intelligence officials and experts say.”
The story indicates that the Pakistani Taliban have reached out to other militant groups, “splinter cells” (which sounds really scary), “foot soldiers,” and guns-for-hire.” The article continues with elaborations of nefarious early connections between the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Al Qaeda, and increasing numbers of Pakistani Punjabi militants. Faisal Shahzad may have received bomb training from one of these groups, a claim reiterated in another article quoting a senior military official who was not authorized to speak in public. The article reported that the leader of the Pakistani Taliban said that “the group had suicide bombers in the United States, who, he said would carry out their mission at an opportune time” while denying complicity in the Times Square bombing attempt.
Reading these stories and viewing a variety of claims about the causes and connections of the failed bombing reminded me of a short essay I wrote for an interesting volume of writings and graphic design images edited by Rebecca Targ titled “Lying,” in Fold: the Reader (http://www.foldthereader.net/ ). I wrote:
Foreign Policy Lies Lead to War
On August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese armed motor boats attacked two U.S. naval vessels off the coast of North Vietnam. The administration of Lyndon Johnson defined the attacks as an unprovoked act of North Vietnamese aggression. Two days later it was announced that another attack on U.S. ships in international waters had occurred and the U.S. responded with air attacks on North Vietnamese targets. President Johnson then took a resolution he had already prepared to the Congress of the United States. The so-called Gulf of Tonkin resolution declared that the Congress authorizes the president to do what he deemed necessary to defend U.S. national security in Southeast Asia. Only two Senators voted “no.” Over the next three years the U.S. sent over 500,000 troops to Vietnam to carry out a massive air and ground war in both the South and North of the country.
Within a year of the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incidents, evidence began to appear indicating that the August 2 attack was provoked. The two U.S. naval vessels were in North Vietnamese coastal waters orchestrating acts of sabotage in the Northern part of Vietnam. More serious, evidence pointed to the inescapable conclusion that the second attack on August 4 never occurred.
President Johnson’s lies to the American people about the Gulf of Tonkin contributed to the devastating decisions to escalate a U.S. war in Vietnam that cost 57,000 U.S. troop deaths and upwards of three million Vietnamese deaths.
Forty years later, George W. Bush and his key aides put together a package of lies about Iraq imports of uranium from Niger, purchases of aluminum rods which supposedly could be used for constructing nuclear weapons, development of biological and chemical weapons, and connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.
As the Vietnamese and Iraqi cases show, foreign policies built on lies can lead to imperial wars, huge expenditures on the military, economic crises at home, and military casualties abroad.
********************************************************************************
Are there any lessons to learn from the Vietnam and Iraqi cases sited above? I think so.
Two of the most damaging, indeed murderous, foreign policies of the United States were built on lies.
The record indicates that key policy-makers in both the Vietnam and Iraq eras made decisions with almost no knowledge of the political cultures of the two countries. In the Vietnam era not more than a handful of Americans had knowledge of the Vietnamese language or history.
In both cases, foreign policy decisions were shaped by frames of reference, or ideologies, that bore little or no relationship to the political reality in the countries targeted for war. The frame shaping Vietnam was the war on international communism; for Iraq it was the war on terrorism.
In both cases, decisions were made based on recommendations of parties interested in war, from Pentagon officials, to military contractors and arms merchants, to academic and think tank “experts,” to media outlets with stories to create, to journalists seeking to establish their careers, to liberal and conservative politicians seeking issues to shape their own quests for power.
Returning to the Times Square incident, we may never learn the truth. But we can assume with confidence that military, economic, academic, and journalistic interests will promote a scenario of a Pakistani Taliban/Al Queda connection to the failed adventure in New York. And we can expect that all these interests will promote the idea that such attacks, perhaps successful next time, can occur anyplace in the United States. We must live in terror of the terrorists.
Finally, we can be sure that “the cure” for perpetual terrorism will not include economic development, a just and humane U.S. foreign policy, ending drone attacks on Pakistani citizens, and stopping the demonization of peoples of color, in this case, those who embrace the Muslim religion.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
WORKERS ON THE MOVE
Harry Targ
This was a week of worker militancy. Wednesday, April 28, in large cities and small towns, workers rallied in support of improved health and safety at the workplace. This was the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. In the minds and hearts of these workers were the recent deaths in mines in West Virginia and Kentucky and oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
On April 29 masses of workers assembled, thousands in Manhattan, to protest Wall Street’s robbery of the American people, particularly for its creation of an economic crisis that has cost workers all over the globe millions of jobs.
And finally on Saturday, May 1, the international day of workers’ solidarity, inspired by the protests in support of the eight-hour day movement in Chicago in 1886, millions of workers mobilized everywhere; from Hong Kong, Istanbul, Athens, Berlin, Hamburg, Manila, Moscow, Seoul, Tokyo Taiwan, Bangkok, to Havana. In the United States huge throngs marched in support of immigrant rights in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and many other cities.
I just finished teaching a course called “The Politics of Capital and Labor in the United States.” We read texts that analyzed the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production. We discussed its various stages from competitive to monopoly capitalism to today’s era of finance capital. I highlighted the post-World War II period in U.S. and world history emphasizing the establishment of a permanent war economy, deindustrialization, financialization, and neo-liberal globalization.
We then concentrated on the changing nature of the circumstances of work and workers over the last 60 years drawing upon the collection from Dollars and Sense magazine called Real World Labor. By way of summary, I prepared a list of the impacts of systemic economic and political changes on workers derived from the various essays in the book. The list, in no particular order, suggests the ways in which the lives of workers have been transformed over the last sixty years and why the mass mobilizations of workers, such as those this week are so desperately needed.
The list only touches the surface. It includes dramatic increases in state and employer mechanisms to obstruct union organizing. Union density in the United States has declined from a peak of 33% in the early 1950s to 15% today (half in the public sector). Employers skillfully use workplace policies to destroy the potential for worker solidarity, from encouraging racism, and inter-ethnic hostilities, to creating two-tier salary schedules.
Work has been increasingly sub-contracted and outsourced shifting manufacturing and service employment from once higher paid industrial capitalist countries to poor countries whose traditional economies have been disrupted to accommodate new factories of outsourced work. Sweatshops, initiated in textile mills in Britain and the United States two hundred years ago, began to be transferred to countries of the Global South in the 1960s and now, with declining real wages in the United States, are returning to domestic venues.
Work has been casualized. Job creation is increasingly characterized by part-time, contingent, and seasonal work, with significant portions of the work force defined as “illegal.”
For those with jobs, whether in manufacturing or service, modern forms of Taylorism are imposed on work processes. Originally Taylorism inspired efforts to control all the physical movements of workers to maximize their productivity at all costs. Now such techniques are applied in the service sector as well, programming what workers say to customers and the appropriate physical space prescribed for interactions with them. Generally, techniques have been created to maximize the productivity (but not wages) with which all work is performed.
Workplace harassment has been rising in recent years, including demeaning treatment of workers, targeting workers with seniority so that they will be forced to retire, and encouraging racism and sexism on the job.
Similarly, the initiating of workplace regulations in the past has been reversed. Taking occupational health and safety as an example, systems of rules, regulations, and inspections led to a significant decline in workplace deaths and injuries during the 1970s. Those changes that benefited workers have been reversed since the 1980s. It is estimated that a shop floor or workplace can be expected to be inspected only once every 83 years. The tragedies in mines and on oil rigs this year remind workers that their jobs have become as dangerous again as they were fifty years ago.
And of course real wages, benefits, and jobs have all declined. Economists still debate what should be the “natural unemployment rate.” Everywhere, from U.S. cities, to most of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East life-sustaining remunerative activities involve creative street hustling, what economists call “the informal sector.” Good paying secure jobs as a percentage of all the work in the world is declining. In factories and service jobs “wage theft” has become common; that is employers find ways to avoid paying workers what they have earned.
State policies have enforced increasing exploitation of workers. Old fashioned repression, that is using the police and armies to crush union-organizing drives occur from time to time. In the United States, business lobbyists pressure state legislatures to pass “right to work” legislation limiting the ability of workers to form unions. Dilatory procedures for certifying union recognition, impediments to elections, prohibitions on strikes, and administrative decisions to prohibit categories of workers from unionizing have become instruments of state policy. Of course, in every country where organizing campaigns occur, leaders are targeted for dismissal and sometimes death squads.
In addition to this modest list, the transforming global economy has created millions of migrant workers who are forced out of their jobs and from their land to become a pool of reserve workers who desperately seek work in other countries. Masses of Latin Americans come to the United States to find low paying jobs while they are threatened by state repression, most immediately illustrated by the new draconian Arizona law. Mobility also occurs from and to countries of the Global South. A million Bolivians have migrated since 1999 to work in sweatshops in neighborhoods of Buenos Aries, thousands of Nicaraguans pick pineapples in neighboring Costa Rica, and Central Americans work in Mexican factories.
So this week workers everywhere were on the move. Their campaigns and rallies are about worker rights, jobs, benefits, and the capacity to be treated, wherever they live, with human dignity. The annual May Day events suggest that workers’ struggles are truly global. Capitalism in the era of neo-liberal globalization is truly global and in the end organization and resistance must be global.
In one of the essays in the Real World Labor reader Bill Fletcher suggests what is necessary for the U.S. labor movement to participate in the struggle for global justice. The labor movement must “…understand the problem of empire, or if one prefers, imperial ambitions.…the American working class resides in a world where corporate/government connections are strengthening, and with them increased repression of progressive and democratic forces in the face of unfolding globalization.”
Those who proclaimed May Day as the workers’ day over a hundred years ago understood the need for global solidarity to achieve justice. Workers need to build off this week’s dynamism to create a movement of global solidarity.
This was a week of worker militancy. Wednesday, April 28, in large cities and small towns, workers rallied in support of improved health and safety at the workplace. This was the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. In the minds and hearts of these workers were the recent deaths in mines in West Virginia and Kentucky and oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
On April 29 masses of workers assembled, thousands in Manhattan, to protest Wall Street’s robbery of the American people, particularly for its creation of an economic crisis that has cost workers all over the globe millions of jobs.
And finally on Saturday, May 1, the international day of workers’ solidarity, inspired by the protests in support of the eight-hour day movement in Chicago in 1886, millions of workers mobilized everywhere; from Hong Kong, Istanbul, Athens, Berlin, Hamburg, Manila, Moscow, Seoul, Tokyo Taiwan, Bangkok, to Havana. In the United States huge throngs marched in support of immigrant rights in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and many other cities.
I just finished teaching a course called “The Politics of Capital and Labor in the United States.” We read texts that analyzed the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production. We discussed its various stages from competitive to monopoly capitalism to today’s era of finance capital. I highlighted the post-World War II period in U.S. and world history emphasizing the establishment of a permanent war economy, deindustrialization, financialization, and neo-liberal globalization.
We then concentrated on the changing nature of the circumstances of work and workers over the last 60 years drawing upon the collection from Dollars and Sense magazine called Real World Labor. By way of summary, I prepared a list of the impacts of systemic economic and political changes on workers derived from the various essays in the book. The list, in no particular order, suggests the ways in which the lives of workers have been transformed over the last sixty years and why the mass mobilizations of workers, such as those this week are so desperately needed.
The list only touches the surface. It includes dramatic increases in state and employer mechanisms to obstruct union organizing. Union density in the United States has declined from a peak of 33% in the early 1950s to 15% today (half in the public sector). Employers skillfully use workplace policies to destroy the potential for worker solidarity, from encouraging racism, and inter-ethnic hostilities, to creating two-tier salary schedules.
Work has been increasingly sub-contracted and outsourced shifting manufacturing and service employment from once higher paid industrial capitalist countries to poor countries whose traditional economies have been disrupted to accommodate new factories of outsourced work. Sweatshops, initiated in textile mills in Britain and the United States two hundred years ago, began to be transferred to countries of the Global South in the 1960s and now, with declining real wages in the United States, are returning to domestic venues.
Work has been casualized. Job creation is increasingly characterized by part-time, contingent, and seasonal work, with significant portions of the work force defined as “illegal.”
For those with jobs, whether in manufacturing or service, modern forms of Taylorism are imposed on work processes. Originally Taylorism inspired efforts to control all the physical movements of workers to maximize their productivity at all costs. Now such techniques are applied in the service sector as well, programming what workers say to customers and the appropriate physical space prescribed for interactions with them. Generally, techniques have been created to maximize the productivity (but not wages) with which all work is performed.
Workplace harassment has been rising in recent years, including demeaning treatment of workers, targeting workers with seniority so that they will be forced to retire, and encouraging racism and sexism on the job.
Similarly, the initiating of workplace regulations in the past has been reversed. Taking occupational health and safety as an example, systems of rules, regulations, and inspections led to a significant decline in workplace deaths and injuries during the 1970s. Those changes that benefited workers have been reversed since the 1980s. It is estimated that a shop floor or workplace can be expected to be inspected only once every 83 years. The tragedies in mines and on oil rigs this year remind workers that their jobs have become as dangerous again as they were fifty years ago.
And of course real wages, benefits, and jobs have all declined. Economists still debate what should be the “natural unemployment rate.” Everywhere, from U.S. cities, to most of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East life-sustaining remunerative activities involve creative street hustling, what economists call “the informal sector.” Good paying secure jobs as a percentage of all the work in the world is declining. In factories and service jobs “wage theft” has become common; that is employers find ways to avoid paying workers what they have earned.
State policies have enforced increasing exploitation of workers. Old fashioned repression, that is using the police and armies to crush union-organizing drives occur from time to time. In the United States, business lobbyists pressure state legislatures to pass “right to work” legislation limiting the ability of workers to form unions. Dilatory procedures for certifying union recognition, impediments to elections, prohibitions on strikes, and administrative decisions to prohibit categories of workers from unionizing have become instruments of state policy. Of course, in every country where organizing campaigns occur, leaders are targeted for dismissal and sometimes death squads.
In addition to this modest list, the transforming global economy has created millions of migrant workers who are forced out of their jobs and from their land to become a pool of reserve workers who desperately seek work in other countries. Masses of Latin Americans come to the United States to find low paying jobs while they are threatened by state repression, most immediately illustrated by the new draconian Arizona law. Mobility also occurs from and to countries of the Global South. A million Bolivians have migrated since 1999 to work in sweatshops in neighborhoods of Buenos Aries, thousands of Nicaraguans pick pineapples in neighboring Costa Rica, and Central Americans work in Mexican factories.
So this week workers everywhere were on the move. Their campaigns and rallies are about worker rights, jobs, benefits, and the capacity to be treated, wherever they live, with human dignity. The annual May Day events suggest that workers’ struggles are truly global. Capitalism in the era of neo-liberal globalization is truly global and in the end organization and resistance must be global.
In one of the essays in the Real World Labor reader Bill Fletcher suggests what is necessary for the U.S. labor movement to participate in the struggle for global justice. The labor movement must “…understand the problem of empire, or if one prefers, imperial ambitions.…the American working class resides in a world where corporate/government connections are strengthening, and with them increased repression of progressive and democratic forces in the face of unfolding globalization.”
Those who proclaimed May Day as the workers’ day over a hundred years ago understood the need for global solidarity to achieve justice. Workers need to build off this week’s dynamism to create a movement of global solidarity.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
THE SOCIAL FORUM MOVEMENT AND THE HISTORY OF RESISTANCE
Harry Targ
The History of Resistance
Just as globalization today has its roots in five hundred years of trade and investment, and in exploitation and capital accumulation the global justice movements of our day also have their roots in the patterns of resistance since the beginning of capitalism.
In a recent article ("Long Before Seattle: Historical Resistance to Economic Globalization") Zahara Heckscher points out that: "In virtually every society the Europeans invaded, people rose up to protest the cruelty of slavery, theft of land, and plunder of resources." While many of the protests were local, provoked by singular transgressions, and were inwardly oriented (from destroying crops to committing suicide to fleeing), many were national in their mobilization or even international.
Heckscher provides examples of resistance movements against globalization that occurred well before “the Battle of Seattle” in 1999. For example, the Tupac Amaru II uprising in Peru (1780-1781) was a multi-class, multi-ethnic rebellion of 6,000 armed protestors who opposed the effort of the Spanish colonial government to impose tariff reductions to flood local markets with cheap Spanish goods, increase taxes, and in other ways force economic integration between the colony and the Spanish economy.
Heckscher also provided the example of nineteenth century cross-national campaigns to ban slavery. She described the social movements in Europe that vigorously opposed the brutal Belgium colonial administration of the Congo at the end of the nineteenth century. She reflected on the efforts of the First International Workingmen's Association in Geneva to prohibit manufacturers from importing strikebreakers to replace striking workers. In the process workers from Europe and North America began to mobilize in solidarity against an increasingly cross-national capitalism. Finally, in her brief survey she mentions the Anti-Imperialist Movement that opposed U.S. occupation and control of the Philippines after 1898.
Each of these movements addressed economic and political issues together. Each was a response to the globalization of a great power, usually in pursuit of economic exploitation. And each of these movements created a shared consciousness, a solidarity, among resisters across national boundaries. Perhaps we can say therefore that each of these movements represented a form of resistance to the globalization of capitalism.
Resistance to Contemporary Globalization
Ever since the emergence of the Bretton Woods system and the establishment of the power of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, peoples in poor countries have resisted the contracts their states entered into with global capitalism. Since the 1950s, workers and peasants have gone into the streets in countries as varied as Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and India to protest the cancellation of programs providing food subsidies, low cost public transportation, free water and sanitation, and other public services.
In November, 1999 in Seattle, the visibility of such protests assumed a new dimension as thousands of protestors, representing a variety of issues and groups shut down the annual meeting of the World Trade Organization. In the North American public mind, the "anti-globalization movement" was born.
The New Internationalist, a magazine representing "the people, the ideas, the action in the fight for global justice" published a chronology of "some key moments of the global movement 1994-2001." They symbolically identified the initiation of the current campaign for global justice with the public pronouncements of the indigenous Zapatista rebel movement in the southern Mexican province of Chiapas on January 1, 1994. Their cry of "Ya Basta," "Enough", was in response to the fact that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)went into effect on that day. A significant part of the NAFTA program was to be the privatization of communally owned land in Mexico.
Additional "key moments" included protests against the World Trade Organization, formed in 1995, an international conference against neo-liberalism held in Chiapas, Mexico, mass mobilizations against the Asian Pacific Economic Community, workers in 21 countries protesting the sacking of Liverpool dock workers, and repeated mobilizations against meetings of the International Monetary Fund, the World Economic Forum and other public manifestations of neo-liberal globalization.
The World Social Forum
At the dawn of the new century, a new tradition, inspired by the hundreds of years of resistance, was launched. Ten thousand activists-representing 1,000 groups from 120 countries, industrial and agricultural workers, indigenous peoples, environmentalists, anti-globalization activists-met at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil in January, 2001. This disparate assembly shared one idea: “Another World is Possible.”
Naomi Klein reported on this first WSF highlighting its exuberant and chaotic character. Neither defining it as a strength or a weakness she pointed out the fact that “…what seemed to be emerging organically out of the World Social Forum (despite the best efforts of some of the organizers) was not a movement for a single global government but a vision for an increasingly connected international network of very local initiatives, each built on direct democracy.”
Subsequent to the first WSF, the organizing committee prepared a “Charter of Principles” which included the following: providing an environment for open and democratic debate; becoming a permanent process of building alternatives, particularly building a “world process;” bringing together and linking civil society groups, NGOs, and social movements from all countries; and increasing “the capacity for non-violent social resistance to the process of dehumanization” and introducing “onto the global agenda the change-inducing practices” that could create a “new world in solidarity.”
The US Social Forum
Each year after, the WSF met in Brazil or India, or Kenya, or Venezuela. In 2007, a U.S. Social Forum was held in Atlanta, Georgia. Ten thousand people, mostly young and people of color attended the hundreds of panels and plenary sessions. Over 100 local and national groups displayed their literature and dialogued with conference participants.
As their call suggested: “The US Social Forum is more than a conference, more than a networking bonanza, more than a reaction to war and repression. The USSF will provide space to build relationships, learn from each other’s experiences, share our analysis of the problems our communities face, and bring renewed insight and inspiration.”
Now activists from nearly 100 organizations are preparing for the next US Social Forum which will take place from June 22-26 in Detroit. It occurs in the midst of a global economic crisis, multiple wars, the rise of neo-fascist forces around the world, and efforts of the United States to forestall the rising global resistance to neo-liberalism.
The National Planning Committee has indicated that the USSF will address movement building, organizing and outreach, and improving structure and programming of the USSF movement. Of particular relevance to 2010 are the following goals:
-Strengthen and expand progressive infrastructure for long-term collaboration and work for fundamental change.
-Disseminate effective models for democratic participation and movement building.
-Shape and influence the public conversation in ways that convey momentum and hope.
-Model diverse, representative movement building that is cross-cutting, democratic, and effectively integrates process and outcomes.
-Continue to be a space in which grassroots lead, while being inclusive of other sectors. Develop a collective systemic understanding and analysis of the current economic and political moment.
-Create a shared vision of the society and world that challenges poverty and exploitation, all forms of oppression, militarism and war, and environmental destruction.
-Articulate and practice concrete internationalism through consciousness of today’s global context and the power of radical movements in the Global South, and awareness of our power in coming from the US and our responsibility to the broader international movement.
-Identify convergences that have already happened.
-Work toward greater convergence between working class struggles and progressive movements.
-Build on the strengths and convergences of the 2007 USSF.
-Further develop Black, Immigrant and Indigenous Nations’ solidarity.
The goals and vision of the US Social Forum are truly ambitious. It is unclear how the Social Forum movement can create enough ideological commonality, organizational structure, leadership sensitive to its grassroots base, and global solidarity to make another world possible. It is clear that the Social Forum movement is part of a long history of resistance and struggle against capitalism, and as such is as necessary now as at any time in history.
The History of Resistance
Just as globalization today has its roots in five hundred years of trade and investment, and in exploitation and capital accumulation the global justice movements of our day also have their roots in the patterns of resistance since the beginning of capitalism.
In a recent article ("Long Before Seattle: Historical Resistance to Economic Globalization") Zahara Heckscher points out that: "In virtually every society the Europeans invaded, people rose up to protest the cruelty of slavery, theft of land, and plunder of resources." While many of the protests were local, provoked by singular transgressions, and were inwardly oriented (from destroying crops to committing suicide to fleeing), many were national in their mobilization or even international.
Heckscher provides examples of resistance movements against globalization that occurred well before “the Battle of Seattle” in 1999. For example, the Tupac Amaru II uprising in Peru (1780-1781) was a multi-class, multi-ethnic rebellion of 6,000 armed protestors who opposed the effort of the Spanish colonial government to impose tariff reductions to flood local markets with cheap Spanish goods, increase taxes, and in other ways force economic integration between the colony and the Spanish economy.
Heckscher also provided the example of nineteenth century cross-national campaigns to ban slavery. She described the social movements in Europe that vigorously opposed the brutal Belgium colonial administration of the Congo at the end of the nineteenth century. She reflected on the efforts of the First International Workingmen's Association in Geneva to prohibit manufacturers from importing strikebreakers to replace striking workers. In the process workers from Europe and North America began to mobilize in solidarity against an increasingly cross-national capitalism. Finally, in her brief survey she mentions the Anti-Imperialist Movement that opposed U.S. occupation and control of the Philippines after 1898.
Each of these movements addressed economic and political issues together. Each was a response to the globalization of a great power, usually in pursuit of economic exploitation. And each of these movements created a shared consciousness, a solidarity, among resisters across national boundaries. Perhaps we can say therefore that each of these movements represented a form of resistance to the globalization of capitalism.
Resistance to Contemporary Globalization
Ever since the emergence of the Bretton Woods system and the establishment of the power of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, peoples in poor countries have resisted the contracts their states entered into with global capitalism. Since the 1950s, workers and peasants have gone into the streets in countries as varied as Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and India to protest the cancellation of programs providing food subsidies, low cost public transportation, free water and sanitation, and other public services.
In November, 1999 in Seattle, the visibility of such protests assumed a new dimension as thousands of protestors, representing a variety of issues and groups shut down the annual meeting of the World Trade Organization. In the North American public mind, the "anti-globalization movement" was born.
The New Internationalist, a magazine representing "the people, the ideas, the action in the fight for global justice" published a chronology of "some key moments of the global movement 1994-2001." They symbolically identified the initiation of the current campaign for global justice with the public pronouncements of the indigenous Zapatista rebel movement in the southern Mexican province of Chiapas on January 1, 1994. Their cry of "Ya Basta," "Enough", was in response to the fact that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)went into effect on that day. A significant part of the NAFTA program was to be the privatization of communally owned land in Mexico.
Additional "key moments" included protests against the World Trade Organization, formed in 1995, an international conference against neo-liberalism held in Chiapas, Mexico, mass mobilizations against the Asian Pacific Economic Community, workers in 21 countries protesting the sacking of Liverpool dock workers, and repeated mobilizations against meetings of the International Monetary Fund, the World Economic Forum and other public manifestations of neo-liberal globalization.
The World Social Forum
At the dawn of the new century, a new tradition, inspired by the hundreds of years of resistance, was launched. Ten thousand activists-representing 1,000 groups from 120 countries, industrial and agricultural workers, indigenous peoples, environmentalists, anti-globalization activists-met at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil in January, 2001. This disparate assembly shared one idea: “Another World is Possible.”
Naomi Klein reported on this first WSF highlighting its exuberant and chaotic character. Neither defining it as a strength or a weakness she pointed out the fact that “…what seemed to be emerging organically out of the World Social Forum (despite the best efforts of some of the organizers) was not a movement for a single global government but a vision for an increasingly connected international network of very local initiatives, each built on direct democracy.”
Subsequent to the first WSF, the organizing committee prepared a “Charter of Principles” which included the following: providing an environment for open and democratic debate; becoming a permanent process of building alternatives, particularly building a “world process;” bringing together and linking civil society groups, NGOs, and social movements from all countries; and increasing “the capacity for non-violent social resistance to the process of dehumanization” and introducing “onto the global agenda the change-inducing practices” that could create a “new world in solidarity.”
The US Social Forum
Each year after, the WSF met in Brazil or India, or Kenya, or Venezuela. In 2007, a U.S. Social Forum was held in Atlanta, Georgia. Ten thousand people, mostly young and people of color attended the hundreds of panels and plenary sessions. Over 100 local and national groups displayed their literature and dialogued with conference participants.
As their call suggested: “The US Social Forum is more than a conference, more than a networking bonanza, more than a reaction to war and repression. The USSF will provide space to build relationships, learn from each other’s experiences, share our analysis of the problems our communities face, and bring renewed insight and inspiration.”
Now activists from nearly 100 organizations are preparing for the next US Social Forum which will take place from June 22-26 in Detroit. It occurs in the midst of a global economic crisis, multiple wars, the rise of neo-fascist forces around the world, and efforts of the United States to forestall the rising global resistance to neo-liberalism.
The National Planning Committee has indicated that the USSF will address movement building, organizing and outreach, and improving structure and programming of the USSF movement. Of particular relevance to 2010 are the following goals:
-Strengthen and expand progressive infrastructure for long-term collaboration and work for fundamental change.
-Disseminate effective models for democratic participation and movement building.
-Shape and influence the public conversation in ways that convey momentum and hope.
-Model diverse, representative movement building that is cross-cutting, democratic, and effectively integrates process and outcomes.
-Continue to be a space in which grassroots lead, while being inclusive of other sectors. Develop a collective systemic understanding and analysis of the current economic and political moment.
-Create a shared vision of the society and world that challenges poverty and exploitation, all forms of oppression, militarism and war, and environmental destruction.
-Articulate and practice concrete internationalism through consciousness of today’s global context and the power of radical movements in the Global South, and awareness of our power in coming from the US and our responsibility to the broader international movement.
-Identify convergences that have already happened.
-Work toward greater convergence between working class struggles and progressive movements.
-Build on the strengths and convergences of the 2007 USSF.
-Further develop Black, Immigrant and Indigenous Nations’ solidarity.
The goals and vision of the US Social Forum are truly ambitious. It is unclear how the Social Forum movement can create enough ideological commonality, organizational structure, leadership sensitive to its grassroots base, and global solidarity to make another world possible. It is clear that the Social Forum movement is part of a long history of resistance and struggle against capitalism, and as such is as necessary now as at any time in history.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
49 YEARS SINCE THE BAY OF PIGS: THE CUBAN REVOLUTION SURVIVES
Harry Targ
I was a student at the University of Illinois during the 1960-61 academic year. Like so many of my generation, I was modestly curious about the Cuban Revolution which had occurred a year earlier. I worked in the cloak room of the student union with two fellow students who were counter-revolutionary Cubans. We argued all the time about the revolution. If only Castro would hold elections they said, we would support whatever candidates prevailed.
I had read a short piece in The Nation during the fall of 1960 warning of a group of anti-Castro Cubans training for a military intervention. I had put that out of my mind until my fellow cloak room workers began to talk in February, 1961 about “something (that) was going to happen.”
I also remembered going to a student organized panel on Cuba that included my cloak room colleagues and other counter-revolutionaries. There was one student (the panel had seven participants as I remember) who defended the revolution. It was clear that the defender of the revolution was not liked by the others.
I went to work on April 17, 1961 to discover that I would be covering the cloak room alone. It seems that one of my Cuban colleagues scheduled to work with me that day had gotten in his car and driven to Miami, apparently ready to join the second wave of what became known in the U. S. as the Bay of Pigs invasion. On that day 1,400 anti-Castro Cubans invaded Cuba at a place known as Playa Giron. Days before air attacks on Cuban airfields were carried out by unmarked U.S. planes, but President Kennedy chose not to provide air support when the invasion occurred because the world would think the U.S. was behind the invasion.
The invasion, planning for which began in the Eisenhower Administration, was cooked up by the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA argued that once an invading force landed on the island, the Cuban people would rise up to overthrow the new government. The folly of that assumption was experienced personally by me when I saw my cloak room Cuban friend return to work about three days later. By the time he reached Miami by car the invasion had been crushed. There was no spontaneous uprising.
The Bay of Pigs invasion of 49 years ago is commemorated every year in the municipalities of La Habana province. One report refers to this year’s celebration as marking “the first defeat of imperialism in the Americas.”
Historical research makes it clear that the United States was opposed to the revolutionary movement led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara well before the revolutionaries marched into Havana in January, 1959. When Eisenhower realized that Fulgencio Batista was vulnerable to defeat, the president desperately sought a replacement who would not threaten U.S. banking, tourist, and sugar interests on the island.
President Eisenhower, deeply troubled by Castro’s victory, refused to meet with the Cuban leader when he came to the United States in April 1959. Over the next two years U.S. and Cuban actions and reactions deepened the hostility between the superpower and the island nation. These included the opening of Cuban relations with the Soviet Union, the refusal of U.S. oil companies to refine Soviet oil, and the Cuban seizure of the refineries. Dramatically the U.S. ended the purchase of Cuban sugar and Cuba responded by nationalizing U.S. banks and other businesses on the island.
In March, 1960 Eisenhower directed the CIA to begin planning for an invasion of the island carried out by counter-revolutionary Cubans. The Eisenhower team had successfully ousted from power both Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh 1953 and Guatemalan President Jacob Arbenz in 1954. He probably thought a move on Cuba could lead to a similar success.
When President Kennedy assumed office in 1961, the CIA presented the new president with the Bay of Pigs invasion plan. During the fall 1960 presidential campaign Kennedy had criticized his presidential opponent, Richard Nixon, for allowing Communism to come to Cuba. So JFK’s support of the invasion was no surprise.
When JFK brought the CIA plot to an early April meeting of the National Security Council, almost no one felt free to raise questions about the plot (even though State Department polls indicated the overwhelming support the revolution had among the Cuban people). The National Security Council endorsed the plot.
After the failure Fidel Castro declared Cuba a Socialist state and President Kennedy declared that the U.S. would not rest until the Cuban regime was ousted from power. Kennedy fully institutionalized the economic blockade against Cuba that still exists today.
Revisiting the Bay of Pigs invasion after 49 years suggests some historic features of U.S. foreign policy and decision-making style.
First, as admirably described by Stephen Kinzer in Overthrow, the United States had been engaging in efforts to undermine and overthrow independent governments around the world, and particularly in the Western Hemisphere, ever since it took Hawaii in the 1890s. In fact, the Cuban revolution of 1898 against Spanish colonialism was usurped by U.S. forces followed by a full-scale occupation of the country, then indirect economic and political domination, lasting until 1959. The U.S. imperial vision regarding Cuba goes as far back as the era of the founding fathers. Thomas Jefferson, among others, had declared that Cuba ought to be part of the United States.
Second, as so many accounts of U.S./Cuban relations suggest, the interests of the Cuban people never figured in U.S. policy toward the island. The economic blockade and diplomatic embargo of the island has amounted to a fifty year effort to strangle, not only the regime, but the Cuban people. Others must be forced to sacrifice for the U.S. imperial agenda.
Finally, the Bay of Pigs fiasco suggests that U.S. foreign policy decision-makers almost always misjudge the will of the people who would be subjected to military action. Ruling classes, by their very nature, are unable to understand the interests, passions, and visions of the great masses of people. The Director of the CIA and other members of the President’s inner circle were incapable of understanding that the Cuban people supported their revolution so they ignored State Department polling data.
The United States continues to make these mistakes virtually everywhere.
I was a student at the University of Illinois during the 1960-61 academic year. Like so many of my generation, I was modestly curious about the Cuban Revolution which had occurred a year earlier. I worked in the cloak room of the student union with two fellow students who were counter-revolutionary Cubans. We argued all the time about the revolution. If only Castro would hold elections they said, we would support whatever candidates prevailed.
I had read a short piece in The Nation during the fall of 1960 warning of a group of anti-Castro Cubans training for a military intervention. I had put that out of my mind until my fellow cloak room workers began to talk in February, 1961 about “something (that) was going to happen.”
I also remembered going to a student organized panel on Cuba that included my cloak room colleagues and other counter-revolutionaries. There was one student (the panel had seven participants as I remember) who defended the revolution. It was clear that the defender of the revolution was not liked by the others.
I went to work on April 17, 1961 to discover that I would be covering the cloak room alone. It seems that one of my Cuban colleagues scheduled to work with me that day had gotten in his car and driven to Miami, apparently ready to join the second wave of what became known in the U. S. as the Bay of Pigs invasion. On that day 1,400 anti-Castro Cubans invaded Cuba at a place known as Playa Giron. Days before air attacks on Cuban airfields were carried out by unmarked U.S. planes, but President Kennedy chose not to provide air support when the invasion occurred because the world would think the U.S. was behind the invasion.
The invasion, planning for which began in the Eisenhower Administration, was cooked up by the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA argued that once an invading force landed on the island, the Cuban people would rise up to overthrow the new government. The folly of that assumption was experienced personally by me when I saw my cloak room Cuban friend return to work about three days later. By the time he reached Miami by car the invasion had been crushed. There was no spontaneous uprising.
The Bay of Pigs invasion of 49 years ago is commemorated every year in the municipalities of La Habana province. One report refers to this year’s celebration as marking “the first defeat of imperialism in the Americas.”
Historical research makes it clear that the United States was opposed to the revolutionary movement led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara well before the revolutionaries marched into Havana in January, 1959. When Eisenhower realized that Fulgencio Batista was vulnerable to defeat, the president desperately sought a replacement who would not threaten U.S. banking, tourist, and sugar interests on the island.
President Eisenhower, deeply troubled by Castro’s victory, refused to meet with the Cuban leader when he came to the United States in April 1959. Over the next two years U.S. and Cuban actions and reactions deepened the hostility between the superpower and the island nation. These included the opening of Cuban relations with the Soviet Union, the refusal of U.S. oil companies to refine Soviet oil, and the Cuban seizure of the refineries. Dramatically the U.S. ended the purchase of Cuban sugar and Cuba responded by nationalizing U.S. banks and other businesses on the island.
In March, 1960 Eisenhower directed the CIA to begin planning for an invasion of the island carried out by counter-revolutionary Cubans. The Eisenhower team had successfully ousted from power both Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh 1953 and Guatemalan President Jacob Arbenz in 1954. He probably thought a move on Cuba could lead to a similar success.
When President Kennedy assumed office in 1961, the CIA presented the new president with the Bay of Pigs invasion plan. During the fall 1960 presidential campaign Kennedy had criticized his presidential opponent, Richard Nixon, for allowing Communism to come to Cuba. So JFK’s support of the invasion was no surprise.
When JFK brought the CIA plot to an early April meeting of the National Security Council, almost no one felt free to raise questions about the plot (even though State Department polls indicated the overwhelming support the revolution had among the Cuban people). The National Security Council endorsed the plot.
After the failure Fidel Castro declared Cuba a Socialist state and President Kennedy declared that the U.S. would not rest until the Cuban regime was ousted from power. Kennedy fully institutionalized the economic blockade against Cuba that still exists today.
Revisiting the Bay of Pigs invasion after 49 years suggests some historic features of U.S. foreign policy and decision-making style.
First, as admirably described by Stephen Kinzer in Overthrow, the United States had been engaging in efforts to undermine and overthrow independent governments around the world, and particularly in the Western Hemisphere, ever since it took Hawaii in the 1890s. In fact, the Cuban revolution of 1898 against Spanish colonialism was usurped by U.S. forces followed by a full-scale occupation of the country, then indirect economic and political domination, lasting until 1959. The U.S. imperial vision regarding Cuba goes as far back as the era of the founding fathers. Thomas Jefferson, among others, had declared that Cuba ought to be part of the United States.
Second, as so many accounts of U.S./Cuban relations suggest, the interests of the Cuban people never figured in U.S. policy toward the island. The economic blockade and diplomatic embargo of the island has amounted to a fifty year effort to strangle, not only the regime, but the Cuban people. Others must be forced to sacrifice for the U.S. imperial agenda.
Finally, the Bay of Pigs fiasco suggests that U.S. foreign policy decision-makers almost always misjudge the will of the people who would be subjected to military action. Ruling classes, by their very nature, are unable to understand the interests, passions, and visions of the great masses of people. The Director of the CIA and other members of the President’s inner circle were incapable of understanding that the Cuban people supported their revolution so they ignored State Department polling data.
The United States continues to make these mistakes virtually everywhere.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH AND IMPACTS ON WORKERS
Harry Targ (in collaboration with David Cormier)
Neo-Liberalism Challenges the Non-Aligned Movement
Since the 1970s, poor countries have been increasingly forced to embrace neo-liberal economic policies at home-cutting government programs, privatizing the economy, opening up the economy to foreign penetration, and shifting to an export-orientation-contrary to the agenda of the Non-Aligned Movement. For many countries, neo-liberal policies constituted a radical break from state policies in which government collaboration with or oversight of the economy were common (so-called heterodox policies).
The Non-Aligned Movement of newly independent countries began to meet in the 1950s. Their concern was the polarization of the international system around debates about “communism” and the “free world” or USSR/US conflicts. For them the central issue was economic development. NAM countries became attracted to variants of Socialist or heterodox policies that called for strong state involvement in economic growth.
Because of United States/Soviet competition during the Cold War for the support of NAM, it gained voice in the United Nations system. Leaders of NAM countries began to demand a new international economic order or NIEO that would regulate international capitalism: limit the free reign of transnational corporations (TNCs), reschedule debts, liberalize patent laws, stabilize prices of agricultural commodities and raw materials, and in other ways regulate global capitalism to reduce some of its negative consequences for the Global South.
In Latin America, these policies were referred to as Import-Substitution Industrialization. The thinking behind ISI, initially developed by Economic Commission for Latin America economists and later amended by dependency theorists, was that manufacturing countries gain more from global exchange than export-oriented raw materials producing countries. Consequently Latin American countries needed to shift resources to industrialization. In the process, ISI policies required protections from unbridled foreign, i.e. United States, economic penetration.
The Debt Trap
The ability to further implement the NIEO and ISI was dramatically reversed by two historic world events. First, the Middle East wars led to dramatic increases in the price of oil during the 1970s. Oil poor countries who had embraced industrial development policies based on the importation of cheap oil experienced enormously increased trade deficits. Western banks choked with oil profits needed to find ways to use the glut of petro dollars. As a result, poor countries were forced to borrow huge sums of money from banks and banks encouraged the blossoming debt system.
To illustrate, indebtedness of the non-oil producing Global South debt increased five times between 1973 until 1982 reaching a total of $612 billion (Wayne Ellwood, The No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization, 43). By the new century, the total debt of developing countries had reached nearly $3 trillion, or $400 for each person living in the Global South (Ellwood, 48) In the 1990s, payments flowing from the South to the North in interest on loans exceeded loan funds entering the countries concerned.
In addition to the debt trap, as suggested above, the debt system came with a policy price: requirements that debtor countries reverse commitments to the NIEO vision and ISI policies. In the 1980s, the neo-liberal economic policies, central to the process of globalization, began to spread throughout the global economy. The debt system has been institutionalized ever since such that countries have become trapped in debt and requirements to carry out the policies of the banks.
The nail-in-the-coffin of Socialist or mixed-economy policies resulted from the economic and political disintegration of Socialism in the 1980s. The former Soviet Union sought to match the U.S. side of the arms race (the Reagan military build-up was the biggest in U.S. history). It found itself in expensive military quagmires in places such as Afghanistan. In addition, political legitimacy of the regime in the Soviet Union and across Eastern Europe declined with the inability of Socialist economies to match consumer growth in the West. The end result was the collapse of Socialism at the same time that the debt system was imposing neo-liberal policies everywhere.
Paradoxically, its advocates claimed, the neo-liberal policy agenda would increase the ability of poorer countries to participate in the global economy. Economic reforms at home would entice increased foreign investment. Shifting from tariffs to markets and from production for domestic consumption to production for sale on world markets would increase earnings which could be plowed into domestic economic development (as well as paying back the bankers for interest on loans).
Data on the 1990s indicated that direct foreign investment increased by about 15 times over the decade. However, 75 % of the investment went to just twelve countries, the most industrialized of the countries of the Global South with the largest markets. These countries included Argentina, Brazil, China, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Korea. Also trade data, exports and imports, indicated that the countries of the European Union, the United States, Japan, and Canada accounted for half of all world trade. Similarly a small number of countries accounted for half of the world’s imports. Despite claims by advocates, neo-liberal economic policies did not increase incorporation of most poor countries into the global economy.
The Transformation of Work
The transformation from Socialist or heterodox policies in the Global South to neo-liberalism, while not stimulating incorporation into the global economy and development, did facilitate changing work patterns. Neo-liberal policies, including privatization and shifting production from domestic consumption to exports, radically transformed rural work in many countries of the Global South.
Governmental pressures undermined traditional patterns of agriculture including land ownership and production processes. Land holdings were consolidated under the control of foreign or wealthy domestic investors. More productive and larger agricultural units began to produce commodities for sale in rich overseas markets. Peasant farmers who in the past produced food stuffs for domestic consumption were replaced by agricultural workers and new technologies to produce winter vegetables and flowers for foreign customers. Countries which had produced enough food for their own people became net importers of food products. In addition, agricultural subsidies characteristic of the United States and countries of the European Union made it all but impossible for poor farmers to compete with the cheap imported food.
As a result of the new agriculture, and farmers forced off their land, migration to urban centers magnified, as more and more rural dwellers sought work. Cities in the Global South doubled or tripled in size, becoming surrounded by make-shift dwellings of people looking for work. Some rural migrants were able to find work in the new export-processing zones or sweat shop industries rising in some countries of the Global South. The pool of cheap labor in the Global South, replenished by the transformation of agriculture, provided an attractive opportunity for textile, electronics, and other manufacturing employment, once basic to the manufacturing economies of the industrialized countries. The globalization of production occurred in tandem with the imposition of neo-liberal economic policies, and the transformation of agriculture.
These changes were reflected in changing employment/unemployment rates and the kind of work that became available in the Global South. From 1950 to 1990, there was a decline by almost 1/3 of those of working age in the world engaged in agriculture. The percentage of the world work force in agriculture in 1990 was down to 49%, from 67% in 1950 (In Latin America and the Caribbean the decline from 1950 to 1990 was from 54% to 25% in agriculture).
In addition, the growth in industrial employment between 1950 and 1990 was modest, not commensurate with the declining agricultural employment. (In Latin America, the decline in agriculture was more dramatic than the world figures while the increase in industrial employment was not greater than the world figures). More recent International Labor Organization (ILO) data suggests that in the world at large “the share of employment in manufacturing declined between 1990 and 2001 in all economies for which data are available…”( ILO, 21 Nov. 2005).
Further, the world data (and the data for Latin America) indicate that the major sectoral growth in employment has been in the service sector. Increases in service sector employment ranged from 8% to 16% among countries in different economic strata. The largest growth in the service sector occurred in the lower-middle income countries.
The Rise of the Informal Sector
Finally, the most significant shift in employment throughout the world, particularly in the Global South, is from the formal economy (agriculture, industry, and service) to the informal economy. Most workers in this growing sector of the work force are driven by a desperate need to provide the rudiments of life. Consequently, they are willing to do virtually anything to earn money. This may involve lucrative small street market sales, or low wage home work (from house cleaning to garment assembly), or prostitution, or drug dealing. Work in the informal economy is not regulated. Workers enjoy no work place health and safety protections. They receive no health or retirement benefits. And, of negative consequence to the national government, they pay no taxes.
In a recent report produced by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations, “The Inequality Predicament,” a distinction is made between “haves” and “have-nots” in terms of employment. The former are employed in the formal economy. They are more likely “…to earn decent wages, receive job-related benefits, have secure employment contracts and be covered by relevant laws and regulations” (UN, 2005, 29). The informal sector represents the polar opposite in terms of wages, benefits, and rights. The growth of the informal sector worldwide, the report says, is intimately tied to growing global inequality.
The UN report estimates that “informal employment accounts for between one half and three quarters of non-agricultural employment in the majority of developing countries.” They indicate that the percentage of those who work in the informal sector varies across the Global South: 48% in North Africa, 51% in Latin America and the Caribbean, 65 % in Asia and 78% in Sub-Saharan Africa (UN, 30).
In addition, the report refers to studies that suggest that the informal sector accounts for significant shares of the overall income and gross domestic product of individual countries. One study of 110 countries in 2000 found that the 18% of the gross national incomes of OECD countries came from the informal sector, 38% in “transition” countries (formerly Socialist), and 41% in developing countries. The informal economy accounted for 42% of the GNP in Africa, 26% in Asia, and 41% in Latin America (UN, 30-34).
The Precarious Classes
Data shows that unemployment around the world rose over the period from 1993 to 2002 and declined somewhat in 2003. What may be the most significant finding from this data is the fact that the seeming recovery of 2003 only imperceptibly impacted on unemployment rates. Even if sectors of the global economy experience growth, some theorists suggest, recovery given the system of global capitalism is “jobless.”
The economic transformations initiated in the Global South in the 1970s occurred in the context of the concentration and globalization of capital and the declining resistance including the collapse of Socialism. The oil crisis, the rise of a global debt system, global policy shifts from state/market economies to neo-liberalism parallel significant changes in work activity from agriculture and industry to service, to the rise of the informal sector and unemployment. The end product of these transformations has been increasing global inequality in wealth and income and the continuation of massive poverty, powerlessness, and precariousness.
While rates of poverty declined over the last twenty years of the twentieth century still half the world’s population in 2001 lived on less than $2 a day. And the percentage declines in extreme poverty, less than $1 a day, during this period mask the fact that more people in 2001 were in extreme poverty than twenty years earlier. The numbers of people in extreme poverty increased in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and India. The numbers of those in poverty declined in East Asia and the Pacific and China.
Also, it is clear that income inequality has been increasing between richer and poorer regions of the globe. With the OECD countries representing the rich countries, on a per capita income basis, shares of income of peoples in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean have declined between 1980 and 2001. Weller, Scott, and Hersch (2001) report that in 1980 median income in the richest countries (top ten percent) was 77 times greater than the median income in the poorest countries (the bottom ten percent). By 1999, the gap had expanded to 122 times.
The transformation of employment from agriculture and industry to service and the informal sector-a shift that has been characterized as one from “have” to “have-not” jobs-has been reflected in the continuation of massive poverty around the globe and substantial evidence that the distribution of wealth and income has worsened over the period of neo-liberal policy influence. “The Inequality Predicament” makes it clear as well that income inequality is reproduced in the distribution of access to health care, education, housing, access to water, and sanitation.
Data like these led Samir Amin (2003) to predict that the transformation of the global political economy was precipitating a crisis of poverty and human misery that will transcend the expectations of the most well-meaning humanists. Amin described the emergence of “precarious classes” in both rural and urban areas. Estimating that half the world’s population (3 billion people) live in the country, he predicted that nearly 2.8 billion of them will become economically redundant. That is, given technology, 20 million people could provide the food needs for the planet. In the cities, 1.5 billion of 3 billion people are marginalized workers who experience work temporarily and/or who always live with the insecurity of job and income loss. Over four billion people of the six billion living on the planet, Amin wrote, constitute “the precarious classes,” made redundant because of declining employment and being reduced to perpetual employment insecurity due to the exigencies of the pursuit of profit in an era of neo-liberal globalization. This situation, Amin asserted, constituted a coming global crisis not seen in human history.
Neo-Liberalism Challenges the Non-Aligned Movement
Since the 1970s, poor countries have been increasingly forced to embrace neo-liberal economic policies at home-cutting government programs, privatizing the economy, opening up the economy to foreign penetration, and shifting to an export-orientation-contrary to the agenda of the Non-Aligned Movement. For many countries, neo-liberal policies constituted a radical break from state policies in which government collaboration with or oversight of the economy were common (so-called heterodox policies).
The Non-Aligned Movement of newly independent countries began to meet in the 1950s. Their concern was the polarization of the international system around debates about “communism” and the “free world” or USSR/US conflicts. For them the central issue was economic development. NAM countries became attracted to variants of Socialist or heterodox policies that called for strong state involvement in economic growth.
Because of United States/Soviet competition during the Cold War for the support of NAM, it gained voice in the United Nations system. Leaders of NAM countries began to demand a new international economic order or NIEO that would regulate international capitalism: limit the free reign of transnational corporations (TNCs), reschedule debts, liberalize patent laws, stabilize prices of agricultural commodities and raw materials, and in other ways regulate global capitalism to reduce some of its negative consequences for the Global South.
In Latin America, these policies were referred to as Import-Substitution Industrialization. The thinking behind ISI, initially developed by Economic Commission for Latin America economists and later amended by dependency theorists, was that manufacturing countries gain more from global exchange than export-oriented raw materials producing countries. Consequently Latin American countries needed to shift resources to industrialization. In the process, ISI policies required protections from unbridled foreign, i.e. United States, economic penetration.
The Debt Trap
The ability to further implement the NIEO and ISI was dramatically reversed by two historic world events. First, the Middle East wars led to dramatic increases in the price of oil during the 1970s. Oil poor countries who had embraced industrial development policies based on the importation of cheap oil experienced enormously increased trade deficits. Western banks choked with oil profits needed to find ways to use the glut of petro dollars. As a result, poor countries were forced to borrow huge sums of money from banks and banks encouraged the blossoming debt system.
To illustrate, indebtedness of the non-oil producing Global South debt increased five times between 1973 until 1982 reaching a total of $612 billion (Wayne Ellwood, The No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization, 43). By the new century, the total debt of developing countries had reached nearly $3 trillion, or $400 for each person living in the Global South (Ellwood, 48) In the 1990s, payments flowing from the South to the North in interest on loans exceeded loan funds entering the countries concerned.
In addition to the debt trap, as suggested above, the debt system came with a policy price: requirements that debtor countries reverse commitments to the NIEO vision and ISI policies. In the 1980s, the neo-liberal economic policies, central to the process of globalization, began to spread throughout the global economy. The debt system has been institutionalized ever since such that countries have become trapped in debt and requirements to carry out the policies of the banks.
The nail-in-the-coffin of Socialist or mixed-economy policies resulted from the economic and political disintegration of Socialism in the 1980s. The former Soviet Union sought to match the U.S. side of the arms race (the Reagan military build-up was the biggest in U.S. history). It found itself in expensive military quagmires in places such as Afghanistan. In addition, political legitimacy of the regime in the Soviet Union and across Eastern Europe declined with the inability of Socialist economies to match consumer growth in the West. The end result was the collapse of Socialism at the same time that the debt system was imposing neo-liberal policies everywhere.
Paradoxically, its advocates claimed, the neo-liberal policy agenda would increase the ability of poorer countries to participate in the global economy. Economic reforms at home would entice increased foreign investment. Shifting from tariffs to markets and from production for domestic consumption to production for sale on world markets would increase earnings which could be plowed into domestic economic development (as well as paying back the bankers for interest on loans).
Data on the 1990s indicated that direct foreign investment increased by about 15 times over the decade. However, 75 % of the investment went to just twelve countries, the most industrialized of the countries of the Global South with the largest markets. These countries included Argentina, Brazil, China, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Korea. Also trade data, exports and imports, indicated that the countries of the European Union, the United States, Japan, and Canada accounted for half of all world trade. Similarly a small number of countries accounted for half of the world’s imports. Despite claims by advocates, neo-liberal economic policies did not increase incorporation of most poor countries into the global economy.
The Transformation of Work
The transformation from Socialist or heterodox policies in the Global South to neo-liberalism, while not stimulating incorporation into the global economy and development, did facilitate changing work patterns. Neo-liberal policies, including privatization and shifting production from domestic consumption to exports, radically transformed rural work in many countries of the Global South.
Governmental pressures undermined traditional patterns of agriculture including land ownership and production processes. Land holdings were consolidated under the control of foreign or wealthy domestic investors. More productive and larger agricultural units began to produce commodities for sale in rich overseas markets. Peasant farmers who in the past produced food stuffs for domestic consumption were replaced by agricultural workers and new technologies to produce winter vegetables and flowers for foreign customers. Countries which had produced enough food for their own people became net importers of food products. In addition, agricultural subsidies characteristic of the United States and countries of the European Union made it all but impossible for poor farmers to compete with the cheap imported food.
As a result of the new agriculture, and farmers forced off their land, migration to urban centers magnified, as more and more rural dwellers sought work. Cities in the Global South doubled or tripled in size, becoming surrounded by make-shift dwellings of people looking for work. Some rural migrants were able to find work in the new export-processing zones or sweat shop industries rising in some countries of the Global South. The pool of cheap labor in the Global South, replenished by the transformation of agriculture, provided an attractive opportunity for textile, electronics, and other manufacturing employment, once basic to the manufacturing economies of the industrialized countries. The globalization of production occurred in tandem with the imposition of neo-liberal economic policies, and the transformation of agriculture.
These changes were reflected in changing employment/unemployment rates and the kind of work that became available in the Global South. From 1950 to 1990, there was a decline by almost 1/3 of those of working age in the world engaged in agriculture. The percentage of the world work force in agriculture in 1990 was down to 49%, from 67% in 1950 (In Latin America and the Caribbean the decline from 1950 to 1990 was from 54% to 25% in agriculture).
In addition, the growth in industrial employment between 1950 and 1990 was modest, not commensurate with the declining agricultural employment. (In Latin America, the decline in agriculture was more dramatic than the world figures while the increase in industrial employment was not greater than the world figures). More recent International Labor Organization (ILO) data suggests that in the world at large “the share of employment in manufacturing declined between 1990 and 2001 in all economies for which data are available…”( ILO, 21 Nov. 2005).
Further, the world data (and the data for Latin America) indicate that the major sectoral growth in employment has been in the service sector. Increases in service sector employment ranged from 8% to 16% among countries in different economic strata. The largest growth in the service sector occurred in the lower-middle income countries.
The Rise of the Informal Sector
Finally, the most significant shift in employment throughout the world, particularly in the Global South, is from the formal economy (agriculture, industry, and service) to the informal economy. Most workers in this growing sector of the work force are driven by a desperate need to provide the rudiments of life. Consequently, they are willing to do virtually anything to earn money. This may involve lucrative small street market sales, or low wage home work (from house cleaning to garment assembly), or prostitution, or drug dealing. Work in the informal economy is not regulated. Workers enjoy no work place health and safety protections. They receive no health or retirement benefits. And, of negative consequence to the national government, they pay no taxes.
In a recent report produced by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations, “The Inequality Predicament,” a distinction is made between “haves” and “have-nots” in terms of employment. The former are employed in the formal economy. They are more likely “…to earn decent wages, receive job-related benefits, have secure employment contracts and be covered by relevant laws and regulations” (UN, 2005, 29). The informal sector represents the polar opposite in terms of wages, benefits, and rights. The growth of the informal sector worldwide, the report says, is intimately tied to growing global inequality.
The UN report estimates that “informal employment accounts for between one half and three quarters of non-agricultural employment in the majority of developing countries.” They indicate that the percentage of those who work in the informal sector varies across the Global South: 48% in North Africa, 51% in Latin America and the Caribbean, 65 % in Asia and 78% in Sub-Saharan Africa (UN, 30).
In addition, the report refers to studies that suggest that the informal sector accounts for significant shares of the overall income and gross domestic product of individual countries. One study of 110 countries in 2000 found that the 18% of the gross national incomes of OECD countries came from the informal sector, 38% in “transition” countries (formerly Socialist), and 41% in developing countries. The informal economy accounted for 42% of the GNP in Africa, 26% in Asia, and 41% in Latin America (UN, 30-34).
The Precarious Classes
Data shows that unemployment around the world rose over the period from 1993 to 2002 and declined somewhat in 2003. What may be the most significant finding from this data is the fact that the seeming recovery of 2003 only imperceptibly impacted on unemployment rates. Even if sectors of the global economy experience growth, some theorists suggest, recovery given the system of global capitalism is “jobless.”
The economic transformations initiated in the Global South in the 1970s occurred in the context of the concentration and globalization of capital and the declining resistance including the collapse of Socialism. The oil crisis, the rise of a global debt system, global policy shifts from state/market economies to neo-liberalism parallel significant changes in work activity from agriculture and industry to service, to the rise of the informal sector and unemployment. The end product of these transformations has been increasing global inequality in wealth and income and the continuation of massive poverty, powerlessness, and precariousness.
While rates of poverty declined over the last twenty years of the twentieth century still half the world’s population in 2001 lived on less than $2 a day. And the percentage declines in extreme poverty, less than $1 a day, during this period mask the fact that more people in 2001 were in extreme poverty than twenty years earlier. The numbers of people in extreme poverty increased in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and India. The numbers of those in poverty declined in East Asia and the Pacific and China.
Also, it is clear that income inequality has been increasing between richer and poorer regions of the globe. With the OECD countries representing the rich countries, on a per capita income basis, shares of income of peoples in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean have declined between 1980 and 2001. Weller, Scott, and Hersch (2001) report that in 1980 median income in the richest countries (top ten percent) was 77 times greater than the median income in the poorest countries (the bottom ten percent). By 1999, the gap had expanded to 122 times.
The transformation of employment from agriculture and industry to service and the informal sector-a shift that has been characterized as one from “have” to “have-not” jobs-has been reflected in the continuation of massive poverty around the globe and substantial evidence that the distribution of wealth and income has worsened over the period of neo-liberal policy influence. “The Inequality Predicament” makes it clear as well that income inequality is reproduced in the distribution of access to health care, education, housing, access to water, and sanitation.
Data like these led Samir Amin (2003) to predict that the transformation of the global political economy was precipitating a crisis of poverty and human misery that will transcend the expectations of the most well-meaning humanists. Amin described the emergence of “precarious classes” in both rural and urban areas. Estimating that half the world’s population (3 billion people) live in the country, he predicted that nearly 2.8 billion of them will become economically redundant. That is, given technology, 20 million people could provide the food needs for the planet. In the cities, 1.5 billion of 3 billion people are marginalized workers who experience work temporarily and/or who always live with the insecurity of job and income loss. Over four billion people of the six billion living on the planet, Amin wrote, constitute “the precarious classes,” made redundant because of declining employment and being reduced to perpetual employment insecurity due to the exigencies of the pursuit of profit in an era of neo-liberal globalization. This situation, Amin asserted, constituted a coming global crisis not seen in human history.
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