Who, moi?
You comrades ever hear of uneven/combined development?
Ok, here's the deal. If you have to be "in" the circuits of transnational corporate-dominated trade/investment, under present circumstances, you simply get drained, if you're a low-income African country. The $ prices of your exports have crashed while trade lib has crashed your local capacity to import-substitute, you're paying typically more than 20% of earnings to the BWIs for repayment on debt taken out a quarter-century ago when your land was run by a dictator fueled by the Cold War, your ruling class structure is now even more dominated by compradors and parasites egged on by homegrown neoliberals, your import bill keeps soaring and includes conspicuous-consumption goodies enjoyed by a tiny fraction of elites and expat foreign-aid staff (and NGO leaders), and today you've got "responsible" international allies like Oxfam trying to teach you that your poor people can rise up if only the int'l trading system was a bit more fair--and the likes of Keynes and Daly get painted as "extremists."
Here's my side of the debate I've been having with Oxfam, after being duped into helping launch their report last Thursday:
(from ZNet on Tuesday):
"Breaking with some of its anti-globalization allies, the aid agency Oxfam International issued a report yesterday that praised international trade as a potentially enormous boon to the world's poor... `The extreme element of the anti-globalization movement is wrong,' said Kevin Watkins, a senior policy adviser for Oxfam who wrote most of the report. `Trade can deliver much more [for poor countries] than aid or debt relief.'"
Those lines appeared in an article by Paul Blustein in last Thursday's Washington Post, on the front page of the business section. No mistake there, and no subsequent apology. It was a self-conscious division engineered by Oxfam's British hq, and not for the first time.
Tellingly, the ploy comes on the eve of what will be excellent anti-neoliberal/anti-imperialist protests in Washington, DC this weekend, and is one of a series of interesting alignment-dynamics. Some go right, but others swing leftward.
We're watching such maneuvers quite closely here in Johannesburg, because the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) will be convened four months from now in our unsustainably hedonistic suburb of Sandton, and is already being vigorously contested.
Thus local politicians and enviro-bureaucrats led by president Thabo Mbeki aim to craft a "New Deal" based in part on the "New Partnership for Africa's Development." But especially after the UN's "Financing for Development" meeting in Monterrey last month, no one seriously expects anything important to materialize. On Friday, for example, even financier George Soros told Johannesburg interviewer Ben Cashdan that Mbeki's Africa plan was "very much designed to meet the standards of the Washington Consensus. And therefore it's a very skewed document which I think could be improved on."
Meanwhile, South Africa's progressive movements are recovering from disarray, in the wake of the ruling African National Congress party' success in persuading leaders of the Congress of South African Trade Unions to U-turn on anti-neoliberal campaigning, and to simultaneously attack independent social activists. I'll grapple with an analysis of this problem in next month's column.
But back to Oxfam, and then to more serious matters, such as recent statements about the WSSD by more genuine allies of poor people, and the ongoing case of the highest-profile political prisoners of South African neoliberalism: Trevor Ngwane and the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee.
Criticizing Oxfam's "Rigged Rules and Double Standards," Food First co-director Anuradha Mittal put it best: "Oxfam's report contradicts its own stated mission that ending poverty requires a global citizen's movement for economic and social justice. We are disappointed that Oxfam, one of the NGO leaders on food security, has chosen to undermine the demands of social movements and think tanks in the South such as Via Campesina, MST, Third World Network, Focus on the Global South, and Africa Trade Network which have demanded that governments must uphold the rights of all people to food sovereignty and the right to food rather than industry-led export-oriented production."
Mittal continued by noting the "discredited World Bank and International Monetary Fund data." In contrast, "Research at Food First shows that global trade in agriculture has not provided new market access for poor farmers, but rather has destroyed the ability of farmers to grow food for their families and communities. It has resulted in dumping of cheap agricultural products in the Third World nations while undermining their domestic production."
Meanwhile, Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South avoided Oxfam's delusional acceptance of neoliberal pro-trade premises, when last week it rejected an invitation for a World Bank "Strategic Policy Workshop: Making Doha work for the Poor" to be held near London next month. Oxfam's former international economist John Clark, who joined the Bank to become its main flack-catcher against social movements and NGOs, is a prime facilitator of the self-contradictory meeting. The Bank invited a small "group of leading thinkers and policymakers from civil society in an intensive dialogue with a senior team from the World Bank" with the proviso that the pow-wow occur "under Chatham House Rules, meaning no attributed quotations should be made after the meeting." It's no surprise that two from Oxfam made the 20-person guest list.
Focus was invited too, but their deputy director Nicola Bullard replied in an open letter, "We are totally opposed to this kind of private and closed meeting. We believe that meetings such as this perpetuate the problems of non-transparency, lack of public responsibility and accountability which are endemic to the WTO and characteristic of the Doha negotiations."
For some years, Oxfam's insiderist strategy has had the effect, as Mittal charges, of "undermining the demands of social movements and think tanks in the South." I recall the international reps of Oxfam in Washington explicitly breaking ranks with the 50 Years is Enough coalition in 1995, when the former appeared at a high-profile press conference to endorse more money for James Wolfensohn's World Bank.
Bad politics are accompanied by weak intellect. Most annoyingly, perhaps, Watkins remark repudiates anyone to the left of, and including, far-sighted bourgeois economists like John Maynard Keynes and Herman Daly. Keynes' famous 1933 article in the Yale Review called for "goods to be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible" because of the damage done by the "Treasury View" (i.e., neoliberal) free-traders of his era: "I sympathize with those who would minimize, rather than with those who would maximize, economic entanglement among nations."
Daly's 1996 departure speech from the World Bank, where as environmental economist he was repeatedly frustrated, concluded optimistically, "Take it as a prediction--ten years from now the buzz words and hot concepts will be `renationalization of capital' and the `community rooting of capital for the development of national and local economies,' not the current shibboleths of export-led growth stimulated by whatever adjustments are necessary to increase global competitiveness."
These are, even to my socialist ears, more sensible sentiments than Oxfam's utopian attempts to reform globalization through, in part, expanding the reach of multinational trading capital. Oxfam fails to recognise not only the merits of self-reliance, but also that enormous amount of socio-environmental damage is done by virtue of the transport, energy, packaging, marketing, waste and currency fluctuations associated with unnecessary cross-border trade of goods and services in the name of an alleged "comparative advantage," which in any case is mainly invented or artificial.
Economically, I've seen Southern Africa become even more distorted than under colonialism and apartheid, these past two decades, by the single-minded orientation to exporting. I've seen class structures skew over to parasitical commercial circuitry, and the universal rise to state power of "comprador" (i.e., local sell-out) supporters of neoliberalism, as a direct result of the 1980s-90s demand of the Washington Consensus that trade be liberalized.
In short, exporting more and more commodities into a world economy faced by massive, unprecedented gluts, and by dramatic declines in the "terms of trade" (import costs in relation to export prices) for Southern exporting states, is senseless.
(more blahblah...)