Jean-Francois Revel could once claim to be a socialist of considerable standing. But have a wee look at his latest screed for The American Enterprise Institute . Or, if you can't be bothered doing that, allow me to pick out the highlights and make fun of them for you:
(Or, click here: http://leninology.blogspot.com/2004_05_01_leninology_archive.html#108404121492911836)
Anti-Globalism = Anti-Americanism
How to understand this war against globalization...?
What motivates this extraordinary resistance? Globalization simply means freedom of movement for goods and people, and it is hard to be violently hostile to that. But behind this fight lies an older and more fundamental struggle—against economic liberalization, and against the chief representative thereof, which is the United States. Anti-globalism carnivals often feature an Uncle Sam in a Stars-and-Stripes costume as their supreme scapegoat. In this way, the new movement taps into an old socialist tradition, where opposition to economic freedom and opposition to America are impossible to separate.
Mark the conflation - economic liberalisation is, for the New Revel, the same as "economic freedom". This is peculiar, since most anti-capitalist activists would tell you that what they object to about "globalisation" is not necessarily the movement of goods from one end of the earth to the other, and certainly not the movement of peoples from country to country. It is precisely the unfreedom that accrues to those who are excluded by TRIPs, and the lack of power of domestic constituencies over the forces which determine their lives (since economic liberalisation removes control from accountable bodies like parliament to unaccountable corporations) that arouses the hostility of much of the developing world and some of the developed world.
But more crucially, Revel is too sophisticated a person to imagine that "globalisation" is not a contested term. For Revel, it may very well mean freedom of movement for persons and goods. However, this is not the only view. Most anti-capitalists regard the term as a neutral cover for a political project which they prefer to call "neo-liberalism", and which has taken the form of the attempted Multilateral Agreement on Investment, Gats, TRIPs and so on. There is also the additional criticism that the free movement of goods and the free movement of people are strictly not part of the same process. In this regard, Kenan Malik makes the point that:
These days the cost of a Easyjet fare will take you from Budapest to Luton, and it's not much more to fly in from Beijing. Immigration only becomes expensive when it's illegal and you have to pay traffickers to smuggle you across borders. Make all immigration legal and it becomes dirt cheap.
Quite. But the decreasing regulation of trade is directly proportional to the increasing regulation of migration. One aspect of the anti-capitalist movement is addressed precisely to this problem (see, for example, Teresa Hayter's essay in Emma Bircham ed., Anti-Capitalism: A Guide To The Movement ).
Revel continues:
"The simplistic article of Marxist faith that capitalism is absolute evil..."
Would that Marxism had the appeal of a faith, (although it admittedly requires a certain suspension of disbelief - like most political philosophy in my view)! But no Marxist of serious standing actually considers capitalism an absolute evil, and Marx certainly did not. Consider this passage from the Communist Manifesto:
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
Not unmixed praise, to be sure - but it was part of Marx's strategy to praise capitalism more fervently than the most naive liberal, all the better to bury it. Frederic Jameson once wrote (in The Cultural Turn, I think) that one should develop a sensibility [about post-modernism] like Marx's, in which one was capable of appreciating in a single thought both the demonstrably baleful effects of capitalism and also its dynamic, liberatory potential.
Revel, then, is rioting (revelling?) in a comic book version of Marxism, which is highly suitable for his audience of spear-carriers.
But ultimately it is something even bigger that the anti-globalizers want to destroy: liberal democracy and free-market economics. Or quite simply liberty itself.
We're off into wonder-land now. Iago-like evil lurks behind the anti-capitalist movement, a motiveless malignity that would like to crush nothing less than "liberty itself".
According to the anti-globalists, the global marketplace will breed ever-increasing poverty for the profit of an ever-richer minority. This is of course the outcome Karl Marx predicted in the middle of the nineteenth century for the industrialized nations of Western Europe and North America. But we all know how history has confirmed that brilliant prophecy.
To extend a little generosity to Revel, this distortion of Marxism is not unknown in economic textbooks (introductions and guides - Marxism rarely features in mainstream macroeconomic text-books). But, of course, neither Marx nor the anti-capitalist movement expect or have expected absolute immiseration to be the rule for either the advanced capitalist core or the increasingly excluded periphery. It is true that there has been a measured increase in absolute poverty in the world over the last thirty years:
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimates that 840 million people are malnourished, the great mass of them living in countries of the Third World. More than half the countries for which statistics are available do not have enough food to provide all their population with the minimum daily requirement of calories. In some regions hunger has become far more general: across Africa the average household now consumes 25 percent less than in the early 1970s.
But while Marx inherited the notion of "absolute immiseration" from Ricardo, and held it as he was writing the Communist Manifesto, his views on writing Das Kapital are considerably altered. He later developed the concept of a "subsistence" wage level, which would be determined by socio-historical factors. Trotsky developed a similar idea on reviewing the Communist Manifesto in 1938.
Nonetheless, Revel has an answer for those who cite Africa as an example of market failure:
This is most obvious in Africa, the only Third World continent to have actually declined. Impoverishment there has political, not economic, causes. It is statism, not the market, and socialism, not capitalism, that has destroyed the African economies. After independence, the African elites who formed the political leadership generally adopted the Soviet and Chinese systems.
This might pass as an argument were it not the case that China is presently booming, that poverty has declined in China from 63.8% of the population living below $1.08 a day in 1981 to 16.6% today. Similarly, the impeccable capitalist states of South Asia have experienced a reduction in poverty - yet, even today, 31.3% of its citizens live on an income below $1.08 per day. This, before anyone starts barking, is not a defense of China. Amartya Sen famously compared India and China on life expectancy, poverty and starvation. Noting that China was well ahead of India on most indicators, he nevertheless noted that China had been fatally prone to famine precisely because of its undemocratic political structure:
"Consider China. Even before the recent economic reforms, China had been much more successful than India in economic development. The average life expectancy, for example, rose in China much more than it did in India. Well before the reforms of 1979, reached something like the high figure --- nearly 70 years at birth --- that is quoted now. China was not able to prevent famine. It is estimated that the Chinese famines of 1958-61 killed close to 30 million people --- 10 times more than the 1943 famine in British India. The so-called "Great Leap Forward" initiated in the late 1950s was a massive failure, but the Chinese government continued to pursue much the same disastrous policies three more years. It is hard to imagine that this could have happened in a country that goes to the polls regularly and has an independent press.
"The lack of a free system of news distribution misled even the government itself. It believed its own propaganda and the rosy reports of local party officials. Indeed, there is evidence that just as the famine was moving towards its peak, the Chinese authorities mistakenly believed that they had 100 million more metric tons of grain than they did.
"These issues remain relevant in China today. Since the economic reforms of 1979, official Chinese policies have been based on the acknowledgment of the importance of economic incentives without a similar acknowledgment of the importance of political incentives. When things go reasonably well, the disciplinary role of democracy might not be missed; but when big policy mistakes are made, this lacuna can be disastrous."
However, while India avoided famine (after 1943), it invested far less in rural health care services than China. Hence, approximately every 8 years in India, the number of people who dying from starvation, poor health, malnutrition, and diseases equals to a 1958-60 Chinese famine. (Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action Clarendon Press, 1989). The point is that political democracy and economic democracy are not co-substantial. And what has happened in Africa? Mugabe, whom Revel bizarrely accuses the anti-capitalist movement of "defending", has implemented, since 1989 at least, an impeccable neo-liberal programme. He has slashed taxes on the top income bracket from 60 percent to 45 percent, and corporation taxes from 50 percent to 37 percent. Government revenue has declined as a share of national income by 5%. He has pursued this programme at the behest of the IMF, in fact, enemy number one of anti-capitalists. The official ideology of such Structural Adjustment Programmes is one of assisting growth. However:
"Although there have been a number of studies on the subject over the last decade, one cannot say with certainty whether 'programs' have worked or not.... On the basis of existing studies, one certainly cannot say whether the adoption of programs supported by the Fund led to an improvement in inflation and growth performance. In fact it is often found that programs are associated with a rise in inflation and a fall in growth rate" (Mohsin Kahn, The Macroeconomic Effects of Fund Supported Adjustment Programs, IMF staff papers, vol. 37, no. 2, 1990, pp. 196 and 122, emphasis added). ( IMF tightens the screws on Zimbabwe, Jean Shaoul, 18 August 1999 ).
Revel mistakes simple declarative statements and bald assertions for argument, however:
The anti-globalists are often incoherent. They brought mayhem to Seattle in the name of combating a "savage" globalism that "profits only the rich." Yet which groups met in Seattle? The World Trade Organization (WTO), whose role is precisely to monitor international economic transactions so as to prevent them from being "savage." ...
If you ask the developing countries what they want, they will tell you they want more globalization, not less. What they desire most of all is freer access to the world’s best markets for their products. So when well-heeled young radical protestors try to subvert meetings whose goal is to extend free trade and strengthen poor countries’ ability to export goods, they actually act as enemies of the world’s poor.
One wonders, then, why it should be the case that institutions such as the World Trade Organisation consider it within their various duties to attempt the imposition of schemes such as the MAI, already alluded to, which would have invested corporations with the powers that properly accrue to democratic states? One wonders if Revel has actually attended any of the demonstrations he derides as having been populated by "well-heeled young radical protestors"? Revel, still not satisfied, succumbs to further absurdity:
"Democrats worthy of the name should not forget that power is conferred by ballots, not by bricks hurled through windows. It is disturbing that the Left too often ignores this principle."
Power indeed ought to be conferred through ballots. Until we are allowed a vote on the decisions of the WTO and its confederate organisations, however, bricks hurled through windows remains all too timid a response. And a younger Revel might well have been the one with the make-shift missiles in his hands. Instead, he now writes on behalf of those who have use of real missiles when they don't like what is happening. Maturity, as Terry Eagleton once said, is a myth that only the young still believe in. He ought to have included those apostates who regard with such miserable condescension the ideals of their youth.
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