The Worldwide Class Struggle
by Vincent Navarro
Monthly Review
www.zmag.org, September 27, 2006
Neoliberalism as a Class Practice
A trademark of our times is the dominance
of neoliberalism in the major economic, political, and social
forums of the developed capitalist countries and in the international
agencies they influence--including the IMF, the World Bank, the
WTO, and the technical agencies of the United Nations such as
the World Health Organization, Food and Agricultural Organization,
and UNICEF. Starting in the United States during the Carter administration,
neoliberalism expanded its influence through the Reagan administration
and, in the United Kingdom, the Thatcher administration, to become
an international ideology. Neoliberalism holds to a theory (though
not necessarily a practice) that posits the following:
1. The state (or what is wrongly referred
to in popular parlance as "the government") needs to
reduce its interventionism in economic and social activities.
2. Labor and financial markets should be deregulated in order
to liberate the enormous creative energy of the markets. 3. Commerce
and investments should be stimulated by eliminating borders and
barriers to allow for full mobility of labor, capital, goods,
and services.
Following these three tenets, according
to neoliberal authors, we have seen that the worldwide implementation
of these practices has led to the development of a "new"
process: a globalization of economic activity that has generated
a period of enormous economic growth worldwide, associated with
a new era of social progress. For the first time in history, we
are told, we are witnessing a worldwide economy, in which states
are losing power and are being replaced by a worldwide market
centered in multinational corporations, which are the main units
of economic activity in the world today.
This celebration of the process of globalization
is also evident among some sectors of the left. Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri, in their widely cited Empire (Harvard University
Press, 2000), celebrate the great creativity of what they consider
to be a new era of capitalism. This new period, they claim, breaks
with obsolete state structures and establishes a new international
order, which they define as an imperialist order. They further
postulate that this new order is maintained without any state
dominating or being hegemonic. Thus, they write:
We want to emphasize that the establishment
of empire is a positive step towards the elimination of nostalgic
activities based on previous power structures; we reject all political
strategies that want to take us back to past situations such as
the resurrection of the nation-state in order to protect the population
from global capital. We believe that the new imperialist order
is better than the previous system in the same way that Marx believed
that capitalism was a mode of production and a type of society
superior to the mode that it replaced. This point of view held
by Marx was based on a healthy despisement of the parochial localism
and rigid hierarchies that preceded the capitalist society, as
well as on the recognition of the enormous potential for liberation
that capitalism had. (39)
Globalization (i.e., the internationalization
of economic activity according to neoliberal tenets) becomes,
in Hardt and Negri's position, an international system that is
stimulating a worldwide activity that operates without any state
or states leading or organizing it. Such an admiring and flattering
view of globalization and neoliberalism explains the positive
reviews that Empire has received from Emily Eakin, a book reviewer
of the New York Times, and other mainstream critics, not known
for sympathetic reviews of books that claim to derive their theoretical
position from Marxism. Actually, Eakin describes Empire as the
theoretical framework that the world needs to understand its reality.
Hardt and Negri applaud, along with neoliberal
authors, the expansion of globalization. Other left-wing authors,
however, mourn rather than celebrate this expansion, holding globalization
as the cause of the world's growing inequalities and poverty.
It is important to stress that even though the authors in this
latter group--which includes, for example, Susan George and Eric
Hobsbawm--lament globalization and criticize neoliberal thinking,
they still share with neoliberal authors the basic assumption
of neoliberalism: that states are losing power in an international
order in which the power of multinational corporations has replaced
that of states.
The Contradiction Between Theory and Practice
in Neoliberalism
Let's be clear right away that neoliberal
theory is one thing and neoliberal practice is another thing entirely.
Most members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) --including the U.S. federal government--have
seen state intervention and state public expenditures increase
during the last thirty years. My area of scholarship is public
policy and I study the nature of state interventions in many parts
of the world. I can testify to the expansion of state intervention
in most countries in the developed capitalist world. Even in the
United States, President Reagan's neoliberalism did not translate
into a decline of the federal public sector. Instead, federal
public expenditures increased under his mandate, from 21.6 to_23
percent of GNP, as a consequence of a spectacular growth in military
expenditures from 4.9 to 6.1 percent of GNP (Congressional Budget
Office National Accounts 2003). This growth in public expenditures
was financed by an increase in the federal deficit (creating a
burgeoning of the federal debt) and an increase in taxes. As the
supposedly anti-tax president, Reagan in fact increased taxes
for a greater number of people (in peace time) than any other
president in U.S. history. And he increased taxes not once, but
twice (in 1982 and 1983). In a demonstration of class power, he
drastically reduced taxes for the 20 percent of the population
with the highest incomes, while raising taxes for the majority
of the population.
It is not accurate, therefore, to say
that Reagan reduced the role of the state in the United States
by reducing the size of the public sector and lowering taxes.
What Reagan (and Carter before him) did was dramatically change
the nature of state intervention, such that it benefited even
more the upper classes and the economic groups (such as military-related
corporations) that financed his electoral campaigns._Reagan's
policies were indeed class policies that hurt the majority of
the nation's working class. Reagan was profoundly anti-labor,
making cuts in social expenditures at an unprecedented level.
It bears repeating that Reagan's policies were not neoliberal:
they were Keynesian, based on large public expenditures and large
federal deficits. Also, the federal government intervened very
actively in the nation's industrial development (mainly, but not
exclusively, through the Defense Department). As Caspar Weinberger,
secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, once indicated
(in response to criticisms by the Democrats that the administration
had abandoned the manufacturing sector), "Our Administration
is the Administration that has a more advanced and extended industrial
policy in the western world" (Washington Post, July 13, 1983).
He was right. No other western government had such an extensive
industrial policy. Indeed, the U.S. federal state is one of the
most interventionist states in the western world.
There exists very robust scientific evidence
that the United States is not a neoliberal society (as it is constantly
defined) and that the U.S. state is not reducing its key role
in developing the national economy, including in the production
and distribution of goods and services by large U.S. corporations.
This empirical evidence shows that federal government interventionism
(in the economic, political, cultural, and security spheres) has
increased over the last thirty years. In the economic sphere,
for example, protectionism has not declined. It has grown, with
higher subsidies to the agricultural, military, aerospace, and
biomedical sectors. In the social arena, state interventions to
weaken social rights (and most particularly labor rights) have
increased enormously (not only under Reagan, but also under Bush
Senior, Clinton, and Bush Junior), and surveillance of the citizenry
has increased exponentially. Again, there has been no diminution
of federal interventionism in the United States, but rather an
even more skewed class character to this intervention during the
last thirty years.
Neoliberal narratives about the declining
role of the state in people's lives are easily falsified by the
facts. Indeed, as John Williamson, one of the intellectual architects
of neoliberalism, once indicated, "We have to recognize that
what the U.S. government promotes abroad, the U.S. government
does not follow at home," adding that "the U.S. government
promotes policies that are not followed in the U.S."_("What
Washington Means by the Policy Reform," in J. Williamson,
ed., Latin America Adjustment, 1990, 213). It could not have been
said better. In other words, if you want to understand U.S. public
policies, look at what the U.S. government does, not what it says.
This same situation occurs in the majority of developed capitalist
countries. Their states have become more, not less, interventionist.
The size of the state (measured by public expenditures per capita)
has increased in most of these countries. Again, the empirical
information on this point is strong. What has been happening is
not a reduction of the state but rather a change in the nature
of state intervention--further strengthening its class character.
Deterioration of the World Economic and
Social Situation
Contrary to neoliberal dogma, neoliberal
public policies have been remarkably unsuccessful at achieving
their declared aims: economic efficiency and social well-being.
Table 1: Economic Growth, 1960-2000_1960-1980 1980-2000 Rate
of economic growth in developing countries (except China): Annual
economic growth 5.5% 2.6% Annual economic growth per capita
3.2% 0.7% Rate of economic growth in_China: Annual economic
growth 4.5% 9.8% Annual economic growth per capita 2.5% 8.4%
Sources: World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2001 CD-ROM;
Robert Pollin, Contours of Descent (Verso, 2003) 131.
If we compare the period 1980-2000 (when
neoliberalism reached its maximum expression*) with the immediately
preceding period, 1960-1980, we can easily see that 1980-2000
was much less successful than 1960-1980 in most developed and
developing capitalist countries. As table 1 shows, the rate of
growth and rate of growth per capita in all developing (non-OECD)
countries (excluding China) were much higher in 1960-1980 (5.5
percent and 3.2 percent) than in 1980-2000 (2.6 percent and 0.7
percent). Mark Weisbrot, Dean Baker, and David Rosnick have documented
that the improvement in quality-of-life and well-being indicators
(infant mortality, rate of school enrollment, life expectancy,
and others) increased faster during 1960-1980 than 1980-2000 (when
comparing countries at the same level of development at the starting
year of each period--The Scorecard on Development, Center for
Economic and Policy Research, September 2005). And as table 2
shows, the annual rate of economic growth per capita in the developed
capitalist countries was lower in 1981-99 than in 1961-80. Table
2 A. Average Annual Rate of Per Capita Economic Growth in the
OECD and Developing Countries 1961-80 1981-99 (A) OECD countries
3.5% 2.0% (B) Developing countries (except_China) 3.2% 0.7%
Growth differential (A/B) 0.3% 1.3%
B. Growth in World Income Inequalities,
1980-1998 (Excluding China) Income of richest 50% as share of
poorest 50% 4% more unequal Income of richest 20% as share of
poorest 20% 8% more unequal Income of richest 10% as share of
poorest 10% 19% more_unequal Income of richest 1% as share of
poorest 1% 77% more unequal
Sources: World Bank, World Development
Indicators, 2001; Robert Sutcliffe, A More or Less Unequal World?
(Political Economy Research Institute, 2003); Robert Pollin, Contours
of Descent (Verso, 2003), 133.
But, what is also important to stress
is that due to the larger annual economic growth per capita in
the OECD countries than in the developing countries (except China),
the difference in their rates of growth per capita has been increasing
dramatically (table 2). This means, in practical terms, that income
inequalities between these two types of countries have grown spectacularly,
and particularly between the extremes (see table 2). But, most
importantly, inequalities have increased dramatically not only
among but within countries, developed and developing alike. Adding
both types of inequalities (among and within countries), we find
that, as Branco Milanovic has documented, the top 1 percent of
the world population receives 57 percent of the world income,
and the income difference between those at the top and those at
the bottom has increased from 78 to 114 times (Worlds Apart, Princeton
University Press, 2005).
It bears emphasizing that even though
poverty has increased worldwide and within countries that are
following neoliberal public policies, this does not mean the rich
within each country (including developing countries) have been
adversely affected. Instead, the rich saw their incomes and their
distance from the non-rich increase substantially. Class inequalities
have increased greatly in most capitalist countries.
Neoliberalism as a Class Practice: The
Roots of Inequalities
In each of these countries, then, the
income of those at the top has increased spectacularly as a result
of state interventions. Consequently, we need to turn to some
of the categories and concepts discarded by large sectors of the
left: class structure, class power, class struggle, and their
impact on the state. These scientific categories continue to be
of key importance to understanding what is going on in each country.
Let me clarify that a scientific concept can be very old but not
antiquated. "Ancient" and "antiquated" are
two different concepts. The law of gravity is very old but is
not antiquated. Anyone who doubts this can test it by jumping
from the tenth floor. There is a risk that some sectors of the
left may pay an equally suicidal cost by ignoring scientific concepts
such as class and class struggle simply because these are old
concepts._We cannot understand the world (from Iraq to the rejection
of the European Constitution) without acknowledging the existence
of classes and class alliances, established worldwide between
the dominant classes of the developed capitalist world and those
of the developing capitalist world. Neoliberalism is the ideology
and practice of the dominant classes of the developed and developing
worlds alike.
But before we jump ahead, let's start
with the situation in each country. Neoliberal ideology was the
dominant classes' response to the considerable gains achieved
by the working and peasant classes between the end of the Second
World War and the mid-1970s. The huge increase in inequality that
has occurred since then is the direct result of the growth in
income of the dominant classes, which is a consequence of class-determined
public policies such as: (a) deregulation of labor markets, an
anti-working-class move; (b) deregulation of financial markets,
which has greatly benefited financial capital, the hegemonic branch
of capital in the period 1980-2005; (c) deregulation of commerce
in goods and services, which has benefited the high-consumption
population at the cost of laborers; (d) reduction of social public
expenditures, which has hurt the working class; (e) privatization
of services, which has benefited the richest 20 percent of the
population at the expense of the well-being of the working classes
that depend on public services; (f) promotion of individualism
and consumerism, hurting the culture of solidarity; (g) development
of a theoretical narrative and discourse that pays rhetorical
homage to the markets, but masks a clear alliance between transnationals
and the state in which they are based; and (h) promotion of an
anti-interventionist discourse in clear conflict with the actual
increased state interventionism to promote the interests of the
dominant classes and the economic units--the transnationals--that
foster their interests. Each of these class-determined public
policies requires a state action or intervention that conflicts
with the interests of the working and other popular classes.
The Primary Conflict in Today's World:
Not Between North and South But Between an Alliance of Dominant
Classes of North and South Against Dominated Classes of North
and South
It has become part of the conventional
wisdom that the primary conflict in the world is between the rich
North and the poor South. The North and the South, however, have
classes with opposing interests that have established alliances
at the international level. This situation became clear to me
when I was advising President Allende in Chile. The fascist coup
led by General Pinochet was not, as was widely reported, a coup
imposed by the rich North (the United States) on the poor South
(Chile). Those who brutally imposed the Pinochet regime were the
dominant classes of Chile (the bourgeoisie, petit bourgeoisie,
and upper-middle professional classes), with the support not of
the United States (U.S. society is not an aggregate of 240 million
imperialists!) but of the Nixon administration, which was, at
that time, very unpopular in the United States (having sent the
army to put down the coalminers' strike in Appalachia).
A lack of awareness of the existence of
classes often leads to condemnation of an entire country, frequently
the United States. But, in fact, the U.S. working class is one
of the first victims of U.S. imperialism. Some will say that the
U.S. working class benefits from imperialism. Gasoline, for example,
is relatively cheap in the United States (although increasingly
less so). It costs me thirty-five dollars to fill my car in the
United States and fifty-two euros to fill the same model in Europe.
But, by contrast, public transportation is practically nonexistent
in many regions of the United States. The working class of Baltimore,
for example, would benefit much more from first-class public transportation
(which it does not have) than having to depend on cars, whatever
the price of gasoline. And let's not forget that the energy and
automobile industry interests have been major agents in opposing
and destroying public transportation in the United States. The
U.S. working class is a victim of its nation's capitalist and
imperialist system. It is not by chance that no other country
in the developed capitalist world has such an underdeveloped welfare
state as the United States. More than 100,000 people die in the
United States every year due to the lack of public health care.
The tendency to look at the distribution
of power around the world while ignoring class power within each
country is also evident in the frequent denunciations that the
international organizations are controlled by the rich countries.
It is frequently pointed out, for example, that 10 percent of
the world population, living in the richest countries, has 43
percent of the votes in the IMF, but it is not true that the 10
percent of the population living in the so-called rich countries
controls the IMF. It is the dominant classes of those rich countries
that dominate the IMF, putting forward public policies that hurt
the dominated classes of their own countries as well as of other
countries. The director of the IMF, for example, is Rodrigo Rato,
who while Spain's economy minister in the ultra-right government
of Jose Maria Aznar (who partnered with Bush and Blair to support
the Iraq war) carried out the brutal austerity policies that severely
reduced the standard of living of the Spanish popular classes
(Vincent Navarro, "Who is Mr. Rato?" Counterpunch, June
2004).
Let me also clarify another point. Much
has been written about the conflict within the WTO between rich
and poor countries. The governments of the rich countries, it
is said, heavily subsidize their agriculture while raising protective
barriers for industries such as textiles and foods that are vulnerable
to products coming from the poor countries. While these obstacles
to world trade do indeed adversely affect poor countries, it is
wrong to assume that the solution is freer worldwide trade. Even
without the barriers, the higher productivity of the rich countries
would guarantee their success in world trade. What poor countries
need to do is to change from export-oriented economies (the root
of their problems) to domestic-oriented growth--a strategy that
would require a major redistribution of income and is thus resisted
by the dominant classes of those (and of the_rich) countries.
It is extremely important to realize that most countries already
have the resources (including capital) to break with their underdevelopment.
Let me quote from an unlikely source._The New York Times, on September
12, 1992 (when the population explosion was held to be the cause
of world poverty), published a surprisingly candid assessment
of the situation in Bangladesh, the poorest country in the world.
In this extensive article, Ann Crittenden touched directly on
the root of the problem: the patterns of ownership of the production
asset--the land:
The root of the persistent malnutrition
in the midst of relative plenty is the unequal distribution of
land in Bangladesh. Few people are rich here by Western standards,
but severe inequalities do exist and they are reflected in highly
skewed land ownership. The wealthiest 16% of the rural population
controls two thirds of the land and almost 60% of the population
holds less than one acre of property.
Crittenden is not hopeful that the solution
is technological. Quite to the contrary, technology can make things
even worse:
The new agricultural technologies being
introduced have tended to favor large farmers, putting them in
a better position to buy out their less fortunate neighbors.
Why does this situation persist? The answer
is clear.
Nevertheless, with the government dominated
by landowners--about 75% of the members of the Parliament hold
land--no one foresees any official support for fundamental changes
in the system.
Let me add that in the U.S. State Department's
classification of political regimes, Bangladesh is placed in the
democratic column. Meanwhile, hunger and underweight are the primary
cause of child mortality in Bangladesh. The hungry face of a child
in Bangladesh has become the most common poster used by many charitable
organizations to shame people in developed countries into sending
money and food aid to Bangladesh. With what results?
Food aid officials in Bangladesh privately
concede that only a fraction of the millions of tons of food aid
sent to Bangladesh has reached the poor and hungry in the villages.
The food is given to the Government, which in turn sells it at
subsidized prices to the military, the police, and the middle
class inhabitants of the cities.
The class structure of Bangladesh and
the property relations that determine it are the causes of the
enormous poverty. As Ann Crittenden concludes:
Bangladesh has enough land to provide
an adequate diet for every man, woman and child in the country.
The agricultural potential of this lush green land is such that
even the inevitable population growth of the next 20 years could
be fed easily by the resources of Bangladesh alone.
Most recently, Bangladesh has been much
in the news as having undergone high economic growth due primarily
to its exports in the world market. But that growth has been limited
to a small, export-oriented sector of the economy and has left
untouched the majority of the population. Malnutrition and hunger,
meanwhile, have increased.
The States and Class Alliances
In the establishment of class alliances,
states play a key role. U.S. foreign policy, for example, is oriented
towards supporting the dominant classes of the South (where, incidentally,
20 percent of the world's richest persons live). These alliances
include, on many occasions, personal ties among members of the
dominant classes. Examples are many--among them, the traditional
support of the Bush family for the Middle East feudal regimes;
Clinton's support for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), one of the
major supporters of the Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arkansas,
and a major donor to Clinton in speaking fees (up to a million
dollars) and to causes favoring Clinton (Financial Times, March
4, 2006). The UAE is one of the world's most oppressively brutal
regimes. The dominant classes deny citizenship to 85 percent of
the working population (called "guest workers"). Needless
to say, international agencies (heavily influenced by the U.S.
and European governments) promote such alliances based on the
neoliberal rhetoric of free markets. Cutting social public expenditures,
advocated by the IMF and the World Bank, is part of the neoliberal
public policies pushed by the dominant classes of both the North
and South at the expense of the well-being and quality of life
of the dominated classes throughout the world. In all these examples,
the states of the North and the South play a critical role.
Another example of alliances among dominant
classes is the current promotion of for-profit health insurance
by the Bush administration, both to the U.S. population and, increasingly,
to the developing world. This is done with the advice and collaboration
of conservative governments in Latin America on behalf of their
dominant classes, which benefit from private insurance schemes
that select clientele and exclude the popular classes. Those popular
classes, in the United States and Latin America, profoundly dislike
this push toward for-profit health care. (The movie John Q relates
the hostility against health insurance companies among the U.S.
working class.) The fact that the dominant classes in the developed
and developing countries share class interests does not mean they
see eye-to-eye on everything. Of course not. They have major disagreements
and conflicts (just as there are disagreements and conflicts among
the different components of the dominant classes in each country).
But these disagreements cannot conceal the commonality of their
interests as clearly exposed in the neoliberal forums (such as
at Davos) and neoliberal instruments that have a hegemonic position
(such as the Economist and the Financial Times).
Is There a Dominant State in the World
Today?
More than globalization, what we are witnessing
in the world today is the regionalization of economic activities
around a dominant state: North America around the United States,
Europe around Germany, and Asia around Japan--and soon China.
Thus there is a hierarchy of states within each region. In Europe,
for example, the Spanish government is becoming dependent on public
policies of the European Union in which the German state predominates.
This dependency creates an ambivalent situation. On the one hand,
the states of the EU chose to delegate major policies (such as
monetary policies) to a higher institution (the European Central
Bank, which is dominated by the German Central Bank). But this
does not necessarily mean that the Spanish state loses power.
"Losing power" means you had more power before, which
is not necessarily the case. Spain, for example, is more powerful
with the euro as currency than it was with the peseta. Indeed,
Spanish president Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero would have paid
a very high price in his confrontation with Bush (in withdrawing
Spanish troops from Iraq) if Spain still had the peseta as its
national currency. Sharing sovereignty can increase power. On
the other hand, the European government is frequently used by
Europe's dominant classes as justification for unpopular policies
that they want to implement (such as reducing public expenditures
as a consequence of the European Stability Pact, which forces
countries to maintain a central government deficit below 3 percent
of GNP); these policies are presented as coming from European
legislation rather than any of the member states, thus diluting
the responsibility of each government. Class alliances at the
European level are manifested through the operation of EU institutions
committed to neoliberal ideology and policies. The "no"
vote on the proposed European Constitution was the response of
the working classes of some member states to the European institutions
that operate as alliances for Europe's dominant classes.
Within the hierarchy of states, some are
dominant. The U.S. state has a dominant place that is maintained
through a set of alliances with the dominant classes of other
states. Neoliberal ideology provides the linkage among these classes.
Needless to say, there are conflicts and tensions among them.
But these tensions cannot outweigh the commonality of their class
interests. Among the practices that unite them are aggressive
policies against the working class and left institutions. The
1980-2005 period was characterized by aggressive campaigns against
left parties that had been successful in the 1960-1980 period.
During the neoliberal period, the alliance of the dominant classes
has promoted multi-class religious movements that have used religion
as a motivating force to stop socialism or communism. It was the
Carter administration that began to support the religious fundamentalists
in Afghanistan against the communist-led government. From Afghanistan
to Iraq, Iran, the Palestinian Territories, and many Arab countries,
the dominant classes of the United States and Europe, through
their governments, funded and supported the religious fundamentalists--often
not only out of their own class interests, but out of their own
religiosity. The "moral majority" in the United States
was supposed to become the moral majority worldwide. These profoundly
anti-left fundamentalist movements developed their own dynamics,
making use of the enormous frustrations of the Arab masses with
their oppressive, feudal regimes, to facilitate the capture of
the state and the installation of regimes with equally oppressive
religious theocracies, as has happened in many Arab countries.
But it is wrong to see the support by
the dominant classes for the feudal regimes as simply a product
of the Cold War. It was much more than that. It was a class response.
The best evidence for this is that the support has continued even
after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Cold War was an excuse
for carrying on the class struggle at the world level--as its
continuation proves. Class war has indeed become an extremely
active component of U.S. interventionism. It was the "shock
therapy" pushed by Lawrence Summers and Jeffrey Sachs in
Russia during the Clinton administration that led to the shortening
of life expectancy in Russia, a consequence of the dramatic decline
in the standard of living of the Russian popular classes. The
increased privatization of major public assets was part of that
class war in Russia--as it has been in Iraq.
The chief of the U.S. occupation in Iraq,
Paul Bremer, fired half a million government workers, slashed
business taxes, gave investors extraordinary new rights, and eliminated
all import restrictions for all business except the oil industry.
As Jeff Faux relates in The Global Class War (Wiley, 2006), the
only laws from the brutal Iraqi dictatorship that the occupation
retained were those that were anti-labor union, including a restrictive
collective-bargaining agreement that took away all workers' bonuses
and food and housing subsidies. As the Economist editorialized,
the economic reforms in Iraq are a "capitalist's dream"_(September
25, 2003).
Recently, another version of the North-South
divide appears in the writings of one of the most influential
thinkers in the United States, the philosopher John Rawls, who
divides the countries of the world into "decent" and
"non-decent" countries. The decent countries (mostly
located in the developed capitalist world) are those that have
democratic rights and institutions, while the non-decent countries
(mostly located in the developing capitalist world) do not._After
dividing the world into these two categories, he concludes that
the non-decent countries had better be ignored, although he admits
"a moral responsibility to help poor countries that are prevented
by poverty from organizing themselves as liberal or decent societies."_Such
positions and statements testify to an overwhelming ignorance
of past and present international relations, as well as of the
class relations in each of those countries. Rawls further confuses
governments with countries (a confusion that occurs frequently
in the assumption that the primary conflict is between North and
South). What he calls non-decent countries (characterized by brutal
and corrupt dictatorships) have classes; their dominant classes
have not been ignored in activities cultivated and supported by
the dominant classes of the decent countries, which have also
hurt the quality of life and well-being of their own dominated
classes. Also, in Rawls's so-called non-decent countries, there
are class-based movements that endure enormous sacrifices, carrying
out a heroic struggle for change, struggling constantly while
handicapped and opposed by the dominant classes of the so-called
decent countries. It is remarkable (but predictable) that such
an intellectual figure defines the moral compass of these indecent
classes. The latest example of this indecency is the reported
support by the U.S. and British governments for the King of Nepal,
which grows out of their desire to stop a mass revolt led by leftist
parties in a third world country.
Inequalities among Countries and Their
Social Consequences
That inequalities contribute to a lack
of social solidarity and increase social pathology is well documented.
Many people, including myself, have documented this reality (The
Political Economy of Social Inequalities: Consequences for Health
and Quality of Life, Baywood, 2002). The scientific evidence supporting
this position is overwhelming. In any given society, the greatest
number of deaths would be prevented by reducing social inequalities.
Michael Marmot studied the gradient of heart disease mortality
among professionals at different authority levels, and he found
that the higher the level of authority, the lower the heart disease
mortality (The Status Syndrome, 2005). And he further showed that
this mortality gradient could not be explained by diet, physical
exercise, or cholesterol alone; these risk factors explained only
a small part of the gradient. The most important factor was the
position that people held within the social structure (in which
class, gender, and race play key roles) and the social distance
between groups, and the differential control that people have
over their own lives.
This enormously important scientific finding
has many implications; one of them is that the major problem we
face is not simply eliminating poverty but rather reducing inequality.
The first is impossible to resolve without resolving the second.
Another implication is that poverty is not just a matter of resources,
as is wrongly assumed in World Bank reports that measure worldwide
poverty by quantifying the number of people who live on a dollar
a day. The real problem, again, is not absolute resources but
the social distance and the different degrees of control over
one's own resources. And this holds true in every society.
Let me elaborate. An unskilled, unemployed,
young black person living in the ghetto area of Baltimore has
more resources (he or she is likely to have a car, mobile phone,
and TV, and more square feet per household and more kitchen equipment)
than a middle-class professional in Ghana, Africa. If the whole
world were just a single society, the Baltimore youth would be
middle class and the Ghana professional would be poor. And yet,
the first has a much shorter life expectancy (forty-five years)
than the second (sixty-two years)._How can that be, when the first
has more resources than the second? The answer is clear. It is
far more difficult to be poor in the United States (the sense
of distance, frustration, powerlessness, and failure is much greater)
than to be middle class in Ghana. The first is far below the median;
the second is above the median.
Does the same mechanism operate in inequalities
among countries? The answer is increasingly, yes. And the reason
for adding "increasingly" is communication--with ever
more globalized information systems and networks, more information
is reaching the most remote areas of the world. And the social
distance created by inequalities is becoming increasingly apparent,
not only within but also among countries. Because this distance
is more and more perceived as an outcome of exploitation, we are
facing an enormous tension, comparable with that of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, when class exploitation became
the driving force for social mobilization. The key element for
defining the future is through what channels that mobilization
takes place. What we have seen is an enormous mobilization, instigated
and guided by an alliance of the dominant classes of the North
and the South, aimed at--as mentioned earlier--stimulating multi-class
religious or nationalistic mobilizations that leave key class
relations unchanged. We saw this phenomenon at the end of the
nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Christian
Democracy in Europe, for example, appears as the dominant classes'
response to the threat of socialism and communism. The birth of
Islamic fundamentalism was also stimulated for the same purposes.
The left-wing alternative must be centered
in alliances among the dominated classes and other dominated groups,
with a political movement that must be built upon the process
of class struggle that takes place in each country. As Hugo Chavez
of Venezuela said, "It cannot be a mere movement of protest
and celebration like Woodstock." It is an enormous struggle,
an endeavor in which organization and coordination are key, calling
for a Fifth International. This is the challenge to the international
left today.
[Vincent Navarro is professor and director
of the Public Policy Program of the Johns Hopkins University,
USA-Pompeu Fabra University, Spain.]_All material (c) copyright
2006 Monthly Review
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