Rich pickings from the world's poor Mike Phipps reviews Your money or your life by Eric Toussaint, published by Pluto, £17.99, and The Globalisation of Finance: a citizen's guide, by Kavaljit Singh, published by Zed, £19.95.
This review first appeared in the British magazine Labour Left Briefing
These two books are a sorely needed antidote to the hype about the benefits of globalisation with which we are constantly bombarded. It is chilling to learn that worldwide income levels are falling, that consumer spending in Africa has dropped 20% over the last 25 years and that even before the economic crash in Indonesia, more than one in four people were officially poor (this could now double).
Toussaint's figures on global
DEBT poverty are quite startling. 1.3 billion
people survive on less than SUS1 a day. In the last six years there has been an eightfold increase in the poor in the "feminisation" of poverty is also increasing: as fewer children go to school, due to the imposition of fees in many countries, it is women who have the highest rates of illiteracy (a staggering 61% in India). As governments cut health care, it is women who suffer most, as shown for example by increasing rates of death in childbirth. Recent research indicates that dowry deaths, far from being a remnant of a "backward" society, have grown in number with the development of free market capitalism.
Why is this happening? The simple answer is structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) -IMF-dictated economic restructuring to allow poorer countries to keep up with the interest payments on their massive national debts.
These programmes deliberately target free education and health services. They demand price deregulation, driving farmers into bankruptcy and insist on trade liberalisation, further destroying local production and allowing domestic capital to move out of productive areas. They also demand wholesale privatisation of state industries and services (also benefiting western 32 International Viewpoint #315 October 1999
capital) and regressive sales taxes that hit low income groups hardest.
Yet most of these IMF programmes to countries becoming increasingly indebted and impoverished. Small wonder then that the IMF also favours strengthening countries' internal security apparatus to
Toussaint's case studies show that much of the money loaned to regimes in the 1980s went straight into the private accounts Argentina is a case in point. Yet civilian administrators are now obliged to pay the loans off by further bleeding the people. More alarmingly, a ruthless the Habyarimana dictatorship in Rwanda in 1990 ruined hundreds of thousands of coffee farmers. These, along with the growing urban poor, became potential recruits for the Interahamwe militias and army. In short the regime channelled social discontent into its plan for genocide in 1994. Today, survivors of that genocide are paying for the weapons used to commit the crime. Elsewhere there are clear links between the rise indebtedness and the growth of the
Singh's book focuses more on the disasters caused by deregulation and globalisation. Even before the 1994-5 stock market and currency crash in Mexico, liberalisation had resulted in huge deficits, tighter credit for farmers, steep increases in wealth concentration, rising prices and an increase in infant mortality due to malnutrition. The 1997 crash in South East Asia provided a more spectacular illustration of the problem. Mainstream pundits were quick to blame the weaknesses in these countries' financial systems. But they neglected to point out that these weaknesses were a direct result of the IMF policy of deregulation in the region. Evidence now suggests that operations-deflation and shock therapy-have actually worsened the
Equally, IMF-inspired financial bailouts are resulting in public money being spent to rescue private markets-so the principle of no government intervention in the economy is quickly suspended when a bailout is required. "Profits are for private owners," the Financial Times observed, "while losses are covered by the taxpayers."
The effect is to create a "social international speculators. For example, much of the $17 billion rescue money earmarked for Thailand is effectively being ransacked by international bankers. meanwhile failing companies in the region are being bought up at knockdown prices by these investors and restructured. The results are a catastrophic effect on jobs and the expulsion and scapegoating of migrant workers. The knock-on consequences are severe for people in Bangladesh, Vietnam and other poor counties in the region that depend for survival on remittances home from migrant workers in the "Asian tigers".
Both books have some solutions, however. One obvious idea is to expropriate dictators' foreign assets— Mobutu's money stashed abroad is the equivalent of Zaire's foreign debt! Another would be capital controls, for example the Tobin tax: a proposal that would slow down short-term currency flows and bring in US$33 billion in revenue. When you consider that just US$40 billion (one twentieth of the sum spent in 1997 on military spending worldwide) could bring universal access to clean water, education, health, sanitation and basic nutrition, then the full irrationality and inhumanity of global capitalism is clear
These two books do a superb job of explaining the nature of the problem and showing how obvious the solution A masterful history of Mexico James D. Cockcroft. "Mexico's Hope: An Encounter with Polities and History." New York: Monthly Review, 1998. 435 pages. Reviewed by Dan La Botz
Jim Cockcroft has written a score of books which have educated a generation or two of Americans about Mexico, Latin America, and Latinos in the United States. He began brilliantly, in 1968, with the Intellectual Precursors of the Mexican Revolution: 1900-1913. Since then, he has periodically punctuated his career with some major revision of our understanding of Mexican history.
Fifteen years ago Cockcroft published what was at the time the best historical analysis of Mexico available: Mexico: Class Formation, Capital Accumulation and the State (New York, Monthly Review, 1983). Over the years I recommended it to scores of people as the most comprehensive and compelling explanation of the economic, social and political forces that shaped Mexico.
But now I will have to recommend a new and better book. Cockcrofthaving written a dozen books in the meantime-has returned to write a new, and yet more comprehensive and compelling synthesis: Mexico's Hope: An Encounter with Politics and History. What began as a re-writing of the earlier book became an entirely new work, one which incorporates not only recent scholarship, but also reflects the impact of new social movements, particularly those of indigenous people and women.
This is a history of Mexico informed by the struggle of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and by the contemporary women's movement. It is a history of the Mexican people in all of their diversity, of the country in all of its complexity.
At the heart of Mexico's Hope is Cockcroft's view that capital accumulation, class struggle, revolution and reaction have driven Mexico's history as he traces it through the conquest, the colonial period, the Bourbon reforms, Independence, the Great Reform, the Porfirian dictatorship, the Revolution, and now through the era of neoliberalism.
This is fundamentally a politicaleconomic history, a Marxist analysis, which sees capitalism and its combined and uneven development as the driving force of Mexico's 500 years of history.
In Cockcroft's book ordinary men and women engaged in the daily struggle for survival not only shape their own lives but also shape Mexico and its history. But they do so not simply as they wish, but within the context of Mexico's particular, distorted development, the legacy of Spain's relative backwardness, a series of unfinished revolutions, and a failed great leap forward into the neo-liberal future.
Particularly original about Mexico's Hope is Cockeroft's integration of an
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* reviews historical materialist analysis with feminist and indigenist perspectives, creating a new synthetic understanding of Mexican history. In Mexico's Hope, women and Indians have become integral to the texture of life, to the history of the country, to questions of power and politics as they so seldom appear in other histories. While maintaining his convincing Marxist analysis of Mexico's economic development, Cockcroft has also written a multicultural and gendered history of Mexico which responds to the contemporary problematic.
Yet, above all, this book is a good read. The political-economic, indige-