Times Are a Changing

Something new is happening in the new age politics of the world, from Europe’s biggest economies (Germany and France) to populist local movements of Latin America. The Zeitgeist is towards more left-leaning corrective measures to the glut of capitalist greed. Political leaders of our age are discovering the hard way that people’s Weltanschauug has turned against insatiable pursuit of profits, and tired of business as usual mentality. They are demanding real change which the politicians ignore at their own peril. The casualties range from the former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder whose welfare reforms cost him job in 2005 to our own out going president Thabo Mbeki.

France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, to offset internal criticism in his country, opted to take the route of industrial protectionism as measure for reviving France’s economy, instead of following the US model. He calls it “Economic Patriotism.” What these leaders are discovering is that to ignore one’s constituency on excuses of imperatives of globalism is detrimental in democratic dispensation.

Germany’s new leftist party is growing fast on the anti-supercapitalist ticket, finding support even among mainstream circles of civil society and parliamentarians. It gains support largely from the resentment of globalization and the country’s reaction against right-wing demagoguery and xenophobia.

Venezuela is the typical example of the present Latinist popular politics. Before it was dominated by two official parties who represented the interests of the wealthiest Venezuelans, but ignored the needs of the 80% who were living in poverty until the firebrand Hugo Chavez was elected as a president. Chavez was elected by a due coalition of popular forces that rejected “business as usual”. Subsequently, Corporate influence, in secret coalition with corrupt union leaders, tried to overthrow Chavez in 2002. Masses of Venezuelan people took to the streets to defend their democracy. Since then Venezuelans have time and again re-elected Chavez with growing majority on every election.

Chavez derives his popularity from the fact that he has given Venezuelan communities direct power to administer their own social programs. His government supports community cooperative enterprises—from worker-run factories, to thousands of other community driven cooperatives. He uses profits from the country’s natural wealth to support these cooperatives. Oil money to diversify the economy, improve agrarian participation for ordinary citizens, and to provide them with efficient public health system.

Chavez’s success comes from his espousing of participatory democracy, i.e. maximizing the direct involvement of communities, rather than minimizing it as bureaucracy of government officials of representative democracy tend to do. Of course Chavez has his short-comings, like a tendency to suppress voices of dissent, and his bunker mentality towards the media. He could also show better concern for environmental issues. But to say he’s an enemy of democracy is disingenuous.

A lot of hypocritical democrats, who though not having any problem with 85% wealth of the nations being controlled by only 8 % elite hands, see what Chavez does as chauvinistic and curtailment of freedom of free market system. We all know by now the fallacy of the invisible hand of the markets having a corrective effect. In effect we’ve been waiting for it since the inception of capitalist system.

The major attraction of free markets is that they create wealth that underwrites democratic political participation. The success China’s economy and India has broken down even this correlation between free markets and plural politics from both ends. Wealth also is supposed to create and sustain organizations and groups independent of the government: business, trade unions and professional associations. Globalisation, at its present form, clearly violates this notion. In short, free market is fast loosing its endearing traits.

What is becoming clear is that Global markets have unleashed economic forces that are becoming too powerful for democratic institutions to control. The free markets have created “supercapitalism” that is suppressing democracy. Instead of leading to free societies, supercapitalism is constraining the power of people to achieve their civic and personal goals. This is the growing opinion even amongst leading economics, and the likes of Robert Reich, the former US Secretary of Labor and now professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at Berkeley.

Reich argues that social responsibility by global cooperation is not enough to offset the corrosive effect of supercapitalism on individual freedom and national sovereignty of the countries. But the blame does not only lie with supercapitalism. In Zimbabwe, for instance, democracy has enabled a culture of impunity on long time serving leaders. In South Asia democracy has been derailed by dynastic politics, where political trust depends on patronage based on personalities and elite class rather than institutions of civil liberty. So local culture and habits are not always good for democracy either when not informed by forces of enlightenment.

In theory, global ‘trade should drive down corruption, nepotism, gate-keeping and market distortions of all kinds.’ But in fact it is otherwise. The irony is that, with all the rhetoric of free market competition, often you find its just a masks for private monopolies. It does not take a genius to see that behind the façade of boastful competition of free market often lies a world of inequality and domination by few elite groups or families. While praising the competitive market, those who actually work the marketplace specialize in mergers and acquisitions, takeovers and cartels, liquidations and ¬sell¬offs that are designed to curtail free competition.

Real democrats, as now emerging in European countries like Germany and France, see through all this farce. Wealth is hardly produced these days, but reshuffled and expropriated. Real competition is avoided, and the risk in whose name profit is supposedly earned, is socialized. Taxpayers are now and again compelled to bail out corporate failures, while profits, though no longer earned by taking real risks, are kept private, reserved for shareholders and overpaid corporate managers. Deregulation, said to enhance competition, in reality has entrenched price fixing, like recently in bread industry in our country. And deregulation facilitates cartels and the kinds of monopoly we see on Microsoft “bundling” for instance.

In developing countries, especially, many of the public goods that citizens require for their freedom to thrive, such as public education, environmental protection and social insurance, are in scarce supply. Developing states lack revenue to offer citizens assurances of equity or security, thus the logic of the free market, which endows global brands with tools that poorly organized and diffuse citizens or civic society lack, sets the economic policies. These countries are overwhelmed by the enormous lobbying power of global companies into towing the line of free market system designed for the vested interests of the companies.

The solution then does not lie only on free markets that are speciously supposed to create pathways into liberalization of political expression, or local culture, but on a working mixture of these. Local culture must feed on global democracy and freedom without necessarily shedding its local responsibilities. The idea here is to maintain the level of democracy and national freedom that trade openness tends to violate by careless pursuit of profits. To introduce corrective measures for democratic stability against increased inequality that global big companies disrupt.

That is what is happening in counties like Germany, France; to a radical effect in Venezuela, and gradually South Africa. Whether you call this left-leaning or developmental state is just semantics. In the end countries are forced to offset bad elements of the enormous lobbying power of global big business, not only to protect their citizenry, but for the sake of saving the wonderful production system capitalism, and better wealth distribution.

What is certain is that, as President Thabo Mbeki declared, it can no longer be business as usual for any country. Times are a changing. The world majority is waking up, and shedding the ransoming chains by the elite few who happen to have shares they expect ridiculous profits on.

In our country, for instance, there’s a constant blackmail by business class of threatening to take their business elsewhere whenever the government does not comply with their demands. My take is that in democratic dispensations everyone has right to go and take their business wherever they like. It probably, in the long run, is better when we rid ourselves of parasites who operates in the name of business. Sure a loss of business is painful for any economy, but we are better off allowing the storm to shake off few bad apples from the tree so that their decomposition may facilitate more trees to fill the orchard.

To their surprise they might discover that the world over is changing. Young people of the world, especially, seek, not necessary a new world order, but to purify the best of what we already have. Some tend to call themselves environmentalists, others new socialists, but what’s common with them is dissatisfaction with the status quo of business as usual. The candidate for US presidency, senate Barack Obama is riding on the same wave.

There is no question about it, the growing preoccupation with consumption, economic growth, and meaningless pursuit of wealth has subverted our search for authenticity and self-realisation. But people are slowly waking up to reality, and realisation that you need to give a little to take a little. The new world demands sacrifice, responsibility, respect for the dignity of the other, education to make better choices, and, of course a patriotic sense of pride for one’s identity and country. Are we up to the challenge?