3:59 AM Oct 1, 1993

THE NEW 'WHITE MAN'S BURDEN'

by Jeremey Seabrook A Third World Network feature

Penang Sep 30 (TWN) -- With the collapse of the Soviet model, the West has reinvigorated its crusade to persuade the Third World to accept its model of a market economy as the norm for development. The question that arises is, given the level of violence, dispossession and plunder of natural and human resources that this model entails, are the resources of the world sufficient to permit the replication of this model on a global scale?

The West now faces the countries of its former colonies from a position of uncontested wealth and power, sustained by riches accumulated, in large measure, from those territories it once occupied.

It presents itself now, however, no longer as conqueror or taker of tribute, but as benefactor, bringer of aid and succour. The West is now more than willing to share, not its wealth -- that would be going too far -- but the secrets of its wealth-creation, with those it once held in subjection. The eagerness with which it now seeks to impart its knowledge could not be further from the single-minded determination with which it not long ago directly assaulted the land, resources and people of the South.

The change of heart appears total. It began to evolve at the time of the formal imperial dissolution. Indeed, it was directly related to the availability at that time of an alternative socialist model to the ex-colonial territories. The new-found benevolence of the West was both prudent and self-serving; it sprang from a competitive desire to outdo the promises held out by the then Soviet Union to the liberated countries. Accordingly, where the USSR offered socialism, the West began to offer something called 'development'; a promise, inchoate, barely articulated in its early years, that the South could become like the West, if it followed the Western way and renounced the treacherous delusions of socialism.

In the process the West learned to assume a quite different aspect in its dealings with lands to which freedom had been 'given': an apparent respect for the newly liberated countries, and the desire to help, the ambiguities of which could have been interpreted as an atonement for colonial predations, an acknowledgement of earlier error.

Having contributed conspicuously to the undoing and downfall of the socialist industrial model, the West has seen no reason to unlearn the civilities it acquired during its earlier rivalry. Why should it? The South has little option now but to accept the advice, prescriptions and instructions which the West now offers, somewhat more insistently than it did when there were still alternative prospectuses on the table.

In this way, the universalising mission of the West _ briefly checked in the era of superpower balance _ takes on a new dynamism. The ideology is no longer one of needless military occupation and expensive colonial administration. What could be a more fitting vehicle of continuity than its economics, the symbol and science of its own self-enrichment? The ideology of the West is now borne by the proselytising world-wide extension of its market economics.

The mechanics of this are to be found in identical structural adjustment programmes and economic reforms, formulated by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and imposed now upon more than 70 countries. There is, in this way, a direct descent from the policy of conquest, annexation and direct imperial rule, to the more subtle conduits of control carried by Western financial institutions; and as the Soviet alternative receded, so these have been urged upon Third World governments with ever more stringent conditionalities.

However, it is not simply the demise of Communism that has emboldened the West to spread the light of its civilising experience across the world once more. The global impulse is based upon more tangible achievements at home. These, too, were designed to demonstrate the moral superiority of the West over its great rival, and may best be described as the pacification of its own working class.

The wealth amassed by the West played a major role in the reconciliation of the estranged classes to capitalist society; so vast were these riches that they could be applied to lifting up the poor without ever jeopardising the increasing well-being of the rich in their serene ascent to ever higher levels of wealth. The role of the colonial lands in this benign progression, was of course, crucial.

Buoyed up by this spectacular achievement, it comes as no surprise that the West should now seek to export world-wide this most notable of all its products. The achievement of economic pacification in the Western heartland is now offered as a model for the entire world; and this is what underpins the unshakeable convictions of the leaders of the West, and blinds them to the real consequences in the world of their fanatical devotion to market economics.

There is, furthermore, a direct parallel between the ambitions of a Labour Movement in the West which has been depowered, and those of Liberation Movements in the occupied territories which have been cancelled. If poverty and insufficiency were seen by the Labour Movement as the greatest enemy of the working class, alien rule was the equivalent evil to the movements for national independence. Both appeared to have been overcome in the middle years of the 20th century, which led, perhaps understandably, to much premature rejoicing, both within the 'metropolitan' countries and in the newly emancipated 'periphery'.

Since then, however, poverty has re-emerged, virtually unchallenged, brutal and violent as ever in the West; and the sovereign lands which achieved independence find themselves more and more tethered to those powers from whom they once, in pain and struggle, sought their freedom. They are once more dominated by an 'interdependence' in which they are destined to remain forever subordinate in a single integrated global system.

Just as in the early industrial period, only one-third of the population of the Western countries had enough for subsistence, leaving two-thirds excluded, this proportion has now been reversed. The ambition of the West is now to replicate globally the proportions of the having classes and the dispossessed. It is only natural that such a venturesome and enterprising system should want to reach out and impose the same settlement upon the planet which has worked so well at home.

This latest twist in a more ancient universalising pretension is full of irony and paradox: the working class of the West was, to a great degree, pacified by the expropriated lands and produce of the South; and it was achieved by what was itself a form of colonialism: the colonising of society by the market. This meant, in effect, that all traditional, non-monetary, non-commodified ways of answering human need had to be suppressed, and these then filtered through the marketplace. It meant the enclosure of land, common resources and indeed, human resources, and the re-sale of all these to the people.

The most formidable weapon forged to disarm the critique of the market economy was the vast enhancement of productive power which lifted a majority of the workers out of poverty; an affluence underwritten by intensified exploitation of those countries dominated by the British, French, Belgian, Dutch, Japanese and later, American, imperial spheres of influence. The pacification of the Western working class was at the expense of others: that those others should now be the object of the exported programme of pacification, the new world order _ for that is what this seductive phrase amounts to _ is an outrage and insult: it demonstrates clearly the impossibilist ambition of the West, the wild fantasy that underlies its reign of reason and pragmatism. It simply cannot be done.

It cannot be done, because the countries of the South have nowhere to go, no colonised, oppressed others to compel into the service of a Western model of wealth creation. This is why what we see in those countries which have already been for a long period subject to the programmes of the IMF and WB is an internal colonialism, whereby their resource-base, their poor and subsistence farmers, their landless and indigenous peoples are exploited, forcibly dispossessed of the forests and lands which contain resources to which the market economy lays superior claim. We see, in caricature and in microcosm, what the West practised globally; and it is everywhere accompanied by the abridgement of freedom, growing impoverishment, expropriation, criminalisation, abuse of human rights, as people are driven into city slums for the sake of unsustainable cattle-ranching, agribusiness, chemicalised agriculture.

The process begun in the early industrial era is now globalised: there is a symbiotic relationship between a majority in the rich world and a minority in the poor world, who make up the one-third of the global having classes. The real question is, can this model, whereby the proportions are reversed, be realised globally? Given the levels of violence, plunder, dispossession which the raising up of the Western working class has required, the world's resources are simply insufficient to replicate it on the scale now proposed.

Can the people of India, of Brazil and of Nigeria really expect to enjoy the levels even of the average citizen of Germany or Spain or Canada? If not, what are the likely consequences of the imposition of this model on the world? Where will the resistance come from? What will happen when the hopes of the poor cannot be realised; when they understand that their destiny is even greater levels of poverty and exclusion?

Of course these questions are asked; by popular movements and resistance in the South; even by some in the West. They really ought to be more widely debated; for they foreshadow the new liberation movement that will form, is forming, in the presence of this monstrosity emanating from an alliance between the Western majority and Southern elites.

The new impulse towards liberation may as yet remain unelaborated, and not very clearly articulated; but this will be the only possible disturber of that new world order, whose real meaning is the repossessing of the world once more by the West.