All thinking people throughout the world recognise that global poverty constitutes the deepest and most dangerous structural fault in the contemporary world economy and global human society.
The elimination of this structural fault requires sustained economic growth and development in the areas of the world defined by poverty.
Various macro-conditions have to be met to create the possibility for such sustained and adequate economic growth and development to take place. These include democracy, good governance, rule of law, property rights, contract law, and so on. They also relate to macroeconomic policy and practice. The first driver of the growth and development process is capital investment.
In contemporary society, the capital needed for this growth and development is privately owned, and the publicly owned fraction of capital is but a tiny proportion of the stupendous volumes of capital in the global economy. There is general agreement that the appropriate climate should be created to encourage the private owners of capital to put this capital into the areas where such macro-conditions exist, especially the poor countries.
Immanent within this is the recognition and acceptance of the fact that in its functioning and reproduction, capital, as distinct from capitalists, is not informed by any sense of social responsibility. It has no soul. Money and its multiplication constitute its motive power. No thinking person would therefore contest the view that profit maximisation is a necessary condition for the existence of capital. Without this, capital dies and humanity perishes.
Again, none of the foregoing is a peculiar feature of progressive politics. What has happened is that “market economics” has acquired the character of a universal and self-evident truth. In this condition, capital, “the market”, has its own innate logic, its own objective process of development, which is independent of human consciousness. This is the reason for the universal victory of the neoliberal/conservative economic paradigm.
Economists have sought to interpret and predict the behaviour of capital as an objective, material factor in the evolution of human society, as opposed to those factors that are subjective and spiritual. In the process, they have elaborated a body of “knowledge”, one of whose features is an assertion about the predictability of the behaviour of capital.
Because, in principle, “sufficiently complete knowledge” of the variables is achievable, it becomes possible to elaborate sets of rules/ predictions about the behaviour of capital, which are, in reality, rules about how human society should respond to the dictates of capital.
This brings us back to the first proposition — that global poverty constitutes the most challenging structural fault in the contemporary world economy and global human society. Logically, this means that the correction of this fault has to be at the centre of the politics, policies and programmes of progressive politics.
Progressive politics must therefore answer the question — what is to be done?
It is in the provision of answers to this question that progressive politics would break ranks with the neoliberal/conservative paradigm, and thus determine what is unique about itself. This paradigm represents the political (subjective) expression of the rules and regularities of “the market”. Consistent with the logic of the market, it correctly emphasises the “private”, as opposed to the “public”, the individual, as opposed to the collective, the individual versus the state. Thus society becomes an agglomeration of atomised individuals, connected to one another only by the reality that to achieve their individual and competing objectives they have to interact with one another as such competing individuals.
Even countries have the responsibility to aim for and achieve international competitiveness.
Each individual lives only for personal gain and fulfilment, on the basis of the principle inherent in the operation of capital and “the market”, of each for himself or herself, and the devil take the hindmost. Thus “the market” becomes the great leveller, the cold, dispassionate and undiscriminating instrument for the achievement of the goal of human equality, giving an equal possibility to all to succeed or fail.
The neoliberal/conservative political ideology therefore proposes that to achieve this democratic goal of egalité, “the market” must be given free reign to operate as it will.
And so it becomes possible to proclaim the edict — woe unto all those who oppose and act in contradiction of this eternal truth.
To be itself, and have any real meaning, progressive politics has to disagree with these propositions. It must disagree with objective regularity within this market to deliver the greatest good. Fortunately, there is sufficient empirical information to substantiate these conclusions. The neoliberals and conservatives would fiercely and vigorously contest any statement by prominent representatives of progressive politics.
Any proposal to intervene in the market, against its “natural” rules, is seen as a punishable act of heresy.
In his novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens warned about the dangers of interfering with “the market”. He wrote: “Surely there never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made. Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before. They were ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were justified in chopping up their people with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke…
“Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used — that is to say, whenever he was not entirely left alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts — he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would ‘sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic’. This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions.”
A century-and-a-half after the publication of Hard Times, the whole world, and especially the poor, is as petrified out of its native wits for fear of losing the favours and residence of the property of the “millers”, as were the British home secretaries.
To ensure that nobody does this, the injunction is issued that all and sundry must abide by the rules of liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, absolute protection of private property rights and all else that would not give cause to the owners of productive property to issue and carry out the threat to pitch their property into the Atlantic or, in the globalisation era, move it to another, less intrusive and threatening location.
If progressive politics decides to challenge this injunction, it has to be made of much sterner stuff than the British home secretaries of Dickens’s days. Do the progressive politicians have the necessary courage?
They need it because they have to present the reality, boldly and frankly, that it is impossible to solve the problem of global poverty solely through reliance on “the market”.
Billions across the world, including Africa, are too poor and underdeveloped to achieve full and beneficial integration into the global market, even if they succeed in creating the macro-conditions supposedly attractive to capital.
These billions of people are described as “unbankable”. Something else, in addition to self-beautification, and outside the possibilities of “the market”, must happen, to make these poor multitudes “bankable”.
Happily for progressive politics, the European Union has found the practical answer to this challenge. The EU says it is irrational and unreasonable to expect “the market” to prepare the material market conditions it needs, that would enable it to come to poor areas, as attractive investment target areas. Public capital has first to be invested in these regions, to prepare them for the possibility of being attractive to private capital. This has led to the establishment and use of EU public sector “structural funds”.
However, Africa’s development partners tell her that for her own development, she must depend almost exclusively on private-sector capital. Little else is being done to assist the process of her beautification, with insignificant inflows of public capital from the partner countries that have unimaginable volumes of capital, both public and private.
To add insult to injury, she is also expected to service the debt she owes to these countries, exporting capital she does not have, compete with their heavily subsidised agricultural products, absorb continuously adverse terms of trade, finance the achievement of “standards” of behaviour set by capital, with money she does not have, negotiate with these countries complex agreements without any capacity to negotiate, and so on.
What Africa and the poor of the world say to their development partners is — do with and for us, what you do with and for yourselves. If regions within the EU needs “structural funds”, as they do, how shall the similar and far greater need of Africa and other countries of the South be met?
If this question is not answered honestly and practically, the structural fault in the world economy and human society will grow ever wider, with incalculable consequences for all humanity. Only, and only, a vigorous, sustained and successful intervention by the school of progressive politics will save humanity from the impending catastrophe.
Does this school have the courage practically to define itself as progressive, recovering its historic character as true champions of the poor, and break the icy ideological grip of the skinny hand of right-wing politics?
The billions of African and world masses are watching and waiting, hoping and praying that a progressive agenda will emerge as the defining feature of the process of globalisation. Nobody knows how long they will watch and wait.
This is an edited version of an article in Progressive Politics Vol 2.2 and at www.progressive-governance.net