In Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (London: Pluto Press, 1992) Michael Hudson explains the polarization tendencies in the world economy, so devastatingly demonstrated in Africa this decade: "The preceding pages have established that economic obsolescence in less developed countries is a direct function of more rapid rates of capital formation, research, development and general technological progress in the lead-nations. The problem is that resources that are not modernised will not be employed, unless prices for their output are supported by subsidies and trade barriers. These programmes may involve substantial economic overhead to support or modernise obsolete labour, land and capital. Not to undertake such public spending is to doom the least developed countries to a fate of world mendicancy. Yet IMF austerity programmes block such investment." (222-223) Hudson continues: "The logical international culmination of this polarization process was described in 1864 by the Rev. W Winwood Reade with regard to the African population: This vast continent...will finally be divided almost equally between France and England. In N Africa, France already possesses the germ of a great military empire. She will ally herself with the Mohammedan powers. With a more peaceful course, will colonize Angola by means of black emigrants, run a railway across Mozambique, and grow on the tablelands of Southern Central Africa the finest wool and cotton in the world. Africa shall be redeemed. Her children shall perform this mighty work. Her morasses shall be drained; her deserts shall be watered by canals; her forests shall be reduced to firewood. Her children shall do all this. They shall pour an elixir vitae into the vein of their mother, now withered and diseased. They shall restore her to youth and to immortal beauty. In this amiable task they may possibly be exterminated. We must learn to look on this result with composure. It illustrates the beneficient law of Nature, that the weak must be devoured by the strong. But a grateful Posterity will cherish their memories. When the Cockneys of Timbuctoo have their tea-gardens in the Oases of the Sahara; when hotels and guide-books are established at the soruces of the Nile; when it becomes fashionable to go yachting on the lakes of the Great Plateau; when noblemen, building seats in Central Africa, will have their elephant parks and their hippopotami waters, young ladies on camp-stools under palm-trees will read with tears THE LAST OF THE NEGROES, and the Niger will become as romantic as the Rhine." Hudson comments: "These quotations are not merely antiquarian documents of the past, they are scenarios for the future. Market forces may be cited to starve out populations unfortunate enough to have been left behind by the course of economic progress. Droughts and famine will be blamed on nature rather than on deforestation, inadequate irrigation expenditures, and related shortfalls in infrastructure spending by governments saddled with austerity programmes. The ultimate question is not whether third world labour is cheap enough but whether it is so low-priced as to deprive it of earning the income necessary to invest in education and related human-capital skills at a rate sufficient to make itself competitive in today's high technology world." (235-6) Rakesh Bhandari UC Berkeley
