In his column, Paul Krugman deals with the alternatives facing the Third World.
Louis Proyect attacks him (and others) on the grounds that " they cannot accept [...] the proposition of an alternative to capitalism." I wish Louis gave us a clearer idea of what he means by this.
The fact is that no political proposal will fly in the Third World if it is not based on their fundamental problems -- the way they themselves perceive them.
People cannot tackle problems they don't see. And they can only see problems whose solutions appear viable to them. The tasks they see are the ones that will be attempted.
On www.marxmail.org, I replied recently to a note that assumed that ours is the age of decaying capitalism in the world. As far as the masses in the Third World are concerned, I said, the opposite is true. From their point of view, this still looks like the epoch of rising capitalism. For how long, I don't know.
I said, take the people in China, India, and the countries in southeastern Asia -- where the bulk of the Third World people live...
Ask people in these countries whether capitalism as a mode of production (a generalized "market economy") is in decline -- or something to that effect. Frame it as you may, they will overwhelmingly say no. Even people in Africa or Latin America, in highly populated countries like South Africa, Nigeria, or Brazil, will give a similar answer.
Specific reactions will vary from country to country, but most people in most poor nations will basically say that they want economic progress -- meaning a decent occupation and standard of living, individual and collective respect. Most people in most poor nations also believe that *capitalism* leads to economic progress, that markets are progressive, that unregulated or mis-regulated capitalism worsens people's lives unnecessarily, and that publicly-funded measures are required to protect them from frequent market turmoil.
The economists have a formula that encapsulates the agenda of people in the Third World: "economic development." In our times, "economic development" is the name of the game in the Third World. It basically means markets, capitalist production, with public institutions that guarantee the formal "rule of law" and a reasonable protection for the disadvantaged, the displaced, the poor. The people in the Third World will experiment politically in order to attain "economic development." And they will move on to higher or different goals and question the structure of capitalist production only after "economic development" is attained or is proved to their satisfaction to be an impossible chimera.
As a rule, the left in the Third World will be marginalized if it doesn't offer concrete ways to achieve economic development.
That "economic development" -- if attained -- will in fact turn out to be the development of new social conflicts and antagonisms should be obvious to all Marxists. But, to use Marx's formulation, the Third World masses suffer nowadays "not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside the modern evils, they are oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations."
A common fallacy is to say that, because production in the Third World is -- one way or another -- linked to the world market and the world market is dominated by capitalist production, then the Third World is already fully capitalist. That is not how things look locally in the Third World.
These beliefs are not fads. They are epochal. They are deep in the mass consciousness in the Third World. I added:
In Russia in the 1920s, this reality led Lenin -- against the wills of "radicals" in his party -- to enact the NEP. In the 1930s, it turned Stalin's collectivization into a disaster. As we speak, it underlies the push towards industrial modernization in China. After fifty years of misguided industrialization strategies and catastrophic economic crises that Marxists have attributed to the structural contradictions of capitalism, it made possible the "neoliberal" reforms in Latin America. Even now, with enormous mass discontent against the economic performance of "neoliberalism," this *is* still the social geology of Latin America.
As they perceive it in the Third World, the task of direct producers in our epoch is to remove the obstacles that hinder economic development (i.e., the capitalist mode of production). The obstacles to the development of capitalist production in the Third World are many and they feed back into one another. But the problems that cut to the chase are political in nature -- primarily the lack of a political leadership that recognizes the tasks of the times and acts accordingly.
The immediate goal in the Third World is the advancement of the workers' interest as these nations build the legal and political superstructure of modern capitalism. In the national struggle for "economic development," the workers have specific needs that they should strive for. And the work of a political enlightened leadership is to assist workers in this.
I said that workers in the Third World should seek political power to push their agenda and added:
But, in this light, both the strategy to take power and the strategy to hold it will not be the same that under the presumption that workers can leap to socialism through some process of "permanent revolution."
The theory of imperialism common in the Left (a recycled version of the old dependency theory) is part of the problem: The idea that imperialism is the necessary manifestation of capitalist production in our times, that the underdevelopment of capitalist production in the Third World is a necessary manifestation of imperialism, and that the only way out of underdeveloped capitalism is "socialism" (i.e., a heavily nationalized economy led by radicals with some measure of participatory democracy).
This theory of imperialism has little to do with, for instance, Lenin's view of the contradictory character of capital exports: "The export of capital influences and greatly accelerates the development of capitalism in those countries to which it is exported. While, therefore, the export of capital may tend to a certain extent to arrest development in the capital-exporting countries, it can only do so by expanding and deepening the further development of capitalism throughout the world." (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism)
The "radical" view that "imperialism" or environmental limits impede a reasonable realization of economic development in the Third World does not stick, because it conflicts with the basic needs of people in the Third World. Hence the huge political disconnect.
A reason why Marxists may have a hard time dealing with this reality is that it appears as if the people in the Third World -- most people in the world in fact -- reject Marx's communism. The same bunk we get from the media and the bourgeois ideologists. Communism is the movement of the modern direct producers generated and trained under capitalist production to emancipate themselves and the humankind. It's an emancipatory movement built on material premises, not on good wishes or illusions. People in the Third World are not rejecting Marx's communism. People in the Third World cannot reject Marx's communism because Marx's communism is not in their agenda -- it's not on their horizon.
This doesn't mean that the needs of people in the Third World are not amenable to Marx's theory and communism. It doesn't mean that communists have no important tasks to accomplish in the Third World. To borrow from Melvin, the political conclusion is always and everywhere to "support the workers in their current struggle." The issue is what the current struggle of the workers in the Third World is really about and how taking it for what it is -- and not for what we would like it to be -- takes us forward.
Julio
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