Charles, I keep wondering why you are even bothering to explore a mode
of economics that has no future except as the ideology of a future
fascist movement.
Carrol, did historical fascist regimes have an ideology against interest
taking by banks or financial institutions ? If so , was it another Big Lie ?
In a book I did on this topic, with Zimbabwe as a case study (*Uneven
Zimbabwe: A Study of Finance, Development and Underdevelopment*, 1998,
Africa World Press), I found the single best source on the ideological
dilemma to be Kees van der Pijl's *The Making of an Atlantic Ruling
Class* (1984, Verso). As he put it, “The anti-Semitism of the Nazi
movement portrayed the economic crisis as the result of `German,
creative’ capital throttled by a rapacious international finance capital
personified by the Jews (`schaffendes’ versus `raffendes Kapital’) ─ an
imagery that combined ancient prejudices with a distorted sense of
Germany’s actual subordination in the liberal world economy.”
Anyhow, applying this to Zimbabwe gave me a functional typology. The key
section from the concluding chapter is below, if it helps...
A typology of financial power and resistance
In each instance of rising financial power ─ mid-late 1890s, mid-late
1920s, late 1950s-early 1960s, late 1980s-early 1990s ─ there were
dichotomous impulses in the economy that led either towards financial
power and liberalised finance, or to a form of financial repression
often based on either official or what we might consider “popular” (or
populist) resistance to finance. In fact, financial power and resistance
both took rather divergent forms, depending upon the broader conditions
of accumulation and the political balance of forces. Figure 13.6 depicts
the wide nature of ideologies bound up in the swings from financial
power to resistance.
Figure 13.6
Tendencies of Financial Power and Resistance
financial power resistance
A B C D
liberal conservative nationalist socialist
internationalist national-oriented protectionist internationalist
“democratic” authoritarian authoritarian democratic
Consider some of the variants of financial power and resistance that
have appeared in Zimbabwe’s history according to this typology, which
can be augmented by van der Pijl’s (1984) typology of ruling global
ideologies and interests. First, Tendency A is the philosophy of
liberal, internationalist financiers who are not unwilling, as in the
case of the World Bank and aid agencies in the early 1990s, to espouse a
content-less “democratic” ideology. This tendency is consistent with van
der Pijl’s notion of a “money capital concept.” In Zimbabwe, to
illustrate, there springs to mind the financial elite’s support for
“Partnership” in the 1950s, the cautious Rhobank “planned transition to
majority rule” in the late 1970s, and in the early 1990s the vocal
opposition of financiers, led by Chidzero, to Mugabe’s ultimately empty
threat to institute one-party state.
Turning next to Tendency C, the money capital concept stood opposed to a
“productive capital concept,” which took on many more of the
characteristics of nationalism, industrial protectionism, and
authoritarian populism. The apex of this was certainly the Nazi project;
locally there was no more committed advocate than Ian Smith (and John
Handford’s Portrait of an Economy Under Sanctions, 1965-1975 is a key
text in this tradition). Whereas money capital respects the rules of the
market, the productive capital concept easily ignores them by invoking
subsidies, tariffs, capital controls, directed credit and even
nationalisation and other infringements of property rights, in the
interests of industrial growth.
Van der Pijl argues convincingly that both such tendencies can and did
co-exist in the conception of what he terms “finance capital” (a rather
different usage than Hilferding’s). This conception captures laissez
faire internationalism (the money capital concept) and “state monopoly
capitalism” (the productive capital concept) in a synthetic ideology of
corporate liberalism. That ideology corresponds to what Regulationists
consider the “progressive,” intensive Fordist regime of accumulation,
which was dominant in the global economy for the major part of the
twentieth century. Given the room for terminological confusion, such
short-hand, heuristic devices as these must be applied with extreme
caution. For whereas van der Pijl’s typology seems to accurately capture
the nature of the accumulation process and the accompanying ideology of
corporate liberalism during the high-growth period of advanced
capitalism (not, van der Pijl notes, the subsequent monetarist,
neo-liberal phase that began in the late 1970s), the Zimbabwe case
introduces important caveats particular to semi-peripheral (and in this
case racially-biased) modes of accumulation.
An important question is whether van der Pijl’s “finance capital” can
exist on the periphery of the world economy. Based on a case study of
both repressed and liberalised financial regimes in Peru, Paul Burkett
(1987, 1) argues that neither the money capital concept nor the
productive capital concept can claim dominance: “Historically, the
uneven development of capital accumulation on a global scale has
inhibited industrialisation in the Third World, and this has not only
stunted the financial development process... but has also eventually led
to enaction of interest rate restrictions by the state.” There is an
uncomfortable tension between Third World production and finance in this
description, as both are impeded as a result of global processes, and as
finance accommodates a dependent form of non-industrialising economic
activity. This, according to Burkett (1987, 1), is the result of the
peculiar class relations that arise from “the competitive dynamic of
capital accumulation, including the concentration and centralisation of
capital and the uneven development inherent in the accumulation
process.” Burkett (1987, 7) specifies the way in which closely
controlled Third World economies can be controlled by small, tight-knit
producer groups which have a considerable stake in, for example,
interest rate policies:
In short, the political forces favouring interest rate restrictions may
not conflict with the economic forces of regressive rationing of
subsidised credit, and this lack of conflict may be due to simultaneity
of economic and political hegemony... (C)heap credit is dispensed to
wealthy landowners and large firms in exchange for political support.
Just this sort of linkage, observed in Zimbabwe on more than one
occasion, is crucial to assessing how changes in the productive circuit
of capital affect the local financial circuit. In turn the example
highlights the geographically-specific nature of the way in which
capitalists operating in productive and financial circuits sometimes
form alliances, and sometimes aim instead, in their search for
individual profits, to undermine each other. In areas characterised by
underdevelopment, it is not necessarily the case that productive and
financial circuits are in conflict.
Indeed, there has apparently never been a durable “finance capital”
synthesis in Zimbabwe’s history, primarily because the economy has been
far more unbalanced and superexploitative than any of the West. Yet at
times, nevertheless, there was a degree of ideological coherence between
leading fractions of capital. This was really only the case during those
periods when domestic financiers exercised influence over the broad
direction of accumulation in the productive circuits. There were, for
example, indications of ideological fusion within the capitalist class
during the expansive 1950s era, at the height of the Central African
Federation (when international financiers were also very important) and
in the domestic financiers’ development of the Salisbury Central
Business District with the support of rapidly-centralising mining and
industrial capital. Perhaps Zimbabwe’s most obvious manifestation of the
“finance capital” concept at the national scale occurred in the late
1980s during the pre-implementation stage of ESAP. At this point there
arose “a more or less general awareness that society is in a particular
condition, and that it is in need of a `bankers’ solution,’ because the
situation elicits `bankers’ arguments,’“ as van der Pijl (1984, 33)
describes the phenomenon. The bankers’ arguments also appealed to
certain industrialists who believed increasingly in internationalism ─
either in search of new markets and inputs (mainly spare parts for
rotting machinery) or, more cynically, in search of means of acquiring
hard currency for speculation or straightforward capital flight.
However, reflecting semi-peripheral fragility, this latter-day “finance
capital” consensus was not to last, at least not with any passion
throughout the productive circuit of capital. Within eighteen months of
ESAP’s implementation, not only were huge, potentially export-oriented
industrialists like Cone Textiles and Hunyani packaging facing
extinction, Zimbabwe’s bankers were even appealing desperately to
international financial power ─ in the form of the IMF ─ to retract the
single most decisive component of the “bankers’ solution,” punishingly
high real interest rates.
The point here is that a lasting synthesis of the money capital concept
and the productive capital concept was never realised in Zimbabwe.
Either financial power was excessively destructive in relation to
productive capital, or finance was subject to substantial repression.
Rarely were the two in harmony ideologically, and when they were it was
for a very short time. Given Zimbabwe’s historical and contemporary
particularities, therefore, it is appropriate to hypothesise other,
different types of financial power and resistance from van der Pijl’s
money capital and productive capital concepts, more finely attuned both
to the contradictions of accumulation faced by Zimbabwean capitalists
and to the possibilities of popular resistance.
If there is an ideal-type, indigenous form of financial power in
Zimbabwe, then, it is cast from a conservative die, as described in
Tendency B. Financiers operating with such a world view always attempted
to maintain some semblance of the status quo when under pressure, but
yet were unable to express this conservatism as a coherent accumulation
strategy. The banks lacked classically liberal instincts for
full-fledged deregulation ─ recall (from Chapter Eleven) the “cozy”
“corset of controls” that both the World Bank and Chidzero remarked upon
in the late 1980s, and the banks’ willingness to, as the Financial
Gazette put it in mid 1992, “throw each other lifebelts” (Chapter
Twelve). In this conservative, uncreative tendency can also be found the
main ideological voice of capital-in-general, the Financial Gazette,
which although a stalwart defender of human rights in principle, drifted
towards authoritarianism in practice (especially when condemning
soft-hearted politicians and potential IMF rioters, as in September
1991), at the same time its internationalist instincts were continually
battered by the sad reality of Zimbabwe’s impotence in exporting
anything much more than tobacco and other primary commodities to the
world market. At the level of state rhetoric, the populist
developmentalism of a Bernard Chidzero was a consistent official
companion of this tendency.
And while it would not yet qualify as a tendency of financial power,
there are nevertheless germs of such a conservative and authoritarian
ideology in the Indigenous Business Development Centre, the Affirmative
Action Group and other aspirant petty-bourgeois forces. Self-consciously
“indigenous” entrepreneurship may well continue to grow, even under the
debilitating conditions currently being imposed upon Zimbabwe by the
world economy, and could even become dominant within a few decades
depending upon the nature of future intercapitalist power struggles. For
while capable of bitterly attacking the currently hegemonic version of
financial power ─ particularly when denied access to credit ─ the IBDC,
AAG and various politicians appear to be cut from much the same cloth as
the aspiring black nationalists of the early 1960s, in the sense they
are readier to join rather than contest the basic rules of capitalism
under financial power. They are very much encouraged in this by the
traditional nationalists (led by Mugabe), to the discomfort of the small
but important black financial bourgeoisie. Moreover, some of the same
rhetoric of conservative populism can be found in several small
political parties that have lined up to the right of ZANU.
It is important not to overstate the case, however. An explicitly
domestic or national-oriented version of financial power ─ such as
existed in South Africa, briefly but most explicitly, following the
imposition of sanctions and disinvestment by the major international
banks ─ is difficult to identify throughout Zimbabwe’s history,
primarily due to the foreign sources of bank headquarters. (The
international linkages of Rhodesian-era banks were challenged,
ineffectually, by a national-oriented bloc of white labour and merchants
in the 1950s.)
There is in Tendency D, finally, the left-popular approach: a lively
critique of financial power and, potentially, the reconstruction of the
financial circuit of capital in which finance would be simultaneously
“repressed” (with respect to the determination of resource-allocation)
but also capable of empowering subordinate classes in democratic,
community-based movements.
(Full available if anyone wants, offlist: [EMAIL PROTECTED])
