Neo-Liberalism - the Glittering Python

28 December 2006
Posted to the web 28 December 2006

Reason Wafawarova
Harare

IT is 17 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the consequent end of the Cold War.

The fall of the communist bloc centred on the USSR marked the beginning of a global campaign of a newly packaged form of capitalism, neo-liberalism, that people like Francis Fukuyama said was to be the last ideology in man's evolutionary process.

The Japanese American went euphoric in 1990 as he celebrated the fall of communism and declared that neo-liberalism was to be the end of history, it was supposed to be the ultimate ideology, the answer to how people ought to live and govern themselves across the world.

Any deviation from the neo-liberal values was doomed to face the fate that befell communism and the Soviet Union, he said.

Neo-liberal capitalism, as we have now come to know it, is nothing more than what Karl Marx described as the spread of capital from the centre to the periphery or simply from industrialised countries to less developed countries.

It is crude capitalism based on Adam Smith and Ricardo's old school of man eat man or dog eat dog mercantilism.

This school of thought is based on the notion that a nation state should strive to sell as much as possible to strangers while consuming as little as possible of the strangers' products.

It is rooted in the belief that whatever has to be purchased from strangers has to be made as cheap as possible and by any means necessary, be it negotiation, deception, skewed trade patterns, stealing or brute force. This is the American tradition enshrined in the Texan way of life where anyone outside Texas is an enemy who must be taken advantage of.

US President George W. Bush, a Texan, lives up to the tradition of Texas Rangers who subscribe to the biblical saying that "the violent shall take it by force".

The most unfortunate aspect of neo-liberalism is not the draconian nature of the owners of global capital.

The sad part of this ideology is that it does not look as ugly as it is or put simply it is not as beautiful as it looks.

Neo-liberalism is like a python that attracts a goat or a duiker with its glittering skin only to pounce and strangle the poor animal with its powerful coils before swallowing the prey.

The post-Cold War neo-liberalism has been packaged in three major ways, that is, politically, economically and legally.

Politically, the neo-liberal campaign has been grounded on the spread of liberal democracy modelled on the American political tradition.

It is a shiny package which gives power to the people by way of allowing the ordinary man to choose a government of their choice and it involves having politicians put themselves up for election by the people before they assume public office.

The ideology sounds really good and attractive until one is told how American foreign policy plays a part in the candidate selection process in many countries.

It does not sound so good when one is told that the American government has a "Cuban government-in-waiting" stationed in Miami.

It also does not sound so good when one hears that the first interim government for Iraq was made up of a group of Iraqis who spent most of their lives living in the US before the illegal invasion of Iraq and deposition of Saddam.

It would not sound any better when one hears that similar characters constitute what is being passed for a government of Afghanistan today.

Naturally, neo-liberalism does not sound so attractive when one hears that the Americans have a keen interest in ensuring that a Western-sponsored opposition party in Zimbabwe must win elections for the electoral process to be considered "free and fair".

It sounds incredibly wrong when Americans declare that democracy has not prevailed when Hamas wins elections in Palestine or when a coup d'etat on the popularly elected Venezuelan president -- Hugo Chavez -- is prematurely celebrated by the American ambassador as a democratic event.

Neo-liberalism stinks when the democratically elected government of Iran is described as an extremist administration, simply because it is headed by a strong president who brooks no nonsense from Washington.

Certainly, the ideology is disgusting when the Americans back Israelis in torturing the democratic governments of Lebanon and Palestine. Of course, it does not sound that good when popularly elected leaders like President Mugabe, Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are labelled "despots", "autocrats" or "rogues" for resisting Western influence.

The reason why neo-liberalism does not sound right is simple, the people's right to self-determination is being interfered with and in most cases it is grossly manipulated and abused by Westerners.

This practice is a blow to the idea of sovereignty as enshrined in Chapter 2 (7) of the UN Charter. The Americans have made sure they determine who runs whichever country they have an interest in and they have a full department to look into that.

To make liberal democracy attractive, like a python, the package is coated with promises of limitless freedoms and liberties; among them freedom of speech, association, sexual orientation, movement and a whole range of other frivolous freedoms that governments are coerced to adopt absolutely, regardless of the fact that some of the freedoms do not obtain in the US.

Our university graduates and some grown-up people have just fallen prey to the python's glitter and are behind the vociferous civic organisations preaching noisy sermons on how such freedoms should go unregulated, never mind that they regulate the freedoms themselves within their own organisations.

Was it not the self-proclaimed guardian of democracy in Zimbabwe, the MDC, which purged and expelled Munyaradzi Gwisai for practising absolute freedom of expression?

Was it not Tsvangirai who reportedly stationed hoodlums at Harvest House to bar Welshman Ncube and company from entering simply because they had seen past his mask of perversion?

Neo-liberalism is packaged economically by the IMF and World Bank loans and aid packages from Western organisations.

These packages can only be accessed on skewed conditions which are deliberately designed to perpetuate dependency and poverty.

For Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Ghana, Zambia and many other African states the bitter taste of Esap is all-pervasive but such is the dosage from the American and Western economic doctors operating from a surgery called the IMF and a referral hospital going by the name World Bank.

Zimbabwe's life expectancy was 58 years before Esap was implemented and had gone down to 42 years by 1999 and there are worse examples for some countries.

This is the economic package that advocates for reduced state participation in the economy.

It preaches that the economy should be left to the whims of market forces, but says nothing about EU and US agricultural subsidies.

Neo-liberal economic prescriptions call on nation states to open up their economies to global capital on the terms of owners of capital, the American idea of liberal economies.

These are business ventures spearheaded by multinational companies owned and run from the West whose idea of business is maximising profits at the expense of weaker states.

They often create an extremely poor lower class and blinkered minority middle and upper class that thrives on the crumbs of looted national wealth.

Finally, neo-liberalism has been packaged through the concept of international justice presided over by international tribunals and the International Criminal Court.

These are international courts whose structural and substantive shortcomings are so gross that even the US vowed that it would never allow any of its citizens to be tried in them.

To date Washington has signed 103 bilateral treaties with the same number of countries to ensure that they are never taken to the ICC.

Under Bill Clinton, Washington pushed for the establishment of the Rome Statute which founded the International Court of Justice but reneged on signing the treaty although it was quite happy to see the likes of Augustino Pinochet, Slobodan Milosevic and Charles Taylor and many of its sworn enemies appearing before the same courts.

It is clear that we have had a campaign for international legal structures meant to punish defeated and weaker states but packaged as punishment on people guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and acts of aggression.

It all sounds so good until one learns how the Americans have shielded themselves from the effects of such a justice system, not by avoiding wrong but by brute thwarting of the justice itself, just like that.

I think nation states should reveal the python for what it is by ensuring that their citizens have an understanding of minimum geo-political processes. Knowledge, after all, is power the same way ignorance is a dangerous liability.