I’m almost done with Sorrows of Empire so I will stop deluging the blog with quotes, but I cannot forgo Johnson’s explanation of the mutating monster that Neo-liberalism is. I’d like to reproduce the entire chapter because it is that good, but instead we’ll look at how insidious neo-liberalism is when it comes to being critiqued by the intelligentsia residing in centres of Western power.
“It is critically important to understand that the doctrine of globalism is a kind of intellectual sedative that lulls and distracts its Third World victims while rich countries cripple them, ensuring that they will never be able to challenge the imperial powers. It is also designed to persuade the new imperialists that “underdeveloped” countries bring poverty on themselves thanks to “crony capitalism”, corruption, and a failure to take advantage of the splendid opportunities being offered. The claim that free markets lead to prosperity for anyone other than the transnational corporations that lobbied for them and have the clout and resources to manipulate them is simply not borne out by the historical record. As even the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, a former director of research at the World Bank, has come to acknowledge, “It is now a commonplace that the international trade agreements about which the United States spoke so proudly only a few years ago were grossly unfair to countries in the Third World… The problem [with globalists is] … their fundamentalist market ideology, a faith in free, unfettered markets that is supported by neither modern theory not historical experience.
[…]
There is no known case in which globalization has led to prosperity in any Third World country, and none of the world’s twenty-four reasonably developed capitalist nations, regardless of their ideological explanations, got where they are by following any of the prescriptions contained in globalization doctrine. What globalization has produced, in the words of de Rivero, is not NICs (newly industrialized countries) but about 130 NNEs (nonviable national economies) or, even worse, UCEs (ungovernable chaotic entities). There is occasional evidence that this result is precisely what the authors of globalization intended.
In 1841, the prominent German political economist Friedrich List (who had immigrated to America) wrote in his masterpiece, The National System of Political Economy, “It is a very common clever device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of combing up after him.” Much of modern Anglo-American economics and all of the theory of globalization are attempts to disguise this kicking away of the ladder.
-Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire. p.262.
So really, colonialism by any other name… I’m so glad we’ve progressed so far.
We have truly breached new moral ground, made the world a safer place (for oligarchic capitalism), and ensured the continued well being of right class of people.
For more on ‘ladder kicking’ see Cambridge’s Ha-Joon Chang and his post on this very topic.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
3 comments
September 22, 2015 at 8:22 am
Steve Ruis
This is encased in stone in the economic “Law of Comparative Advantage” which claims that countries are better off doing what they do and then trading for the rest of what they need. This means that poor countries should export their natural resources and rich countries should “add value” by turning those resources into more expensive goods. This is a trap: it traps poor countries into making the rich countries richer.
Modern examples of Japan (post WW2) and Korea and, more recently, China show that the way to greater economic prosperity is the same taken by today’s rich countries: protectionism. Those country’s governments protected fledgling industries while they were small and relatively noncompetitive. After some time, those industries became competitive as they grew (consider Japanese cars and Korean cars, now some of the finest available for sale but nonexistent 60 years ago). Like we protect our children so they can grow, it is natural for countryies to protect nascent industries so they can grow. Globalization works against this tendency and is promoted, like “free trade,” by the richer countries because it is to their advantage.
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September 22, 2015 at 10:01 am
MoS
I completely agree with Steve. Neoliberalism, at its heart, is a faith-based ideology. Free market fundamentalism is to trade what evangelical fundamentalism is to Christianity. Both are based on some pretty wild notions that are readily refuted.
At the moment I’m exploring globalization in the context of the security vulnerabilities it embeds in our societies. We’ve created so many chains on which the global economy is absolutely dependent and within each of those chains are nodes so numerous that they’re impossible to defend and astonishingly easy to attack and take down. The cost of hardening those chains is not acceptable to governments or the corporations that navigate these trade highways.
Experts believe the next body blow to the global economy won’t come from jetliners crashing into office towers but from mass, hit and run attacks on our supply and infrastructure chains.
There are other factors that will also strain the viability of globalization, climate change among them. The wise country may be the first to wean itself out of this unstable model.
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September 22, 2015 at 11:01 am
VR Kaine
Any “business” to do with Third World countries is nothing but cheap labor. The UN and The World Bank are complicit in this, too – don’t be fooled. All about money at the top – the politicians are just the pawns and puppets who they use to make it happen.
It’s the ugly side of Capitalism, for sure, but I believe it’s also the ugly side of human character as a whole. These third-world politicians rape and pillage their own people, purely out of greed and apathy (such a horrible combination), and basically the people let it happen to them, figuring that the fight isn’t worth dying for.
Anyways, I’ve enjoyed reading “Tales of an Economic Hitman” which details the sinister and Machiavellian ways that countries (OK, mostly the US) figured out that using military force to turn countries is far less efficient then just planting a corrupt seed and letting them turn themselves. Scary stuff.
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