If you and I owe money to a bank or lending agency, a supplier of goods and services, Credit Company or have an outstanding mortgage, and we default in our payments, we know what to expect: threatening letters, last warnings and advisory notes that are really last chance orders before bailiffs, lawyers and auctioneers descend on us.

It may be unfair but somehow we have been brainwashed by the capitalist ideology that there is no alternative but to keep up with our payments unfailingly! The market, we are deceived into believing, is no respecter of anybody and its immutable logic will fix things. In the past three decades, nations, social groups and communities have been destroyed and reduced to penury by Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) across Africa, Asia and Latin America, through supposedly market-led policies imposed by the IMF/World Bank, backed by the West and led by the USA. SAPs gave way to globalisation, which was treated as a moving train in which the only option was to jump in, without an opt-out clause. Imperialism was dressed up as new technology and ‘the market’ became the acceptable vocabulary for exploitation and greed.

This God of the market was supposed to fix all things, regardless of the fact that the market has never been a fair place. We did not enter it on equal terms and the hands of many are tied to their backs inside it. Triumphalist neo-liberalism forced everyone behind its hegemony and the loss of faith in religion and anti-capitalist ideologies were replaced by a new utopia: the Market. Anyone who espoused a different world view that stressed people above profit, was seen as a ‘conservative, ‘old style state socialist’, ‘illiberal’ and a relic of past ideological battles. Fukuyama even declared an end to history with the West (meaning the US and the American way) as the victors. It seemed that our destiny was to be americanised!

All these untruths became received wisdom until recently. What was thought to be a temporary wobble in the greedy halls of Wall Street, London City and other financial casinos across the world, has become a real crisis of a magnitude yet to fully unfold. The market is unable to fix itself, as it was supposed to be able to do for all things. Bankers, financial corporations and mortgage lenders have seen billions wiped off their paper trillions in just a few weeks, with stocks in free fall as they face the market forces of their own greed.

Yet instead of leaving the market to sort itself out, the greedy plutocrats whose excesses led to the financial collapse, have turned to their friends in the White House for a bailout. Why can they not be allowed to chew the grass after swallowing all the cattle? So it is alright for the State to bail out the rich, but unacceptable for the State to protect the poor, the sick, the marginalized and those pauperized by greedy capitalists? They are opposed to socialism after all; but it seems they still want it for the rich!

For decades we have been told that the State is ‘useless’, ‘inefficient’, ‘parasitic’ and ‘anti-enterprise’, yet when the wheelers and dealers are in trouble, they fall back on the very same State to bail them out with freebies! The Right always talk about personal and individual responsibility, so why are they not asking the greedy bankers to take responsibility for their actions, rather than taxing everyone else?

It is instructive that the $700billion bailout plan for Wall Street by the Bush Administration was being hammered out at the same time global leaders were assembling across the river at the UN General Assembly, where two related high level meetings were taking place. One was on Africa’s development needs and the other was a renewed Call to Action on the MDGs. Both identified funding gaps between promises and pledges by African and global leaders on the one hand, and delivery to the poor on the ground on the other. $72 billion annually for the next 7 years will help poor countries to deliver on the MDGs, yet this could not be found almost 8 years after promises were made to achieve the MDGs by 2015! What is required between now and 2015 is far less than what Bush is prepared to throw at Wall Street immediately, not to talk of the further billions to come, and what other richer countries in the EU and Japan are already throwing at their own greedy bankers.

There are a number of lessons for Africa in all this. One: we should not expect others to be our messiahs; we should be our own liberators. We cannot be continuously ridiculing ourselves by accepting every invitation to come and talk about our problems. We should say ‘No’ to future invitations and stay at home and actively engage in development action instead of talking about it. Two: for many years our leaders have been behaving like zombies parroting neo-liberal nonsense that ‘there is no alternative’ to the liberalization and pauperization of our peoples. Now their patron saints in America have shown that the State has to intervene when the market is failing. They have always used state power to protect their markets, that’s what slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism and the re-colonisation of other peoples through globalisation is all about. Three, Fukuyama is right, but not in the sense in which he meant, his end-of-history postulation. It is indeed the end of the history of the Market as God, and hopefully the beginning of a more realistic development dialogue that will give political, policy and intellectual spaces for people desiring a different world and making it possible, beyond the market.

“Forward ever, backward never”…..Kwame Nkrumah (1909 - 1972)

………………DON’T AGONISE!…………………..ORGANISE!!…………….

This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 9:35 am and is filed under Thursday Postcard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.