EDucate! - Development

“Zamane ke andaz budley gaey, naya raag hai, saaz budley gaey”
Allama Iqbal, Saqi nama.

Looking at the free market fundamentalism sweeping the world, one must ask how much the raag and saaz have really changed since Iqbal’s poem was published in 1935.

Like Saqi nama’s recent popularisation for a new generation by Junoon, one of Pakistan’s most popular music bands, the beat, instruments and intensity with which today’s neoliberal policies manifest themselves might sound different from ‘old style’ colonial rule – but the song remains the same.

Now compare these two statements, made almost a century apart. The first comes from Cecil Rhodes, the British colonialist and business magnate who died in 1902. The second was uttered by Percy Barnevik, President of the ABB Industrial Group, in 1997.

“We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.” (Rhodes)

“I would define globalisation as the freedom for my group of companies to invest where it wants when it wants, to produce what it wants, to buy and sell where it wants, and support the fewest restrictions possible coming from labour laws and social conventions”. (Barnevik)

The modern transnational corporations are the true heirs to the East India Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company, the New Zealand Company – major players in earlier waves of colonisation, dispossession and the commodification of peoples, lands and nature itself. The drive to reduce everything and everyone to a commodity to be bought and sold in the market place has been a defining characteristic of the colonisation process the world over.

To fully understand the worldview that informs this process it is helpful to realise that the idea of corporate globalisation as another form of colonisation, also resonates outside of the Third World.
It is no coincidence that the governments of countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – all of them cheerleaders for the neoliberal agenda – are themselves built on legacies of genocide and dispossession of Indigenous Peoples within (and beyond) the territories that they now occupy.

Sharon Venne, an indigenous lawyer and scholar from the Cree Nation in Canada writes:
“Colonizers believe that they can use our lands and resources without acknowledging those resources and lands belong to others. Now the colonizers are being used and consumed by their own corporations and companies. Their governments cannot protect them. There is an assumption that this is a new process. Rather, it is colonization continued. It is a beast who knows no limits. When it cannot consume the Indigenous Peoples’ lands and resources, it has turned on its own people. In an attempt to understand, the colonizers have called it ‘globalization’. For Indigenous Peoples, it is not a new concept. It is just the continuation of the colonization that began in 1492.”

Maori educationalist Graham Hingangaroa Smith points out that the same processes of commodification that we now see as a central tenet of global free market ideology were used by British settlers to access Maori land in Aotearoa New Zealand in the 19th century. “This was achieved through the individualization of Maori land titles; i.e. to commodify or ‘package up’ what were collective or group held titles into individual holdings in order to facilitate their sale to Pakeha [British settlers] under Pakeha rules and customs.” This was a common tool of the old-style colonizer. Nowadays it is the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank and the international ‘investment community’ which views communal ownership of land, communitarian values and subsistence economies as impediments to be swept out of the way in the name of economic growth and ‘development’ through attracting foreign investment.

Although their names may not feature prominently among the individuals and organisations that have high international profiles for their critiques of globalisation, many Indigenous communities in the ‘First World’ have not only been among the most affected by transnational corporate plunder but are also on the frontlines of resistance.

Like earlier jockeying for imperial spheres of influence modern corporations compete for higher profits, new markets and new sources for cheaper labour and raw materials. Transnational corporations account for two-thirds of world trade in goods and services. Free trade is merely a euphemism for freedom from governmental restrictions for transnational corporations. Of the world’s top 100 economies, based on a comparison of annual corporate sales and a nation’s GDP, 51 were companies and only 49 were countries. According to the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies report, The Top 200: the Rise of Global Corporate Power (2000), by 1999, Sony, Philip Morris and AT & T were all bigger than Pakistan, just as IBM was bigger than Singapore.

Just as the imperial powers which built their wealth, industry, political and economic might on colonisation, slavery and theft passed themselves off as civilisers of the savages, so too modern day defenders of the ‘free world’ frequently resort to manipulation and bullying to achieve the kinds of goals that Rhodes and Barnevik share.

Many stories of arm twisting have emerged from last November’s WTO Ministerial Meeting in Qatar as industrialized countries, led by the USA and the European Union coerced developing countries towards opening up their markets and new economic sectors. It was, as one non-governmental observer put it, a meeting characterised by the “high-handed unethical negotiating practices of the developed countries – linking aid budgets and trade preferences to the trade positions of developing countries and targeting individual developing country negotiators”. Such divide and rule tactics are hardly new. But the cynical linkage of the so-called war against terror with support for free trade greatly increased the pressure on many Third World countries which had wanted to stand together against the rich countries at the WTO even more firmly than they had at Seattle.

One of the promises of the globalisation gang in the West was that under the WTO agreements, all countries would play by the same rules. But the USA and other industrialized nations are expert in match-fixing and ball-tampering on the not so level playing field of the global economy. September 11 was seized upon in a desperate attempt to stave off growing disillusionment with both free market policies and the multilateral trading system. Without it, who knows what shape the neoliberal agenda would now be in? Perhaps the Doha Ministerial would have been a repeat of Seattle’s failure to come to agreement on international trade, only without the mass protests outside? Had that happened, what credibility could the WTO have maintained?

Colonialism has always thrived on double standards. From the systematic destruction of South Asia’s rich textile industries in the 1800s so that the Britain’s highly protected factories and economy might flourish, to the recent 64% increase in US farm subsidies even as the Bush administration demands that poor countries open their markets yet further, under the guise of concern for human rights. US politicians have turned the situation of child workers in the Sialkot football stitching industry and China’s prison labour into arguments to protect and ensure a competitive advantage for their own businesses. Yet they remain noticeably silent about the massive privatized prison-industrial complex in the USA which produces goods for domestic consumption. American scholar Richard Falk writes about the USA’s “perpetual rediscovery of its own perceived innocence … Despite the dispossession of the Indigenous Peoples of North America, despite slavery and its aftermath, despite Hiroshima and Vietnam, this self-proclaimed innocence remains untarnished”.

Meanwhile the Australian government, one of the Asia-Pacific region’s most ardent advocates of the free flow of goods and services through trade liberalization is going to extraordinary lengths to keep people – asylum seekers – out. John Howard’s government is continuing the colonial tradition of using the Pacific Islands like Nauru and Papua New Guinea as a dumping ground – this time for the desperate people who have fled from Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries.

Colonized peoples have long been subjected to arguments regarding the inevitability of their subjugation and colonial rule, and the inherent supremacy of the coloniser’s worldview. So too, we are now told that corporate globalisation is like the moon’s pull on the tide. A natural, organic, unstoppable process. As Mike Moore, Director-General of the WTO said while still a New Zealand parliamentarian: “We evolved from families, to tribes to the city state, to the Nation state and now to global and regional economic and political arrangements.”

We can dissect and denounce the privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation policies promoted by the IMF, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, US and European foreign policy and locked in by international free trade and investment agreements all we like. But unless we are prepared to take a clear position against imperialism in all its forms, then all of our talk will remain just that – talk.

It is one thing for us to agree that corporate globalisation is another form of colonisation. It is another to develop strategies locally and internationally which are consistent with this understanding.

Colonization and globalisation have thrived on making us fight one another. Any genuine struggle to counter the latest forms that imperialism is taking must urgently learn to deal with such divisions among peoples.

There is real potential to build strong, vibrant connections between struggles of Indigenous Peoples – and others, especially among the politically-conscious desi diaspora – in the so-called First World with movements and communities in the Third World struggling for economic and social justice. Some of those links have already been made.

The most dynamic and robust resistance to corporate globalisation is coming from peoples’ movements which have grown out of older struggles against imperialism. It is through such movements, and the unglamorous work of community level organizing, not NGO talk fests or arcane and elitist academic discussions, that we can build genuine solidarity among peoples and develop real alternatives to a fundamentalist economic and political agenda that is fuelling desperation and communalism and fragmenting communities across the planet.