BY SAM WAINWRIGHT
Just two weeks ago we watched 80 imprisoned asylum seekers hold off for nearly 24 hours 200 police and security guards armed with tear gas and water cannon. Our smug, reptile-like minister for immigration, Philip Ruddock, responded that the asylum seekers were not "genuine" refugees but "undeserving, illegal, economic refugees".
So why is it, given all the hype about the global village, cyberspace and the virtues of a world with no trade and investment barriers, that the free movement of people is increasingly restricted? And why would people who are "undeserving" of our sympathy have felt compelled to leave behind their homes, friends and family and make a treacherous journey to a destination unknown?
Imperialism
While the world's production and technology are at levels undreamed of 100 years ago, never before have we seen such a gulf between the rich and poor, between the wealthy industrialised countries containing 20% of the world's population and the 80% majority that inhabit the rest of the globe. The wealth gap is growing within these camps as well.
A few statistics make the point. The combined wealth of the world's three richest people is more than the combined GDP of the countries that are home to the world's poorest 600 million people. The countries of the OECD, a club of the biggest industrialised countries, contain only 19% of the world population but account for 71% of international trade, 58% of foreign direct investment flows and 91% of internet users.
In 1980-93, 100 of the world's poor countries, home to more than 1.6 billion people, experienced zero or negative economic growth. In 70 of these countries, average incomes were lower in 1993 than they were in 1980.
The world's Third World countries owe First World private and government institutions US$2.5 trillion, four times what they owed in 1982, even though the original debt has been paid many times over.
How has this state of affairs come about?
World capitalism did not develop evenly. It developed first in Europe and North America, and as it expanded (or globalised) in search of new markets, investments and suppliers of materials it did so on terms favourable to these early capitalists. They were able to use their higher level of productivity (and the superior military strength that goes with it) to integrate the countries and peoples of Asia, Latin America and Africa as subordinate players in world capitalism. This was the period of colonial imperialism: gunboat diplomacy, the carve up of Africa, empires and the civilising mission.
In this world order, the subordinate countries became exporters of raw materials, suppliers of cheap labour and a market for the industrialised countries' manufactured goods. India, before its domination by Britain, had a thriving trade in quality textiles which lured early European traders. But India's textiles industry was smashed by the Manchester mills with which it could not compete. India was quickly transformed from an exporter to an importer of textiles.
V.I. Lenin, in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), was the first to make a thorough analysis of this process. He wrote, "Imperialism [is] the domination of finance capital ... The supremacy of finance capital over all other forms of capital means the predominance of the rentier and of the financial oligarchy; it means the singling out of a small number of financially powerful states from among all the rest.
"In one way or another, nearly the whole of the rest of the world is more or less the debtor to and tributary of these international banker countries."
After World War 2, the colonies gained formal independence. However, their subordinate economic position remains the fundamental determinant of their place in the world economy. They have inherited distorted and retarded economies highly dependent on foreign investment and technology, they have a weak industrial base and they rely on exporting agricultural produce and raw materials for their income.
To call these "developing countries" is misleading. It implies that they might bridge the gap. They won't; the qualitative gap in productivity between the rich and poor countries rules this out.
This question of productivity is so important because every time the poor countries go to market they lose out because their labour does not produce as much wealth in the same time as the labour of workers in the hi-tech industrialised world.
Let us suppose that Kenya decides to buy a jet airliner worth $10 million from Europe or the United States. That airliner might embody 1000 hours work time in its construction. How many more hours of work time are involved in producing enough coffee to raise the same $10 million?
The Third World has to do much more work to realise the same value and in every transaction between the industrialised world and a poor country, wealth is being sucked out of the latter.
The exploited position of the poor countries is exacerbated by the fact that they are pitted against each other. The prices of many their typical exports (coffee, tea, bananas, minerals and so on) are around a quarter of what they were in the 1950s. They all madly produce more and more just to maintain the same level of income, meanwhile driving their prices down. At the same time, the prices of the things they buy from the imperialist world remain the same. The inevitable consequence is debt.
Third world countries don't develop their own industries because their paying the interest on their debts precludes the accumulation of the capital necessary to do so. Besides, the domination by a handful of companies of the key industries (chemicals, oil, etc.) is so complete that the prospect of new players breaking into the field is almost completely ruled out.
In fact, most governments and capitalists in the poor countries are content with their role as lieutenants and enforcers of imperialism. They benefit, even if the majority in their countries suffer deepening misery.
The WTO
This understanding of imperialism has to be the starting point for any discussion of international capitalism's main organisations for maintaining and extending the exploitation of the Third World — the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organisation and World Economic Forum — and the Australian government's role in relation to them.
The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT — later to become the WTO), the World Bank and the IMF were all formed at the Bretton Woods conference of the soon to be victorious allied powers in 1944.
The WTO, the focus of protest at Seattle last November, aims to bring uniformity to trade practices and reduce tariff protection. The push to eliminate tariffs and create the conditions for "free trade" is disastrous for the Third World because it forces their industries, often protected by high taxes on equivalent imports, to compete with advanced capitalist producers with more capital, more technological know how and deeper pockets.
Despite all the talk about how "free trade" and "globalisation" will result in cheap imports from the Third World destroying jobs in the First World, most of the traffic is in the other direction. Through the WTO, the rich countries have bullied the poor countries into giving them unrestricted access to their markets. The rich countries, in return, come up with all sorts of excuses for excluding Third World imports (human rights abuses, biological contamination and so on).
The WTO has put Third World development even further out of reach through its assertion of "intellectual property rights". Only 0.16% of patents are held by residents of Third World countries and 86% of all spending on research and development takes place in the First World.
The drugs used to treat AIDS cost each patient more than $10,000 a year, expensive for a worker in the First World, let alone someone who earns $500 per year. When India proposed to manufacture the same drugs for a fraction of the cost, the US threatened to come down on it like a tonne of bricks.
The multinational companies not only claim ownership of technology, they then cynically manipulate it, such as the deliberate creation of seeds that grow into plants unable to produce new seed. Ideas, knowledge and discoveries, not to mention the maps of individual human beings' DNA, are treated as private property to be bought and sold.
In theory, WTO agreements are reached by consensus. In practice, the US, Europe and Japan develop the agenda and present it to the smaller and poorer states. The WTO agreements are binding on all member states, even if the agreements contradict the domestic legislation of those states (the Tasmanian law banning the importation of salmon, for example, was overruled by the WTO last year). When a ruling has been made against a member state, other states can retaliate with trade sanctions.
The IMF
The original purpose of the IMF was to supervise the capitalist reconstruction of western Europe after World War 2. Its board is made up of government financial advisers from member states and voting power is proportional to financial backing, giving the US 20% of the vote. The combined vote of the advisers from the nine most industrialised countries amounts to 54% of the total.
The World Bank works closely with the IMF, taking advice on where to lend, how much and with what conditions. It is similarly dominated in an undemocratic way by the rich countries. Each country is assigned a subscription based on its economic strength, with voting rights proportional to subscriptions.
The World Bank Group is comprised of four financial institutions: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which lends money to low- and middle-income countries for social infrastructure; the International Development Association (IDA), which gives soft loans or credits to the poorest countries; the International Finance Corporation (IFC), which finances private investment in member countries; and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), which provides guarantees to private investors against loss caused by non-commercial risk.
The IBRD and IDA make structural adjustment loans for restructuring the economy and investment loans for specific projects. To qualify for a loan or a credit, a country must be a member and must agree to carry out whatever conditions the World Bank body attaches to the loan.
This may implementing a structural adjustment program, which usually requires the country to radically restructure its economy in favour of the private sector, in particular Western capital. In the 1999 financial year, adjustment lending was US$15.3 billion compared to US$13.7 billion in investment loans.
Adjustment loans are always geared to creating "business friendly trade and investment regimes". Some past conditions have been that Bosnia privatise its banks, that Ghana establish a low-wage export processing zone, that the Solomon Islands deregulate its economy, that the Ivory Coast sell off its Road Building Authority, and that Indonesia slash subsidies on basic commodities such as rice, cooking oil and kerosene.
World Bank investment lending for infrastructure projects is often tailored to facilitate the greater penetration of Western capital: roads, dams, electricity supply, telecommunications and so on.
The IFC is even more explicit in its support of capitalist interests. It is the largest source of direct investment in the private sector in the Third World.
In 1996, it invested US$3.6 billion of its own funds and mobilised even more in private funds. These investments included such socially useful projects as luxury hotels in Egypt, goldmines in Kyrgzstan, Papua New Guinea and Guyana, oil exploration in Guatemala's national parks and pizza franchises in South Africa.
Under an increasingly critical public glare the IMF and World Bank have been cranking up their humanitarian rhetoric in recent years. Much has been made of so-called debt relief, however, only 8.3% of the debt owed by the most heavily indebted countries has been wiped off. Since 1996, only four out of a possible 33 countries have satisfied the IMF conditions to receive debt relief, and only US$2.7 billion has wiped off. As Fidel Castro pointed out at the Group of 77 meeting in April, that's just one-third of what is spent on cosmetics in the US every year.
Australia's role
How does Australia fit into the equation?
The first thing to note is that Australia is inserted into the world economy as an imperialist country. Certainly, it's a junior imperialist power (the school bully's offsider) and it does not have privileged access to the major imperialist trading blocks (NAFTA, the European Union).
Furthermore, Australia has a particular dependence on mineral and agricultural exports which means that it is often competing in the same markets as Third World countries and is similarly subject to the uncertainty of price fluctuations for primary products.
However, Australia's labour productivity and its policy in relation to its Third World neighbours make it abundantly clear that Australian capitalism is a regional exploiter.
Australian governments — Liberal and Labor — have enthusiastically participated in and pushed the "free trade" agreements. They have been particularly aggressive in demanding access to agricultural markets.
In country after country in the Asia Pacific, Australian mining, oil, timber and manufacturing companies, backed by the Australian state, have plundered and pillaged. In Indonesia, for example, successive Australian governments' close collaboration (including militarily) with the Indonesian regimes' annexation of East Timor and West Papua and brutal oppression of the Indonesian people was aimed at giving Australian corporations a competitive advantage vis-a-vis other capitalists. Following the economic 1997-98 economic crisis in Asia, the Australian government moved quickly to shore up Australian capitalists' investments, becoming one of the main sponsors (to the tune of $1 billion) of the IMF package to Indonesia.
It's important that activists in Australia realise that this country's government and ruling class is as much our enemy as "shadowy" international institutions and the bigger imperialist powers. It's not a case of little Australia battling against the world: this misrepresentation of the true dynamics betrays the working people of the Third World and leads down the racist, nationalist path of Pauline Hanson's One Nation.
The WEF and protest action
What then of the World Economic Forum, which met in Melbourne September 11-13? Unlike the WTO and the IMF, the WEF is composed of representatives, not of governments but of the big corporations. It has 968 members, all of them amongst the largest and most powerful multinational corporations in the world. The WEF summits are a chance for them to rub shoulders and mould consensus.
The WEF's biggest meeting is held each January in the Swiss town of Davos. At the Davos 2000 meeting, much of the discussion centred on how to respond to the gathering opposition to corporate globalisation. This was highlighted by the massive anti-WTO protests in Seattle last year and the fact that the talks collapsed because the Third World countries refused to accept the next round of trade liberalisation that the rich countries were trying to force on them.
Then came the big anti-IMF protests in Washington in April. For the first time ever, a sitting US president came to a Davos summit with the purpose of steadying the ship. Discussion followed the Bill Clinton's lead: globalisation must continue, but we must sell it better, put a human face on it, convince people of its necessity.
In the wake of the protests against the WEF in Melbourne this week, plans are now well under way for protests in Prague in September to coincide with the annual summit of the World Bank and IMF.
The 1990s began with the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The capitalist ideologues seized on the moment: "Socialism is dead. There is no alternative. It's the end of history."
But a decade later it's clearer than ever that capitalism doesn't work. Ecological degeneration is accelerating, whole swathes of the world's population have been condemned to eke out a miserable existence on the very fringes of the world economy, and the Asian economic crisis confirmed that there is no capitalist road to development for the Third World. No sooner had the Berlin Wall that kept people in been pulled down than the rich countries began building higher walls to keep people out, walls that claim more lives every year than the Berlin Wall did during its whole existence.
So what demands should we be raising on the streets, in our unions and on campuses? At a minimum they should include:
the immediate and unconditional cancellation of the entire Third World debt;
a massive increase in unconditional aid from the First World to the Third World;
defend the right of Third World countries to impose tariffs to protect their industries, but guarantee them access to First World markets;
apply a 1% Tobin Tax on the value of all speculative financial transactions. The money raised to go into a fund, controlled by the Third World countries, to promote Third World development;
abolish the World Bank, IMF and WTO; and
immediate free transfer of technologies to the Third World.
These measures, were they implemented, would not overturn the private profit system that causes the globalised misery and destruction of today's world. But the fact that imperialism cannot even entertain these very reasonable demands highlights the ultimately inescapable conclusion that this insane and inhumane system needs to be replaced by a truly just, democratic, socialist economic order. Those of us who live in the belly of the beast — in imperialist Australia — have a special responsibility to struggle, with urgency, for such a world.
[Sam Wainwright is a national committee member of the Democratic Socialist Party. Visit Green Left Weekly's anti-corporate tyranny web site at <http://www.greenleft.org.au/globalaction/s11>.]