Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy
By Walden Bello
Zed Books, 2002
132 pages
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BY PATRICK BOND
Walden Bello's new book, Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy, is part of the worthy Zed Press series called Global Issues. It's an easy-reading companion to Bello's other recent book, The Future in the Balance — a collection of 20 eloquent essays published in 2001 by Food First, the San Francisco advocacy organisation that he once directed.
Bello probably needs no introduction to GLW readers, but they may not be aware that his hectic schedule includes participation in virtually all confrontations with the global power structure; a professorship at University of the Philippines; leadership of a left-wing political party in the Philippines; and most importantly, from the standpoint of the international anti-capitalist movement, the directorship of Focus on the Global South, a people's movement think-tank based at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok (visit ).
Humble and humourous, Bello — who holds a Princeton doctorate in sociology — has a long history of social mobilisation. Six months ago, the New Left Review published an engaging interview with him that explored his political trajectory, including an important break with the Communist Party of the Philippines ().
What are the main arguments for "deglobalisation"? The book opens by arguing, tightly and persuasively, that the existing world system is untenable on several grounds. This is captured by the first chapter's main subheadings: "Multilateralism in disarray"; "The crisis of the neoliberal order"; "The corporation under question"; "The degeneration of liberal democracy"; "The spectre of global deflation"; "The rise of the (anti-capitalist) movement"; "September 11"; and "Imperial overstretch".
Bello closes the introductory chapter with a hint that "progressive responses are coming together under the canopy of the Porto Alegre process" — though here the argument becomes distressingly vague, particularly in relation to previous traditions of anti-capitalism.
Analytically, Bello is influenced by Robert Brenner's two major Marxist studies of intercapitalist competition and its resulting systemic overcapacity and declining profitability: "The Economics of Global Turbulence" in New Left Review, May/June 1998, and The Boom and the Bubble, published by Verso last year. But Bello hesitates to more forcefully ground his anti-capitalism, beyond coy signals and code words.
Instead, Bello's great strength is the extraordinary lucidity of his largely institutional critique. The second chapter reviews the half-hearted "anti-imperialism" of Third World governments through the 1970s and the subsequent right-wing reaction that has left most Third World leaders mere lackeys of Washington.
Bello's third chapter adds analyses of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation. The fourth shows how these organisations — and global capitalism more generally — came to suffer a late 1990s legitimacy crisis. He demolishes both the actual "vicissitudes of reform" (chapter five) and the main bourgeois proposals for future restructuring of global economic governance, by commentators ranging from the United Nations, Bretton Woods system revivalists to the recently convicted insider trader George Soros (chapter six).
"The alternative: Deglobalization" is chapter seven. Although the book is short, it is sad that only 11 pages carry the concrete strategic options for the anti-capitalist movement, because they are worthy of amplification. Bello's description — "I am not talking about withdrawing from the international economy. I am speaking about reorienting our economies from production for export to production for the local market" — recalls the way, more than a decade ago, that the renowned Egyptian Marxist, Samir Amin, described his own conception of deglobalisation. "Delinking is not synonymous with autarky, but rather with the subordination of external relations to the logic of internal development... Delinking implies a 'popular' content, anti-capitalist in the sense of being in conflict with the dominant capitalism, but permeated with the multiplicity of divergent interests", wrote Amin.
But this begs the question of whether to conceptualise the problem as one of deep-seated tendencies towards the commodification of everything under capitalist relations of production, or simply pernicious globalists and hostile excessively powerful institutions.
Indeed, the weakest possible conception of deglobalisation is Bello's suggestion at the 2002 World Social Forum that, as one option, we could seek to reduce existing neoliberal institutions to "just another set of actors coexisting with and being checked by other international organisations, agreements and regional groupings. These would include such diverse actors and institutions as United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, multilateral environmental agreements, the International Labour Organisation, the European Union, and evolving trade blocs such as Mercosur in Latin America, [the] South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation ..., the Southern African Development Community, and a revitalised ASEAN in Southeast Asia. More space, more flexibility, more compromise—these should be the goals of the Southern agenda and the civil society effort to build a new system of global economic governance."
Anyone involved in local struggles in which these institutions play a role know them to be part of the problem, not part of the solution. Thus Bello has come under sharp criticism from the left, and for good reason in view of some past and ongoing gaffes:
* four years ago, Bello promoted a greater role for the existing regional development banks in resolving the Asian crisis — though he is now no longer so enthusiastic, in the wake of the subsequent brutal critiques of the Asian Development Bank by his Focus colleague Shalmali Guttal;
* two years ago, Bello advanced the idea that the international left could "unite" with US Republicans against the World Bank and IMF — which may have been merely a mistake in wording (if he meant simple tactical convergence) but which says volumes about his clarity on alliances;
* in Deglobalization, Bello suggests "a demand that has potential to unite a broad front of people is that of converting [the IMF] into a research agency" (this, after Bello has demolished the IMF for its stupidity and blindness when it came to East Asia's crisis); and
* he also remarks in passing that deglobalisation will entail more "microcredit schemes such as the Grameen Bank" — perhaps unaware that in late 2001, the Wall Street Journal wrote that, "To many, Grameen proves that capitalism can work for the poor as well as the rich" but then had to unhappily concede how Grameen's recent "steep losses" and unethical accounting practices had left the international microcredit industry "alarmed" (in spite of Grameen's more assertive debt collection method: removing tin roofs from delinquent women's houses).
These may be picky, outdated and largely semantic points. After all, on alliances, for instance, Bello and Anuradha Mittal — in a chapter in Future in the Balance — blast the peak US trade union organisation, the AFL-CIO, and some environmentalists for their "Faustian bargain" with the xenophobic right at the time of the Chinese accession to permanent normal trading nation status with the US.
Indeed, Bello completely convinces me with the more militant components of the strategy, especially "deconstruction" techniques to defund and disempower global capitalist institutions. It was, in particular, his shift towards advocating abolition of the World Bank in April 2000 that helped most to provide intellectual buttressing for the great militancy witnessed in that year's Washington and Prague protests.
But for the sake of intra-movement discussions, is there not a more expansive way to address deglobalisation, by departing from dual-reformist notions of globalised regulation and utopian localisation strategies? Would it be so difficult for intellectual leaders with the movement prestige of Bello to grapple with the notion of socialist revolution?
After all, this book is probably the finest short guide to what's wrong with the institutional framework of global political economy. We can only hope Bello will be pulled by activists further leftwards, to next explore an explicitly anti-capitalist development strategy for a new generation of radical states that are themselves the product of a successful deconstruction of globalisation's power centres.
[Patrick Bond teaches at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and is an associate of the Center for Economic Justice in Washington, DC.]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, February 26, 2003.
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