/* Written 5:27 PM May 28, 1998 by [EMAIL PROTECTED] in web:twn.features */ /* ---------- "Triumph of the market" ---------- */ Content-type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit TRIUMPH OF THE MARKET Democracy may be winning, but economic options are limited indeed. By Sasha Abramsky The 18th-century Scottish philosopher and essayist David Hume wrote that 'factions [parties] arise most easily in small republics. Every domestic quarrel, there, becomes an affair of state. Love, vanity, emulation, any passion, as well as ambition and resentment, begets public division.' Living in a political world divided between Whigs and Tories, the astute commentator continued, 'Nothing is more usual than to see parties, which have begun upon a real difference [in this instance, their respective stances on Britain's constitutional revolution of 1688] continue even after that difference is lost.' Scroll forward two and a half centuries. In place of the ruffled gentlemen-aristocrats of Hume's time - the Pitts and Foxes who helped shape parliamentary politics in the age of Empire - Britain is governed by Tony Blair's Labour Party. On the surface, it appears that history has come a long way: aristocracy has given way to democracy, empire to self-determination. But in some crucial aspects, the political situation in the final years of this millennium is more akin to the world Hume wrote about than the political world of a generation ago. Blair's Labour government was elected in May 1997 with the largest parliamentary majority since 1832, when the franchise was broadened to include the propertied middle class. With over 170 more Members of Parliament than all other parties combined, its numerical superiority dwarfs that of Clement Atlee's post-World War II Labour government and Margaret Thatcher's first two Conservative governments. But the 1945 government embarked on an ambitious programme of nationalisation, committing itself to full employment and a comprehensive welfare system designed to protect citizens 'from the cradle to the grave', while Thatcher's government overhauled the 'corporate welfare state' - albeit in a massively destructive way. Blair's government has no equivalent transformative economic programme. His administration has introduced radical constitutional reforms: devolving power to Scotland and Wales, proposing a powerful new system of municipal government, and advocating a Bill of Rights and a Freedom of Information Act. It's also kick-started the Irish peace process, and modernised Britain's relations with the European Union (EU). But its economic policy has been remarkably conservative. First, New Labour has shied away from abrupt departures with the monetarist, deregulating policies of the recent past. Second, the principles that it has chosen to highlight - from a 'small government' approach to social spending to cutting welfare for single mothers and an independent Bank of England - are more akin to Conservative economics than traditional Socialist thinking. In 1997, Labour was so wary of scaring off newly supportive business interests that it dropped even its manifesto pledge - never more than symbolic in recent years - to full employment. Constrained by Britain's membership in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and other international trade agreements, increasingly interrelated global economic structures, and EU commitments to low budget deficits and tight anti-inflationary policies, Blair's government echoes what ruling parties most of the world over are doing: It constructs a 'pragmatic' programme within the rather narrow economic spaces permitted by the movements and behaviour of the 'market'. Meanwhile, it shifts much of its political energy to constitutional changes, an area in which the market is much more flexible. In theory, the late 1990s should be a time of hope and progressive social changes for much of the world's population. No longer divided by Cold War logic, Europe East and West has more social democratic governments than at anytime since the war. Cuahatomac Cardenas, who has led the opposition to Mexico's corrupt ruling party, is mayor of Mexico City, and most of Latin America is now officially in a post-dictatorship, post-civil war renaissance. The US has a two-term Democratic president. The few governments in Africa that are democratic have strong progressive credentials. And until the recent election, the largest democracy in the world, India, was being run by a Leftist coalition. Yet, wealth differentials between rich and poor (individuals, countries, or hemispheres) are widening, and the quality of life for much of the world's peasants and urban slum dwellers is deteriorating. Peasants in Latin America are less often massacred en masse by semi-official death squads, but they certainly aren't any less impoverished. And social democracy may well be fashionable again in Europe, but that doesn't make unemployment less endemic in the inner cities. While the formal trappings of democracy are on the march, the sphere of possibility is shrinking. Increasingly, the role of the party in a pluralistic society - as an umbrella for competing sects who nevertheless share enough broad ideological overlaps to cooperate in forming a programme of action - is being assumed by the structure of the marketplace. Lacking the fundamental ideological distinctions that characterised parties of yesteryear (in particular, the economics and morals of socialism versus capitalism), the parties themselves are left to behave like the old sects that used to exist within the umbrella of the parties. Whether New Labour or the Conservatives rule Britannia, the governing power will broadly accept the distributive outcomes dictated by the market, coalescing around personalities rather than distinct world visions. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela heads a government that emerged out of one of the most emotive liberation struggles in modern history. Yet, despite the ANC's Freedom Charter and its support of redistributive economic tenets, the government is committed to limited privatisation. And due to its need for foreign investment, it's proven largely unable to orchestrate a fairer distribution of land and income. The somewhat absurdist result is that Mandela, arguably the world's most principled liberation leader, and a man who spent 27 years in prison because of his beliefs, is being denounced by some on the Left, such as the International Socialists, as a sell-out, a well-meaning but misguided Market Uncle Tom. Assuming Mandela's entire life-history isn't part of an elaborate conspiracy to capture a liberation movement only in order to thwart its expectations, how is the ANC's cohabitation with the market, and acceptance of the constraints it has thrown up, to be explained? For an answer, look to the dead Soviet bloc: While command economics and nationalisation were discredited within a broader capitalist framework, globalising tendencies were unleashed by instant-transfer technology. Neither Mandela nor the ANC ever embraced the Soviet programme. Yet, with that system's collapse, the options for political diversity have shrunk. In the final years of the century, the market has assumed a political agenda-setting potency on a scale undreamt of a few years ago. The larger political parties within this system have become market sects, left to either coalesce around telegenic leaders who are spokespeople for a market-society, or, in more desperate countries, around sectarian issues. This has removed the possibility of cross-sectional political movements against poverty, hunger, and all the other issues that made social reform through democratic elections possible. Where once democratising forces produced vibrant socialist and social democratic parties adhering to universal themes and dreams, the market increasingly splinters the politics of universalism. When economics is cut out of the party-political discourse, societies are left either with a bland personality-politics or the more frightening politics of racial and religious exclusion. If Hindus in India can't see a political way to bypass austerity measures and the absolute poverty in which so many live, then at least they can see scapegoats - Muslims, tribals, 'others'. Hence, the rise of the terrifying 'religious nationalist' politics espoused by the Bharatiya Janata Party. In Europe, it's parties such as Le Pen's Front Nationale in France. In the US, we see disgruntled militia movements and political fundamentalists such as Pat Buchanan. In the long run, this may be the most lasting legacy of the spectacular rush to market globalism. By denying citizens even minimal control over their countries' economic structures, the market may end up undermining the meaning of democracy, even as political rhetoric seeks to bind 'democracy' and 'market economics' ever more closely together in the popular consciousness. The political party, serving both to delineate substantial alternatives between opposing ideological movements and bind alliances into workable political forces, continues to exist. But it's increasingly consigned to the margins, more a servant to the existing status quo than a transformative social force. Karl Marx, always pessimistic about the possibility of peaceful transformations of the capitalist order, wouldn't be at all surprised. - Third World Network Features -ends- About the writer: Sasha Abramsky is a regular contributor to Toward Freedom, in which the above article first appeared (May 1998). When reproducing this feature, please credit Third World Network Features and (if applicable) the cooperating magazine or agency involved in the article, and give the byline. Please send us cuttings. Third World Network is also accessible on the World Wide Web. 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