EMERGING ANTI-CHINA ALLIANCE STUCK IN NEOLIB IRON CAGE
In 2005, I published a piece in the Mumbai-based Economic and Political Weekly, titled "Redistributing Global Inequality: A Thought Experiment." A few months later, it was re-published in Magyar, in the journal Eszmélet, under the title "Gondolatkísérlet a globális elosztásról: Polányi Károly emlékére," with subsequent re-appearances here and there. Branko Milanovic, a (former) chief economist for the World Bank, has made similar arguments later, see, e.g., here or here.
In this piece, I argued--and presented some calculations based on publicly available data to demonstrate--that resources are amply available to remedy rampant global inequality. Clearly, the main reason why a global redistributive system is not in place today is not the relative lack of resources but the malign neglect of the potential solution by the world's governments. To repeat, a global redistributive system is in fact entirely possible in terms of available resources--what humankind lacks is the political ability / will to encourage / force the world's governments to invent, introduce and maintain such a scheme. The biggest obstacle is the globally unsustainable, nationalist-racist baseline that makes any sustained social remedy impossible on a scale "above" the absurdly mis-named "nation"-state. Today's system is, historically speaking, a continuation of the colonial global order, by other means. Or the same means, as it turns out.
18 years have passed since the first publication of my argument. Then, this morning--June 21, 2023--we read a news report with the title "Macron and world leaders call on private finance to help reduce poverty." The title says it all: After at least three, if not more, generations since the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of development studies, "world leaders" of a particular orientation are still talking about "poverty"--not INEQUALITY--and still practice voodoo economics, assuming that a global effort to remedy global "poverty"--which they themselves have been unwilling to devise / introduce--will somehow miraculously work once they add private finance profits to the cost. Srsly, dude.
This has prompted me to look into the relative global trajectories of the public authorities that have just proposed this idea, as reported in The Guardian. They include, in alphabetic order (I hope I haven't left out any participant-the presentation of the participants is a little confusing in The Guardian's write-up): Barbados, Brazil, the European Union, France, Germany, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates and the United States of America. (Europe-savvy readers will notice that The Guardian's journalist / editors seem to be unaware of the fact of the membership of France and Germany in the European Union, i.e., making the list redundant (representing France and Germany twice, once as themselves, second time as members of the EU). An application of what I called, in Chapter 4 of my 2009 book in English or Magyar, "the elasticity of weight," a defining feature of the European Union's global strategy: It shamelessly presents itself either as a single unit or a group of 27 separate (voting) units, depending on what is more advantageous.
Anyway, here is the combined share of today's signatories in the Gross World Product, in graphic form (computed from data from the World Development Indicators data set of the World Bank). I start the graph 5 years before the publication of my paper on global redistribution.
- It would have been a lot easier to do this a generation ago--say, around 2000, when today's signatories had in excess of 61% of the Gross World Product under their control. But they didn't. They waited until their global influence shrank to below half of the total economic output of humankind. This suggests that the motivation is not some kind of benign good will toward the wretched of the earth, people who suffer unfairly just because they happen to have been born in, live in, and locked in, societies that are "poor." Anyone even remotely familiar with the geo-economic / geo-political landscape on Planet Earth surely recognizes that this is part of a whole series of reactions, structural proposals and emergency measures aiming to preserve the signatories' global sway, to maintain their global significance in spite of their shared loss of global economic weight. By the way, that loss of global economic significance would be even more visible, had India and Brazil not been driven into this group by global geopolitical considerations. I.e., the shared losses of the EU and the US are much more dramatic than what you see in the graph above.
- That brings up the next logical question: What actor(s) are gaining, if the above nine (or, counting the two EU-b.s.tters twice, eleven) states have been losing? Again anyone even remotely familiar with the global situation (or has so much as held my above linked book--again: see in English or Magyar--on the longue-durée historical sociology of European statehood and global geopolitics of weight in their hands) already knows the answer: China and a set of states that "sail" the waters of the world economy in formation with the gigantic, and globally growing, economy of the People's Republic of China. In other words, the current agreement by the 9 (or 11) signatories is nothing but a geopolitical chess move to counteract the shift of the global economy BACK to where it was, for millennia, until the "west" managed to undermine the internal coherence of the Chinese Empire by opium, war, colonialism and racism, starting in earnest in the middle of the 19th century.
- This brings us to the, to me most striking, third conclusion. What amazes me is that the above listed 9 (khm, 11 😒 ) public authorities are so locked into their own neoliberal ideological iron cages that they are--even now, after what could be considered the insistent geopolitical wake-up call of their own apparent downslide--still unable to conceive of a solution that would resemble the construction of the northwest European redistributive welfare state in the last decades of the 19th century, on a global scale. (I won't even mention a possibly socially and environmentally more efficient and more sustainable, eco-, global south-, or just plain reasonable, democratic, socialist alternatives, such thoughts will of course never be entertained in the mainstream media that provide ideological scaffolding to today's system, that goes without saying.) Instead the "west" and its global southern allies still apply neoliberal snake oil, somehow expecting results from a move that rubs private finance profits onto global inequalities. I can't even begin to outline how immoral, antihuman and idiotic that is.
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