The great trade robbery

By Bukka Rennie
July 16, 2003

It is interesting that the leaders of the industrialised, so-called "developed" world cannot meet anywhere to discuss issues of the day without being confronted in the streets with mass mobilisations of everyday people.

The leaders of the G-7 countries (USA, Britain, Japan, Canada, etc) are forced each time they congregate to virtually fortress themselves behind modern security systems in order to proceed with their agenda. But from where do these mobilisations emanate? No one can say.

There is no clear international core or cadre of people, a vanguard, if you wish, that spearheads this galvanising of people protesting the inequality of world trade and the resulting extreme high levels of poverty existing everywhere in the midst of vulgar opulence. And when you look at where most of the crushing poverty lies, you realise that it is south of the Equator, but yet these mobilisations against the leadership of the industrialised world takes place in Western European and North American cities.

Recently, the Irish leader of the rock group U2, Paul "Bono" Hewson, said openly that he shall join these activist mobilisations and be "out there getting very noisy".

He expressed the view that: "This is the first generation that can actually eliminate absolute poverty from the planet, this is the first generation that can afford it because of the wealth of the wealthy countries... we can actually transform the real lives of people living in absolute poverty... I, for one, am not going to let it pass... this for me is an issue of equality...this is the defining issue of our time."

He was speaking in Dublin at a ceremony to highlight the 2003 United Nations Human Development Report which indicates that over a billion people exist in absolute poverty, living on less that a dollar a day and that "54 countries got poorer in the 1990's despite the global economic boom".

It is interested to note that only last year Oxfam out of the United Kingdom accused the rich, industrialised countries of robbing the world's poor countries of some US$100 billion annually through abuse of world trade rules and regulations.

The Oxfam report exposed what they termed the "great trade robbery" through which global trade is being made "more unequal" than ever before. This report on "Rigged Rules and Double Standards" explained how some 128 million people can easily be lifted out of poverty if poor countries are allowed to increase their share of world exports by just one per cent. Imagine that!

Bono is quite correct, unequal trade and the increasing impoverishment of the majority of the world is the "defining issue of our time". This is exactly what the mysterious moblisations have been demonstrating. But why is such a level of social and political consciousness becoming so generalised?

The major distinguishing feature of this modern epoch is that knowledge and information are now common universal property, no longer the preserve of any select elite nor any special social grouping. This is the difference that separates the past from the present.

Information is there to be commandeered by anyone so desiring. People post information about the G-7 meetings on the Internet and call on all and sundry to rally at certain points to pressure world leaders to deal with the burning demands from below.

In response, people book their passages by air, sea or rail and arrive with their placards in hand, gas masks on their faces, as instructed by the respective Web sites. They stand ready to do battle against the coercive arms of state that try to prevent them from imparting a different point of view to the leaders of the industrialised nations who, in fact, represent the international ruling class. We must understand that this present stage of globalisation has clearly demarcated, as never before, this ruling class of the world from the masses of people of the world.

As this column demonstrated last week, this polarisation is extreme and has clear-cut economic, cultural and political manifestations.

How can we, therefore, find ourselves expounding about the realities of our "offshore" and "inshore" economic sectors, about our skewed economic development and our satiation with the mere distribution and circulation of rents and various forms of taxes, and our raison d'etre of "producing for export" to earn forever scarce foreign exchange and, at the same time, not recognise that the ruling class of T&T and the Caribbean is that very international ruling class who wield and manage and expropriate capital accumulation on a global scale.

They are the ones who set the stage, define the rules of the game of life and death and take everything for themselves. How can we not see that our so-called impotence, of which some political pundits speak, stems largely from the incapacity so far to bring this international ruling class to heel. And that this incapacity is international as well, nothing that's peculiarly unique to us. If Bono can see that, why can't we.

It has always been this international ruling class or specific branches of it or special organisational outgrowths of it, like the joint stock companies of old and now the multi-national corporations, that have determined property relations in the Caribbean from slavery to present time. They have always directly, and now indirectly, set the stage for what is done here, what is produced here, when it is produced here and how it is produced here, meaning under what terms and conditions.

What has come to emerge after 1956-1962 as local expressions of political-economy have been leverages for the further entrenching of the same system. No one is to be blamed for this. That has been our history. It is a history of subjugation and domination by this international ruling class. The Caribbean mass movements have never failed to recognise this. That is why Caribbean mass movements have always been anti-imperialist in nature.

Our masses have only ever rallied in full flight when this international ruling class is called to question. Yes, the Black Power Movement of the 1970s rallied against the local regime to the extent that the regime stood as buffer between the organised mass and the wielders of international capital.

Tate & Lyle, Texaco, the foreign banks, and the local expressions and minions of the Church of Rome, etc were the prime targets of the mobilisations and general discontent. We stand firm with our reading of the situation.

In our sense the proletarian view is not a "half-view". In fact it is the full view. We daresay that it is the middle element that sees only half the picture, that sees all agitation and subversion from below as "incapacity", precisely because they are positioned in the middle and neither at the top nor the bottom.

The people here have always been cautious of "salaried thinkers" who see "thought" as synonymous with action or as substitute for action and never comprehend that it is through action that one comes to see wholly. Ah mean, if Oxfam and Bono have come to see, why can't we?

(To be continued)