Trump who has emerged from the collapse of the so-called new world economic order appears like the spirit of raw,savage capitalism incarnate.He combines in himself qualities of early capitalist adventurers and the storied American robber barons,those qualities of a bully and a businessman.Alternately offering unsettling threats and sweetly worded deals,which is of course primarily to his own advantage.He is closely surrounded by a new breed of unruly capitalists who find any old kind of rules that restrain their unruly passion to plough huge profit out of powerful new technologies just a ‘damn nuisance’,who cock a snook at misgivings of climate catastrophe and political fall-out from pauperised millions.
There is thus little surprise in the fact that such people find in our Modi the perfect soulmate.Of course Modi has claims to spiritual grandeur that Trump would find unnecessary.Like his periodic retreat into the air-conditioned cave in the Himalayas where he retires after carrying out frenetic rounds of election campaigns peppered with choice epithets of abuse and lampooning of rivals and fantastic inventions of ‘post-facts’ and concoctions of dark conspiracies by a motley range of enemies of India and Sanatan Dharma,Urban Naxals and lurking agents of China and Pakistan.
But he too had shot like a meteor out of some corner of the sky upsetting calculations of the Advanis and Joshis who had settled down to a low-key Hindutva and conventional democracies.The difference is dramatically illustrated by his patronage of this year’s mammoth Kumbh Mela where so many crores had taken a dip in the holy Ganga and so many thousands perished in the stampedes.They both are experts in making deals and ‘surgical strikes’ that take the wind out of sails of their rivals.
Now what in bare essentials was the ‘new economic world order’?It was, stripped of its colourful rhetoric, the a myth about increasing equitable progress for all countries powered by free trade that would enable even the poorest countries to find value for their products bringing prosperity,and the richer developed countries to retain their own levels of affluence.
Of particular interest to poor and backward countries was the promise of getting unrestricted access to what they were in dire need of,Capital.In return however, they were compelled to abandon existing and long-standing protective state measures to fend off exploitative entry and exit of private capital.Especially critical was liquidation of practically all government interventions like agricultural rebates and subsidies,which led in India to a massive hike in food prices and farmer suicides by hundreds.
Most important it did not address the deeply unjust and unequal terms of trade between developed and under-developed countries in place since colonial times when natural products and industrial goods were valued differentially by colonial masters at the cost of colonies and less developed countries.Even when prices of such natural goods saw substantial rise the increase was pocketed by foreign corporates that now had unrestricted access to it! Thus it was in essence some sort of a cartel of developed nations along with any number of client states in the tow.It was blandly called World Trade Organization.
Significantly the rules of this organization were drawn up by the elite club of developed Western countries and Japan.If these led to oppressive conditions in less developed countries there was no help for it.True in the beginning either through some temporary new openings in world market or through deliberate strategic laxity of the dominant countries,India gained some benefits which famously enabled it to lift 30 million people out of abject poverty.
But since then it has pushed down the abyss many millions more——a fact hidden by the scandalous systematic expansion of free rice doles and regular tidbits of cash transfer under various fancy names.It has become a real ordeal for economists to get at the real figures of poverty in this country thanks to the regular and proliferating fudged statistics thrown up by state-funded sham expertise.
The general reversion to capitalist free competition from social democratic state-led development to freedom and dignity for those who will and work was accompanied by a whole gamut of political and cultural changes,with state-owned DOORDARSHAN leading from the front.From the accursed black beast of social democratic phase America somersaulted on screen to being the land of freedom and plenty,indeed the end of the long road for progress.Indeed in serial after serial on DOORDARSHAN America was portrayed as the desirable goal for merit and hard work, that was rewarded with prosperity, freedom and happiness.
Capitalist competition was no longer denounced as pathological but as the embodiment of Dharma.In one popular serial two tycoons who were competing in business were shown fighting a savage all-in physical tussle,with the hero receiving timely spiritual advice from a holy man.
Popular culture also replicated similar images of enterprise and success.Bill Gates now replaced Martin Luther King as the new icon that drew attention from aspiring generations. Particularly for the thrilling story of a leap from a start-up in a garage to the status of the world’s toasted billionaire.He received and responded to massive fan mail from Indian children.Jobs like those of an air-hostess loomed before wistful young men and women as dream jobs marked by riches,glamour and prestige. Troops of young girls from small towns decked out in smart miniskirts and ties it bows got themselves trained for such dream jobs.Incidentally,years later I saw three such girls forced to attend to all the needs of a planeload of passengers, and their drawn faces spoke of anxiety and deep pent-up distress.
Of course this order was destined to collapse when the cartel of freedom-touting trading nations had squeezed as much profit as they could and the majority of former third world countries getting no richer nor wiser from all this.Following the classic law of business cycles( Marxian crises,if you like) it collapsed and their hopes got buried in its rubble.
So back to square one of renewed and severer conflict among nations,domination by the rich and powerful and helpless anger and despair among the poor.
The new element was the return of poverty to America.As Bernie Sanders the ‘socialist’ senator starkly laid out in the Senate the other day the great majority of American ‘middle class’ had slid back into the ‘working class’ status by all manifest signs.
However recognition of the calamity was delayed indefinitely among intellectual and scholarly circles by a significant paradigm shift.Disillusionment with Marxism among intellectuals who lacked the patience and the optimism to sustain them during periods of social inertia made them opt for a crucial paradigm shift.
The very idea of radical transformation based on analysis and practical experience in the present being a product of enlightenment rationality sublimated in Marxist dialectics was blamed for the non-appearance of the blessed moment of revolution and Postmodernism invaded the campuses and the media in a lightning campaign,seeming to sweep all before it.
Its strategy turned on a simple misrepresentation of Ferdinand De Saussure’s basic idea that language is to be treated as a semiotic system which proceeded from a word as a referent not necessarily organically linked to an object outside the system.The referent was needed to build the rule-bound structure,and to De Saussure it was immaterial if it really existed or not for such a semiotic system to be functional. Varieties of postmodernism leapt to the conclusion that language alone constructed the world we live in and deal with it.From logical bracketing to total erasure of the objective world!
One curious product of postmodernism,as in Foucault,was the reading of power equation in all human relations ranging from parent to child through teacher and student to doctor and patient.While possible it does not consider if such power is necessarily evil or harmful.Then the matter of the poststructuralist Derrida showing all structured thinking untenable and brittle,rendering any construction of meaning hopeless.
A deep vein of scepticism and pessimism runs through these prolific iconoclastic writings.The upshot is distrust of any meaningful human effort to find a way forward in any field.The only doubtful benefit is the sense of emancipation from all illusions about existing and potential human endeavours.
A related field of studies in postmodernist epistemic reversal was the Subaltern Studies where the grand narrative of total revolution through class-struggle is replaced by numerous mitnor or Subaltern struggles bretween oppressor and opprressed,like patriarchy and women,centre and margin , upper caste and dalit,modern and traditional.
The proponents trace the conceptual germ of this alternative history in Gramsci though it is doubtful if Gramsci would have approved of replacing class-struggle with them.As far as I understand these subsidiary contradictions are rendered possible and kept in place by the overarching architecture of class society. For instance capitalist class domination ensures that private property of males is organised around a particular constitution of the patriarchal family where women lose their agency and rights.And the primary concern for location of industry and enterprise being profit,certain regions remain in the shadows.And so on.
Halcyon days of new economic order lasted from 1990s to early years of the new millennium until the 2008 blow-up. During this period there was so much optimism about future Utopia being within reach that United Nations Human Development Index was prepared to guide the international community in directing attention and funds towards deserving regions for required deployment to pull up those lagging behind.
Then there is the less talked about and whispered underside where the repressed passions spoke in their own tongues. A phenomenal spurt in crime and vicious and heinous acts of people we can only call psychopaths.Sadistic acts of hair-raising cruelty and wanton violence frequently hit headlines in media.Similarly atavistic racial or sexual antipathy erupts but are kept under wraps by dominant social discourse.Mahbubul Haque,propounder of HDI,while joining the chorus of praise to the coming neo-liberal Utopia did not forget to put all such eye-popping data in a box.
Since these pathologies of human behaviour belong integrally to deregulated capitalism,the question arises if such blind animosities and savagery is the hidden and suppressed double of capitalism itself.It prods us to wonder if fascism is a latent possibility inherent in capitalism.
Realising that the architecture of security built around military threat and deterrence and the solid alliance of advanced capitalist countries against any challenge to its hegemony have become not only outdated since collapse of Socialist camp and then diminishing returns from military arm-twisting of rebellious countries,but also much too costly Trump has taken the bold step of tearing down the veil of cordiality and brutally laying bare the accounts showing the allies prifiting at America’s expense.He now cuts down on costs of American charity to gag protests in the third world,demands allies bear burden of NATO in equal measure and proposes a return to unvarnished rules of naked capitalist competition and exploitation.In his own country he remorselessly cuts down welfare outlay on the poor and the depressed sections.
Reduced to his perspective America is just one of the handful of giant economies in desperate mutual competition with Russia.China, European Union,and to a lesser extent with India,Brazil and the rest.Trump bids fair to defy all previous norms to restore America to a position wrestling the lion’s share from the spoils of a new trade war.The narrative marks a clear and complete departure from that dominant heretofore. Capitalism minus its liberal veil,in sum.
That makes the path for liberation struggles all over the world so much the clearer.End capitalism or get resigned to go down to an epochal crash with it.
Hiren Gohain is a political commentator
