Once more: Guyana and the wider world Guyana and the Wider World
By Clive Thomas
Stabroek News
April 8, 2007
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Almost a year has passed since my last article in the SN series 'Guyana and the Wider World.' During the past ten weeks, by agreement, Janette Bulkan has filled the space occupied by this series with an admirable survey of the key economic, environmental, social and policy issues facing the forestry sector in Guyana. Faced with having to resume my own articles I have found it rather difficult to decide which is the best topic to re-enter the series. The choice was made difficult because so much had transpired during the year I was ill - globally, regionally, and at home.

Apparently, however, from comments I have received from various persons who have been following the series over the years, the feeling is that I should begin with an assessment of the standing of the earlier set of speculative theses I had advanced on the 'State as a criminal enterprise.' I produced those theses four years ago during the period March and July, 2003. There were about 20 consecutive articles, and these can be retrieved by interested readers from the SN Sunday articles archives. The concerns expressed by those suggesting this starting point are whether there might have been a mis-specification of the reality of Guyana in the wider world in those articles. In other words, did I fail to distinguish the immediate manifestations of crime, violence, banditry, thuggery, death squads and such phenomena which abounded then, from the more systemic considerations? Do those theses therefore, still have validity after 3 years, and if so, what sort of validity?

Overview: One year later

This is a challenging task. In order to get to the bottom of such issues it is first of all necessary for me to undertake a rapid reconnaissance of recent global and regional developments as a prelude to inserting Guyana into these phenomena. In the original articles the global and regional contexts had together formed key dimensions or the backdrop for the evolution of the state as a vehicle for criminal enterprise. The question I need to resolve is: have these changed for the better or worse in recent times?

Let me begin with the global overview. Certain key aspects of the present global environment stand out as they would affect the evolution of the state. First, during the past year I have witnessed some faltering of the neo-conservative agenda as symbolised by their ubiquitous 'War on terror,' with Iraq, Afghanistan, and possibly Iran constituting the major hot spots.

Secondly, this 'War on terror' has pre-empted the trade and financial agenda of globalisation, which was previously ascendant. Today globalisation remains somewhat in the background of global considerations, certainly as compared to the situation a year ago. Nonetheless, the global economy continues to evolve with the same fundamental rhythms at work as those of a year ago. Thus India and China, which many people say might challenge this paradigm of capitalist-led growth, are becoming more and more evident the classic prototypes of 'factory states.'

While their phenomenal growth rates increasingly make them the workshops of the world for machine goods, all this development continues to be linked to a global network of trade and finance in which raw materials are imported for manufacture and re-exported to satisfy the pre-eminent requirements of the highly developed capitalist economies of America, Europe and Japan.

The transformation of this network to a more rationally-driven needs-determining growth based on these countries' domestic markets has not taken place. In fact the opposite increasingly occurs. In this sense, therefore, global capitalism continues its rampant transformation of the world economy the same as ever. Alternative models and paths of development have made no real impression globally.

Those who expected that the development of China and India as 'Third World' states would have produced a modification of global growth in favour of poor countries have been deeply disappointed. All that we can fairly say has been achieved thus far is a modest degree of differentiation of the world economy to the point where these countries have become bigger and bigger markets for raw materials, export manufactures and foreign investment. In that sense they have become more 'important' to the rhythms of global capitalist development, but they have not altered the central logic of global capital accumulation and growth.

Politics in command

Third, in addition to the above, the world has also witnessed a growing maturation of environmental threats, symbolised by those associated with global warming. Pollution, environmental degradation and waste disposal threaten the very existence of the global biosphere and all life forms on it.

The threat now is not only greater than a year ago, despite all the warnings that have been forthcoming in recent times, but the earth as a living biosphere is at tremendous risk of extinction as we now know it. This and the two previous developments have generated a situation where politics seems to be 'in command of economics.' By this I mean that political priorities and hence ideological considerations have become more ascendant in the global agenda, displacing economics, trade and financial considerations to second-order priorities.

With 'politics in command' we must note that this politics of course has two very different starting points for ideological interaction. The 'War on terror' is the cutting edge of the neo-conservative ideology. Environmentalism is the 'green' response of the citizenry at large to the threats to Planet Earth.

The 'War on terror' has led to a fourth major development, which is the explosive growth of militarism. It is not only the hot wars of Iraq and Afghanistan that drives this phenomenon, but geo-strategic considerations as well. In truth, the latter always seem to lead governmental action when politics is in command.

This militarism has pushed science and the technological-industrial complex relentlessly to search for new armaments and arenas for warfare. Space-based weaponry is being developed. Weapons of mass destruction are being miniaturised and precision targeting made more and more effective. Underwater-based warfare has advanced immensely as have the techniques of surveillance and monitoring.

Next week I shall continue this discussion.

Last Sunday's article recommenced my SN series on 'Guyana and the Wider World.' In that article I had indicated that for the period of the next several weeks I shall devote attention to an appraisal of the several theses I had advanced four years ago on the further deformation of the post-colonial authoritarian state that characterised long periods of our post-colonial politics to "the state as a criminal enterprise" (SS, March-July, 2003). This is largely due to the urging of some readers. A necessary prerequisite for this appraisal as might be expected is an assessment of some recent global and regional developments, since these provide the external context for the evolution of the state within Guyana.

So far I have highlighted four features of the global environment, which have a direct bearing on the analysis to follow. These are firstly, the covert and overt war on terror; secondly, the relegation of issues of trade, finance, and investment (globalisation) to the position of second order priorities on the global agenda; thirdly, threats to the environment, especially through global warming; and, finally, the explosive growth of weaponry and the 'securitization' of the state worldwide. As I argued last week, these had combined to put as it were, 'politics in command.' By this I meant gave the lead to ideological considerations in determining not only economic, social and political priorities but the geo-strategic posture of states as well. Today I continue this discussion.

Onslaught on human rights

The global developments I am singling out are those which, I believe are most germane to the criminalisation of the state. They are not intended to be exhaustive. Thus when 'politics is in command,' I infer that ideology invariably takes the lead in shaping responses to global affairs. One consequence of this has been that the war on terror, militarism and such like have produced an unprecedented onslaught on human rights worldwide. Pursuing terror and terrorists has served to justify the most brazen and systematic undermining of such basic human rights as habeas corpus; the right to fair and independent judicial review and trial; protection from arbitrary arrest and detention; and, the right to legal counsel of one's choice.

In the shadowy and covert war on terror, extraordinary rendition, preventive detention, torture, and prisoner abuse have been falsely justified and rationalized. While terrorists are more often than not portrayed as 'faceless' people, they are usually presented as pursuing everywhere the highly organised, relentless, systematic and ruthless destruction of basic human freedoms and personal liberty. Such actions on their part, it is claimed, justify responses which ignore traditional human rights protections. In this war in defence of liberty and freedom the ends justify the means.

On reflection, however, true democracy has always advocated opposite responses. It sees human rights preservation as becoming even more necessary when confronted by pathologies like terrorism. Democracy fears that if one sets out to fight terrorism with the use of state terror as a means it will rapidly become counter-productive and degenerate into a self-destructive exercise for society at large. The ends do not justify the means.

This assault on core human rights has occurred widely across the world, even in countries where liberty, freedom and the rule of law were seemingly most highly entrenched. Furthermore, in countries with fragile democracies it has become routine for governments to mobilize international public opinion against their domestic opponents through labelling them as having association with terrorists or worse as being 'terrorists' themselves. This as we shall see, has particularly unfortunate consequences for militant, yet entirely legal and constitutional, political opposition to domestic political concerns.

By-products

There have been also several unfortunate by-products arising from this situation. Firstly, it creates a predisposition for society at large to side with those who see themselves as 'enforcers' of the law rather than the traditional custodians serving and protecting the rights of the citizenry. Secondly, and associated with this it also creates a predisposition to the criminal use of the state, even in those countries where it is presumed democracy and the rule of law are well entrenched.

Thirdly, other and seemingly unrelated law and order issues follow from this situation. Thus in the US it is not an unrelated occurrence that during this period about 2.5 million persons are now sequestrated in some sort of prison or punitive detention. About 60 per cent of these are Blacks or Hispanics, even though combined these groups account for only 26 per cent of that country's population. Such outrages have not generated the sort of public outcry one would expect in a less highly inflamed situation.

Other social pathologies

Of equal importance to this review of significant recent developments is the accelerated growing proliferation globally of certain social deformations and pathologies. Thus religious antagonisms have grown more deeply, especially those between the Muslim and Christian faiths. Indeed this has occurred to the point where the principal protagonists in the 'war on terror' are portrayed by many as being defined by the faith they uphold.

Racism has also become more commonplace than it was years ago despite our growing understanding of the science of race.

Today as well institutional lip-service continues to be paid to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the vast majority of countries.

Organised crime, racketeering and the narco-economy have grown to even more stupendous proportions in the recent period, and today they provide livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And, despite international coordination of efforts to suppress such developments they remain effectively unrestrained as the war on terror has taken precedence over the war on drugs, it having demoted the latter to lip-service global attention.

In the meantime cultural, political and social intolerance has also grown exponentially. Very often this has become blended into the war on terror itself, which simply has added further fuel to the raging fire of global intolerance.

Next week I shall continue the discussion.

This week I conclude my contextual review of those recent global trends, which impact on the criminalisation of the state.

Inequalisation and Instability

Two dimensions of the evolving global economy are of great relevance to the issues under consideration. These are the deepening inequalisation it generates and the growing economic instability associated with this. In the former case the rich are getting richer and the poor relatively poorer, both within and among countries, suggesting that deep systemic processes are at work. Thus the USA, the world's wealthiest industrial capitalist economy, has reached levels of income and wealth inequality, which are the sharpest in its entire history. Worldwide, the gap between the wealthiest countries and the poor ones has widened in the face of weak efforts at global cooperation and despite the significant number of international agencies and governments providing foreign aid and technical assistance to the poor countries. Even the much touted reform of global trade under the Doha Round of the WTO has not reversed this process. Indeed the Doha Round has by all accounts, effectively expired. The processes of globalisation therefore, continue to produce the embeddedness of inequalisation. Resources directed to the war on terror, particularly in such hot spots as Iraq and Afghanistan, compete directly with resources that one would have hoped might have been directed to the attack on global hunger and poverty.

In the latter case of systemic instability, despite the positive global demand pressure created by expenditures on the war on terror, inequalisation not only persists but has been compounded by systemic instability. Fluctuating commodities prices, incomes, levels of employment, and profits have, through cause and effect, made global markets for finance, raw materials, and investment funds extremely volatile. These markets have, in effect, become like casinos, the sites for pure gambling. When crises erupt, given the high degree of market integration, they spread instantly around the globe. Thus "investor herding" and "contagion produced by panic reactions" have become familiar deviant patterns of market behaviour. Speculation has become destabilising, rather than stabilising, as the pure economic theory of competitive market equilibrium suggests. Global markets therefore, are not only efficient means of exchange, but as sites of pure gambling, sources of instability.

Positive Trends

Not all the trends have served to further the criminalisation of the state, because of their nature. Some have evil consequences because they have been manipulated by social forces in that direction. A striking example of this has been the continued worldwide explosive growth of science and technology. There has been an unprecedented growth in the discovery and application of new materials; biotechnology; information gathering, processing and analysis; and, space exploration. Similar advances have occurred in health, education, food and nutrition, and indeed most areas of scientific research and inquiry. Unlike say the war on terror, these trends do not necessarily produce negative tendencies favouring the criminalisation of the state. It is the misuse of the technological advances that produces this result. Most technologies are, by and large, available to those who could "afford" them and obviously prospering criminals are better able to do so than poor people and poor governments. This technological explosion has been unequally distributed and utilised among countries. Thus the Internet, with all its potential and ease of use is still not available to billions of persons. Nonetheless, the net effect of technical advances is that the world as a whole has attained the capacity to satisfy all the basic needs of its population for food, housing, clothing, recreation, health, education, and social services. What is missing in the equation is the political will to harness this capacity to secure the eradication of hunger, disease and death now stalking the lives of billions of persons.

We should also note that the development of the new technologies, while heavily concentrated in the rich countries, has permitted the evolution of a more differentiated global economy. This can be observed not only in the dramatic emergence of China and India but across large areas of the Third World, where advances have been made in levels of living of their populations. This is especially the case in East Asia and some parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. Africa, apart from a very few countries has failed to benefit significantly from these new technologies.

The clear conclusion, which emerges therefore, is that because these scientific and technological gains are at the heart of the process of globalisation, a key weakness of globalisation itself is its failure to conform to any reasonable sense of social justice and equality. The distribution of gains globally has been unequal and the political will to redress this, as I have pointed out earlier, does not exist.

Journalism

One final global trend that affects the criminalisation of the state is the rapidly growing crisis of journalism and newspapers. There has been a remarkable recent growth of non-traditional media, like the Internet and television, while in a large number of countries a marked decline has occurred in circulating newspapers, notably within the large cities of the USA, Europe, Japan and Australia. As newspapers have become more and more unprofitable due to this, journalists have become more and more dispensable. This situation has deeply challenged the relevance, usefulness, capacity and the very identity of the medium. The result is a decline in its position and standing as the "fourth estate," which is supposed to be a vital component of the structure and functioning of any democratic society. As the role of investigative journalism has declined, in this environment, the wicked, the criminal, the illicit, the illegitimate, and the intellectually dubious have prospered.

Next week I will begin to trace the significant regional trends in the same manner as I have documented global trends.