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III The Consequences: Really-Existing Globalized Liberalism

THE PARA-THEORY OF LIBERALISM and its accompanying ideological discourse promise salvation for all of humanity. This promise ignores every lesson of history. Really-existing globalized liberalism can produce nothing other than an intensification of the inequalities between peoples (an intensified global polarization) and within populations (of the global South and North). This pauperization, an integral part of capital accumulation, in turn makes democracy impossible, eliminating its imaginative potential in the developed centers (by substituting a low-intensity democracy for new advances in the social control of transformation) and reducing to farcical status the possible adoption of apparently democratic political forms in the peripheries.

Polarization occupies a central place in the history of the global expansion of really-existing capitalism. I understand by that the continually growing gap between the centers of the global capitalist system and the peripheries. This is a new phenomenon in the history of humanity. The extent of this gap has grown in two centuries to a point where there is nothing in common with what humanity could possibly have experienced in the past. This is a phenomenon that one can only want to do away with by the gradual construction of a postcapitalist society that is really better for all peoples.

Capitalism has developed the productive forces at a pace and to an extent unparalleled in all prior history. But, unlike any prior system, it has simultaneously widened the gap between what this development would potentially allow and the actual use made of that development. Potentially, the level of scientific and technological knowledge attained today makes it possible to resolve all of humanity’s material problems. But the logic that transforms the means (the law of profit, accumulation) into an end for itself has, without historical parallel, simultaneously given rise to a gigantic waste of the potential and an inequality of access to the possible benefits. Until the nineteenth century, the gap between the potential development that knowledge made possible and the level of development actually produced was negligible. Not that this reflection should encourage in us any sort of nostalgia for the past: capitalism was a preliminary necessity in order to realize the potential of development attained today. But it has had its day in the sense that continuing to follow its logic would produce no more than waste and inequality. In this context, the “law of immiseration,” formulated by Marx, has been verified in a striking manner—on the world scale—every day during the last two centuries. One should not be surprised then that at the very moment when capitalism appears to be completely victorious, the “fight against poverty” has become an unavoidable obligation in the rhetoric of the dominant groups.

This waste and inequality form the dark side of the picture, defining the “black book of capitalism.” They remind us that capitalism is only a parenthesis in history and not its end; that if it is not surpassed by the construction of a system that puts an end to global polarization and economic alienation, then it can only lead to the self-destruction of humanity.

The construction of a citizen democracy implies that the advances of socialization be grounded on the implementation of democracy and not exclusively through a market that has never produced the anticipated benefits.

1. FIRST CONSEQUENCE: THE NEGLECTED PAUPERIZATION AND POLARIZATION OF THE WORLD.

Is it poverty or pauperization that is produced by the process of capital accumulation?

It is fashionable today to discourse on poverty and the necessity, if not of eradicating it, at least of reducing its extent. This is a discourse of charity, in the nineteenth century style, which does not devote much time inquiring into the economic and social mechanisms which engender the “poverty” in question, and this in an epoch where the scientific and technological means at the disposal of humanity are sufficient to eradicate it totally.

Capitalism and the New Agrarian Question

All societies prior to capitalism were peasant societies, whose methods of agriculture were certainly diverse. But the logic which defines capitalism (the maximum profitability of capital) was foreign to them all. Capitalist agriculture, represented by a class of newly wealthy peasants, and even owners of modernized latifundia, or by domains exploited by transnational agribusiness corporations, readies the assault on peasant agriculture. It was given the green flag by the WTO at its meeting in Doha in November 2001. However, at the present time, the agricultural and peasant world still makes up at least one-half of humanity. Its output is divided between two sectors that are economically and socially completely distinct.

Capitalist agriculture, governed by the principle of the profitability of capital, is localized in North America, Europe, the southern cone of Latin America, and Australia, and employs only several dozen million farmers who are not truly “peasants.” But their productivity—a function of mechanization (which exists almost exclusively in these regions) and the extent of the land which each possesses—leads to a yield of between 10,000 and 20,000 quintals¹ of grain-equivalents per worker per year.

On the other hand, peasant agricultures support nearly half of humanity—three billion human beings. These agricultures are divided, in turn, between those that have benefited from the green revolution (fertilizer, pesticides, and the best quality seeds), but are still hardly mechanized, whose production yields between 100 and 500 quintals per worker and those that have not benefited from the green revolution, whose production yields only around 10 quintals per worker.

The gap between the productivity of the best equipped agriculture and poor peasant agriculture, which was 10 to 1 before 1940, is today 2000 to 1. In other words, the rate of growth in agricultural productivity has largely surpassed that of other activities, resulting in a real price reduction of 5 to 1.

Capitalism has always combined with its constructive dimension (the accumulation of capital and development of the productive forces) several destructive dimensions, such as the reduction of humanity to being nothing more than the bearer of labor power, itself treated as a commodity; long-term destruction of reliable natural bases for the reproduction of the means of production and of life; and destruction of sections of older societies and sometimes entire peoples, such as the North American Indians. Capitalism has always simultaneously “integrated” (that is, workers subjected to diverse forms of exploitation by expanding capital—by “use” in direct terms) and excluded (that is, those who, having lost the positions that they occupied in older systems, have not been integrated into the new). But in its ascendant, and historically progressive phase, it integrated more than it excluded.

This is no longer the case, as is specifically and dramatically evident in the new agrarian question. If, as dictated by the World Trade Organization since the Doha conference of November 2001, agriculture is integrated into the whole set of general rules of “competition,” thereby making agricultural and food products “commodities just like all the others,” there will be definite consequences, given the huge conditions of inequality between agribusiness, on the one hand, and peasant production, on the other.