For a Diverse and Plural Millenium
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In Spite of White Man's Lament^*

Philippe Norel

During the 90's, an attack against the third world was started. “White man” would not have to reproach himself anything, the plunder of the South would only be an optical illusion, colonization had cost more than what was reported …

The forgetfulness of history is never neutral. To erase the past is one of the most dependable ways to sterilize any analysis of the present in order to tirelessly repeat old recipes and reiterate the same mechanism of domination. The Third World does not escape from this, and we see how a “Marshall Plan” is being proposed to it, that is, massive loans at low interests rates, when its debt to the generous central powers have already celebrated its first centennial¹.

The Third World movement has always been intent on remembering certain basic historical facts related to international economic relations. Not because of some morbid satisfaction, but to propose the intellectual conditions of a rupture with the established world disorder. It is accused of abusively simplifying history, of “not seeing in history other than Western history and its expansion, of depriving, in an insidiously paternalistic behavior, the Third World population of any responsibility for its own history”².

Historians and economists that know the Third World did not wait to be insulted in order to improve their own concepts and review their image of a certain number of facts not well perceived in their origin. That is the case of the concept of imperialism whose evolution has been important since the beginning of the twentieth century. Circumscribing the Third World historical thesis with accuracy and also to show its limits has become a demand opposite to ideological misappropriations of which they are currently victims. For the rest, the actual challenges exceed theory. They are especially related to a new attempt to ignore the history of international economic relations, a useful attempt for a liberal alternative to the current crisis, that is again looking to dominate the Third World following very old patterns …

The accusation of forgetting history and the responsibilities of the Third World peoples has already been widely and preventively refuted³. It practically ends by erasing the fact that Samir Amir among others, dedicated the essence of his production to analyze internal social clashes of the Third World nations in the framework of the center – periphery relations. It was him who introduced the distinguished three phases in the history of Third World plunder. India’s plunder and England’s fortune.

During the Mercantilist Phase (16^th–18^th centuries), Central and South America were deprived of their treasures and emptied of their populations (in the first conquered regions over 90% of the population was massacred since 1600). Slavery will replace these “Indians” who died due to violence, excessive work, and illness: around 10 million Africans arrive in America during those three centuries. Triangular commerce brought substantial incomes (300,000 pounds per year for Liverpool, thanks to the slaves, at the end of the 18^th century; and 4 million pounds of income for the British plantations in the Antilles, in 1798⁴. Finally, since 1760, the pillaging of India allowed transferring part of its wealth to England for the accumulation of the Industrial Revolution. Corresponding to this logic or pillaging, in the theoretical aspect, is the rise of and extraordinary ability of capitalism to exploit non-capitalist productive systems. Thus, after 1570, Spanish extracted silver from Potosi, using free labor force, sustained in an autonomous way and accustomed to paying taxes to the Inca with work⁵. With slavery, mercantile England knew how to recreate a non-capitalist productive system that could be exploited by the dominant economy. These were the first attempts to articulate different productive systems with capitalism in order to extract from them their autonomous labor forces.

The Industrial Revolution (1780-1880) is the second period when “old ways (slave traffic, New World pillaging) gradually disappear. One has the impression that Europe and the United States withdraw themselves to move from the pre-historic forms of capitalism to its finished industrial form”, and “the terms of exchange of foreign goods against manufactured British goods evolve according to the rule of equal exchange, with a tendency to reduce salaries to subsistence”⁶.

However, this period, is above all of penetration of Indian and Latin American markets that respectively absorb 22% and 35% of English cotton products exported in 1840⁷. At the same time, Chinese markets were obtained against the determination of Emperor Jia Qing. In 1816, Qing wrote to King George III who was pressing him to import English goods: “All the curious and clever things of your kingdom cannot be considered as having a rare value”⁸. We know about the means that powerful countries used in order to force this market needed for the Industrial Revolution products. Thanks to opium, the Chinese balance of trade was unbalanced since 1825, which provoked a reaction of the imperial power and resulted in the two Chinese military defeats of 1842 and 1860.

With the crisis of the period 1873-1895 a third period opens up, which sees in the United States the constitution of the great oil, electricity and steel oligopolies. In Europe, banks develop a capacity to export capital massively, above all to the border of Europe-Russia, the Ottoman Empire. Excessively indebted, the latter must give in to its creditors in 1881. The tutorship it must then bear installs "foreign control over salt and tobacco monopolies, the product of fiscal stamp rights, rights on alcohol and fishing, tax on raw silk production in certain districts"⁹. It is a real channeling of wealth produced in traditional economies, autonomous until then, towards a foreign country. The articulation of capitalism with an economy that is not, but which can be structurally adjusted to the demand for accumulation, can be found here.

This period characterizes the imperialist phase of Third World plundering, an imperialism defined as the financial capital capacity (banks and industries) to export capital towards the periphery with the aim of expanding the capitalist prosperity sphere and, above all, to alleviate certain income reductions registered in the center. It is on this point that Leninist theses have unquestionably grown old¹⁰. Today, imperialism would be defined, rather, as the export of capitalist production beyond its original borders. As of 1880, capitalism considers the possibility of devouring the various modes of production (to transform them into their image and likeness) on which it had fed until then.

The colonial plunder accelerating in the period 1920-1930, founded on the poll tax and forced labor, appears then, a priori, as an archaic residue destined to be replaced by capitalist expansion itself. But this forced labor will be largely used by private colonial companies and will constitute the basis for "primitive accumulation" of groups such as Boussac and Unilerver¹¹. This "archaism" will also serve as a relative buffer for the crisis of the 1930's, allowing to maintain markets and provisions within a protected space of foreign competence¹².

However, this historical body is not free of ambiguities. It is not only that it remains dependent on conceptual approximations, sometimes debatable or surmounted¹³, it also responds to a continuous vision of history. In this way, the previously described phases evacuate the crises and the moments of rupture in the modes of accumulation of capital. By not allowing to link the ways in which the Third World is exploited to the various modes of accumulation resulting from each major crisis, this type of analysis fails mainly in accounting for the challenges of the 80's.

Analyses of theoreticians called of regulation¹⁴ show, however, the complexity of recent phases of capitalism. Thus, in the crisis of the 1873-1895 period a "monopolist" regulation substitutes competitive regulation in the processes of adjustment of capitalism. Competition among companies, managed by recent concentrations, no longer allows for adjustment of offer to the demand through the free play of market forces. Since then, the power of semi-monopolies oppose labor forces, the Taylorian organization of labor is established and the free circulation of capital to the branches of strong demand.

This new mode of accumulation-regulation plays a role attributed to the Third World. Taylorism is accompanied by drainage towards the United States of peripheral unqualified manual labor, which will replace, in the chains, less protesting specialized workers¹⁵. Monopolies are capable of imposing low prices to the periphery for raw materials. Above all, they obtain substantial gains by limiting workers' salaries. But, since they are opposed to any competitive regulation that would demand automatic transfer of their profit towards branches of strong demand, they must export them. This export of capital towards the periphery becomes, thus, the form of monopolist regulation itself at the end of the 20^th century.

This new mode of accumulation and regulation allows to resolve, for a while, the great crisis of the 20^th century, particularly thanks to the role played then by countries receiving capital. However, salaries stand still at the center, which limits the development of the domestic market. The export of capital, creator of markets until the 1920's, stumbles on the lack of solvency of some debtors (the USSR after 1917) and the limits of colonial foreign markets¹⁶. The crisis of the 1930's will ratify these contradictions.

After 1945 Fordist and state regulation become generalized in developed economies. The new mode of accumulation is founded on Taylorism and in constant technological progress. In order to evacuate massive production thus authorized, Fordism will consist of regularly increasing the purchasing power of buyers, while the State contributes in sustaining consumption through indirect salary (social benefits), assuming collective costs necessary for capitalist accumulation (education, transportation and infrastructure, etc.).

In this same central dynamics, Third World export seems to play, a priori, a very secondary role. Indeed, the North-South trade portion in world exchanges regresses from 1945 to 1972. But one must not forget the deterioration of the terms of exchange of Third World primary products, which continues until 1973. One must not forget, above all, aid policies, after indebtedness, which serve to encourage peripheral markets of western Fordism due to consumption of Third World dominant layers. Finally, one must not forget the structural adjustments imposed by each payment deficit (through the International Monetary Fund or not) to dominated economies, in order to adjust them to the needs (even secondary) of an international labor division desired by the centers¹⁷.

And just as the crisis of the 1930's registered, as a form of alleviation, an intensification in exchanges between the metropolis and the colonies, the present crisis has shown, since the end of the 1960's, a renewal of flows of capital and goods towards the periphery. Wishing to improve the high production costs in the center and to invade new markets, central companies accelerate the transnationalization movement when the crisis is declared in the center¹⁸. Also wishing to evacuate their surplus of Euros and later of petro-dollars, western banks accelerate their loans to the Third World, thus creating the conditions of an always life-saving market, in view of the consumption stagnation in the North. Thus, the present crisis has looked for a peripheral discharge, just as the crisis of the 1930's resorted to a withdrawal of the colonial empire, which would supposedly solve the difficulties of French capitalism of the time.

The analysis of the phases of Third World exploitation with respect to the precise phases of accumulation-regulation in the center, is not only of theoretical interest. To depart from analyses, sometimes overly general, sometimes conceptual a priori and which do not take sufficiently into account the ruptures at the center, is a necessary condition to understand present challenges at their bases.

Joint action of banks and transnational companies

In the years 1970 and 1980, a mode of regulation that seemed to have a great future began to be implemented. Some may have thought that it constituted a solution to the present crisis. The joint action of banks and transnational companies in the Third World - integrating commercial, productive and financial world flows under the decision-making power of some financial groups - has been, unquestionably, a response to the crisis. In allowing to overflow the limits inherent to the powers of the various national governments, this process could be substituted by weakening state regulations. Due to the dis-localization of Taylorism and later of Fordism, for some peripheral countries (Brazil, Mexico, South Korea) that harbored western-type factories, this transnational regulation also seemed to geographically distribute the cards and break the central heaviness¹⁹. Particularly, the obstacle constituted by strong unions that return to hard to compress salaries.

In spite of individual economic successes of South Korean and Taiwanese state capitalism and of the capacity of transnational powers to adapt to many different national situations, the world crisis has severely worsened. Until now, transnational companies have not known, anywhere, how to recreate markets bearing an authentic economic recovery. In the financial front, the accumulation of debts produce fear of the worst to happen and forces very painful readjustments. Banks themselves begin to insure and resell at a loss their doubtful credits. World private regulation, then, has not known how to transform responses to the crisis into a true way out of the crisis²⁰.

If any new regulation should be established, the one that will see the light will have to integrate the Third World, with all its diversity, to a way of functioning capable of reproducing capitalism at a world scale. There is a great risk in reusing old recipes incapable of considering the Third World in different manner: not as an instrument at the service of central accumulation.

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