jssadmin – Journal of State and Society

Unravelling the genre of ‘Experience – writing’ in Malayalam

jssadmin — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 05:22:36 +0000

Knowledge Economy: A Theoretical Review

jssadmin — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 05:16:58 +0000

RAJAN GURUKKAL

Kerala State Higher Education Council, India

Knowledge economy, much discussed these days, is topical and most of us have a fairly good idea about it as an economy that transforms the contemporary world. Acquisition of knowledge, the basic economic resource, is a critical economic process today. We talk about nations leapfrogging into it by ensuring preparedness to be globally competitive in innovative research. Still most of us are commonsensical about conceiving this economy and characterising it transformative. Scholars have been adding to the dubiousness by using the words ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’ as well as ‘economy’ and ‘society’ interchangeably and by coining new expressions like ‘information society/economy’ as corollary.

Most economists have characterised the knowledge economy as an entity independent of Capitalism. Even specialists forget Capitalism, while they characterise the knowledge economy, despite the former being the dominant economy of the world for so long. Some scholars who are bothered about Capitalism have taken the knowledge economy either as a post-capitalist or post-industrial economy or as a phase of the dissolution of Capitalism. As a result, all of them have lost sight of the fundamental process under way and the far reaching consequences thereof. Amidst a commendable number of economists, only a few critical political economists and social theorists have approached the knowledge economy in the context of Capitalism. Based on their insights and drawing on the meaning and implications of the term economy as a system of production, consumption and exchange; this article seeks to do a theoretical review of what the expression ‘knowledge economy’ connotes and how it operates. Examining who coined the expression, how the concept evolved, when it got lost in descriptions of features, and why a theoretical resuscitation indispensable, the essay attempts to show that ‘knowledge economy’ is a rhetoric that hides new dimensions of Capitalism.

For PDF version of Full text Read 1. State and Society 2023 – Rajan Gurukkal

How to think about colonialism

jssadmin — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 15:56:00 +0000

SUREN PILLAY

Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape

Contemporary approaches to the legacy of colonialism tend to narrowly emphasize political agency as the solution to Africa’s problems. But agency is configured through historically particular relations of which we are not sole authors.

Though for many there is little dispute that colonialism “happened.” What that historical fact means for the contemporary lives of people across the world today is matter of dispute, and not only amongst scholars. Those who were once upon a time either colonizer or colonized would more readily find agreement that some countries colonized other countries. Or more precisely, that some European empires colonized many territories. The recent coronation of a new British monarch recalls that famous phrase that the “sun never sets on the British empire.” Simply put, the British Empire’s reach was so geographically expansive—it is said nearly 25% of the Earth’s land mass at its mightiest–that if the sun was setting in some part of the empire it was also simultaneously rising in another part of the empire.

The lights never went out, so to speak. Extending this luminous metaphor further, it was projected that the light of Enlightenment radiated by British civilization would also illuminate the darkness of consciousness amongst the colonized. But as signaled by British prime minister Harold Macmillan’s famous speech to the whites-only parliament of South Africa in Cape Town in 1960, the winds of change were to set the sun on the political rule of empires over colonies, at least as a legitimate political practice that had started in 1497, for the British. Chiding his white South African audience a tinge, Macmillan observed:

In the twentieth century, and especially since the end of the war, the processes which gave birth to the nation states of Europe have been repeated all over the world. We have seen the awakening of national consciousness in peoples who have for centuries lived in dependence upon some other power. Fifteen years ago this movement spread through Asia. Many countries there of different races and civilisations pressed their claim to an independent national life…The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

The idea of national consciousness as the inevitable expression of freedom, in this account, first thought of and lived out in Europe, was now repeating itself in the rest of the world. This was how Macmillan’s liberal contemporaries had come to philosophize the relinquishing of political rule and trusteeship over “their” colonies. Liberal imperialists narrate decolonization as a benevolent act in the inevitable march toward freedom and the nation-state that liberalism would claim as its proud heritage to this day. It remains a narrative denuded of the actual story of liberal trusteeship and paternalism that violently denied colonized peoples their sovereignty for hundreds of years. My point in recalling this is to underscore the consensus by most people—erstwhile colonizer and colonized— that colonialism happened, but also that colonialism definitely ended. (With more nuance, a version of this argument can be found in the Cornell philosopher Olufemi Taiwo’s Against Decolonization, Taking African Agency Seriously.)

It has a start date and a terminal date: colonization ended with decolonization by the 1960s. Except in settler colonies, in territories such as Rhodesia, Angola, Mozambique, South West Africa, and South Africa. Well, yes it did end in that sense. But even in the very moment of hoisting up the new flag of national independence with exuberance, anti-colonial leaders like Nasser of Egypt, Nkrumah of Ghana and Nyerere of Tanganyika already began to talk of “neocolonialism,” the new form of colonialism they discovered, which tethered politically free countries to economically dependent relations with the former colonizing powers. It was a relationship they experienced immediately as a fetter on true independence and sovereignty.

Over the next decades, African political leaders preoccupied themselves with the processes of state formation, of building the national consciousness seen as necessary to produce new forms of communities that could unite around the nation. Charismatic political leaders, and the ideologies of development, offered symbols and programs around which to unite. At the same time, a generation of critical intellectuals and scholars drew attention to the limits that neo-colonial relations placed on the freedom of the freed states. Africa could not “develop” if development itself was being kicked at the shins from the very beginning.

Walter Rodney, the Caribbean historian and activist who found himself in the heady debates at the University of Dar es Salaam in the 1960s articulated the problem powerfully in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Colonialism was formally over, but it held on to its mission and gains through a systematic relationship of economic dependency. Critical intellectuals in Latin America were coming to the same conclusions, and developed concepts such as “dependency theory,” articulated by historical sociologists such as Andre Gunder Frank to describe the historical phenomena they were living through.

At the same time, holding the postcolonial nation-state together was a challenge across many parts of the African continent, but also elsewhere right at the very beginning of decolonization as an expression of Macmillan’s celebrated national consciousness. Think of the slaughter that accompanied the fracturing of India through partition to produce two new political entities, a homeland for Muslims by the name of Pakistan, and the contested idea of whom India should be a homeland for, a question that features prominently in India’s current predicaments. There was also the secessionist impulse that produced the Biafra war in Nigeria (1967-1970). It was Julius Nyerere’s political dexterity that successfully welded Tanganyika and Zanzibar together despite the Zanzibari revolution.

The precarity of unity increasingly required a firm grip on political life and more centralized states. The suspicions of coups and palace intrigue further concentrated political powers, encouraging military rulers to take on political roles in the name of unity and development. New kinds of political figures emerged in this context—playing into the bigman theories of African politics were figures such as Idi Amin, Jean Bedel Bokassa, Mobutu Desire Sese Seko.

Another trajectory of post-independence leaders is symbolized by the lionized and tragic figure of Thomas Sankara, or the ideologically syncretic figures of Sekou Toure and Muammar Gaddafi; they represented a different kind of hope for radical nationalist commitments. The civil wars that took place in the post-independence period in Africa mobilized constituencies defined in some places by tribal solidarities, in other places by religious solidarities or combinations of either, and mapped onto territorial notions of who belonged. And often also inflamed by the Cold War.

When it came to intellectuals, the mainstream orthodoxies of those “studying Africa” as professional vocations—the policy experts and many mainstream Africanists of North America or Europe—looked askance at some of their colleagues, who tended to valorize the social reality of solidarities and consciousness of clan or tribe over nation and state. Africanist political science tended to lament the absence of national consciousness as an antidote to a parochial consciousness. The future, as modernization theory wished it, would produce the modern individuated and supposedly abstract citizen of liberal political theory, unencumbered by tribal or religious identity. On the Western, Marxist-influenced left there was a lament too, less for the individual of liberal freedom but for the radical collective political subject united by class relations that was being fractured by the cultural/ethnic consciousness of tribal mobilizations.

But what a consensus about the historical fact of colonialism means in relation to understanding political life today remains a major debate. Political movements on the continent critical of the centralization of leaders and powers of states and political figures, increasingly identified the problems of contemporary Africa as a product of the agency of African elites and leaders. Disillusioned by the emphasis on state formation and unity at the expense of the people, while claiming to be in the name of the people, the answer to the problems for post-Cold War opposition movements resided in the panaceas of civil society and multipartyism championed in the late 1990s.

By the early 1970s analyses of the practices of states and leaders were understood through concepts such as corruption or neopatrimonialism; both are concepts that conflate descriptions of power with explanations of political practices. More elaborate descriptions of agency as the expression of pathologies of grotesque and even libidinal power would follow (for example in the writings of Bayart, and Mbembe). These arguments increasingly emphasized agency or the choices made by African leaders themselves as primary culprits, whether as participants in colonial rule or agents of their own dire fates as post-independence African societies.

Over time, this mode of critique produced two responses as solutions. First, a current wave of well-meaning policies and think-tanks dedicated to leadership studies, and the need to produce more “ethical leaders.” The hope that leadership studies will solve Africa’s problems is an expression of an idea of agency. Second, emphasizing agency by holding individual leaders accountable through criminalizing abuses of power—a response driven by a human rights approach.

The emphasis in many of these approaches is on the solutions to African political and economic predicaments, as primarily solved by African agency; where agency is interpreted as the choices individuals make in the present. These choices are understood as bad choices when political leaders derive private gain from public resources, and as good choices when political leaders act in the public interest. As formulations of political agency, these approaches tend toward a largely ahistorical understanding of political subjects and political subject formation because they think of agency and leadership outside of political and economic history. Colonialism in these analyses ended, as Macmillan declared, with political independence. For example, in the frameworks of human rights discourse shaped by criminal law, to try and explain why this or that practice or horrendous event is happening, or has happened, tends to be viewed as an excuse. Explanation and impunity have become conflated.

It was into this breach that some scholars of contemporary political predicaments weighed in across different geographical locations and out of different colonial experiences, to offer accounts of political predicaments in the present. When the Ugandan political theorist Mahmood Mamdani published his landmark Citizen and Subject in 1996, it was in intervention that sought to rethink agency by historicizing political identities and political practices. Rather than lament the absence of the liberal subject that could transcend tribe or lament the absence of a class consciousness that could repress tribe or race, Mamdani’s starting point was to ask how could we explain the politicization of cultural identity as the basis of solidarities that produced the violence of civil war and even genocide? Before offering a solution Mamdani compelled us to first ask, what is the problem? How do we understand the predicament that was politically manifesting?

As an approach, Citizen and Subject offered a way to think about colonialism, not as a specific experience or moment that happened in the past that is better left in the past, but as a historical phenomenon, with the legacy of late colonialism in the present. A legacy does not imply that we are prisoners of history, overdetermined by the past. But it implies that agency is configured inside of historically particular relations of which we are not sole authors or agents. The late Caribbean intellectual Stuart Hall might have described this analogously as “studying the conjuncture:”

A conjuncture is a period during which the different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society come together to give it a specific and distinctive shape…A conjuncture can be long or short: it’s not defined by time or by simple things like a change of regime – though these have their own effects… history moves from one conjuncture to another rather than being an evolutionary flow. And what drives it forward is usually a crisis, when the contradictions that are always at play in any historical moment are condensed….Crises are moments of potential change, but the nature of their resolution is not given.

What then is the relationship between colonialism as a historical fact, and the predicaments of our political present, our current conjuncture? Should the formerly colonized, both intellectuals and political leaders, dispense with colonialism as a presence in the present? Or should scholars and intellectuals encourage more rather than less reflection on the ways in which colonialism shapes political institutions and political agency, and the sensibilities and ways of thinking and knowing the world? These are questions that animate the chapters that have been gathered together in On the Subject of Citizenship: Late Colonialism in the World Today. In it scholars have considered contemporary political predicaments, for example: political violence in ethnic federations such as Ethiopia; how European societies contend with their self identity as secular and tolerant in relation to postcolonial migrants; or how women as political agents are understood in relation to markets and patriarchy in Indian democracy.

Diverse as they are, the reflections could be considered as ways to think about colonialism in the present. They argue not just that we understand the global South better if we understand the relationship between the colonial past and our present better, but also that we understand modernity on a global scale better by understanding the historically specific ways in which every expanse of the earth, East and West, North and South, bears the trace, and the blood-stained signature of late colonial modernity.

______________________________

Courtesy: Africa Is a Country

Sectarian Citizenship and the Marginalized in the New India

jssadmin — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 15:25:00 +0000

SREEREKHA SATHI, International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University in The Hague, Netherlands

Keywords:

India, Citizenship Amendment Act, National Register of Indian Citizens, Covid-19, Shaheen Bagh, Hindutva.

Abstract

This article discusses the citizenship legislation in India in light of its increasing violation of citizens’ rights, growing fascist politics, and strengthening alliance with contemporary transnational capital. More specifically, the article examines India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) of 2019 along with the attempts to implement a National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC) by 2021 and elaborates upon the moves by the Indian state around the passing of the CAA. In so doing, the author aims to reveal a new phase in the assertion of the extreme right-wing agenda which seeks to make India into a Hindu nation. The article also places the controversial CAA and NRIC within the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and examines the impact of the pandemic on India’s poor, migrants and marginalized. Finally, the article discusses the suppression of voices against the Citizenship Act, and the continuing resistance to it led by women, students, intellectuals, activists and others.

For the full text, read the PDF version 2. State and Society 2023 – Sreerekaha – Proof-14-27

Will the world ever recognise Pakistan as a ‘Failed State’?

jssadmin — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 15:17:00 +0000

N SATHIYA MOORTHY

Commentator, India

For years if not decades now, some Indian analysts have dubbed neighbouring Pakistan as a ‘failed state’ or a ‘fragile state’. It owes mostly to their prejudices, which stood exposed sooner, and they too have stopped using the pejorative / adjective as frequently as earlier. In comparison, western analysts and scholars have been more circumspect in the matter, their views influenced both by academic discourses in the matter and also the given-day’s perception of their governments, based on Pakistan’s geo-strategic utility to them and their allies over the immediate term.

An academic definition of a ‘failed State’ — and there are many with minor alterations – is of a nation that has ‘dis-integrated to a point where basic conditions and responsibilities of a sovereign government no longer function properly’. A State can also fail ‘if the government loses its legitimacy even if it is performing its functions properly’.

Accordingly, a failed State is defined by the ‘loss of control of its territory or of the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force’. It can become one if there is ‘erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions’ or ‘inability to provide public services’ or ‘inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community’.

Needless to point out, these are western definitions, and are wide enough to provide for various possibilities so as to tag their various adversaries accordingly at the time of their choosing. Or, so it seems. Yet, no nation has been declared a ‘failed State’ by any other, implying that all those conditions, or at least a majority of them, need to be met for a nation to be declared a ‘failed State’.

No covenant

It is also unclear if the UN or any other body could declare a nation as a ‘failed State’, as there is no international convention or such other covenant, for fixing the authority and responsibility for such branding. There is hence no set procedure for anyone to tick off boxes in a detailed questionnaire to arrive at a conclusion, whether convincing or otherwise.

With the result, the branding of a nation or a people as a ‘failed State’ is a geo-political and geo-strategic attempt to run down a fellow-nation in the comity, without having to defend the decision. For, even an academic attempt of the kind would require to flow from a process where academic rigour counts the most – at times, more than the facts on the ground that could be touched, felt and also perceived.

Thus, over the past several years, the international media and strategic analysts writing for them have dubbed Somalia a ‘failed State’, from time to time. Much of it recur whenever there is a dramatic spike in the Indian Ocean piracy attributed to pirates, supposedly based in Somalia or belonging to Somalia. Both are often one and the same.

At the same time, when Yugoslavia, an artificial creation after the Second World War, threatened to break up, and whatever remained the ‘central authority’ tried to stop it through military means, its leaders were tried by the International Court of Criminal Justice (ICCJ). It thus became clear that a nation-State should attempt to stop or stall disintegration only at the risk of losing out on all fronts and grounds, if someone more powerful – and they always are – choses to do so.

Such discrepancies galore. Those instances would roll out of the closet if there is a comprehensive study of ‘failed States’ on the one hand, and States that are all but dead but remain in the reckoning as a full-fledged nation-State only because no one had tagged or branded it as such, for narrow political reasons.

Thus, Afghanistan under ‘foreign occupation’ with a puppet government, whose authority did not cross capital Kabul, escaped the branding whereas the native Taliban rule that is ‘all pervasive’ (!) risks such a tag. Both, however, are for good reasons, if one looks beyond it as more than an academic exercise.

How to name it

There is once again the 21st century western norm of ‘my failed State and your failed State’ just as they have devised ‘my terrorist and your terrorist’, to fix a nation. By such an approach, Pakistan, because it lost sovereignty over its eastern wing with the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, is typically a ‘failed State’. Yet, the residual areas, which used to be the western wing and still constitute Pakistan as a nation-State, are alive and active. How does someone name it – failed, failing, or neither?

Yet, there is the question of the central authority not doing enough or not having enough to offer all the existing services to its population, even if not enhance them in quality and quantity. Pakistan today does not have fuel to electrify homes that had got used to the services. For the same reason, the nation’s Railways has come to a grinding halt, according to news reports. There are such other shortages, where fuel is the main ingredient, in manufacturing and services sectors.

The government is also reported to have sold properties in the US, not that the realised amount would have gone to meet a year’s national budget or fuel imports. Does it all make Pakistan a ‘failed State’ just now?

Flowing from this construct is a real-life situation when such problems fade away, possibly over the short, medium or long terms. Again, it is theoretical: Will the tag be then removed? If so, who will remove it, and how? Is it just as it was conferred the title, by some faceless persons sitting in cubby-holes of newsrooms or analysts’ desks? Or, who are they?

Following ‘illegal orders’

The reasons are not far to seek. In another South Asian nation, Sri Lanka, the year 2022 witnessed shortages of every kind, in everything, and people were denied train and bus services, food and medicines, owing to fuel shortage. Of course, this became a reality owing to a shortage of American dollars that nations other than the US have to earn while the latter had to only print. An unfair system, yes, a system that continues to rule the world.

What more, in Sri Lanka, there were nation-wide mass protests that forced the exit of the government of the day. Fearing for personal safety, President Gotabaya Rajapksa first fled the country and then quit, formally, officially.

Lately, there are unsubstantiated accusations that the top brass of the nation’s armed forces might have colluded with ‘external players’, nations and their intelligence agencies, to extend silent support to the protestors. At least, there is some evidence that the leadership of the armed forces might not have passed on instructions from the President, who was/is the supreme commander, down the line, to settle the situation before it went out of hand.

The question would still have arisen, both legally and morally, if the armed forces should have followed ‘illegal orders’ that also purportedly violated international human rights norms and conventions, whose colours again keep changing, depending on the target-nation and the targeted leadership. Anyway, in the end, despite ticking off most boxes, Sri Lanka was never considered a failed or failing State anytime during the mass protests or thereafter.

Responsibility to Protect

It was not the case with some other nations, where the UN’s ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) dictum was employed to ensure international intervention of one kind or the other. Long before the UN adopted the dictum and the spirit and conditions that went with it, India had employed the R2P in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, but to different outcomes.

Pakistan has escaped international odium, though at the height of the 20-year-long, failed American military presence in neighbouring Afghanistan, the US Air

Force bombed many Pakistani areas, purportedly targeting terrorists belonging to Al Qaeda and Taliban. The precision-targeting of Osama bin-Laden in Abbottabad is well documented to be repeated in detail.

In the immediate South Asian context and neighbourhood, every other nation other than India, seems ready to be tagged a ‘failed State’ as per western academic definitions, now or a lil’ later, for reasons that could be attributed with retrospective effect. Apart from Afghanistan, Myanmar is one nation that may have been branded as a ‘failed State’, very long ago and very many times over the past decades, and at least once since the military coup of 2020.

Yet, they all have a central authority with which the international community has contacts and contracts, from whichever part of the world they come from and whatever be their ideological moorings. Hence, a central authority, whose writ runs substantially if not wholly, may be the defining clause. Pakistan has nothing to fear in context, as despite one too many mass protests and long marches, both sponsored and spearheaded by the political Opposition of the day, over the past decades, the central authority has remained.

Did ‘democratisation’ and smooth power-transfer help, unlike when the late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto rigged the 1977 elections – and paid for it with his authority first and later life, when the armed forces under Gen Zia-ul-Haq found him too inconvenient and too ambitious at the same time? Is it also why, despite the current political uncertainty bordering on inevitable calamity, the armed forces are not sticking their necks out, beyond a point? Definitely, they do not want to have the resources to clean up the economic mess, and would want the politicos to take the full blame for it, and step in, if they still have to.

Deep State syndrome

Yet, none of it justifies Pakistan-sponsored cross-border terrorism against India, which has now become seasonal rather than being all-weather, but it still remains. Also, as is often said, while other nations have armed forces, in Pakistan, the armed forces have a nation. Ask every democratically-elected Prime Minister of the nation who has been deposed – again, democratically (!) — they would say how the army played foul.

The latest to join the list is Imran Khan, who did not have to say much against the armed forces when he became Prime Minister or was enjoying his honeymoon with them – more than with his voters. That is only one side of the story.

Looking from outside, especially from the neighbourhood Indian perspective, the question is slightly modified: Does the army in Pakistan own the ISI or is it the other way round? Yes, prima facie, the former is the truth, but the Pakistani ‘Deep State’ has characteristics that put the ISI as an institution on the top of the conventional armed forces.

After a point, the distinctions disappear, or at times stand out, as the case maybe. Thus, nations like the US seem to believe that Pakistan’s armed forces, through the incumbent chief of staff of the army, control politics and political administration. They have no hesitation talking to the generals over the head of the popular government, in Rawalpindi, Islamabad and Washington or elsewhere, as the case may be.

Greater bother

For India, the ISI is a greater bother as on the conventional war-front, Pindi too seems to have acknowledged the superior fire-power and past victories of their Indian counterparts. That also supports the argument that the Pakistani armed forces control and use the ISI to target India through cross-border terrorism and support for ‘separatist militant terrorists’ inside India.

New Delhi however has refused to yield to suggestions that it should engage the Pakistani generals, either through its army top-brass or diplomatic corps based in Islamabad. On that score, as with India’s overall China policy, there is a kind of consistency in the Indian approach, independent of parties, purported ideologies or leaderships at power in Delhi.

Just now, Pakistan is caught between the economic crisis, where the Chinese friend has been hesitant in bailing out the country beyond all red-lines, and the emerging problems with the Taliban. Recently, an Afghan Minister tweeted a vintage picture of the Pakistan army’s surrender in the Bangladesh War as if to mock the Islamabad-Rawalpindi combo, in response to a threat to target them for terrorist incidents in Pakistan.

Where India is not there

That is where the West wants Pakistan to be vis a vis Afghanistan, and that is where Pakistan has to be seen being in, if Islamabad has to get economic aid from the West and the West-controlled international financial institutions. The reception that Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto received in Washington and Berlin late last year, especially the former, should be indicative of what was in store.

Suffice is to point out that through the past decades until the US decided to withdraw from the Afghan theatre, and executed it some time later, successive American Presidents had underwritten Pakistan’s wayward expenses, and told Congress that the huge spending was all required to secure their own homeland, and/or to serve America’s geo-strategic interest in the region, viz an expansionist China. Though Zia did dub President Jimmy Carter’s aid offer as ‘peanuts’ and got caught in live-microphones.

India is not in the game, yes, but that could also mean that New Delhi might soon see a slow-paced US approach to its complaints against Pakistan on terrorism front, in furtherance of the larger all-American ‘supreme national self-interest’, now and later. Which also means that no one is going to declare that Pakistan is a ‘failed State’, whatever the reason and whatever the ground condition(s).

Integrity in State and Statecraft: Revisiting Kautilya

jssadmin — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 15:09:00 +0000

RAJEEV KUNWAR, Kantipur TV HD, Kathmandu, NEPAL

Kautilya is a pioneer in the logical and unique treatise on the state and statecraft. He is a realist by tradition. A chef-d’oeuvre popularly read by the title Arthashastra, Kautilya delved into the art of statecraft or governance par excellence. His text has its pretext and context wherein every single aspect of human life falls under the jurisdiction of the State. Kautilya’s text lays down an organizational set-up. It provides a neat and clean separation of ethics and politics. Integrity in state and statecraft includes ethics and more so applied ethics or ethics in action in a real-life situation. There is a dilemma in contemporary politics about whether to follow realism or ethics to resolve and manage public and state affairs. Revisiting Kautilya has become necessary to strike a balance on this dichotomy to pursue “liberal realism.”

Kautilya was convinced that politics devoid of ethics posed a danger to the prosperity and security of the State. He believed that dharma or righteousness must govern the state of affairs. In this regard, to understand the entire state machinery Kautilya conceptualized the Saptanga Theory of State. In this theory, seven vital elements/organs of the State are denoted for their functional operations, namely, Swami (the King or the Head), Amatya (the Minister), Janapad (the land and the people/population and territory ~ elements of the state by the western conception), Durga (the Fortress/Gadhi or Garh), Kosh (the Treasury), Danda/Balla (the Army/Punitive Agency/Law Enforcement Agency) and Mitra (the Allies/friends). This holistic set-up of the organs of the State is known as the Saptanga Theory of State in Kautilya’s ancient India.

Swami is an indispensable, integral and inseparable part of the State in ancient India. Swami is primus inter pares (first among equals) and in all cases, belongs to the noble class who possess virtuous qualities in both head and heart. In other words, this chief or figurehead reigns by using the faculty of logic, reason and emotions. Amatya refers to all principal public officials who are involved in the functioning of the government. They ensure the proper functioning and adequate performance of the government. Janapad must be fertile and productive. The Durga is constructed on the borders of the territory. Kautilya divided these forts into water, hill, desert and forest forts. The fifth element is Kosh which Swami must conserve and acquire to promote the welfare, well-being and security of the State and its residents.

Swami and the Mantriparishad (the Council of Ministers)

Kautilya attached great importance to the Mantriparishad or the Council of Ministers. It is Swami who has to decide on the number of departments his State should have. In all important decisions, the Swami must consult his ministers and make particular policy decisions. He further provides essential criteria to become a minister. A minister must be a native of the territory, born in a high family, influential, highly trained in arts, must have foresight, be wise, bold, eloquent, skillful, intelligent, pure in character, staunchly loyal towards the Swami, excellent in conduct, strength, health and bravery, and free from all the six vices. After the Swami, the Amatya is of chief importance and sometimes in charge of the entire administration according to Kautilya. He suggested that the Swami must appoint not more than four ministers to function as a consultative body. The Ministers have to be summoned for their suggestions and the Swami must thoroughly and meticulously monitor the activities of all the Ministers.

In the ancient Indian political process, the Dharmashastra served as the guide for the delivery of justice. According to Kautilya, whenever there is a conflict between the sacred law and the law in practice, the Swami must give a judgment. He further supported the rule of law. When the Swami abides by the rules, he would one day conquer the whole world. On the other hand, if he abuses or misuses power and authority, he would be condemned to hell.

About the qualities of a judge, Kautilya viewed that he must be a person of high caliber, self-restraint, balanced and must be well-versed in the basic principles of law. It is binding upon a judge to familiarize himself with the people and also has thorough knowledge about the customs of the people. Then, it would enable him to give the correct judgments. Further, the judge should not be corrupt, greedy and contemptible. By being kind-hearted and capable of adjudicating, the judge must give punishment as per the magnitude of the crime committed. Kautilya also emphasized an eye witness, who is a person of integrity and character and is given due protection against injury or insult. It was widely believed by the entire ancient Indian society that Dharma and customs are inviolable and the Swami’s commands are nothing but application of those sacred laws. To convey his decree, a group of secretaries and clerks were maintained and precautions were taken to prevent any connivance of existing laws.

National Integrity Context and System Analysis

When we evaluate the Constitution of Nepal 2072 which was promulgated on September 20, 2015, the principles of transparency, accountability and integrity in the pillars of the national integrity system are somewhat touched upon. To start with the main political document, we have to examine some principal pillars.

At the outset is the Preamble. It is to be noted that it mirrors the spirit and letters of the Constitution – the main document in the political charter. The preamble lists aspirations of the competitive multi-party democratic system, entitlements of civil liberties, creation of independent, impartial and competent judiciary, the concept of the rule of law, socialism based on democratic norms and values, good governance, and sustainable peace-building in the federal democratic republic. The fundamental political essence has been covered and this constitution is the main source of law in the country (Part 1, Preliminary).

Under fundamental rights and duties, there are provisions of freedom of expression and views, right to peaceful assemblies, freedom to form political parties and associations (Article 17), freedom of media (Article 19) and its importance in a democratic society, right to information (Article 27), right to social justice (Article 20) and delivery of writ and petitions from the court if fundamental rights are infringed upon (Article 42). Public interest litigations can be filed to seek constitutional remedies for social justice and security. All these fundamental rights and duties are to be experienced, fully within three years of enactment of the Constitution.

In directive principles, fundamental policy and responsibility of the State, there is an emphasis on the minimum consensus of the State and its clear stance on governmental areas of work. Article 50 mentions the rule of law, fundamental rights, and norms and values of human rights, inclusiveness, participation and social justice, and mutual support of the federal state, province and local line agencies of the government. In the private sector (business) public-private partnership model is prescribed. Article 51 Clause B states about the policy related to political and governing systems to implement international treaties, agreements, conventions, and protocols (rule 3), stresses the public sector to be clean, competent, impartial, transparent and corruption-free, publicly accountable and participatory state of affairs to ensure good governance (rule 4); cordial and cooperative relations envisioned between the central/federal government and provinces.

On policy-related social justice and inclusion, clause 14 states the assistance and role extended by the community, national and international NGOs making it accountable, transparent and engaged in the needy areas and country’s priority sector.

To make state and constitutional agencies accountable with built-in checks and balances, they annually present the report to the Government of Nepal through the Head of State and from the Head of State to the Prime Minister and then discuss it in the Federal Parliament.

Regarding the structure of state and division of power, federal law is supreme and laws that are in contradiction with the federal law stand null and void. Federal executive power is vested in the Council of Ministers of the Government of Nepal which is vested with the rule application power. It is accountable and responsible to the Federal Parliament.

Federal Parliament is bicameral, with representatives elected from the mixed electoral system. The sessions of the Parliament are summoned, prorogued and ended by the Head of State. A motion of confidence and no-confidence can be tabled in the House of Representatives with the provision of impeachment of the President and Vice-President if they do not follow integrity rules and code of conduct. All Bills except fiscal policy are tabled in the Federal Parliament which is vested with the rule formulation powers. An ordinance or the government by Act is enforced by the Federal Executive which needs concurrence from the Federal Parliament.

Judiciary has three tiers of the judicial system – Supreme Court, High Court and District Court are vested with the rule adjudication powers. It has the power of judicial review, judicial activism and acts as a custodian of the Constitution. An independent, fair and impartial judiciary with the Supreme Court follows the principle of separation of powers. In the parliamentary form of government, there is a fusion of powers as the Executive is formed within the Parliament. The Judicial Council and Judicial Service Commission report annually to the President and from the President, through the Prime Minister, to the Federal Parliament underlying norms and values of transparency, accountability and integrity.

Chief Commissioner and Commissioners of Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (in its scope it can probe retired judges of the Judicial Council and retired soldiers of Nepal army relieved from Army Act), Auditor-General of Auditor-General’s Office (it does annual auditing of public expenditure of all three tiers of federal governance), Chief Commissioner and Commissioners of Election Commission and Chairman and Members of the Public Service Commission are relieved of the duty if they are not competent to execute their roles, responsibilities and tasks. These public officials of constitutional agencies must be of high integrity and caliber. They submit their annual report to the President and from the President through the Prime Minister who is accountable to the Parliament. However, the parliament follows the procedural method and the report is not discussed much nor implemented to the hilt.

In Article 269, related to the Political Parties, a party can be registered by submitting By-Laws, manifestos and additional documents required by federal laws to the Election Commission. The annual auditor’s report of political parties also has to be submitted to the EC.

On the matter of public treasury, Public Expenditure Financial Accountability rests with the Federal Parliament. Legislative deliberations, oversight and implementation on this domain are not enforced to address grudges against this approach. The National Integrity System functions well if ideas and principles are followed and enforced astutely by exhibiting and acting on strong political will.

New Context in the Saptanga Theory of State

In the new context of the Saptanga Theory of State, there is a need to unveil seven crucial and major overarching elements derived from the standard national integrity system’s pillars, namely, the Parliament, the Executive including the public sector, the Judiciary, oversight agencies of the State, media, civil society and business. These are in the abstract form derived from the thirteen pillars of the standard national integrity system framework. This standard is devised in the concept of measuring good governance, transparency, accountability and integrity by Transparency International. It is developed to research national integrity systems to support strong advocacy based on evidence. This evidence reveals the discrepancy between the legal regime and practical application of law to maintain a clean, swift and smart government with efficient public service delivery institutions. It would assist the leadership with enough stamina to push toward reforms in the national integrity system. Thus, integrity in the state and the statecraft can be conserved, promoted and sustained. This innovative context by revisiting Kautilyan Saptanga Theory of State can address, redress and remedy the ever-growing creaks in the cogs of governance in the 21st century.

An abridged version of the original Saptanga Theory is honed to meet the reason with action-oriented solutions and knowledge. The principal in charge of the Executive should possess situational and decisive leadership in the critical transitional political system. This would determine the course of direction of the State and further enrich the statecraft. It would put a benchmark characterized by excellence and intelligence. This smart quality of leadership must be groomed and nurtured in every domain of the life of the state. Professionalism brings more goods avoiding a loss in money, time and resources.

The deliberative functions of the Parliament are not negated in the modern democratic state where democracy is being democratized. Voices of every Member of the Parliament should echo the vibrations of prudent questioning and answer across the floor and with the floor.

The Judiciary is another chief pillar in rule adjudication where legal and criminal cases are to be resolved. But the power of the judiciary is confined mostly to judicial review on administrative/executive decisions and in Nepal even inviting this sacred jurisdiction in examining political decisions in the form of politics of point or points of politics. Judicial activism is nowhere to be seen when the delivery of justice is delayed more frequently with the use of judicial discretion. This monolithic artifact of justice delivery institutions has become more and more obese and deformed as corruption has not spared it too.

On the other hand, the oversight agencies which scrutinize the proper functioning of state institutions are showing publicity stunts. They must resort to addressing recommendations and suggestions as mentioned in their constitutionally guaranteed annual reporting to the Head of State and Government.

The Media in the modern state and statecraft is an important element in pressurizing and bringing to notice the attention of stakeholders on the burning issues as well as concerns of life, liberty and security – human and social. Its space is ever more increasing, persuasive and influential. If we read in between the lines it is the Fourth Estate by its nomenclature.

The Business promotes employment, opportunities and peace. It unleashes prosperity and the potential to tap human and social capital as well. Its importance is underlined in any liberal democratic state where capitalism reigns but “invisible hand” rules.

The final element in this recipe of a new context in the Saptanga Theory is deliberations outside the domain of the state and market economy in Civil Society. It enables the participative, collective and concerted interests of the citizens who converge to counter-argue, counter-discuss and counteract the reasoning and praxis of the Arthashastra. It is perceived and experienced by citizens who deliberate on alternatives to their needs and wants if it is not addressed by the polity.

Thus, making these seven ingredients in a new context is an old wine in a new bottle. Leadership qualities have to muster experience in checks, balances and separation of powers making state organs truly democratic and attuned to the forces impinging on the Nepalese state in the need of the hour.

References

Pravin Chandrasekaran (2006). Kautilya: Politics, Ethics and Statecraft. Harvard University/Harvard Kennedy School, 5 May (pp. 1-22).

Aseem Prakash (1993). State and Statecraft in Kautilya’s Arthashastra. A paper presented at the Fall Semester Mini-Conference organized by the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University, Bloomington, December 11&13 (pp. 1-18).

For PDF version Read 3.State and Society 2023 – Rajeev Kunwar

The Coloniality of Global Health

jssadmin — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 14:54:00 +0000

LAURA A. MEEK, The University of British Columbia, Canada

With the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa now officially declared over, the moment is ripe to take stock of what the myriad contested truths around the public health emergency have revealed about medical interventions on the continent. New emergencies and crises—such as antimicrobial resistance (AMR)—continue to generate panic, forming part of global health’s discursive African tragedy: “the uncritical epistemic industry that has long produced knowledge of African development as a monolithic and primordial tragedy.” This narrative ignores the decades of neoliberal deregulation which left many African healthcare systems under-resourced. Meanwhile, Africa itself serves as a source for raw material for medicines and the extraction of medical knowledge for the global North. These dynamics are important but they form only part of the multiple stories that need telling in pursuit of African health justice.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the AIDS pandemic that came before it made clear that medical knowledge and access to treatments play out unevenly in a world marred by deep and ongoing colonial legacies. For Africa, this has meant being positioned as the passive recipient of aid and intervention. And yet, a wealth of knowledge, resources, and technologies were—and continue to be—extracted from the continent. The idea of Africa’s supposed epistemic lack was critical for those agents justifying colonial medical interventions which spanned from social engineering to ecological experimentation to human subjects research.

Historian Helen Tilley documents the broad effects of colonial science on human health, beginning with the devastation of colonial conquest itself. To defeat the formidable Wahehe in East Africa, for instance, Germany employed a scorched earth policy to create genocidal famines and plagues. Impoverishment and trauma reverberated from the genocide of 1895-1898, as did a collective distrust for the government lasting “until tomorrow” (mpaka kesho) as the Swahili aphorism goes. Furthermore, to the extent that colonizers built healthcare infrastructure, their goal was to maximize labor power and the extraction of wealth. This meant investing as little as possible in healthcare and focusing only on diseases that impacted production. Similarly, in today’s neocolonial era of privatized global health, basic medical supplies like pain medicine and treatments for rarer conditions like leprosy continue to lack funding.

Meanwhile, colonial regimes subjected Africans to medical experimentation without their informed consent. They often coerced or manipulated African subjects into extremely painful and debilitating procedures, like the ones carried out to cure sleeping sickness. The idea of Africa as a site for the extraction of raw health data is ongoing in the twenty-first century—with pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer performing fatal meningitis clinical trials without informed consent and African blood samples being used to develop for-profit Ebola vaccines for the global North. During the recent COVID-19 pandemic, we saw this logic play out when French doctors infamously suggested that vaccines should be tested first on African populations because there were supposedly “no masks, no treatment or intensive care” on the continent. They further compared their proposed exploitation of this structural vulnerability to studies done on “prostitutes” who were perceived as ideal guinea pigs during the AIDS era. Against this backdrop of misogynoir—sexist, antiblack racism—opting out of medical treatment can be a form of protest against biomedicine’s failure of moral legitimacy in Africa.

Concomitant with these iatrogenic effects, neo/colonial global health discounts African knowledge around health and healing. Western Enlightenment and its rhetorical invention of “Africa” was founded upon a hierarchical, racialized construction of the human. These hierarchies dubbed African knowledges as “traditional,” “intuitive,” “practical,” “sensuous,” and “superstitious,”—but always outside the paradigmatic banner of the scientific. As Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga writes about colonial tsetse fly control policies, the “‘natives’ became samples, specimens, data, and, at best, informants, rather than intellectual agents in their own right.” Colonizers outlawed African healers—who were often at the forefront of anti-colonial struggles—or stripped them of their powerful political influence through the epistemic purification of spirituality, which included separating “witchcraft” practices from herbal remedies.

In the coloniality of today’s global health and the system of racial capitalism in which it is embedded, the global North continuously depicts Africa as a “black hole”: a continent cast in epistemic darkness, harboring biological threats that might engulf the word, but incapable of producing truths or knowledge of global significance. For instance, while western media ridiculed and discredited Artemisia, Madagascar’s remedy for COVID-19, Europe and the USA conducted clinical trials to extract—and patent—a treatment derived from the very same plant. This double standard stems from a white supremacist, Eurocentric, and colonial definition of what counts as science and technology. As Mavhunga insists, “the arbitrary restriction of what constitutes technology to measurable things and experiments in the built laboratory performed only by those with mastery over them constitutes not just an epistemological exclusion, but also an ontological and sociological one.”

We must approach African resistance to global health initiatives in light of this longue durée. African reappropriations of biomedicine and engagements with alternative healing are often forms of fugitive science that resist EuroAmerican epistemic violence. In the case of COVID-19, for instance, much of what appeared to be “conspiracy theories” in fact harnessed the “usefulness of suspicion” to create Black counterknowledge. This counterhegemonic knowledge denounced and refused medical “surveillance, stigmatization, and the differentiation of developing countries from developed ones along (neo)colonial fault lines.”

All of these factors figure prominently in my own research on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in East Africa, where the World Health Organization (WHO) has told governments to establish National Action Plans for AMR. Global health experts urge African countries to make haste as AMR becomes a new “silent pandemic” now considered among the top ten global health challenges in the world. It has the highest mortality rates in sub-Saharan Africa. In Tanzania, the WHO AMR Plan’s objectives include “strengthening patient and health care provider compliance” to conform with standards of drug use developed in the global North. According to this Plan, the solution for so-called “misuse” or “overuse” of pharmaceuticals lies with promoting “behavioral change” and installing “new attitudes and practices” to be “embedded in the whole society.”

Antimicrobial resistance is surely a serious and urgent concern. But this is all the more reason to recognize and refuse the coloniality behind health interventions which assume that African doctors and patients are not well-informed. My ethnographic research demonstrates that in fact they very much are, and that practices like buying only partial dosages at a time stem not from ignorance but from structural injustices like the prevalence of counterfeit drugs.

Almost half of all detected cases of counterfeit drugs are found in Africa: “the proportion of fake pharmaceuticals in some countries can be as high as 70%.” Even the World Health Organization (WHO) emphasizes that “the greater the efforts made to look for substandard and falsified medical products, the more of them are found.” Why then do global health organizations like WHO frame their interventions in terms of “compliance” and “attitudes”? Why not aim them instead at the structural problems which force patients seeking medicinal efficacy to experiment with drugs in the first place?

If AMR does indeed threaten “the very core of modern medicine” as the WHO claims, then it needs a structural solution that brings reliable, quality, affordable pharmaceuticals to African consumers. As structural adjustment programs imposed free-market principles in Africa, multinational pharmaceutical companies fought to maintain their markets against a rise of generics. And, as African countries fought back, wealthy nations sought to interrupt movements for social medicine on the continent. They did so by offering targeted aid interventions which provided select pharmaceuticals like antibiotics and antiretrovirals—often ones they produced in their own countries. Thus, Western domestic economies benefited while African pharmaceutical industries were left underdeveloped, aid dependent, and with severe shortages of drugs. These are problems that cut to the core of the neocolonial world order. But Western media and global health initiatives misrecognize this when they gloss such issues with racially coded phrases like “ignorance,” “hygiene,” “cultural norms,” and “attitudes and behaviors.”

In the same month the COVID-19 pandemic was declared over in Africa, we also heard the United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, remark that Africa as a whole spends more on debt repayments than on public healthcare each year. Despite this indictment, however, the Secretary-General’s proposed solutions were predictably mild fare. They did not question the racialized and gendered capitalist world order. Activists and public intellectuals have long insisted that we must recognize the neocolonial structure of international economic and global health relations and that this recognition demands much more radical alternatives. Proposed solutions range from debt cancellation and reparations to a universal basic income and the degrowth of the global capitalist system. As international organizations move once again to reinforce inequalities that protect the global North at the expense of Africa in the name of “global health,” perhaps these radical-sounding solutions deserve a closer look.

@Africa Is a Country

The Implications of Dollar Hegemony

jssadmin — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 14:50:00 +0000

Prabhat Patnaik

Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

The status of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency is closely linked to both U.S. imperialism and the broader imperialist system. As a reserve currency, the dollar serves as a medium for holding wealth in the global economy, similar to the historical role of precious metals like gold. While the dollar is no longer officially convertible to gold, it is still considered a reliable store of value due to its negligible carrying costs and the expectation that its value will not decline significantly over time. The perception of the dollar as “as good as gold” allows the United States to finance its current account deficits without having to devalue its currency. Other currencies like the euro, pound sterling, and yen also play a role in wealth-holding, but their value is ultimately tied to the dollar. These currencies maintain their relative values vis-à-vis the dollar through adjustments in aggregate demand and employment levels. Therefore, the dollar’s status as the primary wealth-medium currency enables the U.S. to sustain its current deficits and maintain its hegemony in the capitalist world. Thus, the dollar’s status as a reserve currency is intertwined with U.S. imperialism and the broader imperialist system. It allows the U.S. to finance its deficits, maintain its hegemony, and determine the level of economic activity in the global capitalist world. However, the dollar’s dominance is being challenged, indicating a potential decline in the future.

HOW exactly is the dollar’s status as reserve currency related to imperialism? This question has two parts: how this status of the dollar is related to US imperialism, and how it is related to the overall imperialist arrangement. The dollar’s being a reserve currency makes it (and dollar-denominated assets in general) a medium of wealth-holding in the world economy, a role that precious metals, like gold, and to a lesser extent silver, have played historically. Currencies have for a long time played this role by being convertible to gold at a fixed rate, which was also the case under the post-war Bretton Woods system. The dollar at present is not so convertible officially; nonetheless the world’s rich consider the dollar to be as good as gold in two ways.

First, unlike commodities it has negligible carrying costs; and second, its value in terms of commodities is not expected to decline secularly, notwithstanding year-to-year fluctuations in this value. This is ensured by having an adequately large reserve army of labour (to keep down dollar wages in the US) and by imposing income compression, through political compulsion and through IMF “conditionalities”, on third world primary commodity producers to keep down their prices.

But if the dollar is considered “as good as gold” by the world’s wealth-holders, then in effect it makes the US sit on an inexhaustible gold mine, with which it can finance its current account deficits, without having to depreciate its currency. To be sure, the dollar is not the only currency in terms of which the world’s wealth is held; there are other currencies like the euro, the pound sterling, and the yen in terms of which (or in assets denominated in terms of which) the world’s wealth is also held. But all these currencies become vehicles for wealth-holding only because their values in terms of dollars are not expected to decline secularly. These other advanced countries adjust their levels of aggregate demand and hence rates of unemployment in order to ensure that their currencies do maintain their relative values vis-à-vis the dollar, and hence that these expectations continue to be sustained. The wealth-medium status of these other currencies in short is derived from that of the dollar; it is the dollar that is the basic “as-good-as-gold” currency, and this fact allows the US to finance its current deficits without any hitch.

But why should such deficits arise in the first place? Throughout the history of capitalism, the leading capitalist country has generally maintained a current account deficit vis-à-vis other emerging capitalist powers, giving them access to its own market (even when these rival powers have protected themselves against the leading country) in order to accommodate their ambitions, and thereby maintain its own leadership role; in fact it is a condition for its being the leader that it should run a current account deficit vis-à-vis them. When Britain was the leader of the capitalist world, it ran a persistent current account deficit vis-à-vis continental Europe and the United States, which were then emerging as rival powers. But Britain offset its deficits vis-à-vis these countries through an unrequited appropriation of the large gold and exchange earnings from the world by its colonies, by imposing administered liabilities on them, a process that is rightly called a “drain”. This was supplemented by pushing out deindustrialising exports to its colonies and semi-colonies, so much so that taking its balance of payments as a whole it was actually able to show a current account surplus, that is, undertake capital exports. Ironically it was making capital exports to those very countries (taken as a group) vis-à-vis which it had current account deficits, namely continental Europe, the US and other temperate lands of white settlement.

The US cannot extract a “drain” today on the same scale; nor can it make sufficient deindustrialising exports to third countries (countries other than the emerging capitalist powers); it perforce therefore has to run an overall current deficit, which it meets by printing dollars (or exporting dollar-denominated IOUs). The dollar’s reserve currency role therefore is crucial for the US to maintain its hegemony vis-à-vis the capitalist world.

It is also what determines the level of activity within the US and hence in the entire capitalist world. While every other country is constrained by the fact that its government cannot increase aggregate demand through larger expenditure, as it had done during the Bretton Woods period, because globalised finance capital imposes a limit on its fiscal deficit relative to its GDP, the US is free of this constraint; there can hardly be a financial flight from the US since its currency is deemed to be “as good as gold”. Therefore, barring “asset-price bubbles”, expenditure by the US government is what determines, for any given level of income distribution in the world, the level of activity in the capitalist world economy. The US government may itself choose to limit its expenditure to avoid getting into debt vis-à-vis the rest of the world (through the latter’s holdings of dollars and US government bonds); but it is not constrained to do so. What it does is a matter of its policy, and it determines what happens to output and employment in world capitalism.

This entire matter can be looked at in a different way. Let us suppose for a moment that the dollar was not a reserve currency. Then the US would have to attempt to eliminate its current account deficit through a depreciation in the external value of the dollar. Such a depreciation, if it is to be effective and not just dissipate itself through an equivalent rise in money wages and prices within the country, would necessarily squeeze real wages, which would arouse domestic working class resistance (to counter which unemployment would have to be increased sufficiently to beat down workers’ wage-bargaining strength); and even if depreciation becomes effective by weakening the workers’ resistance, it would arouse retaliation from other advanced capitalist countries at whose expense the US would be expanding its sales for reducing its current account deficit.

Thus if the dollar was not a reserve currency then the US could not remain the leader of the capitalist world; it would be engaged in a beggar-my-neighbour conflict vis-à-vis other advanced capitalist countries (each trying to snatch markets from others), and facing even stronger workers’ resistance than it does today. And if unemployment within the US was raised to beat down the workers’ wage-bargaining strength, then this would mean a lower level of economic activity for the capitalist world as a whole. (The effect of such reduced levels of economic activity in other advanced capitalist countries could not have been countered through larger state intervention there, since such State activism within each country is not possible in a world of globalised finance).

This also explains why the dollar’s role as a reserve currency is beneficial for the system as a whole, not just for the US but for the entire advanced capitalist world. It is what gives coherence to the system and makes it function smoothly. But it is also what sustains the entire imperialist arrangement, for the system rests on imperialism.

The dollar, as the reserve currency, is not only a medium of wealth-holding but also a medium of circulation. In fact it cannot be a medium of wealth-holding without also being a medium of circulation; countries need dollars for trading with one another. If there is a scarcity of any raw material or tropical wage good produced within the third world relative to its demand in the world market, then its price rises. But obviously the overall extent of such inflation will be higher in an economy where it is the only product, or even the only major product, than in an economy where it is just one input into a whole range of products, i.e., within the third world economy compared to the advanced capitalist economies where there is substantial value addition. Because of this higher inflation, there would be capital flight in anticipation of a depreciation of the third world currency relative to dollar, which would cause an actual depreciation that may go on and on. To stem such depreciation, “austerity” measures would then be imposed upon the third world, greater unemployment would be generated, and incomes would be compressed.

The growing wage goods and raw material needs of the metropolis as a whole therefore are met, even when there is no increase in their output, through compressing incomes and hence demand for such wage goods and raw materials within the third world itself. This would not happen if the third world did not use dollars and traded largely within itself. Dollar hegemony thus constitutes the basis of contemporary imperialism.

This hegemony is currently under threat. Trading arrangements with local currencies, or with new currencies such as what the BRICS countries are reportedly planning to introduce, are gaining ground, encouraged in particular by the number of countries against whom the advanced capitalist countries have imposed “sanctions”. Not that a collapse of dollar hegemony is imminent; but a process of its decline over time has been surely initiated.

Are We Living Through a De-Dollarization?

jssadmin — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 14:45:00 +0000

JUSTIN PODUR

Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Canada

The global economy has traditionally relied on the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency and currency for international transactions. This granted the United States significant financial power and the ability to impose sanctions on countries that deviated politically or militarily. However, the establishment of a new global monetary system without a dominant reserve currency would result in a significant reshuffling of political, economic, and military power. The concept of a standardized global exchange system is relatively recent, and there are no fixed rules on its organization. Understanding the historical context and potential triggers can shed light on the future evolution of this system.

Currency systems are not just a reflection of existing power relations in the world; they also have the ability to shape and influence those power dynamics. Historical examples like the Anglo gold standard and the American dollar standard demonstrate how dominant currencies have been linked to imperial monopolies and concentrated power. However, in a multipolar world where power is more distributed, we can anticipate the emergence of diverse currency arrangements that reflect the shifting dynamics. These new arrangements have the potential to challenge and reshape existing power structures, as different nations seek to establish their own influence and economic standing on the global stage.

De-dollarization is apparently here, “like it or not,” as a May 2023 video by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a peace-oriented think tank based in Washington, D.C., states. Quincy is not alone in discussing de-dollarization: political economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson outlined its mechanics across four shows between February and April 2023 in their fortnightly YouTube program, “Geopolitical Economy Hour.” Economist Richard Wolff provided a nine-minute explanation on this topic on the Democracy at Work channel. On the other side, media outlets like Business Insider have assured readers that dollar dominance isn’t going anywhere. Journalist Ben Norton reported on a two-hour, bipartisan Congressional hearing that took place on June 7—“Dollar Dominance: Preserving the U.S. Dollar’s Status as the Global Reserve Currency”—about defending the U.S. currency from de-dollarization. During the hearing, Congress members expressed both optimism and anxiety about the future of the dollar’s supreme role. But what has prompted this debate?

Until recently, the global economy accepted the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the currency of international transactions. The central banks of Europe and Asia had an insatiable appetite for dollar-denominated U.S. Treasury securities, which in turn bestowed on Washington the ability to spend money and finance its debt at will. Should any country step out of line politically or militarily, Washington could sanction it, excluding it from the rest of the world’s dollar-denominated system of global trade.

But for how long? After a summit meeting in March between Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping, Putin stated, “We are in favor of using the Chinese yuan for settlements between Russia and the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.” Putting that statement in perspective, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria said, “The world’s second-largest economy and its largest energy exporter are together actively trying to dent the dollar’s dominance as the anchor of the international financial system.” Already, Zakaria noted, Russia and China are holding less of their central bank reserves in dollars and settling most of their trade in yuan, while other countries sanctioned by the United States are turning to “barter trade” to avoid dependence on the dollar.

A new global monetary system, or at least one in which there is no near-universal reserve currency, would amount to a reshuffling of political, economic, and military power: a geopolitical reordering not seen since the end of the Cold War or even World War II. But as a look at its origins and evolution makes clear, the notion of a standard global system of exchange is relatively recent and no hard-and-fast rules dictate how one is to be organized. Let’s take a brief tour through the tumultuous monetary history of global trade and then consider the factors that could trigger another stage in its evolution.

Imperial Commodity Money

Before the dollarization of the world economy took place, the international system had a gold standard anchored by the naval supremacy of the British Empire. But a currency system backed by gold, a mined commodity, had an inherent flaw: deflation. As long as metal mining could keep up with the pace of economic growth, the gold standard could work. But, as Karl Polanyi noted in his 1944 book, The Great Transformation, “the amount of gold available may [only] be increased by a few percent over a year… not by as many dozen within a few weeks, as might be required to carry a sudden expansion of transactions. In the absence of token money, business would have to be either curtailed or carried on at very much lower prices, thus inducing a slump and creating unemployment.”

This deflationary spiral, borne by everyone in the economy, was what former U.S. presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan described in his famous 1896 Democratic Party convention speech, in which he declared, “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” For the truly wealthy, of course, the gold standard was a good thing, since it protected their assets from inflation.

The alternative to the “cross of gold” was for governments to ensure that sufficient currency circulated to keep business going. For this purpose, they could produce, instead of commodity money of gold or silver, token or “fiat” money: paper currency issued at will by the state treasury. The trouble with token money, however, was that it could not circulate on foreign soil. How, then, in a global economy, would it be possible to conduct foreign trade in commodity money and domestic business in token money?

The Spanish and Portuguese empires had one solution to keep the flow of metals going: to commit genocide against the civilizations of the Americas, steal their gold and silver, and force the Indigenous peoples to work themselves to death in the mines. The Dutch and then British empires got their hands on the same gold using a number of mechanisms, including the monopolization of the slave trade through the Assiento of 1713 and the theft of Indigenous lands in the United States and Canada. Stolen silver was used to purchase valuable trade goods in China. Britain stole that silver back from China after the Opium Wars, which China had to pay immense indemnities (in silver) for losing.

Once established as the global imperial manager, the British Empire insisted on the gold standard while putting India on a silver standard. In his 2022 PhD thesis, political economist Jayanth Jose Tharappel called this scheme “bimetallic apartheid”: Britain used the silver standard to acquire Indian commodities and the gold standard to trade with European countries. India was then used as a money pump for British control of the global economy, squeezed as needed: India ran a trade surplus with the rest of the world but was meanwhile in a trade deficit with Britain, which charged its colony “Home Charges” for the privilege of being looted. Britain also collected taxes and customs revenues in its colonies and semi-colonies, simply seizing commodity money and goods, which it resold at a profit, often to the point of famine and beyond—leading to tens of millions of deaths. The system of Council Bills was another clever scheme: paper money was sold by the British Crown to merchants for gold and silver. Those merchants used the Council Bills to purchase Indian goods for resale. The Indians who ended up with the Council Bills would cash them in and get rupees (their own tax revenues) back. The upshot of all this activity was that the Britain drained $45 trillion from Indiabetween 1765 and 1938, according to research by economist Utsa Patnaik.

From Gold to Gold-Backed Currency to the Floating Dollar

As the 19th century wore on, an indirect result of Britain’s highly profitable management of its colonies—and particularly its too-easy dumping of its exports into their markets—was that it fell behind in advanced manufacturing and technology to Germany and the United States: countries into which it had poured investment wealth drained from India and China. Germany’s superior industrial prowess and Russia’s departure from Britain’s side after the Bolshevik Revolution left the British facing a possible loss to Germany in World War I, despite Britain drawing more than 1 million people from the Indian subcontinent to serve (more than 2 million Indians would serve Britain in WWII) during the war. American financiers loaned Britain so much money that if it had lost WWI, U.S. banks would have realized an immense loss. When the war was over, to Britain’s surprise, the United States insisted on being paid back. Britain squeezed Germany for reparations to repay the U.S. loans, and the world financial system broke down into “competitive devaluations, tariff wars, and international autarchy,” as Michael Hudson relates in his 1972 book, Super imperialism, setting the stage for World War II.

After that war, Washington insisted on an end to the sterling zone; the United States would no longer allow Britain to use India as its own private money pump. But John Maynard Keynes, who had written Indian Currency and Finance (1913), The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), and the General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), believed he had found a new and better way to supply the commodity money needed for foreign trade and the token money required for domestic business, without crucifying anyone on a cross of gold.

At the international economic conference in 1944 at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, Keynes proposed an international bank with a new reserve currency, the bancor, that would be used to settle trade imbalances between countries. If Mexico needed to sell oil and purchase automobiles from Germany, for instance, the two countries could carry out trade in bancors. If Mexico found itself owing more bancors than it held, or Germany had a growing surplus of them, an International Clearing Union would apply pressure to both sides: currency depreciation for debtors, but also currency appreciation and punitive interest payments for creditors. Meanwhile, the central banks of both debtor and creditor nations could follow Keynes’s domestic advice and use their powers of money creation to stimulate the domestic economy as needed, within the limits of domestically available resources and labor power.

Keynes made his proposal, but the United States had a different plan. Instead of the bancor, the dollar, backed by gold held at Fort Knox, would be the new reserve currency and the medium of world trade. Having emerged from the war with its economy intact and most of the world’s gold, the United States led the Western war on communism in all its forms using weapons ranging from coups and assassinations to development aid and finance. On the economic side, U.S. tools included reconstruction lending to Europe, development loans to the Global South, and balance of payments loans to countries in trouble (the infamous International Monetary Fund (IMF) “rescue packages”). Unlike Keynes’s proposed International Clearing Union, the IMF imposed all the penalties on the debtors and gave all the rewards to the creditors.

The dollar’s unique position gave the United States what a French minister of finance called an “exorbitant privilege.” While every other country needed to export something to obtain dollars to purchase imports, the United States could simply issue currency and proceed to go shopping for the world’s assets. Gold backing remained, but the cost of world domination became considerable even for Washington during the Vietnam War. Starting in 1965, France, followed by others, began to hold the United States at its word and exchanged U.S. dollars for U.S. gold, persisting until Washington canceled gold backing and the dollar began to float free in 1971.

The Floating Dollar and the Petrodollar

The cancellation of gold backing for the currency of international trade was possible because of the United States’ exceptional position in the world as the supreme military power: it possessed full spectrum dominance and had hundreds of military bases everywhere in the world. The U.S. was also a magnet for the world’s immigrants, a holder of the soft power of Hollywood and the American lifestyle, and the leader in technology, science, and manufacturing.

The dollar also had a more tangible backing, even after the gold tether was broken. The most important commodity on the planet was petroleum, and the United States controlled the spigot through its special relationship with the oil superpower, Saudi Arabia; a meeting in 1945 between King Abdulaziz Al Saud and then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on an American cruiser, the USS Quincy, on Great Bitter Lake in Egypt sealed the deal. When the oil-producing countries formed an effective cartel, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and began raising the price of oil, the oil-deficient countries of the Global South suffered, while the oil exporters exchanged their resources for vast amounts of dollars (“petrodollars”).

The United States forbade these dollar holders from acquiring strategic U.S. assets or industries but allowed them to plow their dollars back into the United States by purchasing U.S. weapons or U.S. Treasury securities: simply holding dollars in another form. Economists Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler called this the “weapondollar-petrodollar” nexus in their 2002 book, The Global Political Economy of Israel. As documented in Michael Hudson’s 1977 book, Global Fracture (a sequel to Super Imperialism), the OPEC countries hoped to use their dollars to industrialize and catch up with the West, but U.S. coups and counterrevolutions maintained the global fracture and pushed the global economy into the era of neoliberalism.

The Saudi-U.S. relationship was the key to containing OPEC’s power as Saudi Arabia followed U.S. interests, increasing oil production at key moments to keep prices low. At least one author—James R. Norman, in his 2008 book, The Oil Card: Global Economic Warfare in the 21st Century—has argued that the relationship was key to other U.S. geopolitical priorities as well, including its effort to hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. A 1983 U.S. Treasury study calculated that, since each $1 drop in the per barrel oil price would reduce Russia’s hard currency revenues by up to $1 billion, a drop of $20 per barrel would put it in crisis, according to Peter Schweizer’s book, Victory.

In 1985, Norman recounted in his book that Saudi Arabia “[opened] the floodgates, [slashed] its pricing, and [pumped] more oil into the market.” While other factors contributed to the collapse of the oil price as well, “Russian academic Yegor Gaidar, acting prime minister of Russia from 1991 to 1994 and a former minister of economy, has described [the drop in oil prices] as clearly the mortal blow that wrecked the teetering Soviet Union.”

From Petrodollar to De-Dollarization

When the USSR collapsed, the United States declared a new world order and launched a series of new wars, including against Iraq. The currency of the new world order was the petrodollar-weapondollar. An initial bombing and partial occupation of Iraq in 1990 was followed by more than a decade of applying a sadistic economic weapon to a much more devastating effect than it ever had on the USSR (or other targets like Cuba): comprehensive sanctions. Forget price manipulations; Iraq was not allowed to sell its oil at all, nor to purchase needed medicines or technology. Hundreds of thousands of children died as a result. Several authors, including India’s Research Unit for Political Economy in the 2003 book Behind the Invasion of Iraq and U.S. author William Clark in a 2005 book, Petrodollar Warfare, have argued that Saddam Hussein’s final overthrow was triggered by a threat to begin trading oil in euros instead of dollars. Iraq has been under U.S. occupation since.

It seems, however, that the petro-weapondollar era is now coming to an end, and at a “‘stunning’ pace.” After the Putin-Xi summit in March 2023, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria worried publicly about the status of the dollar in the face of China’s and Russia’s efforts to de-dollarize. The dollar’s problems have only grown since. All of the pillars upholding the petrodollar-weapondollar are unstable:

+ The United States is no longer the dominant manufacturer and China is catching up in science and technology as well.

+ The United States does not seem to be an attractive development model for Global South countries anymore and is not able to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative deals in Africa and other parts of the developing world.

+ The United States has sanctioned so many countries (Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and China) that they are beginning to achieve a critical mass by trading with one another.

+ U.S. military power is no longer seen as supreme after its lack of success in bringing about a regime change in Syria and its withdrawal from Afghanistan.

+ While the United States may have succeeded in dramatically reducing Russian gas sales to Europe by—if Seymour Hersh’s widely believed February report is eventually vindicated—blowing up Nordstream, it has been unable to convince India or China to go along with its plans in this regard: both countries are purchasing Russian energy and reselling it as well.

+ After watching the United States steal Russia’s reserves and Venezuela’s gold and force the sale of Venezuela’s oil company CITGO, even U.S. allies are reluctant to hold assets in dollars or keep their assets in the United States lest they be seized. Saudi Arabia will be trading with China in yuan instead of dollars, has canceled its U.S.-backed war on Yemen, made peace with Iran, and hosted Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad at the Arab League summit in May 2023.

But what will replace the dollar?

“A globalized economy needs a single currency,” Zakaria said on CNN after the Xi-Putin summit. “The dollar is stable. You can buy and sell at any time and it’s governed largely by the market and not the whims of a government. That’s why China’s efforts to expand the yuan’s role internationally have not worked.” But the governance of the U.S. dollar by the “whims of a government”—namely, the United States—is precisely why countries are looking for alternatives.

Zakaria took comfort in the fact that the dollar’s replacement will not be the yuan. “Ironically, if Xi Jinping wanted to cause the greatest pain to America, he would liberalize his financial sector and make the yuan a true competitor to the dollar. But that would take him in the direction of markets and openness that is the opposite of his current domestic goals.” Zakaria is wrong. China need not liberalize to internationalize the yuan. When the dollar was supreme, the United States simply excluded foreign dollar-holders from purchasing U.S. companies or assets and restricted them to holding U.S. Treasury securities instead.

But as Chinese economist Yuanzheng Cao, former chief economist of the Bank of China, argued in his 2018 book, Strategies for Internationalizing the Renminbi (the official name of the currency whose unit is the yuan), Beijing can internationalize the yuan without attempting to replace the dollar and incurring the widespread resentment that would follow. It only needs to secure the yuan’s use strategically as one of several currencies and in a wider variety of transactions, such as currency swaps.

Elsewhere, Keynes’s postwar idea for a global reserve currency is being revived on a more limited basis. A regional version of the bancor, the sur, was proposed by Brazil’s President Luis Inácio (“Lula”) da Silva. Ecuadorian economist and former presidential candidate Andrés Arauz described the sur as follows in a February interview: “The idea is not to replace each country’s national, sovereign currency, but rather to have an additional currency, a complementary currency, a supranational currency for trade among countries in the region, starting with Brazil and Argentina, which are the sort of two powerhouses in the Southern Cone, and that could then amplify to the rest of the region.” Lula followed up the sur idea with an idea of a BRICS currency; Russian economist Sergey Glazyev proposes a kind of bancor backed by a basket of commodities.

Currency systems reflect power relations in the world: they don’t change them. The Anglo gold standard and the American dollar standard reflected imperial monopoly power for centuries. In a multipolar world, however, we should expect more diverse arrangements.

Tribal Development -Perspective from Below

jssadmin — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 05:32:00 +0000

ANIL GOPI

Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala

Abstract

Development of Scheduled Tribes has always been a matter of concern, extensive discourse, and actions for a long period in India. Starting from the colonial period, initiatives made by various bodies, both governmental and non-governmental, have invariably brought changes to the lives of tribal people in India. Kerala also follows a similar historical trajectory. Although conditions are improving, there is a persistent degenerative condition experienced by the people, and there is also a noticeable disparity in the extent of improvements. Drawing on two key governmental reports, one at the national level (Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Govt. of India – 2014) and one at the state level (Scheduled Tribes Development Department, Govt. of Kerala – 2013), a contextual and thematic analysis of the socio-cultural, economic, and infrastructural aspects was conducted based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a group of settlements in Idukki district, Kerala. The study reveals that there is a scenario where development reaches the ground differentially, and the reception by the beneficiaries also demonstrates a continuum of aspirations, expectations, and realities. It also illustrates that, for the effective realization of development initiatives, certain cultural specificities and social dynamics at the basic level need to be emphasized.

Keywords: Scheduled Tribes, Xaxa Committee report, Development, Modernity, Kerala.

For PDF version Read 7. State and Society 2023 -Anil Gopi