I have been thinking a lot about economic strategies lately and would like
to know how other Penners feel about issues concerning the state and
transborder organizing.
More specifically (and drawing on a discussion started by a few people a
while back on the World Bank's study of East Asian economies), it is
pretty clear that those capitalist countries that have been the most
"successful" economically have been those countries where the state has
played an important role in directing domestic economic activity and
regulating international economic activity. [See my book, The Rush to
Development: Economic Change and Political Struggle in South Korea
(Monthly Review Press) for an examination of the role of the state in
South Korea!] What conclusion(s) should we draw from this fact: Some
progressives would argue that it demonstrates that Third World countries
should reject neoclassical, World Bank/IMF advice to adopt free market,
free trade policies and instead build up their powers to control economic
activity through the state? There are also economists who would draw the
same conclusion as far as the U.S. is concerned. In other words they
would argue that our policy advice should center on building a movement in
support of a stronger state, one capable of regulating the mobility and
activity of private capital? If so, then we need to figure out how we
drive home the understanding that it is the unregulated mobility of
capital that is the main source of our current economic difficulties and
that no real improvements are possible until that mobility is brought
under some form of social regulation. This strategy also demands that we
think more about the kind of national regulatory structures we might well
want to support: a state controlled banking system, controls on
international capital movements, etc.
Now there are growing number of progressives who would reject these
conclusions. They argue that the strong state strategy is unworkable.
Structural adjustment policies pushed on the Third World by the IMF and
World Bank have greatly weakened the ability of the state to do anything
in most countries. Even South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan are finding it
more and more difficult to regulate the activities of their own
capitalists. Moreover the recent GATT negotiations by imposing
restrictions on the use of state restrictions on foreign direct
investment, such as domestic content, domestic ownership, or export
requirements, make such policies even more difficult to imagine.
Furthermore, and this is true just as much for the developed as the less
developed capitalist countries, transnational corporate activity has now
make it impossible for any capitalist state to regulate economic activity
effectively. Thus, these progressives argue that organizing around the
state is counterproductive. At best it is a waste of time. At worst it
can lead to destructive nationalism, racism, and possibly facism.
Their answer: transborder organizing. The problems facing us, such as
environmental destruction, militarism, and poverty, transcend nations and
thus cannot be solved nationally. They require global movements. And in
this sense, identification with one's country or state makes the kind of
global organizing that is necessary more difficult to do. Organzing must,
according to this way of thinking, help people understand the need to
build grassroots movements across borders that can challenge the power of
capitalists and the destruction that capitalism causes the environment and
peaceful and equitable human relations. This approach also holds out the
promise of creating far more democratic forms of social organization than
appear possible under the first approach which calls for building state
power.
So, at the risk of oversimplyfing, one approach calls for building
opposition to the mobility of capitalism on the basis of the nation state
and projects a vision of greater national regulation of capitalist
activity through a restructured and more powerful state. The other
approach argues that transnational corporate activity and the nature of
our environmental and social problems makes this strategy unworkable.
Instead it calls for transborder organizing to create new movements based
on common interests that crosscut borders and nations. It also tends to
support more decentralized means of controlling economic activity --
looking more to communities then states and coordinated community
exchanges then nationally managed trade regimes.
What do people think of all of this? Have I accurately represented the
two approaches? Are there others? Have I created a false division? It
seems to me that very different understandings of economic strategy flow
from these two different positions. I would be very interested in hearing
what position and what kinds of strategy people on PEN advocate, in
particular with reference to state policy.
Marty Hart-Landsberg
