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Page 27 of 27
Notes
(1). “Using figures provided by the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) and the UN Economic Commission for Africa, it has been estimated that at least six million children under five years of age have died each year since 1982 in Asia, Africa, and Latin America because of the anti-people, even genocidal, focus of IMF-World Bank SAPs.” [Structural Adjustment Programs}. Davison Budhoo, “IMF/World Bank Wreak Havoc on Third World,” Chapter 3 in Kevin Danaher (ed.) Fifty Years is Enough: The Case against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Boston MA: South End Press, 1994. pp. 21-22 Budhoo is an economist from Grenada who was on the IMF staff until he resigned in protest. See also Gloria T. Emeagualdi (ed.) Women Pay the Price: Structural Adjustment in Africa and the Caribbean. Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 1995. Publications sponsored by UNICEF itself present the data but prudently refrain from asserting a direct causal link between SAP’s and the death of children. Giovanni Andrea Cornia, Richard Jolly, and Frances Stewart. Adjustment with a Human Face. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Manmohan Singh, who was at the time secretary-general of the South Commission wrote, "The adjustment policies imposed on many developing countries by international financial institutions further accentuated deflationary pressures. They were generally shaped by a doctrinaire belief in the efficacy of market forces and monetarist policies….The resulting reduction of economic activity and social expenditure led to widespread social distress." Manmohan Singh "In a Changing World: Challenges to the South," in Uner Kirdar (ed) Change: Threat or Opportunity. New York: United Nations, 1992, p. 172. John Cobb suggests that structural adjustment policies were not malevolent or unintelligent, but rather consequences of the general forms of thought that shape the modern world. “The standard form of SAPs that have been imposed on most of the Third World …follow from standard economic thinking in general.” John Cobb, The Earthist Challenge to Economism: a theological critique of the World Bank. London: Macmillan, 1999, p. 93.
(2) Thus Johan Galtung finds that the world is afflicted by structural violence, defined as “…avoidable denial of what is needed to satisfy the fundamental needs.” Galtung continues, “…Structural violence ‘just happens’ without any specific actor behind it. The slum child, brain-damaged for life because of protein deficiency, who will have a self-realization level far below any reasonably defined potential, is not necessarily the ‘object’ of any evil will of any particular ‘subject’ who has committed the violence. The violence is built into the structure, usually derived from some fundamental inequity that then generates, and is reinforced by, inequality and injustice.” Johan Galtung, The True Worlds. New York: The Free Press, 1980. pp. 67-68.
(3) “The social and solidary economy is to be consolidated on the basis of the presently existing people’s economy.” Jose Luis Coraggio, De la Emergencia a la Estrategia. Buenos Aires: Espacio Editores, 2004. (Cited hereafter as Estrategia) p. 316.
(4) On the coexistence of the entrepreneurial (capitalist) economy and the people’s economy see Estrategia pages 74, 142, 144, 181, 182-4, 198, 267.
(5) “Such a society will not emerge from the sum of initiatives at a microsocial level. It requires the State, and therefore it requires the democratization of the State at all of its levels; it posits a cultural revolution. Such a revolution has as its fundamental component the radicalization of democracy.” Estrategia p. 145.
(6). These first eight items are based on a free translation and the insertion of some background information starting from Jose Luis Coraggio, La Gente o el Capital: Desarrollo Local y Economia del Trabajo. Buenos Aires: Espacio Editores, 2004. (cited hereafter as Gente o Capital) p. 173. The term comedor popular is also used sometimes where a more formal institution such as a government agency organizes a free public dining hall. It is also used when there is a small charge, or a small charge for adults while children eat free.
Regarding the swap meets and barter systems with local currencies see also the chapter by Fabiana Leoni and Mariana Luzzi, “Nuevas Redes Sociales: Los Clubes de Trueque,” in Ines Gonzales Bombal (compiladora), Respuestas de la Sociedad Civil a la Emergencia Social Buenos Aires: CEDES, 2003. pp. 13-42.
(7). These items 9 through 15 are drawn from the same book, Gente o Capital, p. 198-9.
(8). The Charter and Mission Statement of the Banco Municipal de Rosario require it to lend to small local borrowers. There used to be many such banks in Argentina, but most were privatized and sold to foreign investors during the presidency of Carlos Menem. Besides the Municipal Bank in Rosario, there remains a Municipal Bank in Buenos Aires.
(9). Items 16 through 26 on this list are drawn from Estrategia, fully cited in note (2) above, p. 287.
(10) Gente o Capital pp. 14-24. “How such contradictions are resolved, how they are articulated and under what conditions situations are produced which can only be resolved by structural change are basic questions for explicating the very roots of our social movement.” Id. p. 14. (I translated del movimiento social as “of our social movement” since I think that is what Coraggio means.)
(11). The paradox of hunger in a country which is the world’s number one food exporter in terms of food exported per capita is itself a factor that inclines one to say that “structural” issues are in question.
(12). Karl Marx uses the term “relationship” where some other authors would write of “structures.” For example, he says that production relations determine distribution relations. Verhaltnis, the German word for relation or relationship is found throughout the pages of Das Kapital.
(13) The historians Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Karl Polanyi, as I read them, identify (or at least closely associate) modernity with large markets. Large markets (“disembedded” markets in Polanyi’s terminology) form the governing contexts in which people live their lives, rather than being, like the village fair of old, small incidental adjuncts of the process of living (of “material life” in Braudel’s terminology).
(14) Estrategia cited in note 2 above, p. 304.”And here I think we need to resignify the word market, always associated with the existing capitalist market. There are other markets that exist today, and solidary ones too.. … there is not just one type of market.”
(15) Estrategia, p. 143..
(16) Estrategia, p. 144.
(17) Estrategia p. 187.
(18) Estrategia p. 162.
(19) Jean Piaget used a version of holism to summarize some of the main tenets of scientific theories known as “structuralist.” Jean Piaget, Le Structuralisme. Paris: Collection Que sais-je? , 1968. In anthropology, sociology, mathematics, biology, and other sciences, structuralists find that there are no data points that are not integrated into wholes. For example, in Piaget’s own field, which he called genetic epistemology (more commonly known as cognitive developmental psychology) the infant does not learn by passively accumulating isolated facts. Learning starts and continues through actively exercising what Piaget calls “schemas,” or patterns, of which one of the earliest is sucking the mother’s breast at birth. Many writers have reservations about one or another version of structuralism, and call themselves, or are called by others, “post-structuralists.” One common reservation is that structuralism is supposed to be determinist, leaving no room for human agency or creativity. Coraggio is explicitly not a structuralist in this sense. Another common reservation is that structuralism is supposed to insist on going beneath mere surface appearances to discover scientific realities that move the world but which ordinary people do not understand, leaving no space for the knowledge of the people. Coraggio is explicitly not a structuralist in this sense either.
(20) Estrategia p. 237.
(21) Estrategia p.. 241.
(22) Estrategia p. 291.
(23) “The logic of these people’s organizations of domestic economy is not maximizing profits (money) but the continuing enlargement of the frontier of the material conditions of the lives of their members.” Gente o Capital p. 196.
(24) “If we have to define an organizational cell larger than the individual, with some degree of consciousness and coordination of the decisions of its members, that cell would be principally the family, or, more broadly, the households.” Gente o Capital p. 195. Franklin Vivekananda and S. Naryanasamy, writing from a Gandhian perspective, agree that, “the household and not the individual should be considered as a unit of development planning for the poverty alleviation, allowing special consideration to women, children, and disabled who are disadvantaged in the poor households.” “Gandhian Way to Zero Poverty,” Paper Presented to the Global Political Economy Commission of the International Peace Research Association, Seoul, Korea, July 3, 2002. p. 5.
(25) Gente o Capital. pp. 131-33, p. 144. At p. 133 Coraggo writes: “This operational definition implies including [in the people’s economy] units with very different purchasing power, including units with durable consumer goods (electric appliances, housing, automobiles) and/or means of production (land, buildings, tools). It can also include professional members with high levels of education, and with children dedicated exclusively to studying. It does not coincide, then, with the segments of families designated as ‘poor’ although it includes them.” Coraggio remarks that the Grameen bank in Bangladesh has been empowering because the borrowers use small amounts of capital to enhance large amounts of labor. Estrategia p. 271.
(26) Estrategia p. 107
(27) Estrategia. pages 74, 142, 144, 181, and 198.
(28) Estrategia pp. 238-39 and passim. To say that Coraggio is an institutionalist is not to deny that he has learned much from Marxism and from other schools of thought.
(29) One of the classic accounts of the role of entrepeneurs in history is that of Joseph Schumpeter. “…the function of entrepreneurship is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production.” Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1943. p. 132 Schumpeter finds that capitalism is an inherently unstable system which can never remain stationary, but must always replace existing technologies with more efficient technologies through what Schumpter calls “creative destruction.” “To act with confidence beyond the range of familiar beacons and to overcome that resistance requires aptitudes that are present in only a small fraction of the population and that define the entrepreneurial type as well as the entrepreneurial function.” Id.
(30) Gente o Capital p. 9.
(31) Coraggio thinks that in any case governments have tended to cave in too easily to threats of capital flight. He sees many of the concessions made to capital more as the products of political power than as the products of imperatives dictated by economic structures. Estrategia p. 123. Bernardo Kliksberg appears to hold the view that building an ethical society, even though it implies higher taxes and other limitations on capital accumulation, actually attracts investment more than it repels it. Bernardo Kliksberg, Mas Etica, Mas Desarrollo. Buenos Aires: Temas Grupo Editorial, 2004.
(32) Gente o Capital p. 337. It is not automatic that more participation by more people at all levels, which Coraggio advocates, will lead to a higher level of ethical consciousness and conduct, which Coraggio also advocates. It may lead to a lower level. In the latter case, more participation might still be desirable, if it is true that decisions are more likely to serve the interests of the masses when the masses themselves play a major role in making them. However, it should be noted that researchers in the psychology of moral development have found that participation in deliberations concerning ethical issues gradually over time leads to higher levels of moral judgment. See e.g. F. Clark Power, Ann Higgins, and Lawrence Kohlberg, Lawrence Kohlberg’s Approach to Moral Education. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Coraggio is always clear that the social movement he advocates is not only a movement uniting forces to gain more power at the bargaining table, but also an educational movement for cultural, moral, and intellectual reform. See for example his essay on the role of popular education a la Paulo Freire, Gente o Capital pp. 229-256. “If this work is to be a collective task, it presupposes producing and sharing a matrix of thought –cognitive, conceptual, and including criteria for evaluation.” Gente o Capital p. 327.
(33) Gente o Capital p. 99; Estrategia p. 113, pp. 177-78,
(34) Coraggio frequently refers to the desirability of an anthropological approach, for example, at Estrategia pp. 153, 190, and 290. Statistical data are often contrasted with “thick description.” The latter gives richer information than is possible with measurement that starts with categorizing, i.e. with what statisticians call nominal level measurement. With respect to understanding cause and effect relationships the concept of science as essentially about functional relationships among dependent quantities is often contrasted with social science which seeks to understand rules that the actors themselves take as guides to conduct (what H.L.A. Hart calls the inner aspect of rules) and whose violation authorizes criticism by others. See the discussion of rules in H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1981. A thorough critique of the tendency to identify causal relationships with mathematical functions relating dependent quantities, or with statistical significance, has beeen carried out by the schools of philosophy of social science known as realism and critical realism, for example in the writings of Rom Harre, Mario Bunge, Heikki Patomaki, and Roy Bhaskar.
(35) Estrategia p. 205.
(36) Estrategia p. 129. Cf. pages 127-28.
(37 ) Estrategia p. 70. Cf. pages 146, 167, 230.
(38) Coraggio’s view of education as a typical method of enhancing labor, can be viewed as the opposite, or complement, some of the views of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron in La Reproduction. Paris: Editions Minuit, 1970.. For Bourdieu and Passeron educated people possess a form of capital, their knowledge, called “cultural capital.” A moral effect of Bourdieu’s approach is to make the intelligentsia feel guilty for having joined the exploiters, and to make them want to make amends by doing something for the working class. A moral effect of Coraggio’s approach is to make the intelligentsia regard themselves as intellectual workers, and thus as the natural allies of the rest of the working class.
(39) “…investors under capitalism …enjoy a very special position in society as the private controllers of resources everyone else depends on….” Jeffrey Winters, Power in Motion: Capital Mobility and the Indonesian State. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. p. 1.
(40) Gente o Capital p. 32. Coraggio specifies that the first C, commodities, has two components, labor power and the material goods needed to get production underway.
(41) Estrategia. p. 326.
(42) Gente o Capital p. 99. See Sudhir Anand and Amartya Sen, Sustainable Human Development: concepts and priorities. New York: UNDP, 1996. See generally, John Toye and Richard Toye, The United Nations and Global Political Economy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Toye and Toye find that in its early days the United Nations shifted away from a post World War II Keynesian focus on promoting full employment to a focus on third world economic development conceived as capital accumulation precisely because the latter was less controversial and more acceptable to the United States and other conservative political actors. . Id p. 87-109.
(43) W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: a non-communist manifesto. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Toye and Toye, cited above, attribute the early growth of such ideas to several authors, most notably W. Arthur Lewis.
(44) The story of how the discourse of development arose after World War II is masterfully told by Arturo Escobar in his Encountering Development Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
(45) See Gunnar Myrdal, The Challenge of World Poverty: A World Anti-Poverty Program in Outline. New York: Vintage Books, 1971.
(46) See Julio E. Nosiglia, El Desarrollismo. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de America Latina, 1983.
(47) On the disappearance of the exemplars that after World War II gave meaning to the term “developed,” see Viviane Forrester, L’horreur Economique. Paris: Fayard, 1996; Robert Geyer, Christine Ingebritsen, and Jonathan Moses (eds.) Globalization, Europeanization, and the End of Scandinavian Social Democracy? New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000; Engelbert Stockhammer, The Rise of Unemployment in Europe. Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar, 2004; Thomas Kieselbach et al (eds.) Living on the Edge: An Empirical Analysis of Long Term Youth Unemployment and Social Exclusion in Europe.. Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 2001. Evens Foundation (ed.), Europe’s New Racism: Causes, Manifestations, and Solutions. New York: Bergahn Books, 2002.
(48) “Development theories of the past are now being questioned. Any purely economic outlook of development is rejected. Development must be seen as a multi-dimensional process based on equity and self-support.” Boutros Boutros Ghali, former UN Secretary General, quoted by Bernardo Kliksberg, in Political Economy in Latin America.. Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1999. p. 7. See also note 37 above.
(49) Gente o Capital p. 159.
(50) See, e.g. Richard Nelson, Howard Pack, and the World Bank: The Asian Miracle and Modern Growth Theory Washington: World Bank, 1998; John Williamson (ed), The Political Economy of Policy Reform. Washington DC: Institute of International Economics, 1994. . .
(51) See Paul Burkett and Martin Hart-Landsberg, Development, Crisis, and Class Struggle: Learning from Japan and East Asia. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000; and the references to East Asia in Ronaldo Munck and Denis O’Hearn (eds.) Critical Development Theory. London and New York: Zed Books, 1999.
(52) See the remarks on African experiences in James F. Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, System in Crisis: The Dynamics of Free Market Capitalism. New York: Zed Books, 2003.
(53) Three basic works by Immanuel Wallerstein are his first three volumes on The Modern World-System, published by Academic Press in New York and San Diego in 1980, 1984, and 1989.
(54) Jean Baptiste Say made the contrary argument, which became a part of conventional establishment economics. The argument held that everybody seeking work will find it, because “supply creates its own demand.” Variations of the argument attribute unemployment to a “bias against employment” created by socialistic policies that raise wages and thus distort the normal market equilibrium where everybody finds work at the wage the market sets. Say was refuted by John Maynard Keynes, who showed that a normal market equilibrium, far from being a full employment equilibrium, is a low level equilibrium leaving many without work. For Keynes’ argument see his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money New York: Macmillan, 1936. J.K. Gibson-Graham’s argument, in many ways similar to Coraggio’s, showing that exceptions to what any economic theory regards as normal are pervasive all around us is in her The End of Capitalism (as we knew it). Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
(55) Conservatives can reply that liberals and radicals too make use of evidence from country case studies from time to time to support their policy recommendations. They can also say that in recent years there has been a tendency for absolute poverty to decrease in the world as a whole, as a result of the numbers reported by China and India, which bring down the averages. (See Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty. New York: Penguin, 2005. p. 21) If, as a mathematical exercise, one projects the recent global trend far into the future, some day there will be zero absolute poverty. (This mathematical exercise would be one in which Argentina would play no part because its poor, like those of the USA and of Europe, are not poor enough to be included in global statistics measuring absolute poverty.) Although these replies call for rejoinders, which are not made here, I do not believe they affect the validity of the point I do make here.
(56) The industries run by workers’ councils in the former Yugoslavia are illustrative. Studies showed that workers felt less alienated when they were worker-owners. However, the worker-run enterprises still had problems selling their products; they still went into debt; and they still did not generate many jobs for the unemployed. See Susan L. Woodward, Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
(57) See the chapters on Sweden in Howard Richards and Joanna Swanger, The Dilemmas of Social Democracies Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Press, 2006.
(58) A new culture would not be required if it were possible and desirable to create a command economy where the people would work just because they were commanded to do so, while technocrats who plan the work to be done would give the commands. In such a case a rather old-fashioned culture, based on dominance and submission, would work.
(59) The idea that ethics fills in the gaps in the legal framework of a commercial society is central to the thinking of Bernardo Kliksberg, who is, like Coraggio, a very influential thinker in Argentina today. See, e.g. Bernardo Kliksberg, Capital Social y Cultura; Claves Olvidadas del Desarrollo. Buenos Aires: Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo, 2000. See also the website www.cambiocultural.com.ar.
(60) It is not immediately obvious why the natural environment would benefit from a socioeconomic system with multiple dynamics, less constrained by the bottleneck that requires investments expecting profits in order to get production started. But I would argue that a world where (1) the social construction of reality enjoys more options and faces fewer constraints, and (2) participatory processes and cultural reform raise the level of ethical consciousness, would be a world more likely than the present one to implement the profound ecological changes needed to remove homo sapiens sapiens and many other species from the endangered species list.
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