Francois Houtart (en inglés)
An International Forum on Liberation Theology must necessarily be introduced by an analysis of the global situation of humankind. This is a methodological request for a theology, an ethics and a spirituality which recognises itself as contextual. The choice of the analysis is oriented by the concrete life experience of the victims: to look at the world with the eyes of the poor, of the people from below, knowing that a neutral approach does not exist. Such a pre-scientific option does not negate the necessity of a rigorous methodology based both on the best possible apprehension of the facts and on the logic of the human brain, two factors always susceptible of betterment.
To speak from Africa has also a specific meaning. It is not the forgotten continent of globalization. It is not the marginalized part of the economic system. It is the most integrated continent in world capitalism as an exploited periphery. This is also a reason for a specific choice of socio-economic analysis as base for a theological reflection and a religion's motivated action.
Therefore we will first take a look at the genesis of the neo-liberal orientation of the world economy and describe some of its political, social and cultural consequences. After that we will tackle the main logic of the capitalist system and the reasons of its necessary de-legitimization. Finally something will be said about the globalization of resistances.
1. The genesis of neo-liberalism as the present stage of capitalism
After the Second World War, following Samir Amin, world economy has been organized on three main pillars. The first one was the Western industrial economy, where Keynesianism was introduced (in reference to J.R.Keynes, the British economist). It implied an agreement between capital, labour and State for the distribution of the social product (the wealth produced in a country). This was the result of the long social struggle by the working class and also of the fear of communism, strongly represented in the political field of Western Europe and by the USSR and Eastern Europe.
The second pillar was precisely the socialist block. Intended to be an alternative to capitalism, it developed a strong public sector, outside of private capitalist accumulation. The third one was called by Samir Amin, the Bandoung model. The aim was to substitute importations by local production and it resulted also in an alliance between the national bourgeoisie and the organized working class, the peasants (the majority) not being little taken into consideration. In Asia it had been known as Nation-building and in Latin America as desarrollismo.
After a few decades, the three models entered into crisis. The first one was the Bandoung model, because of the cost of the transfer of technology and of know how. Most of the so called "Third World" countries were obliged to open their economies to international capital protected by military dictatorships or authoritarian regimes. The second one was the Keynesian model, because of a diminishing growth of productivity reducing the profitability of capital. The third one was the socialist model with the fall of the wall of Berlin, for internal and external reasons. Inside the socialist project was transformed in a competition with capitalism trough a non-democratic power structure and outside the Western world developed the cold war, introducing the socialist block in an arm's race contradicting the social redistribution of the wealth produced.
This explains what has been called the Washington's Consensus, meaning, in the middle of the 70ies, a general agreement among the economic leaders of the capitalist system, to transform the world economy along neo-liberal lines. This was envisaged in order to rebuild a higher rate of accumulation necessary to introduce new technologies (informatics and communications) and to prepare the wave of concentration of economic decision's powers (multinationals). Among the bodies concerned were international organizations as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund which were transformed into the institutional framework of the project, followed by the OECD, the European Union and lately the World Trade Organization.
Neo-liberalism had its theoretical basis built immediately after the Second World War by von Hayek and the group of "Mont Pèlerin" (in Switzerland). They estimated that Keynesianism was destroying freedom and conducing to a new slavery and that the power of the State had to be reduced. Full freedom of exchange had to be established, in order to develop economic growth. Such an idea may seem evident as long as it remains theoretical, but in an unequal organization of society, it means in practice an advantage for the most powerful. A Nicaraguan economist was calling the Free Trade Agreements between North America and the Central American countries: treaties between the shark and the sardines !
Neo-liberalism has been also characterized by an increasing role of financial capital, more and more speculative and imposing its logic on the productive activities (dictatorships of the shareholders). Finally it paved the way for the monopolistic power of the trans-national corporations, absorbing an ever growing part of the international commerce.
2. Political, social and cultural consequences
As a result of such an economic project aimed at increasing the part of capital in the general wealth, a double offensive was initiated against labour and against the State in order to diminish their respective part in the social product. The rate of increase of productivity had diminished, because of the physical limits in the production of goods and the feeble possibility of its growth, at that time, in the sector of services. At the same time a new strategy of exploiting natural resources was also begun.
Labour has been deeply transformed with the new technologies, not so much for the betterment of work conditions as for an increasing profitability.. Real salaries have decreased in the whole world, especially where the working class was weak. Labour has been deregulated and delocalised. Trade Unions have lost power in the industrialised countries and have been criminalized in the South. This has been a policy, very explicitly applied by political leaders like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush in the USA or Margaret Tatcher in the UK. However it corresponded to a world trend. In the Europe of the 15, there are more than 20 million unemployed and in the USA the "working poor", unable to live with their salaries, are multiplied. In Mexico and in Indonesia real salaries have being cut by 50 %.
The offensive against the State is expressed by the wave of privatizations, not only of economic activities, but also of public services. State expenses must be diminished in order to increase the revenue of capital. In many of the Southern countries, privatization was a real robber of the public patrimony, because of the conditions of the deal.
Finally overexploitation of natural resources, necessary to promote development in the neo-liberal perspective, created massive destruction of the environment and even the beginning of climate changes. Humankind entered in an area of non-sustainable evolution.
Political aspect
The nature of the nation-State as redistributors of wealth and as guaranty of the social agreements has been transformed. The State is no more the instrument to create the common good, but is a service for the reproduction of capital. It has to guaranty private property and to care for the provision of adequate manpower and its repressive functions are increased.
Militarization of the universe is at stake mainly for the control of natural resources, in particular energy. Hence the war in Irak and Afghanistan. But the appropriation of raw material for new industrial purpose has been also at the origin of wars, like in central Africa. Geo-strategic purposes are clearly linked with interventions in Somalia, Colombia, Paraguay, central Asia, the Far East and the struggle against terrorism is also a way of crushing resistances. Neo-liberalism has promoted a stage of "permanent war", its cost being of more than 1000 billions dollars. Imperialism is not a theoretical idea, but a strong reality represented mainly by the USA.
New forms of hegemony of the North on the South have been developed. It is no more necessary to colonize territories to control their economies. Many other means exist today, like influencing the prices of raw material and agricultural products, the main riches of the South. Their value have decreased during the last 50 years, with the exception of some increase lately, because of the growth of China. The cost of the service of the foreign debt has constantly increased, being a way of transferring wealth from the South to the North. For countries like Africa south of the Sahara it represents four times the combined budgets of education and health. Fiscal heaven allow the rich of the South to invest their money in the North (Switzerland, Luxemburg, Lichtenstein, Bermudas, etc). Agricultural programmes of the North (European Union and the USA) are using subsidies for dumping's policies, selling products less than their production's cost and ruining local rural economies. Brain drain absorbs professionals trained in the South for the benefit of Northern economies. All those mechanisms are resulting in a greater extraction of riches than during the colonial time.
Social aspects
The main social consequence of neo-liberal globalization has been the generalization of submission of labour to capital. With industrialization, labour was introduced in a real submission (Marx said subsumption), i.e. through the process of production itself (unlike artisans, workers cannot produce without the capitalist class which monopolize the decisions). Today all human groups are submitted to the logic of capital mainly through formal means, financial or juridical.
Structural adjustment and other conditionalities imposed by the World Bank and the IMF are weakening the capacities of the States. The service of the external debt of the Third world affects health and education of the poor, because the States are unable to maintain the necessary level of such services. Women of the subaltern classes are the first victims of privatization of water, electricity, health and educational services, because it means an increase in prices. Indigenous people are expelled from their original territories, by agro-business corporations. Small peasants are pushed into poverty by the diminishing rate of agricultural products. Damages to the environment affect primarily the weakest sections of population. All this explains the increasing resistances and their convergence that we will examine later on.
Increasing social distances are produced. The 20% richest section of world population absorb more than 82 % of the world revenues and the 20 % poorest have access to only 1.4 % of them. When real salaries are decreasing, incomes of the capitalist class is growing drastically. In the USA, heads of corporations were paid the equivalent of 41 workers salaries in 1960 and 475 in 1999. Pauperization is increasing all over the world. In Latin America there are 200 million more poor today than 30 years ago.
The so called struggle against poverty of the World Bank is far from meeting its own objectives of alleviating poverty (not eliminating) and is a remake of the traditional assistencial approach, not to speak about criminalization of the poor and the willingly weakening of social movements.
Cultural aspects
The main effect of the neo-liberal model is the increase of individualism. Individual promotion, excellence, competitiveness, productivity are the main, if not the exclusive values. This invades the educational system which must be rentable and competitive. Humanism, solidarity are relegated issues. The psychological effects are also impressive, conducing to squizofrenic conditions (human beings managing inhuman structures). Mass media are controlled by economic power structures and tend also to promote the values of the system, being little accessible to a critical thinking.
Raising fundamentalisms are also linked with the development of the neo-liberal era. From one side they are the result of the resistance against a cultural, political and economic aggression, like the case of Islam and from another one they reinforce the elitist character of the dominant classes, like Opus Dei and other similar movements in the Catholic Church. The great success of Pentecostal movements corresponds to the social and psychological needs of broken communities in search for solidarity, meaning for life and ethics.
Even at the level of philosophical thinking we assist to the rize of postmodernism, not only as a critic of the type of modernity brought about by the economic rationality of the capitalist system, but more as the denial of all systems and of the existence of structure. What counts are the individuals building immediate history, the "small talks" against holistic theories. At the moment that capitalism is becoming a world system, with the material basis of its reproduction (the new technologies of information and communication), nothing could be more useful.
3. The logic of capitalism
When we see the results of the neo-liberal phase of capitalism, we can ask ourselves what are the logics at the base of such a system, claiming to be the only way of creating wealth in the world. Indeed the development model of the South is a spectacular growth of about 20 % of the population. This is also the case of China today. The rest remains in poverty with a very slow betterment thanks mostly to their own efforts and millions are living in extreme poverty. In the North, economic differences are in full increase, with great richness monopolized by a few, a great vulnerability of the middle class and the creation of a new poverty. All this seems quite contradictory.
As a matter of fact, it corresponds to a specific logic. It is more advantageous for capitalist accumulation (profit) to produce sophisticated goods and services with a great added value for a minority of people able to buy them than to produce ordinary products for majorities with little or almost no purchasing power. It is of course a short time view, but this is the logic of capitalism. It even brings to the classical crises of overproduction, because the trend to diminish the cost of production, in particular the cost of labour, in order to make more profit, makes that there is a lack of people able to buy the products.
There is a theory at the basis of such a behaviour. We spoke already about von Hayek, but the economic liberal thinking is much older. Adam Smith and many of his followers have naturalized the market relationships. In a conversation with Michel Camdessus, when he was the director of the International Monetary Fund in Washington, I asked him why there was such a distance between the apparently very logical approach of the IMF policy and the catastrophic results it had in reality, suggesting that it was because no consideration was given to the fact that the market is a social relation. His angry answer was the market is not a social relation.
So the market is considered as a fact of nature and it has to be respected, eventually has to be regulated to avoid abuses and assure competition. But the reality of the capitalist market is very different. To open the market means to give the advantage to the powerful and that is what we see in reality. To diminish the power of the State means to open the way for the capitalist logic of accumulation. The same logics requests that all goods and services would be evaluated in function of their exchange value and not of their use value. It means that to contribute to capital accumulation everything has to be transformed in merchandise (commodities). It is not the needs of the people which are counting, but the profit you make on selling. If necessary artificial needs are created.
True enough this is very creative in the production of sophisticated goods and services, but it also provokes a tremendous waste of resources in order to increase the rate of profit (goods have a shorter life and must be replaced). Only a minority can afford to be actors in the show. Because of the contradictions that this is bringing in the economic functioning of the world, new frontiers of accumulation must be found. Three of them are central today.
First, peasant agriculture. The greatest part of agricultural production is still outside the main logic of capitalist profit. Small peasants are producing mainly for themselves or for a local circuit of consumers. To feed 6 billion people and tomorrow 10 billion, means an enormous possibility of capital accumulation if this economic activity is transformed in merchandise. Hence the plan of the World Bank for the next 25 years : to transform peasant agriculture in a capitalistic productivist agriculture. It means to organize agrobusiness as the base of world food production. No consideration is given to the almost 3 billion people living from small agriculture, neither to food security considered by the United Nations as a basic Human Right, neither to the ecological and human cost of this model of rural exploitation, neither to the logic of overproduction which already characterizes industrial agriculture. The law of the market is the only logic and this is why for example, the World Bank proposed to suppress the cultivation of rice in Sri Lanka (which is the main food production since 30 centuries), because it is cheaper to buy it in Vietnam or in Thailand.
The second frontier is the public services. Billions of dollars are spent for education, health, water, electricity, telephones, transportation in the world. As long as such sectors remain public, they contribute very marginally to capital accumulation. But if they are transferred to the private sector and transformed into merchandize they become useful. At that moment little consideration is given to the fact that some are able to buy them and a great majority will be excluded. The main logic is always the same : short time profit.
A third frontier is the control of biodiversity. For the future of important industrial sectors the biological basis is more important than the chemical one. It is the case of pharmaceutical or cosmetic industries, but also or the so called new "green energies". Destruction of soils and forests, non sustainable exploitation, robber of traditional knowledge of indigenous people are the price to be paid.
Accumulation in a capitalist perspective is generally a short time vision. As a matter of fact it does not envisage in its calculations the social and ecological cost paid before its operations and after, as long as the profit is immediate. It is only when the system is challenged by another relation of power that it has to abide to regulations. This is very important to understand for the strategies of social movements and for ethical judgments.
4. To delegitimize capitalism
A major discussion is about the choice between humanizing capitalism or to change the system. Some are thinking that the first issue is the only possible and that through dialogue and reforms things may become better. They make the difference between salvage capitalism and a "civilized one". However the history of capitalism shows clearly that it is always salvage, because its logic tends to eliminate any other consideration than accumulation and that it is only when enough strength is exercised that he must accept some concessions.
The reasons why it has to be delegitimize in its logic and not only contemned in its abuses are various. The first ones are economical. Capitalism is generally presented as the most efficient economic system to produce goods and services. And this is true, at condition of not asking too many questions about the way it is producing (social and ecological cost) and how the distribution of the social product is done. But if we define economy as the human activity destined at furnishing the basis of the physical, cultural and spiritual life of all human beings in the world, never in the history of mankind have we known such an inefficient system. More it develops, more are social distances constructed and worse is the situation of millions of people.
With the neo-liberal phase of capitalism, the gap between the 5 % richest and the 5 % poorest has greatly increased. The difference between rich and poor countries is growing. Mankind has the means to solve the problem, even in a short time. The fortune of the 500 richest persons in the world could finance more than 10 times the cost of what the UN estimates necessary to solve the basic needs of the whole of mankind. If we compare the distribution of revenues in Cuba with the rest of Latin America, we see that the structure is completely different: a relatively equal distribution in the first case against a fundamental distortion the second, with a concentration of revenues in the 10 % up and almost half of the population living below the poverty line. If it has been possible in Cuba, why is it not possible elsewhere ?
The second economic reason is that to use the categories of Schumpeter, the German economist, the destructive character of capitalism has now largely gone beyond its constructive aspects. It is the reproduction of life itself which is at stake. Yet a considerable percentage of the economic activities are not sustainable and if it continues climate changes will become graver. Water supply is already a problem in certain parts of the world. It goes so far that some philosophers do not hesitate to adopt a pessimistic approach, thinking that it is yet too late. Without going so far, we have to note that this will not be changed by continuing in the economic logic of capitalism.
It raises thus very serious ethical questions. We cannot remain in an ethics of the functioning of the system, as most of the management or business ethics do. It is the logic of capitalism which is unethical, because of contradicting the reproduction of life and producing and reproducing worldwide injustices. Hence the weakness of liberal ethics (Rawls), clearly anti-neo-liberal, but not going to the bottom of the matter. The same can be said of the social doctrine of the Christian Churches and of most of other religions.
This reasoning does not consider that small steps are not necessary, because people suffer and die today and not tomorrow. But if such actions, which could be called reformists because they can be absorbed by the system, are not accomplished as steps to transform its fundamental logic and build an alternative way of organizing the material basis of human life, they will only contribute to the reproduction of the capitalist system, allowing it to adapt itself.
5. Global resistances
Resistances have existed since the beginning of the hegemony of capital, but what is specific today is the convergence of those resistances. In 1999, twenty five years after the Washington's Consensus and 10 years after the fall of the wall of Berlin, in the meeting: The Other Davos and a few months later in Seattle, representatives of very different social movements and organizations, which never before had been working together, discovered that they had the same enemy. It was the beginning of the common protests against the world decision powers: WTO, IMF, World Bank, European Union and of the World Social Forum, the first one being held at Porto Alegre in 2001.
The aim has been not only to protest, but also to search for alternatives. Contrary to the famous declaration of Mrs Tatcher, that there is no alternative (to capitalist market), the Forums allowed to discover that alternatives were existing in every sector of collective life: economic, social, political, cultural and at every level, from the utopia (which society do we want) to the middle and the short range ones. What is lacking is the political will and the social pressure to impose it.
Of course the system is strong, but at the same time it is weak. The classical crises of overproduction and the financial crises are succeeding themselves. In Latin America, the Empire has been hindered in its integration project of ALCA and a new political panorama has been established. Europe is halting the spread of genetic transformed agricultural products. In Irak resistance is destroying the dream of American hegemony in the region.
The numerous Social Forums (more than 200 in 6 years) have really formed a new collective consciousness and this task must be continued. However the present challenge is how to pass from this stage to the creation of collective actors. Some already exist, like Via Campesina, coordination of the peasant's movements. More have to come up and common actions must take place, in order to build a New Historical Subject, which will be plural, with all the victims of the prevailing system and not only with an exclusive role of the working class. Even if this is not the direct function of the Social Forums which must remain encounter places, to reflect on the matter and to propose orientations are real challenges for the Nairobi World Forum.
Religions have also their role, to promote commitments, to propose motivations and orientations for the construction of the utopia, to contribute to the ethics of the strategies and to help the development of a spirituality.
We can conclude that an analysis of the socio-economic and political situations is necessary for any praxis, even in the religious field, to create the awareness of the reality, as an indispensable mediation for any social ethics and to create solid hopes away from wishful thinking. Such an analysis should be holistic and global, historical (the genesis of the phenomena) and dialectical (actors in interaction). This is why Liberation Theology has a future.
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*Professor emeritus of the Catholic University of Louvain, former Professor of sociology of religion, founder of the Tricontinental centre at Louvain la Neuve, member of the International Council of the World Social Forum, president of the International League for the Rights of the Peoples, autor of books and numerous articles on sociology of religion and of globalization