Subject: M-I: IPS: Marxist Lessons For Beleaguered Asia (fwd)
Date: Sun, 19 Apr 1998 09:55:42 -0400 (EDT)
From: "hoov" <hoov-AT-freenet.tlh.fl.us>


forwarded by Michael Hoover

Forwarded message:
> Date: Sat, 18 Apr 1998 22:35:40 -0500 (CDT)
> From: kerryo <astingsh-AT-ksu.edu>
> To: thrdwrld-AT-sphinx.Gsu.EDU
> Subject: IPS: Marxist Lessons For Beleaguered Asia
> 
> ECONOMY: Marxist Lessons For Beleaguered Asia
>     By Dipankar De Sarkar
>     
>    LONDON, Apr 7 (IPS) - As a dumbfounded world grapples with the
>    financial turmoil that has engulfed the Tiger economies of Southeast
>    Asia, a voice can be heard from the grave saying ''I told you so - and
>    that was 150 years ago.'' 
>    
>    Karl Marx could be excused for laughing loudly from his much- visited
>    resting place in Highgate in north London, at the spectacle of 10
>    Asian leaders being lectured by their European counterparts last week
>    on how to manage their collapsing economies.
>    
>    In recent weeks, the grave of the ''father of communism'' - with its
>    imposing memorial to the bearded German philosopher and economist -
>    has become more than a favourite tourist haunt. It has turned into a
>    timely reminder of his astonishingly accurate prophesies.
>    
>    The Asian financial and economic collapse may well be reason enough to
>    remember Marx, but just to drive the point home, 1998 turns out to be
>    the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Communist Manifesto.
>    
>    The pamphlet, in which Marx and fellow-German Friedrich Engels charted
>    out the principles of history through an incisive class- analysis and
>    set out the menu for radical workers' action, was to change the course
>    of world history, inpiring revolutions a cross the world well into the
>    20th century.
>    
>    It has been translated into every conceivable language, including such
>    unused classical languages as Sankrit. It was written when Marx was 29
>    years old and Engels only 27 -- a fact that makes their insights all
>    the more astonishing, according to the British historian Eric
>    Hobsbawm.
>    
>    That the document is still as relevant as when it was first published
>    - Apr. 24/25, 1848 -- is borne out spectacularly by the issues thrown
>    up at last week's Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM-2) in London, attended by
>    25 heads of government from the two regions.
>    
>    ''We hope to see a major revival of interest in the Manifesto and some
>    brand new editions are on their way. It has something to do with
>    Indonesia, Korea and Japan, doesn't it?'' said a counter-assistant at
>    a major London bookstore.
>    
>    It does indeed.
>    
>    Even though economists, government leaders and nongovernmental
>    activists around the world have given out varying and conflicting
>    reasons for the Asian crisis, many have balked from using the ''C-
>    word'' that Marx himself identified as the root cause of past, present
>    and future ills -- Capitalism.
>    
>    ''He talked about capitalism going into periodic crises. Sometimes, it
>    can bailed itself out by exploitation, but it's never a static
>    situation. These crises will flare up -- it's part of what is to be
>    expected, '' said Tish Newland, librarian of the Marx Memorial Library
>    in London.
>    
>    So what exactly did Marx and Engels foretell about the future of the
>    world? More to the point, say his supporters, what did he not?
>    
>    For instance, the leaders of the Asian Tiger economies would have done
>    well to quote the following from the Manifesto to their European
>    counterparts while being told of the value of free trade: ''The
>    bourgeoisie... has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in
>    place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up
>    that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade.''
>    
>    In the event, far from quoting from the Manifesto, the Asians bore the
>    lecture with impressive fortitude. Just to bear out the accuracy of
>    the forecast, European leaders brushed aside concerns about such
>    ''chartered freedoms'' as human rights in order to ensure Asia's
>    compliance with free trade.
>    
>    And if anyone thought the International Monetary Fund's 100
>    billion-dollar bailout package for Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand
>    was an act of magnanimity, they would well to read this from the
>    Communist Manifesto: ''Just as it (the bourgeoisie) has made the
>    country dependent on the towns, so it has made... nations of peasants
>    (dependent) on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.''
>    
>    The words never seemed truer than when Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai of
>    Thailand took the stage at the concluding news conference Saturday and
>    admitted before hundreds of reporters: ''Thailand was in a necessary
>    condition to seek IMF assistance, because foreign reserves had
>    depleted. And as a debtor nation, we have to abide by the terms of the
>    creditors without any choice... There is no certainty -- we still have
>    to abide strictly by IMF conditions.''
>    
>    If he needed an explanation on what makes a country so completely
>    dependent on foreign exchange reserves, he could do worse than leaf
>    through the slim volume, say Marxists.
>    
>    And there is further proof. Here's what the book has to say about
>    commodity prices -- the scourge of many African economies -- and
>    Globalisation.
>    
>    ''The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with
>    which it (the bourgeoisie) batters down all Chinese walls, with which
>    it forces the 'barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to
>    capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt
>    the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it
>    calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois
>    themselves
>    
>    ''In one word, it creates a world after its own image.''
>    
>    As to the disruptive nature of market forces unleashed by a free
>    market system -- the roots of the Asian turmoil, according to some --
>    the Manifesto is chillingly accurate.
>    
>    ''Modern bourgeois society... is like the sorcerer, who is no longer
>    able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up
>    by his spells,'' it says.
>    
>    ''It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their
>    periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the
>    existence of the entire bourgeois society.'
>    
>    ''Suddenly... it appears as if a famine, a universal war of
>    devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence';
>    industry and commerce seems to be destroy; and why? Because there is
>    too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much
>    industry, too much commerce,'' the Manifesto says.
>    
>    To that list, Asian leaders today might add: too much foreign capital,
>    too much export-oriented growth and too much liberalisation of the
>    financial sector.
>    
>    Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohammad told the news Saturday that
>    some 20 million workers were out of job in the region as a result of
>    the financial crisis. And what about child labourers - the so-called
>    invisible victims of the currency crisis, who, it is thought by some,
>    will be sought out more and more because they are cheaper to employ
>    than adults?
>    
>    ''All are instruments of labour,'' says the Manifesto, ''more or less
>    expensive to use, according to their age and sex.''
>    
>    Is there then no hope for the beleaguered people of Southeast Asia or
>    those of the 'newly emerging (that is, liberalising) economies' --
>    whether in Asia, Africa or Latin America?
>    
>    The Manifesto has this to say: ''The development of Modern Industry...
>    cuts from under its feet the very foundations on which the bourgeoisie
>    produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore,
>    produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the
>    victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.''
>    
>    That, followers of Marx say, is the message from an anniversary the 10
>    Asian leaders missed out on during their trip to London.
>    (END/IPS/dds/mk/98)
> 
> 



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