February 23, 2002

Sartre — wondering at the firm adherence of the French workers to the communist party, reasoned that they accepted the philosophy — had no such effect on Dr Mahnaz Fatima, Associate Professor at the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi. She, it would appear from the portion of the book on economic history, believes that it is not the social existence of the men that determines their consciousness but their consciousness that determines their existence (if one may stand Marx on his head). A chacun son gout. The surprising thing, however, is that in spite of her idealist framework, she has got her sums right.

Dr Fatima is a radical. She goes as far as one can without actually stepping outside the boundary of bourgeois economics. And that is the correct approach. She is writing not to propound some utopian theory but to offer solutions to the serious problem of averting the ill effects of globalization upon a backward country — Pakistan. The choice for Pakistan, according to her is not whether to join the global economy or not.

It is whether to join it as a split economy — where its core becomes a part of the globalized market and the rest of the national economy is marginalized — or to integrate into the globalization system as an economically unified unit. The latter she terms the true globalization. This would require integrating the peasantry with the rest of the economy. The starting point, indeed the essence, of this integration would be land reforms, creating a strong class of middle farmers, with viable holdings and using modern inputs.

She speaks of three globalizations in history. The first, she traces to divine revelations, coming down to the European renaissance, which advocated combining the pursuit of wealth with virtue. She regrets that the world got hold of the first part, forgetting virtue and thus universalized inegalitarian socio-economic organization.

The second globalization, starting in the fourteenth century, brought most of the earth “into the scope of the European man”. This was the age of the early European empires starting in the sixteenth century. Portuguese, Spanish and later Dutch.

The third commences in the eighteenth century with the industrial revolution and the British Empire with competition from France, Germany, etc. The US overtook them in the nineteenth century.

She says that colonial imperialism gave way to neo-colonialism in the mid-twenties. This is economic in nature, while the old one was political. Of course, there is no purely political imperialism. No one occupies barren lands except for strategic reason.

It is when she gets to modern times that she forgets the virtue part and is on firm economic ground. She poses the question why the newly independent countries have not developed themselves since independence.

She makes two recommendations for Pakistan: integrating the backward agricultural sector with the rest of the economy, whose essence is: (a) equitable distribution of income so agriculture can provide a market for industrial goods, enabling the industry to grow and to create backward linkages, and (b) the third world countries negotiating collectively with the advanced ones in order to create a level playing field, where one is not enriched by impoverishing the other.

Both are political questions. The internal integration involves breaking up the semi-feudal big estates, (which two land reforms have not been able to do), creating viable farms which can afford mechanization and, above all bringing the wages of the agricultural workers close to those of industry and services. Actually no country has been able to industrialize without land reforms, except England, which could do so because it dominated the world market. All others, France, Germany, Russia, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, etc had thorough going land reforms.

Our legislatures, when in existence, are dominated by the landed class. They will not legislate meaningful land reforms. That can be done only arbitrarily. Will the army perform this historical task?

As to the advanced countries, they are rich because the others are poor. Neo-colonial system in the latter suits the rich. They are not ready to give up the unequal exchange with the third world. In fact, the third world’s debt is part of this system of tribute to the first world. The advanced countries not only reduce aid, they even close their doors to the third world’s products like textiles and steel in which the latter have an advantage. Then there is talk of intellectual property, etc. However, one who has advantage, will not give it up even by collective bargaining. The fifty years since 1945 are witness to it.

A third world country can bargain only if it is internally united and strong, as Dr Fatima says again and again. But she does not tell us which class in Pakistan will lead us to internal integration. Our nascent industrial bourgeoisie, which would have an interest in consolidating the country internally, was destroyed by the PPP government in the interest of the semi-feudal landed class. The industrial working class is weak and fragmented. Will the middle peasant do it? The peasantry has played the decisive role in all the revolutions. But it has been led by some other class.

Kagarlitsky says that the globalizing powers want economic integration and political disintegration of the world (Twilight of globalization). This is only partly true. They also want to preserve compartmentalization of the working class at the global level, which is necessary for the wage differential between the centre and the periphery and the consequent transfer of value from the latter to the former. This requires states, may be weak states, but states all the same. Yet it is only the states, which can resist globalization, not of technology but of exploitation, by re-organizing themselves, as Dr Fatima recommends.

The author has done a good job of bringing out the various features of globalization and she has recommended practical ways for Pakistan to protect itself while joining the global economy. But her terminology is often unusual. She refers to the Western world as the “free world”, which, of course, included Suharto’s Indonesia, Verwoerd’s South Africa and Pinochet’s Chile. It was free only in the sense that, in capitalism, “freedom” is the freedom of the capital.

Secondly, she mixes up a lot of notions in description. She says globalization is “getting integrated intellectually, geographically and economically” (p.57). In actual fact, it is, as she herself puts it two pages later, “freedom in the realm of international economics” i.e. in the removal of all barriers to the reproduction of capital at the global scale.

Imperatives of globalization: implications for Pakistan
By Dr Mahnaz Fatima
Area Study Centre for Europe, University of Karachi
ISBN 969-8551-02-6
168pp. Rs250. US$15

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