Ideological Fixation by Azar Gat

Author:Azar Gat
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Capitalism and the Presumed Exploitation of the Undeveloped Countries

Much of the domestic criticism in the West has been due to the lingering, combined legacy of Marxism, the New Left, and the struggle against colonialism in Western consciousness. The view that capitalism and the West are the root of all evil and that the less developed parts of the world are among their main victims has become entrenched in the democracies from the 1950s and 1960s on. Within this frame of reference, capitalist exploitation has been denounced, the West’s wars have been viewed as exploitative interventions, and the economically undeveloped parts the world have been presented as the bearers of native innocence. All these propositions incorporate serious distortions of reality.

Capitalism has been deeply controversial ever since it became the dominant socioeconomic regime in the nineteenth century, and inevitably so. We have traced the debate over some of its supposed virtues and ills in the previous chapter. With the historical experience of two centuries behind us, the debate has narrowed considerably, or it should have. As competing systems for organizing modern society have failed to deliver on their promises and have lost their erstwhile tremendous cognitive and emotional appeals, the market principle is now more widely perceived as unchallenged as an engine of development, wealth creation, and prosperity. The current debate mostly revolves around the desired scope of action by states and by other authorities and institutions for regulating, correcting, and directing the markets, distributing their fruits, preventing market failures, and guarding against social and environmental ills. We shall see more about this later in this book. Concerning the economically less developed parts of the world, the charge of capitalist exploitation there has been widespread. In the 1960s and 1970s, socialist leanings in developing countries went hand in hand with what was known as “dependency theory”. This was the view that capitalism and free trade worked to the advantage of the rich countries and left the world’s periphery in a perpetually inferior and subordinate status. Joining the system was regarded as a continuation of colonialism, as “neo-colonialism”.

Irrespective of its ideological underpinnings, “dependency theory” was a legitimate proposition at the time, whose test was empirical. It did not fare this test well. Singapore was the creation of Britain in the era of imperialism, and its leader after independence in the 1960s Lee Kuan Yew paid little attention to the alleged need to break away from “informal imperialism”. He integrated Singapore into the global economy, making it one of the world’s financial and manufacturing hubs, with the result that the former colony has become wealthier than its former imperial master. Singapore has thus been the great winner, successively, of both imperialism and informal, “neo-imperialism”. Over time, other developing countries reversed course, embraced the markets, and opened up to the global economy. India, another former colony, went through this reversal from the early 1990s on, with spectacular economic results. Indeed, an old-new realization has grown, expressed in the half-whimsical, sweet-and-sour saying that the real problem is not the countries that capitalism exploits, but those which it does not care to exploit.

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