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Page 1 of 2 Baffled by the refusal of their IIT students – and indeed most middle class people -- to see the flip side of globalisation, Rahul Varman and Manali Chakrabarti engaged the students in a semester-long debate on globalisation. The interaction provided useful insights into how dominant ideologies are shaped
 I. Making sense of globalisation
Earlier this year we saw two news items together on the front page – Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh once more extolling the virtues of the 9% growth rate, and the chairman of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector reporting that four out of five Indians live on less than Rs 20 a day. Every time there is a report on the rising information technology (IT) sector, or the promise of the retail industry, or of India becoming a superpower, somewhere tucked away there is also news about another farmer suicide or police firing on agitating peasants or yet more starvation deaths. We live in Kanpur, a metro with a population of over 4 million, where every morning it is a nightmare to even glance at the newspaper headlines – power breakdowns, epidemics, killings, suicides, burglaries…the list goes on without respite. And yet, on the same pages, there are reports on the new malls and fashion shows of India Shining. One often wonders whether these divergent reports and the people talked about in them belong to the same geographical region, the same society, or even the same species. The divide is even more in and around the IIT Kanpur campus where we have been living for many years now. On the one hand here are our students whose starting pay packets are several times the amount our senior colleagues draw as their last salary at retirement, and on the other hand are the migrant workers from Malda and Chhattisgarh who construct those swanky buildings out of contributions from our alumni in Silicon Valley, and earn Rs 50 for a 12-hour workday. While our graduates have been in leading positions in technology and management across the globe for decades, last month a visiting German student asked us why it is that women workers on our construction sites carry loads on their heads: “Could you not design something to alleviate their workload, not even a crude contraption to carry the load on wheels?” the student asked. Despite this state of affairs and the ensuing bewilderment for somebody not ‘used’ to it, the media tells us that the world is, finally, turning out to be a wonderful place for us thanks to globalisation, and all we need to do is work sincerely and not entertain any ‘negative thoughts’ about these developments. When we pose some of our above concerns to our students, they too tell us that our problem is that we think pessimistically and see only negative things. They proclaim that we are looking at the empty half of the glass (which is actually getting filled up very fast). Given such a massive disconnect in views on contemporary reality, we have attempted of late to engage our students on the phenomenon of globalisation in order to further understand the nature of the debate and its underlying premises. In the process of debating with our students formally through a semester-long course, we have discerned a pattern. This consists of what we call three limiting ‘tendencies’ in their thinking about globalisation: Globalisation without interconnections, A homogeneous world without differentiation and A world without a past. We also see the reflections of these tendencies in the popular media and literature and even in our arguments with friends and colleagues, hence this attempt to share it in a popular forum as well. Globalisation without interconnections The most educative aspect of the debate with our students has been our realisation that they lack appreciation of interconnections in the global order. Though they are all for globalisation and believe in the captivating ideas of ‘one world’ and ‘global village’, they find it hard to look beyond standalone concepts like corporation, state, World Bank, India, US, etc. They fail to assess the phenomenon in terms of cause and effect of various socio-political and economic forces; they fail to see the interconnections amongst institutions and to understand globalisation as an emergent system of all these variables put together. They are used to thinking in terms of good versus bad, black versus white and have a limited understanding of grey, so to them, corporations are good but the government is bad, the West is good and the developing world is bad, technology is good but population is bad, and so on. That there are complex interconnections amongst the global forces and institutions – the corporations, states and multilateral institutions, the developed first world versus the underdeveloped third world, technology and unemployment, industry and agriculture, all this largely escapes them as they look for quick and ready answers to the ills of the present order. We opened up the debate with what perhaps best symbolises the present order of globalisation -- the large corporations -- and our first case was that of Wal-Mart. We made the class examine the phenomena underlying the success of Wal-Mart -- the ‘high price’ behind the ‘low costs’ of the corporation. We discussed the labour practices of Wal-Mart in the US – less than legally stipulated minimum wages, long hours of work, gender discrimination, ethnic discrimination, union-busting, undercutting of employee benefits, systemic and regular violation of laws, their record of consistently infringing environmental regulations combined with huge state subsidies, massive salaries of the top executives and profits for the owners. And, of course, perhaps the worst of all -- their outsourcing policies in the developing countries, zero taxes and horrific work conditions (universal violation of minimum wages) from China to Bangladesh to Honduras, and so on. We attempted to enlarge the scope of this debate by demonstrating that this phenomenon is not limited to one ‘bad’ corporation and hence not attributable to the ‘unethical’ practices of a specific set of managers but is inherent in the present order of globalisation and its favoured vehicle – the large corporation. We tried to establish this through multiple examples across a wide time-span – United Fruit’s involvement in the coup in Guatemala against the Arbenz government in order to protect its interests and the subsequent military regime and muzzling of civil and democratic rights of the people for decades (in fact the phrase ‘banana republic’ can be traced back to the corporation-State relations in Guatemala). Similarly we discussed the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway, Nike’s labour practices in the South, and finally the financial jugglery that led to the meteoric rise of Enron and its equally dramatic demise at the cost of employees and consumers. Through various case studies we attempted to establish that the phenomenon was not ‘survival of the fittest’ as is claimed, but actually the power of the biggest and the mightiest, as the Yale sociologist Charles Perrow puts it in his pioneering study of 19th century American corporations. In other words, the corporations are not ‘efficiency maximising’, implying more output for less input, but are in fact ‘externality maximising’, that is, their bottom line may appear good only because they are able to pass off their costs to others – consumers, workers, society, the developing world, or even future generations if you look at it in terms of environmental costs as argued by Harvard economist Stephen Marglin about the factory system of 18th century England. Faced with a critical set of facts and the unenviable record of corporations on various counts, many in the class came up with a new position: that it is not the corporations’ job to promote development and fulfil related objectives like providing employment, good wages etc. Many asserted that these were only incidental to the primary objective of the corporations, which was to earn profits for their shareholders. In their modified opinion it was the state which was to be blamed if the corporations are not following their legal obligations. After all, they argued, it is the state which is mandated to take care of the public good – it is the government’s duty to ensure that corporations ‘behave’ as good citizens and follow appropriate labour laws, environmental regulations etc. Several of them emphasised that the primary problem is that “we (developing countries) have not put our house in order” and hence “we cannot blame others (corporations/theWest) for our failures”. They were disinclined to see the interconnections between state and corporations, for instance the state subsidies that Wal-Mart gets everywhere, the manner in which Enron was promoted and propped up by the political elite of the US, the nexus between Nike and third world states, the manner in which medieval Middle East states have been propped up by the oil corporations (sociologist Dan Burton calls them ‘oilocracies’), and so on. Further, they seem to think that all governments are the same, irrespective of the process through which they have developed – whether it is a state in Europe which has emerged from a thoroughgoing and long-drawn-out process of capitalist transformation, including benefiting from the colonial plunder of Asia, the Americas and Africa, or a nascent nation-state like India or Bangladesh which has been subject to centuries of colonial plunder. In fact, some of them would tend to ignore the historical fact of colonialism, choosing to believe that it was a mutually beneficial arrangement between the West and the third world and probably the only possible way for the latter to industrialise and modernise. Thus we found that for most in the class the emptiness and fullness of the metaphorical glass (representing individual national economies) are two discrete qualities of the glass. We, on the other hand, attempted to reveal that in the global order nothing can be studied in isolation and a complex understanding can be achieved only by studying the whole picture with all its inherent interconnections. That is, the empty and full glasses are intimately related in historical processes. A homogeneous world without differentiation Interestingly, though the students were not able to see the systemic interconnections, they thought of society as an undifferentiated homogeneous unity. Thus, the US, India, etc are units by themselves which are not amenable to further categorisation and hence the Dabhol project is good for India, Wal-Mart is good for China, structural adjustment is good for India, and so on. The argument that society is divided in many ways and often when we juxtapose costs versus benefits it is likely that the costs are borne by one class -- most likely the poorest -- and the benefits go to the higher strata, was incomprehensible to the students. Similarly, many of them felt that the government was one unified entity, synonymous with the notion of nationhood, which works for the benefit of all. That governments may consciously favour certain classes over others was unimaginable for them. Perhaps the two points are related: the students fail to see the societal differentiations probably because they are unable to decipher the interconnections amongst the elite across the world and the convergence of their interests at the cost of the toiling poor. A world without a past We discovered that a significant category like history is alien to many in the class; for them, either the world always existed like it is, or it has evolved to the best possible form courtesy ‘survival of the fittest’. Inferentially, thus, the profit motive always existed and market-based exchange has always been part of human interactions. The very fact that the present world is embracing globalisation and corporations is, for them, testimony to the fact that this must be the best and most effective form available to humanity for progress. The class seemed unwilling to recognise that what may be perfectly rational for one set of individuals in the global sweepstakes, can possibly be absolutely irrational from another vantage point. That, for example, what might appear to be in the best interests of the Enron headquarters has the possibility of being devastating for electricity consumers in the Maharashtra countryside. Most significantly, a lack of appreciation of the historical context of various societies, capitalist institutions and the present global order, has made them practically blind to the historiography of possibilities – that history is always full of alternatives and that humanity could have taken multiple paths. Once certain choices are made at specific historical junctures, alternative possibilities are closed, at least for a time, as the choices made have their own momentum. For instance, monopoly, limited liability, public interest minimising and profit maximising corporate structures were not inevitable but happened at a historical juncture through the confluence of certain socio-political and economic forces in the US. Once such a corporate form was devised, it closed the possibilities of other ways of organising production, such as small firm networks, labour hiring capital, worker-owned organisations etc. II: No alternative to globalisation One of the primary reasons for the students’assertion that a critical analysis of the present form of globalisation was pointless was TINA – ‘there is no alternative’. We tried to establish that the above mode of thinking was against the spirit of science and that one ought to be willing to acknowledge a problem even if one has not been able to identify any solution yet; that, after all, is usually the first step towards a solution. We repeatedly invoked the metaphor of the ‘lost key’ – that one cannot hope to find the key by searching in a lighted area if it was lost in the darkness. We spent considerable class time dealing with various attempts at creating an alternative world order – kernels of new possibilities. We emphasised at the outset that each of these examples is only a part-answer to the ills of the present order, and that is how it will be for a long time as only incomplete alternatives can be forged in the interstices of a dominant system. And yet, we can find examples all around the world, including our immediate context, where people have attempted to transcend the limits posed by the present order. This is a tribute to human ingenuity and the striving for betterment in spite of the restrictions of the present system. We began with the example of ‘free software’ which is based on diametrically different principles from proprietary software. The free software effort indicates that humans like to work for motives other than mere economic gain, such as professional satisfaction, freedom and community participation. It suggests that people can work well in non-hierarchical settings and yet implement complex tasks like producing operating systems. At the time that this case was presented to the class, three million lines of ‘free’ code was available and tens of thousands of professional programmers were contributing to the movement. Most importantly, it has been empirically established that open source leads to far more reliable programmes that are likely to be free of faults as they undergo scrutiny at multiple points. For this reason systems requiring high reliability such as those used in operation theatres and for security, are rapidly converting to free software based systems. We discussed examples of the community form of service organisation like the celebrated dabbawallahs of Mumbai, who make less than one error in 15 million lunch deliveries from homes to workplaces, while working with little differentiation and hierarchy. They have evolved complex systems of self-organising through which around 5,000 dabbawallahs deliver 175,000 lunch boxes every day in a massive metropolis like Mumbai. They have been providing this service for more than a century now and it has not been possible for any competing courier service, national or international, to be able to challenge their low price and high reliability service. We also discussed the Mondragon complex of cooperatives in the Basque country of Spain, which has now become a huge conglomerate of manufacturing firms, educational institutes, retail chains and financial institutions with a turnover in billions. The cooperative complex has tens of thousands of worker-members at present and is still following many of the contra-capitalist principles, like worker ownership, with one member one vote, systems for accountability to community, equitable salaries and participatory democracy. Finally, we discussed the ongoing experiment of the Bolivarian revolution of Venezuela to demonstrate that society can be organised on fundamentally different principles which would lead to very different outcomes. The Venezuelan experience gives rise to hope and also provides a direction for challenging the present imperial global order. It empirically demonstrates the effectiveness of the two-pronged strategy of people’s participation in economy and polity to organise society on fundamentally different principles, and pan-third world solidarity -- in this case Latin American solidarity -- to create possibilities beyond those offered by the present global regime. The cases chosen as alternatives to globalisation attempted to demonstrate that people work for motives other than monetary benefit, that market-based exchanges can be substituted with community ties, that production systems can be far more egalitarian than the present large-scale hierarchical systems, that top-down bureaucratic states can be replaced by participatory democracy leading to unleashing of tremendous energy and spontaneity, and finally, that labour resource can be a substitute for capital resource. Without providing a blueprint for a new world -- which none of us have -- the purpose was to sensitise students to the possibility of an alternative world, beyond the present globalisation. Probably, most importantly, we attempted to reveal that the ‘promises’ and ‘claims’ of the present global order could be met but with radically different principles of organisation of world systems and commensurate institutions and norms. The class’s response to these alternatives was both interesting and educative. It can be summarised, overall, as – small, short-lived, and specific. The class was generally sceptical about the above examples and their objections were primarily threefold. The first objection was that the alternatives being discussed are “too small” in their scope and do not pose any serious challenge to the present order. They were unwilling to consider the Popperian idea of falsification that so long as one can find even one white crow, it is a serious challenge to the thesis that all crows are black, and that alternatives to a dominant order can be found only in the interstices. And, above all, each of the above examples amply manifests the energies and ingenuity of a huge set of individuals, either as producers, consumers or participants. The second and oft-cited limitation was that these examples have been short-lived, that at some point of time during their existence they acquired the characteristics of the dominant order. Thus Linux (free software) is getting increasingly commercialised, the Mondragon conglomerate has become identical to any other corporate giant, the Grameen Bank has become a huge top-down bureaucracy dependent on international funds from the likes of the Gates Foundation, and so on. Though we do agree in part with most of these criticisms, and encouraged the class to look at the limits of the alternatives, the interesting aspect for us with reference to the ‘about-turn of the course’ argument is that it assumes that at some point each of these examples stood on a different set of principles than the present order. But the students had no time to dwell on that phase and would quickly like to move over to the purported stage where these ‘alternatives’ have become contradictory to their own stated principles, or, in other words, fallen in with the norm. Finally, even if some of our students did recognise that at some point there was a concrete reality organised on ‘counter-intuitive’ principles, they would like to quickly find some specificity to which they can attribute its success. Thus the success of free software was attributed to the contributions of ‘retired’ professionals who had already secured their economic future by working on proprietary software, the success of the Mumbai dabbawallahs and the Mondragon cooperatives was attributed to peculiar ‘community values’ in which each of them was located and which were not transferable to other contexts. Similarly, the Venezuelan army could participate in development activities only because they were surrounded by particularly ‘peace-loving neighbours’, unlike India. And if none of the above fitted, then they took recourse to the extraordinary individual theory: ‘the great leader’ who descends from nowhere from time to time – Stallman for free software, Yunus for Grameen Bank, Chavez in Venezuela and so on. Once we attribute the alternatives to the great leaders, we do not need to do anything other than wait for the moment of our salvation from any situation, including globalisation. Our greatest learning through this exercise has been an appreciation of the grip of ideology which determines the kind of weightage each one of us attaches to a set of facts. Thus, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, the students justified and defended the present order because of their belief in a certain philosophy of globalisation based on notions of individual gain, corporate profits and markets. Likewise, they dismissed the possibilities of another global order which can be human-centric, based on community values of mutuality, and ecologically sustainable. Of course we also appreciate the fact that most of us, including our students, are likely to be more susceptible to certain ideas because it serves our immediate individual and/or class interests especially if they stem from the dominant ideology. Our experience conclusively demonstrates the need for persistent ideological debates with every strata of society. And further, the need to repeatedly point out and acknowledge the existence of contending ideologies, that even the universally accepted norm represents an ideology because otherwise it is generally assumed that only when one critiques the present order is one being ‘ideologically motivated’. (We would like to put on record that while we are sharing our debate and disagreements with our students of various classes we have regard for their viewpoints, in fact, that is the reason for our attempts at engaging them. Moreover, the students had multiple points of view and many of them displayed the finest of sensitivities and attempts at grappling with a complex phenomenon like globalisation.) (Rahul Varman teaches at IIT Kanpur, and Manali Chakrabarti teaches at the Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata) InfoChange News & Features, November 2008 |
