In 1848, Marx and Engels predicted that capitalism would develop as a world system. This has been borne out in almost laboratory fashion in the 20th century. The crushing domination of the world market is the most important fact of the epoch. We have a world economy, world politics, world diplomacy, world culture, world wars – there have been two of those in the past hundred years, and the second came close to extinguishing the light of human civilisation. Yet the globalisation of the economy does not mean a lessening of the problems, but, on the contrary, an enormous intensification of the contradictions.
In the last decade of the 20th century, despite all the wonders of modern science, two thirds of humanity lives on the border line of barbarism. Common diseases such as diarrhoea and measles kill seven million children a year. Yet this can be prevented by a cheap and simple vaccination. 500,000 women die each year from complications during pregnancy, and perhaps another 200,000 die from abortions. The ex-colonial countries spent only 4 per cent of their GDP on health – an average of $41 a head, compare with $1900 in the advanced capitalist countries.
According to United Nations reports, more than six billion people will inhabit the earth by the year 2,000. About half of them will be under the age of 20. Yet most suffer from unemployment, lack of basic education and health care, overcrowding and bad living conditions. An estimated 100 million children aged 6 to 11 are not in school. Two-thirds are girls. Incidentally, even in the USA, UNICEF estimates that 20 per cent of children live below the national poverty line. However, the situation in Third World countries has reached a horrific level. As many as 100 million children live on the streets. In Brazil, this problem is being “solved” by a campaign by the police and murder squads to exterminate children for the crime of being poor. Similar atrocities are being carried out against homeless people in Colombia. Not long ago it was discovered that a large number of men, women and children living on the street had been murdered and their bodies sold to the University of Bogota for dissection by medical students. Such stories fill all civilised people with horror. But it is only the most extreme expression of the morality of a society that treats human beings as mere commodities.
One million children have been killed, four million seriously injured, and five million have become refugees or orphaned as a result of wars in the past decade. In many ex-colonial countries, we have the phenomenon of child labour, often amounting to slavery. The hypocritical protests in the Western media do not prevent the products of this labour from reaching Western markets and increasing the capital of “respectable” western companies. A typical example was the recently published case of a match factory where children, mostly girls, work a 6 day-60 hour-week, with toxic chemicals, for three dollars. A letter to The Economist of 15 September 1993 pointed out that: “Parents do realise the value of education for the future of their children but often their poverty is so desperate that they cannot do without the wages of their labouring children.”
The main reason for the grinding poverty of the third world is the two-fold looting of the resources through the terms of trade, and the trillion dollars debt owed by the third world to the big western banks. Just to pay the interest on the debt, these countries have to export food needed by their own people and sacrifice the health and education of the people. According to UNICEF, debt repayments have caused incomes in the third world to fall by a quarter, health expenditure by 50 per cent and educational expenditure by 25 per cent. Despite the hypocritical outcry against the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest, Brazilian economists have proved that this is mainly motivated by the need to raise cash for agricultural exports, such as beef, raised on reclaimed land. The financing for such export projects comes from the World Bank and other international financial organisations.
In a very literal sense of the word, humanity stands at the crossroads. On the one hand, all the potential exists to build a paradise in this world. On the other, the elements of barbarism threaten to engulf the entire planet. In addition to everything else, we have the threat to the environment. In their frantic search after profit, the big multinationals are destroying the planet. The tropical rain forest is being devastated at a rate of 29,000 square miles a year. That is an area the size of Scotland. People may speculate on what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But there is no doubt about what is the cause of the present catastrophe – the uncontrolled pursuit of profit and the anarchy of capitalist production.
Even scientists who have nothing in common with socialism have been driven to the conclusion (perfectly logical, if one thinks for a moment) that the only solution is some kind of world planned economy. However, this is not possible on the basis of capitalism. Forty-one nations formally endorsed the “World Conservation Strategy”. But, in the absence of a world socialist federation, this is mainly an exercise on paper. The interests of the big monopolies decide.
Yet there is no inevitability about this. All the dire predictions about the hopeless plight of humanity, starting with Malthus, have been shown to be false. The potential for human development is limitless. The capacity exists even now to eliminate hunger from the face of the earth. In Western Europe and the United States, agricultural productivity has reached such heights that farmers are paid not to produce food. Good land is taken out of commission. Wheat is thrown into the sea, or mixed with dye to make it inedible. There are mountains of beef, butter and powdered milk. Spanish olive trees are deliberately uprooted. And there are 450 million people in the world who are malnourished, or actually starving.
By early next century, the Pacific Rim countries will probably account for half of world output. The world economy will have come into its own. For centuries, Europeans have regarded themselves as the centre of the globe. Objectively speaking, this has no more basis than the idea of Ptolemy that the earth stood at the centre of the universe. Already in the 1920s Trotsky predicted that the centre of gravity of world history would pass from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The next stage of human history will see the multi-millioned masses of Asia realise their full potential, as part of a Socialist World Federation.