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globalization
•nytimes.com/2006/07/06/opinion/06mishra.html
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laodan discovered 24 months ago
The Myth of the New India In The NYT by PANKAJ MISHRA """ It was not so long ago that India appeared in the American press as a poor, backward and often violent nation, saddled with an inefficient bureaucracy and, though officially nonaligned, friendly to the Soviet Union. Suddenly the country seems to be not only a "roaring capitalist success story" but also, according to Foreign Affairs, an "emerging strategic partner of the United States." To what extent is this wishful thinking rather than an accurate estimate of India's strengths? """ URL: The Myth of the New India
This article is an answer to the article "The India Model" that was published in Foreign Affairs (July/August 2006 and on which I commented here in SU. Pankaj Mishra's arguments are a perfect illustration of my earlier comments: - "the country's $728 per capita gross domestic product is just slightly higher than that of sub-Saharan Africa" - "Despite a recent reduction in poverty levels, nearly 380 million Indians still live on less than a dollar a day." - "Despite the country's growing economy, 2.5 million Indian children die annually" - "the official literacy rate of 61 percent includes many who can barely write their names" - "Feeding on the resentment of those left behind by the urban-oriented economic growth, communist insurgencies have erupted in some of the most populous and poorest parts of north and central India. The Indian government no longer effectively controls many of the districts where communists battle landlords and police, imposing a harsh form of justice on a largely hapless rural population." - "India's economic growth has been largely jobless. Only 1.3 million out of a working population of 400 million are employed in the information technology and business processing industries that make up the so-called new economy" Economic development by a few entrepreneurs is a myth. This is the story of Great-Britain but nowadays no-one would be admitted to go plunder around its initial capital accumulation as the British did for centuries. In the present "trying to catch-up" reality the French model of development is definitely more appropriate that gives the state a leading role in the organization and investment in the industries judged strategic for the future of the country. Here follows the content of a conversation that I had with mark-the-lark about my comment on the article by Gurcharan Das in Foreign Affairs: My understanding is that "industrialization" or taking over the Western model of "the logic of capital" is being done by both China and India out of sheer necessity for their own survival as nations. The world is indeed faced with this inescapable fact that "the logic of capital" is globalizing it around the values and interests of "whitemen". Survival now means awakening and use of "whitemen" ways to expand. It is indeed understood in China and in India that waiting means being swallowed, absorbed and the consequence is disappearance as a free nation. The exemples of Europe, the US, Japan and the Asian Tigers indicate that the process towards modernity implies economic change that brings social change that in turn brings cultural change. Its this complete process that guarantees the capitalistic strength for a nation to strive in modernity. Here is what modernity is all about: - the industrial production of goods is displacing farmers from the land to the cities. - the ensueing urbanization destroys the economic autonomy of the new "workers" who become "captive" of the need to buy their means of subsistance which in turn is massifying the economy (mass market) - for all that to work, a functional education has to be given to all so that they can become productive in the economy and the mass market encourages a culture of consumerism that maximizes demand. - in terms of culture, the start of an industrial production implies the injection of "rationality" (the ideology of the logic of capital) that counters the impact of traditional belief systems. Consumerism then leads to the injection in each consumer's head that he knows what is best. That's the point when the "imposition" of the "worldview" of "the men of knowledge" by "the men of power" ceases. It is this economic-social-cultural process that builds up the national capital base that ultimately gives the power to a state to help preserving its national life and to instill its eventual flourishing in modernity.
