The Grind

Term projects do an interminable workload make. The coffee book I just finished, Coffee: A Dark History, by Anthony Wild, was a lengthy polemnic in the best UK radical tradition. Free Trade coffee is not enough, Wild insists, as long as global capitalism holds sway. It's the revolution or...well, ceaseless complaining, actually.

One thing I'm getting from all of the far-left contemporary political/economic analyses I've read in the last few months is that they acknowledge that what really spelled disaster for the third world was the fact that the end of the Cold War obviated the necessity of the US worrying about the social welfare of anyone poorer than, say, Canada. During the Cold War the US certainly intervened militarily whenever a regime with the slightest socialistic tendencies came to power (see: 20th century Latin American history 1945-1989), but it also supported some kind of regulation to insure the basic subsistence of people in countries it feared might otherwise embrace leftist populist politics. This is the case with coffee, even: the US supported the International Coffee Agreement which helped regulate the ups and downs of the global coffee market. However, the US withdrew its support in '89, fatally undermining the whole enterprise and ultimately insuring that the worst effects of neoliberal economic policies spearheaded by the IMF and World Bank would be felt by subsistence-level coffee farmers (currently, coffee producers make about 13% of total coffee revenue, down from 40% in 1989.)

My point is that what changed were policies, not "capitalism." The faith in the free market and total deregulation led directly to economic disaster for all but the richest nations, and the richest people within those nations. Without communism as an ideological rival, (neo-) liberalism was unfettered and promptly set about restructuring things to insure that the rich got much richer and the poor got whatever they could scrape up. For me, this still suggests that the appropriate response is social democracy; if policies were aligned according to human needs and were enacted in line with the notions of justice that are currently only used as excuses for military intervention, we'd have a set of potential solutions to some of the worst socio-economic abuses in the contemporary world.

This lines up with my experience of the Perry Anderson lecture a few weeks ago: no matter how insightful radical scholars are about what capitalism is up to, they never have solutions worth a damn. They're so wedded to this manifestly impractical notion that it's revolution or nothing, that capitalism is so bad that ameloriation is useless, that they end up repeating the same stale formulae over and over.

In other news, I'm tired. I'm ridden with grad-guilt and feeling like I'm not doing enough. I nominate Sisyphus to be our patron mythical Greek guy.