We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, November 26, 2012

Liberal capitalism, crony capitalism and lumpen development

Click here to access article by Samir Amin from Panbazuka News (south Africa). 
Liberalism creates nothing, in the peripheries of the Global South that agree to submit to it, other than a crony capitalism based on a Comprador State in opposition to the National State committed to sustainable economic and social development.
The author provides an excellent summary of the principles and practices of neo-liberalism, a doctrine of the contemporary capitalist ruling classes that are now being implemented all over the world. It is an ideology of a small class of people who lay claim of "ownership" over increasingly concentrated productive enterprises and the currencies which, like oil, enable this machinery to function. While claiming that it serves to benefit societies as a whole, in reality the self-serving doctrine serves only this small class and subjects the rest of us to the miseries of exploitation, poverty, and wars.

Unfortunately, the author offers solutions that require only reforms to this hideous system.