Thabo Mbeki: The icy ideological grip

[T_i_B]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,994218,00.html

The recognition that global poverty constitutes the deepest and most dangerous structural fault in the world economy is not the preserve of progressive politics. All thinking people agree that the elimination of this structural fault requires sustained economic growth and development in the poorest areas of the world.

Thinking people also agree that various macro-conditions - democracy, rule of law, property rights - have to be met to create the possibility for such growth and development to take place, and they agree that the first driver of growth and development is capital investment. Further, all these thinking people would agree that in contemporary society, the capital needed is privately owned, and that publicly owned capital is but a tiny proportion of the stupendous volume of capital in the global economy.

The consensus about these necessary macro-conditions relates to the agreed requirement that the right climate should be created to encourage the private owners of capital to put it into the areas where such macro-conditions exist, especially the poor countries.

Implicit within this is the recognition that capital, as distinct from capitalists, has no sense of social responsibility. It has no soul. Money and its multiplication constitute its motive power. No thinking person would therefore contest the view - advanced by political economy - that without profit maximisation, capital dies. "Market economics" has acquired the character of a universal and self-evident truth.

(snip)