This epoch must make a difference

March 13, 2002
By Bukka Rennie

Objectively all the signs are there that the world will not proceed for much longer without significant, fundamental change to the prevailing international system of relationships and the way we "see and do" things.

Whereas before much of the touted ideals and demands for deepening the democratic political process and for equality in economic transactions and international trading could have been considered "utopian", today the situation has been transformed totally.

There is now existing the objective basis to make such ideals and such demands attainable and sustainable once there is the political will to do so.

The technological advancement of all kinds that have come in this present epoch, including not merely the invention of the personal computer and the Internet but moreso their application to the production, distribution and consumption processes, have served to a great extent to remove the previous logistical nightmares involved in getting the whole world integrated and making the various parts and regions of the world "talk", regardless of size of population, income a person, land area, and level of social development.

Now everywhere and everyone counts for something. The fact that modern technology as it applies to industrial and agricultural activity allows for mass production and reproduction of the basic necessities of life, objectively people everywhere are rapidly being taken way beyond the mere eking out of back-breaking subsistence and becoming more and more free to engage themselves and challenge themselves.

The collapse of the Iron Curtain (Soviet Union) and the opening up of the Bamboo Curtain (China) signalled the beginning of this new epoch with the deepening of a one-world modern capitalist market. It was the historic mission of modern capitalism to pull the world into one.

Today as part of this ongoing modernisation process, nations, all over, are budgeting fixed percentages of their gross national product (in most cases seven per cent) to guarantee the furthering of the ongoing process of educating and enhancing the skills and technical competence of their populace.

Even the lending agencies, as imperialistic as they were from inception, have been know in the most recent past to encourage the required human resource and infrastructure development within the client nations.

Obviously the logic of profitable capital financing in today's world would demand no less from these lending agencies. Even more so when one considers the direct link between such lending agencies and the metropolitan sources of the direct foreign investments involved particularly in the export sectors of these said developing client nations.

As we said before, now everywhere and everyone counts. Size no longer matters.

What matters is integrity and political will of free people, the preparedness of the smaller, developing States to "take up their beds and walk", so to speak, and most of all their capacity to organise and institute the broadest possible democratic structures as the only true basis of their ship of State.

But while this is being done, attempts are being made to hammer out new relationships with the sources of foreign investments.

Not surprisingly, militants from all over the world, using the Internet to co-ordinate their activities, are turning up wherever the leadership summits of the G8 countries, the WTO, the FTAA, etc are in session in order to protest vehemently the inequality of the present arrangements and the vulnerability of the developing, dependent client countries.

Interestingly, The United States found herself virtually isolated at the Durban, South African, conference on issues of racism, reparations, and basic human rights, and also on that most vexing issue of Palestine.

Even recently at the World Economic Forum in New York, America was described by almost all the speakers as "a smug superpower, too beholden to Israel at the expense of the Muslim world and inattentive to the needs of poor countries."

The publisher of MER, one Mark Bruzonsky, recently told students at the University of Chicago, during a model United Nations, that Bush and Bin Laden have a lot in common: "They both invoke God, both are dangerously armed, one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscene powerful, and the other with the destructive power of the utterly hopeless..."

Enough for the while!