Rashed Al Mahmud Titumir

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake
— Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

The 'spread of democracy' and 'free enterprise' by use of force has been the hallmark of our age. Yet coherent accounts of vertical and horizontal casualties and resultant directions have remained unexplored on why such an assumed libertarian political project is embedded with contradictory goals, despite availability of some narratives, statistics and evidences. Such analyses have to deal with questions — why are coercions and compulsions indispensable for the current form of accumulation, why do values of so-called liberalism acquiesce to coercion, war, and the police state? Why do professional elites, generating from civil-military-business, replace the politicians in governing countries, why does a particular form of civil society thrive to transform politics into a domain of apolitical and to usher in a mode of politics of identity to camouflage structural injustices and why are fussy constitutionalism and legal reforms at global and national levels invested to protect a particular kind of property rights, implant intellectual property rights, and rob the producing classes of traditional property rights? Recognising that such questions need more out of the box thinking, here is a sketch to spark debates.

This is perplexing, yet causal and correlated, that a tyrannical state is needed for a free-enterprise economy, since we are told that free market is a voluntary association and free exchange between producers, without the state's privileges. Secondly, why is the spread of democracy compulsive and authoritarian, if democratic dispensation is meant for people to live free, with the right to voluntarily associate, dis-associate, as they deem fit, and participate in the decisions affecting their lives. Why would the democracy, envisioned by the concept of liberty — meaning the right to shape own institutions as opposed to the right of those institutions to shape the citizens — need to succumb to oligarchic power and to conform to manufactured consent of 'what is done, is done in the best interest of the country and the people,' without questioning the legitimacy of such 'public interest.'

Let us sketch the continuum of coercion by the state in order to respond to the questions and to show how such compulsions protect the system of privileges and interests of a few for the continuation of accumulation.

Impossibility by peaceful means

The current myth of 'voluntary' exchange or exchange through market cannot stand up either to logic or to the evidence of history. For example, first, the so-called advanced capitalist countries rose to their current level, by all account of history, is due to exploitation of their colonies. Second, the means of production, particularly the land has not been occupied by a means of individual appropriation or workings of economic forces in the market, rather were politically occupied by a ruling class, acting through the state (examples are seen throughout history – from church to enclosures to present-day commons or individual property of the weak).

Therefore, applied to the present, survival of global accumulation requires an imperial power. Since the United States has the resources to maintain hegemonic control. And, thus, it ought to exercise imperial power. The variation is, unlike several imperial powers of the past, the current dispensation finds sub-hegemony in blocs or in the middle, which in their part become members of 'coalition of willing' of imperialist and sub-imperialists.

Adjusted state institutions and market interests

The capital has one motive i.e. to seek profits, and intrinsically is not a bed-fellow of competition, no matter how many lessons are dished out in text books or in rhetoric or in polemics. In their search for surest route for profit, the corporations — the current structure of capital ownership and organisation of production — in the so-called market economy, adjusts the state institutions to protect its system of privileges by crushing competition. The adjusted state reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. This point needs no elaboration — why on earth would businesses donate billions to elect someone to office of the state, or now beginning to elect themselves to such offices or why are elected parliamentarians more interested in signing a deal or getting commission or why do the taxpayers give away billions every year in subsidies to such corporations?

Accordingly, the modern corporate capitalism needs a coercive state, particularly concentration of power of the state office in the hands of a few, to subsidise accumulation of capital in a few hands, to deprive the many, who are nothing but labour, from access to the means of production and forced to sell themselves on the buyer's terms. The examples are all over the period, from Asia to Africa to Latin America, particularly seen in the rise of state capture by extra-constitutional means, or civilian oligarchy.

Moving towards banana republics, low-wage, non-union

Libertarians propagate voluntary exchanges, including wage goods and rights to free association. The shifts of the corporations in terms of production sites suggest the complete opposite – the places wherein the state is subsumed into corporate diktats, and is ready to accept and bullying, guarantee unlimited exploitation of labour force, including nimble fingers, with no collective bargaining processes. This can be done, more securely, if the state is run by a regimented collective. The history of the spreaders of so-called democracy suggests that their foreign policy devotes untiring efforts in ensuring that such anti-labour regimes stay in power. The examples are in abundance. The Suharto regime (which was put in power by a U.S.-sponsored coup, followed by the mass-murder of several hundred thousand people) treated independent labour organising as a serious criminal offense. Even today, Indonesia is a favourite haven for sweatshops, nor do EPZs in Bangladesh have any union, while the non-compliance of ILO covenants are routine in the garment sector.

As a result of acceleration of coercion, workers are forced to sell their labour in a buyer's market on terms set by the owning class at wages less than their labour-product.

Robbing the producing classes of their traditional property rights

Gone are the days, by a colonial decree, the means of production could be appropriated, yet newer and subtle forms have replaced the old ones. While the local elite are grabbing the commons – forests, khas lands, waterbodies – the corporations are encroaching lands through state acquisition in the name of development on the one hand, and driving the traditional peasantry out the land through money power, enslaving them into contract farming analogous to that of indigo production in British India.

The state's collusion with both quasi-feudal landlords and agribusiness TNCs has resulted in millions of peasants being robbed of their traditional rights of land, their private plots being consolidated for cash-crop agriculture. The examples of such grabbing are in abundance, including in Bangladesh, as media almost every day reports on such encroachment.

Systematic grabbing through privatisation

This is nowhere more prominent than in the way public assets are handed over to the nouveau-riche comprador elite in the name of privatisation. The pattern of privatisation might be more accurately described as the systematic looting of public assets by politically connected corporate elites. As revealed by the press, the world over, a typical privatisation procedure is a type of auction, which is nothing but new expropriations by domestic and foreign investors, resulting in most cases, for example, in Bangladesh, in closures. It is evident, including in Bangladesh, that higher propensity of privitatisation is related to non-elected governments or/and authoritarian regime, which can exert power, without being accountable to the electorate.

IFIs clearing the way, and subsidising the expropriation

The amount and speed of loan disbursements by the international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank, IMF and ADB are positively co-related with autocratic regimes, as such regimes easily succumb to the particular policy directions that these organisations sell owing to non-requirement of scrutiny by different tiers of people's representatives, particularly in absence of freedom to protests. These organisations smoothen the bottlenecks, including regulatory regimes, providing security of investment to expropriate, and make the state subsidise the enterprises.

Offensive intellectual property rights

The corporations have enacted a global regime through World Trade Organisation (WTO) and at the national levels, what has come to hide under a neutral sounding name of intellectual property rights, as if to provide incentives to innovate, rather to accelerate profits while the rate of profit began to decline in manufacturing. These enable TNCs to control and master the latest production technology.

These rights are so pervasive; it does not leave even a marginal farmer from its reach. For example, farmers have to obtain a yearly license for genetically modified (GM) seeds from corporations instead of the standard farming practice for thousands of years across human civilisations. These GM seeds have typically been modified from seeds developed over thousands of generations by indigenous farmers and shared freely like agricultural open source. The US is at the fore-front in enacting new IPR regime across the globe. For example, former Coalition Provisional Authority administrator L Paul Bremer III left behind the Order 81 on 'Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety,' with important implications for farmers and the future of agriculture in Iraq.

Government by 'right'-thinking professional elites

The current dispensation of the spreaders of democracy has found its own way of operationalisation of democracy. The adjusted state has given birth to a periodic legitimisation ritual in which professional elites are selected to govern. If however such rituals fail to deliver the dictated level of results or prove to be chaotic, there are examples in cases where non-elected professionals are sworn in. The reduced form of such 'democracy' has to have salient features such as centralised, indirect, and all-around as possible to protect the interest of a few.

This view of democracy is built on the fundamental theorem that politics should be the domain of apolitical expertise, with conflict minimised and decisions based on the consensus of 'right'-thinking people i.e., the centrist establishment of men who control government and big business.

Rigged rule of law

The 'Constitutionalism' of the New Right, like every other aspect of their ideology, is geared towards concealment of expropriation of people's assets and rights through populism. The ideal society of such people, it seems, is aggressive capitalism, minus the regulatory and welfare state: a society 'reformed' by the likes of Pinochet in Chile.

The neo-conservative prefers their version of 'rule of law' for the security of business and the general mess for masses. But if such a status-quo threatens to turn into the real dispensations, there are plenty of examples in such cases where the state reverses the status quo. For example, they would not hesitate to bring in Pinochet's military, or give the Guatemalan death squads to liquidate labour organisers and peasant cooperative leaders so that a country can be safely restored to a non-threatening, apolitical democracy.

National security dwarfs human rights

The champions of the spreaders of democracy also champion a skewed form of civil and political liberty, camouflaging their own records. The human rights concerns, as demonstrated in numerous articles, particularly in the neo-conservative era, have generally been subordinate to national security. For example, President Bush's 2002 US National Security Strategy makes it clear that 'defending our Nation against its enemies is the first and fundamental commitment of the Federal Government'.

Politics of identity for muting class antagonism

The colonisers exploited existing religious and ethnic divisions by the divide-and-rule strategy. The colonisers not only exploited and intensified ethnic tensions – they also systematically dismantled all the mechanisms that had restrained such tensions.

Following the departure of colonisers, the rulers have to find a strategy on how a tiny ruling elite can rule over an indigenous majority of the exploited. The natural strategy is to rely heavily on means to ignite tribal, ethnic, and religious divisions, as majority of the people is also exploited, and thereby reinforce the symbolic, cultural, and legal traditions to keep the majority in divisions. In Asia, it meant using ethnicity, caste and religious divisions and giving them a salience that they had never enjoyed before. In Africa, this entailed a splintering of civil law and political rights on ethnic and tribal criteria, relying ever more strongly on the despotic rule of chiefs and hardening indigenous linguistic and cultural divisions.

Co-opted civil society

There has been a great emphasis, particularly in the aftermath of breaking down of former USSR and East European system of governance, on civil society and its usage and activation resurrected, with its particular triumphs through 'orange revolution'. This new-found belief in civil society situates itself on the running of the state in a created space as a communicator of voice – a self-styled non-elected representation of people, but indulgence in the name of the people.

The current dispensation, understood in terms of neo-conservatism, are up in arms to emphasise decentralist values in their rhetoric of 'civil society', but their version of civil society and citizen involvement in reality applies only to the realms of conformism to the politics of continuity, being a source in supply of professional elites for maintaining the status quo, private consumption and recreation. This version of the civil society, which is by every means an annexed apparatus of the state, remotely focus on the spheres of rights to self-government or economic production, that would undermine the control of the duly constituted managerial and plutocratic classes over the corporate state.'

Over-accumulation and under-consumption

The rhetoric of 'liberalism' in its recent incarnation, manifested through lesser government, and lesser intervention in public and private lives have proved to be false. The state has expanded manifold — not in schools, hospitals, factories, farms, laboratories, parks, and pensions — in national security, in buying the corporate economy's excess product, and utilising excess capacity. The fundamental reasons underlying tendency of the system to coerce is for protecting a system of over-accumulation by a few, and under-consumption by many.

The writer is an economist, and can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it