[Militant International Review, No. 31, Summer 1986, p. 12-15]
During the prolonged world economic upswing of 1950 to 1973 more was produced than in all the centuries of human endeavour combined up until then. This brought rising living standards compared to the inter-war years and virtual full employment to Europe and North America. Based upon this was a period of relative social. peace in the industrialised countries. But what of the world’s impoverished millions? Did the benefits of world economic growth trickle down, did their living standards improve during the best possible period of capitalist growth? Of course the third or developing world is not one homogeneous block. There is a deep disparity in wealth and income within third world countries, with an equally wide differentiation between the different countries. The ‚underdeveloped‘ countries include the poorest of the poor like Chad with an annual (1983) gross national product per head of 120 dollars, or Bangladesh with 110 dollars, but also the middle income, semi-industrialised nations that appear to be in a different world, Argentina has a GNP per head of 2390 dollars a year. In Brazil, the capitalist world’s eighth industrial power and manufacturer of more motor cars than Britain, GNP per head is 2050 dollars. By comparison in Britain and the United States it is 7,920 and 11,360 respectively.
World market dominates
Uninterruptedly since the end of the Second World War the most monumental struggle of the masses in the world’s history has been fought out in the third world, against imperialist oppression and the rule of capital. The mighty struggles in India, Kenya, Algeria, Mozambique, Indo-China etc., compelled the major capitalist powers to renounce direct colonial rule.
It has exactly been the persistence of intolerable living conditions, and a burning land hunger that has fuelled the revolt of the colonial peoples over the last forty years particularly.
For the masses across the spectrum of the third world countries, poverty, squalor and hunger is still their daily experience.
According to the International Labour Office the number of seriously poor rose by 119 million, and the number of destitutes (those receiving less than half the poverty line income) rose by 43 million between 1963 and 1973. By 1976 1,210 million were seriously poor, 700 million of them destitute, The Brandt Report in 1980 talked of one billion in absolute poverty.
After all, the post-war economic boom for the developed nations was partly based on the super exploitation of the third world. Imperialist domination continued, but now through the major powers‘ control of the world market, through the terms of trade and additionally through interest rates and loans. All third world countries, the relative poor and the absolute poor, are in its thrall.
Three quarters of third world exports are still primary products – copper, rubber, tea, coffee etc. While two thirds of their imports are manufactured goods mainly from the industrialised world. The dominant economies of the USA, EEC and Japan determine the prices the third world will receive and the prices they will pay.
Economies distorted
This relationship has been stark since 1945. Between 1870 and 1950 the quantity of imports a third world country could purchase with a given quantity of exports rose 50%. By 1970 while there had been constant price fluctuations, for the non-oil producers the quantity of imports they could buy was 11% less than in 1950. By 1975 after the massive oil price increases the non-oil third world could buy 21% fewer imports than 1950, and for the poorest countries (per capita income below 200 dollars a year) it was 32% less.
Sri Lanka for example could have bought six tractors from the West with 25 tons of rubber exports in 1960. In 1975 it could only have bought two. Most third world countries are locked into this relationship. They cannot get off the treadmill. Two thirds of Ghana’s exports are cocoa. Between 1954 and 1965 its volume of cocoa exports doubled but the earnings from them fell 20%.
The need to repay loans, including ‚aid‘ loans compels these countries to continue cash crop production for the essential export earnings, at the expense of domestic food consumption. Zaire was self-sufficient in food a quarter of a century ago, now it expends a third of its export earnings (300 million dollars) on food imports. In Nicaragua under the old Somoza regime cotton acreage increased five times in 25 years, while the area devoted to basic grains was halved. If families went hungry it was not for want of cotton!
An Inter American Development Bank in 1966 noted that “most of the increase in production recorded“ throughout South America was in export crops while „per capita domestic output of nutritionally important products such as meat, milk and eggs seems to have actually declined.“
70% of the third world’s population still live in the 2 million rural villages, most of which have seen little improvement over centuries. In India the capitalist world’s most populous developing nation where three-quarters of the people are on the land, half of the 572,000 villages still have no road link.
Was rural poverty eased during the decades of economic growth when landlessness, unemployment and the steady drift to the towns to escape rural deprivation increased? Was the crisis of hunger solved?
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimated in 1947 that two thirds of the world’s population existed on less than the minimum required number of calories. Twenty years later a report produced by American scientists considered 20% of the third world’s population to be undernourished, and 60% to have diets inadequate in nutritional quality. Or take Bangladesh (East Pakistan until 1971) where during the 1960s the proportion of absolute poor rose from 40 to 61%. In 1962 45% of rural families had daily less than the minimum recommended calorie intake. By 1977 59% had less.
„In Bangladesh a major feature of rural poverty is the high degree of landlessness, estimated at 26% of the total labour force in 1977. In addition to this group, another 11% is almost totally dependent on wage labour. Changes in the poverty level of this group can be charted through information on daily wages which, in real terms, were lower at the end of the 1970’s than they had been 30 years earlier.“ (International Labour Office – World Labour Report 1984).
Land hunger
A 1977 ILO Report, Poverty and Landlessness in Rural Asia calculated that in seven South Asian countries (Philippines, Pakistan, India, Thailand, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia) 70 per cent of the rural population were poorer than 10 or 20 years before. These countries alone account for over a third of the under-developed world’s population, excluding China. In many parts of the third world rural poverty is enforced by the continuation of feudal land distribution. It is most glaring in Latin America. There 1.4% of land holdings (105,000 of 7.5 million) account for 65% of the continent’s 723.6 million hectares of agricultural land. This is equivalent to the population of a small city owning land mass greater than the total size of India.
Peru provides one of the most graphic examples of the extreme disparity of income, which is more severe in the third world than even among the developed countries. The Chilean economist Jacques Chonchol worked out in 1966 that one fifth of Peru’s total income went to the 12,000 landlords and capitalists, out of a population of 12 million. That meant that, on the other hand any group of 12,000 peasants on average received 1/4,300 of the total income.
Of course it has been in Latin America that the migration to the towns has been most pronounced, and where industrialisation and economic growth have gone the furthest. But growth and urbanisation did not necessarily lead to a rise in living standards for the majority.
A third of the developing world’s city dwellers live in slums. They have exchanged rural neglect for the urban squalor of the sprawling corrugated iron shanty towns that ring every third world city, lacking the basic amenities allowing for a civilised existence. The shanties of Lima housed 10 per cent of the city’s population in 1940 and 29 per cent in 1961. The number of shanty-dwellings in Rio doubled over the same period. The UN estimates that worldwide shanty settlements are growing by 15% per year, four times faster than the overall city growth rate.
The post-war economic development of certain newly industrialised countries, saw what has been described as the ‚theory of marginalisation.‘ For as much of the growth was based on the importation of capital intensive techniques, and food production was neglected, so along with it went the exclusion and expulsion from economic life of many millions of both rural and urban poor.
In Brazil for all its industrial development 40 per cent of its population (the third largest population amongst capitalist third world countries) are not in the market economy at all and gained nothing from the ‚economic miracle‘. An Economist report of 1979 includes the São Paulo car workers amongst the richest 20 per cent of the population. Yet only 4 per cent of Brazilians could afford to buy a car.
Between 1948 and 1961 industrial output in the developing countries grew by 7.5 per cent per annum but industrial employment only by 3.5 per cent. Yet urbanisation raced ahead by 6 per cent per year. The ILO World Labour Report comments that „‚industrialisation is rarely a major employment generator in the developing countries“.
The unstoppable tide sweeping the landless and rural poor into the cities‘ slums is in fact creating chronic urban unemployment and underemployment. The overcrowded third world cities are rife with beggars, street hawkers, even child prostitutes, sometimes encouraged by desperate and impoverished parents. These are the degrading conditions that greeted many of the rural migrants. 40 per cent of India’s urban population lives in one-room dwellings housing on average 4.6 people.
Urban squalor
The poor have no choice but to live in these squalid conditions. They are poor because there are not enough paying jobs to go round. Industry in the third world was unable to even absorb the increase in the labour force, during the best period for the world economy. Now industrial output would have to grow by 20% per year in the developing world to absorb the extra workers coming onto the labour market.
„The experience of the 1950s and 1960s showed that high rates of industrial growth were consistent with rural and urban poverty.“ (ILO World Labour Report).
Industrialisation, urbanisation and economic growth did not in the main lead to any alleviation of third world poverty. In East Pakistan during the sixties gross national product doubled, while the real income of the labouring masses declined.
Impressive increases in GNP per head do not mean that the benefits were equally shared, or that the poor saw any improvement in their standards of life. Anyway in 10 per cent of third world countries even GNP per head declined between 1960 and 1980, including Chad, Angola, Mozambique, Sudan, Ghana and Uganda, scenes of some of the most prominent upheavals during this period. (World Labour Report).
The gross inequalities in income distribution in the third world make figures on GNP per head, or national disposable income per head, utterly inadequate as a gauge of the living standards of the majority. Statistics indicate that the average household in Western Malaysia was 14 per cent better off in 1970 compared with 1957. But in reality income for the bottom 60 per cent declined absolutely, for the bottom 20 per cent by one third.
In the boom period the UN considered that in Mexico the share of national income going to the bottom 50 per cent fell from 19.1 per cent to 15.6 per cent between 1950 and 1957. In Brazil the share of national income going to the poorest half of the population fell from 17 to 13%, while the share of the top 1% rose from 12 to 18% between 1960 and 1977. These figures do not necessarily mean that in those semi-industrialised countries that enjoyed the best growth rates, some lower income groups may not have benefited, though to nothing like the extent of the rich.
Perhaps in a country like South Korea, where GNP per head rose by 8.1 per cent per year (compared to a middle income average of 3.8 per cent), and where during the seventies real wages grew by 9.8 per cent a year, and where apparently income distribution is less unequal, some improvements will have been seen. In Brazil skilled workers, the minority of the working- class, may have seen an improvement.
Several countries however, including Nicaragua, El Salvador, Uruguay, Bolivia, Kenya, the Philippines and Zambia have experienced long term wage declines. (World Labour Report).
But as British workers know only too well, averages for wage increases have to be treated with caution. This is particularly necessary in the third world where the rural and urban poor, perhaps working in the massive black economy, are not included. „Generally,“ comments the World Labour Report, “the poor are the rural landless or land-poor and urban chronically underemployed and marginal workers.“ In many countries these make up the majority.
The Mexican economy grew by around 6 per cent during the sixties, yet the Times could report in 1969 that „millions of Mexican peasants are still waiting for a piece of land; land hunger is recognised by the government as a social problem … Excessive disparities between wealth and poverty have grown rather than been curbed of recent years. The peasant communities remain remote from the cities and powerless (more than half the population in all rural areas at the last census was unable to read and write); but the shanty town problem with its inhuman living conditions and heavy under-employment represents a growing, serious threat.“ And indeed it has been from the shanty towns of Latin America that some of the most heroic fighters that have recently helped remove a number of the dictatorships, have come.
It is unquestionably true that health and education have improved in the third world since the war. Clearly giant steps in medical knowledge and research, into immunisation and the eradication of disease, have had an important effect. Smallpox was pronounced globally eradicated in 1977. Infant mortality rates have declined, and they have been the major factor in improving life expectancy. Yet still today 40,000 infants die in the third world each day, according to the World Health Organisation. Half of all third world deaths are under the age of five. Even in São Paulo, the most industrialised city of Latin America, more children than adults are buried each year.
Medical knowledge alone cannot prevent disease in the third world, where half the population do not have access to safe water supplies, and three quarters have no real means of disposing of human waste.
Health and education
„The great extermination campaigns and vaccination drives saved millions of children from an early death, but left them to face a life of … debilitation, because the health of the majority of adults, and the diseases that weaken rather than kill, were neglected. The population increase that resulted from death control without birth control pushed up the incidence, of poverty, malnutrition and disease.“ (Paul Harrison, Inside the Third World).
Large families and lack of ‚birth control‘ of course are not primarily the , result of ignorance or religious prejudice. They are more fundamental than that. To many rural families children are seen as more hands, not more mouths, and also as the only insurance for the time when the parents are too old to till the land.
The number of doctors per thousand, the number of children in education and literacy rates have all improved over the last two decades or so. But higher general literacy does not improve employment, housing or overcrowding, nor does it feed hungry children. When child labour is endemic reported figures. for school enrolments, do not indicate the high lack of attendance.
In all the post-war period only in a small number of cases of middle income countries was any increase in living standards registered for the masses, and then only for a minority. For the many millions of the third world conditions that were already dire, declined. For them international capitalism’s best period offered no relief.
What prospects do they face now, when an era of permanent world economic instability has been ushered in? With the developing countries reneging on their loan repayments to Western bankers, and falling on the mercy of the IMF, they find its terms for loan rescheduling are based on domestic austerity, cutting what welfare and subsidies exist and hitting the poor again.
Constricting world trade and growing protectionism have damaged prospects for third world manufacturing exports, and as a consequence threatened employment. International over-capacity means slack demand for raw materials and falling prices on the commodity markets, slashing third world earnings.
“Not in a generation have expectations af world development and hopes for an end to life-denying mass poverty been at,such a low ebb,“ reported UNICEF in 1981.
All projections for the end of the century are laden with doom. A world population of six billion, four-fifths of them in the third world, where excepting Latin America „a calamitous drop in food per capita is projected“. (Global 2000 Report to the US President). For Central Africa a 19.1 per cent fall in food consumption per head is anticipated. By the year 2000 „more of those surviving infancy may be mentally and physically handicapped by childhood malnutrition“‚.
What sort of life will be possible in a Mexico City of 31 million cramped inhabitants within just 15 years, when already half the city’s people live in shanties on the outskirts and a further 10-15 per cent are overcrowded in central city slum tenements?
What future?
Of course the world has known desperate poverty for centuries. But never before when the means for its rapid eradication for all lie at hand. Only 40 per cent of the world’s cultivable land is utilised. It does not profit the big landowners to use more. The science and technique exist internationally literally to make the deserts bloom. Hunger, starvation-related disease, poverty and misery could be rapidly eliminated, with the abolition of capitalism world wide.
The Fourth Comintern Congress in 1922 proclaimed: “Under capitalism the backward countries cannot share in the achievements of modern technical knowledge and culture without paying an enormous price in the form of savage exploitation and oppression by Great Power capital. … Only the victorious proletariat of the advanced countries~-will give them disinterested aid in the development of their productive forces”. That is still the task before the international labour movement today.
Schreibe einen Kommentar