By Paul Caspersz.

Globalization comes in two forms: the one beneficial to humankind, the other, harmful and pernicious. To the former, of course, there is no question of alternatives, for we would want it to continue. To the other, on the contrary, for the sake of humanity, alternatives are urgently to be sought and made operative.

Life Expectancy

Until about the middle of the nineteenth century, it is probable that the human throughout the several hundred millions of years of human history on this planet would have lived healthily but not long. Life expectancy around the world would not have exceeded an average of forty years and was probably in cold climates much less. Before the profligate use of ever stronger chemicals to grow food, humans certainly ate healthier food than we do today; they did not have to contend as we do with the known and the yet unknown dangers of genetically modified crops. But they did not have the medical knowledge to contend with various forms of bodily illness. In the days before forests began to be cleared to make way for paved footpaths and roads, thousands probably died of snake bite, for there was no anti-venom.

The lives of rulers and many saints do tell us that many of them lived for sixty or more years, but these were women and men who were substantially well fed, clothed, protected against climatic extremes and cared for in times of sickness or advancing age in palaces or monasteries.

Medical Science

From around 1850 medical knowledge and the care of the sick in hospitals all over the world made spectacular progress, each new discovery triggering off many others. In Sri Lanka even as late as the Census of 1931 the population was only 5.3 million and in the Census of 1946 was only 6.7 million - an increase of 26 per cent in 15 years. Twenty-five years later, at the Census of 1971 it had risen to 12.7 million, registering a record intercensal increase of 90.6 per cent in only 25 years. The annual rate of population increase had risen from about 1.5 per cent to nearly 3 per cent. The resultant near doubling of the population from 1946 to 1971 was due largely to the conquest of malaria, the biggest killer until DDT was widely used during the years of the First European War and to great improvements in medical and health care. In 1999, according to the estimates of the Central Bank, the population was 19.04 million. The birth rate too had had fallen but not at all so spectacularly as the death rate which is now less than 6 per 1000 (though it may be expected to rise again with the recent inroads made into health care by the open economy, "free" market forces, the deregulation of doctors, charges, and the other structural adjustments imposed on a hapless people by the World Bank and the IMF with the connivance of the United States Treasury and the TNCs).

Dr. Christian Neethling Barnard did the first heart transplant on a human in South Africa in December 1967. Today heart transplants are conducted by many surgeons in many countries, and the possibility is known in all countries. So also the standard medical treatment of cancer, tuberculosis, leprosy, pneumonia, diabetes, malaria and even skin diseases like eczema is now not merely knowable worldwide or globalizable but is actually known all over the world or is globalized.

Such is globalization which is beneficial to humanity. To this kind of globalization there is of course no need to look for alternatives but only for ways and means of speeding it up and making beneficial globalizability actually globalized. Beneficial globalizability should be extended to the remotest corners of the globe. The poorest people and the poorest nations of the world should be given the right of access to beneficial globalizability on equal terms with the richest.

Capitalist economic globalization

But the globalization that has been on the rampage in the world over the past fifty years is not beneficial to humankind. It is capitalist economic globalization. Its defining characteristics place it in diametrical opposition to all true and genuine progress and development. To the centrality of the human-person-in-community so as to ensure true human progress and human development, capitalist economic globalization opposes the centrality of capital, money, financial profit. To the conception of the globe as a community of nations engaged in the peaceful use and interchange of resources, economic globalization opposes the hegemony, political, economic and cultural, of a few countries in the North over many others in the South. North and South are not merely two locations of humans on the same globe, but have increasingly become two different parts of the same globe, the northern for the rich, the southern for the poor. It is this type of capitalist economic globalization which has to be opposed with all the resources at our command. To say to it TINA, There Is No Alternative, is therefore a falsehood and an ignominious sentence of self-condemnation. If peoples and nations in the South refuse to pass this sentence on themselves, they have to look for alternatives. Happily TAMA, There Are Many Alternatives. These alternatives may broadly be divided into two categories: the one to be pursued within the country; the other regulating the impact of relationships with countries outside itself.

Internal Alternatives

Within our country what are the alternatives to the capitalist organization of society? If two persons are seriously wounded in an accident, whom has the only surgeon at hand to operate on first? Obviously the person more in need of attention. If for an alms-giving one has to choose between two Homes for Elders, one well provided for, the other very poor, whom should the alms-giver choose? Obviously the Home in greater need. So also for the economic programme of development within the country.

Those in greater need are obviously the poor, and they are the overwhelming majority in the countries of the Third World. True human development has therefore to begin with programmes geared to the satisfaction of the basic needs of the poor which are adequate food, clothing, housing, health and basic education. Spurious human development which is promoted by capitalist economic globalization - unfortunately and increasingly accepted by the economic policy makers of our country - gives priority not to the poor but in effect to the rich: hence private hospitals for the rich are encouraged while in our general hospitals there is serious shortage of beds and bed linen, ultrasonic scanning equipment takes funds that could be spent on better free outpatient facilities, highways and freeways in the cities are seen to be more important than rural roads, a few royal colleges are developed in the cities while rural schools have no classroom dividers and many estate schools continue to be rectangular sheds. Priority goes to urban over rural and estate community development.

The economic logic undergirding the model is that if the few rich in the scantier upper class are developed (by lowering taxes, tax holidays, leave to expatriate profits, elimination of price controls, etc.) some of their new wealth will "trickle down" or "ooze out" to the many who are poor and to the densely populated lower classes. If pressed that one does not see the trickle down effect operate, but only that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening, the capitalist logician answers, Be patient. Wait for the long-term. It matters little to the logician that, as it has been said, in the long-term we shall all be dead, the poorer of course much sooner than the richer.

Urban vs Rural

In the capitalist model the Urban Development Authority is more important than the Rural Development Societies which are starved of funds. The inter-city highways have to be constructed. The rural roads and footpaths can wait. The urban hospitals have to be given the latest diagnostic and curative equipment. Let those in the village come to the town or - die. The urban schools are provided with good libraries, laboratories and new classrooms (though even those that charge high fees are far too often overcrowded to allow for any real teaching of the pupil by the primary or secondary teacher). The rural schools are left to languish with leaking roofs and damaged furniture. This is the standard development prescription of capitalist economic globalization.

One alternative to this model of development was suggested as early as 1973 by G. V. S. de Silva, a Marxist theoretician and practitioner, in a slender booklet entitled, Some Heretical Thoughts on Economic Development. He saw the inroads being made into several Asian countries by the capitalist model. In our country in the early 1970s he thought that with a professedly socialist government there might be an opportunity for establishing the alternative.

Existing urban-rural relations, he said, are based on exploitation of the rural (let us add, and the estate) by the urban. How easily, for instance, have even "Marxist" scholars justified the appropriation of the estate surplus not primarily for the improvement of the estate line-rooms and for the upliftment of the estate workers and their closest neighbour, the pauperized peasant, but for the development of urban schools and hospitals and for welfare made more than equally available to the city dweller than to the estate worker and the peasant.

The exploitation of the village and the estate by the urban sector takes many forms: through trade, in favour of the urban middleman and trader; through the terms of trade which are unfavourable to the rural producer, the guaranteed rice of a bushel of paddy is about three times less than the price of an ordinary cotton shirt, for a litre of milk the rural or estate producer (when she can get to the milk van in time) earns only Rs. 12, but it is sold in the city with some value added for five or more times that price. Exploitation of the rural and estate sector by the urban further takes place through the provision of finance at exorbitant rates of interest, through the prices charged the rural producer by the urban transport contractor, through absentee landlordism (the present Private Plantation Company owners are such absentee landlords), finally through the financing of schemes of urban development through surplus extracted from the village and (in Sri Lanka) from the estate.

G. V. S. de Silva demands the alternative: the subordination of the urban to the rural. This means that there has to be a complete reversal of government priorities, attitudes and thinking, in respect of investment, research, technological innovation, deployment of skilled personnel and professionals, internal marketing and terms of trade, housing, transport, education, health, administration, cultural activities. At election time the politicians say that they will set up a Royal College in every village. They do not realize that this can only be done if the money spent on urban schools (to which they make sure that their own children go) is diverted to the rural areas.

In the field of investment, the country should give very high priority to rural and estate line electrification. The ancillary electric equipment industries for the production of transformers and motors should be located either wholly or in part in the rural and plantation areas. Other investment priorities should be agriculture, the manufacture of agricultural implements, irrigation and drainage, rural fishing, boat building, the provision of stud bulls and insemination facilities for the upgrading of the cattle stock.

It needs to be noted that in this scheme of investment priorities there is little room for capital-intensive industries based on imported equipment. Instead, these industries based in the rural and estate sector will be such as to be capable of absorbing the surplus urban labour which will flow upon the disintegration of the urban economy and the shift of human and physical resources from the urban to the rural sector.

All this means that the cream of the urban talent - the doctors, engineers, accountants, architects, planners - which even today is under and ill-utilized must be diverted to the rural economy. The cry must not he, Back to the Village, for the urban talent has never been to the village, but, To the Village and the Estate for that is where the Action is.

What then in this process of development will be the future of our cities? They will definitely take second place to the development of the villages. As the contradiction between the urban and the rural begins to weaken, town and country will begin to be truly and equally interdependent. It may even be that the reverse contradiction may emerge in that the village or the estate may now dominate the town. If this happens, at some future date, the process will have to be reversed again by conscious planning and plan implementation. But that will take some time. As the Sinhalese proverb has it, When the Walawe Ganga is still seven miles away, one need not change into a span cloth! It may even be that the contradiction between town and country will cease with the specific characteristics of one being hardly distinguishable any more from the other.

Heresy and Orthodoxy

What de Silva asserts of the inversion of relations between the urban sector and the rural is only a special case of the necessity of inverting the relations between the rich and the poor. The rich should be brought down from their pedestals of power and privilege. The lowly have to be raised up. In the dominant model the trickle-down effect has to take place from the narrow apex of the pyramid to its broad base. In the alternative model the pyramid must be made to stand on its head. The trickle down effect will then take place from the millions in the rural sector to the rest of the country through increasing demand and what economists call the multiplier effect of increasing consumption expenditure.

G. V. S. de Silva’s ideas were a Marxist version of Gandhi’s. They were heretical even in 1973 when a socialist government was in power. Today he would be burnt at the stake by our political leaders and by the framers of our national economic policies in the Banks and in our Chambers of Commerce and by their masters in the World Bank and the IMF. Yet when orthodoxy has only led us to disaster, is it not time to give heresy a chance?

External Alternatives

It has to be re-emphasized that the enemy is not globalization - and it has been shown that it has indeed often been the friend of the poor - but capitalist economic globalization. It is to this that an alternative has to be found.

Since independence was granted to, or successfully fought for by, the colonies and dependencies at the end of the Second European War, the newly independent countries saw that there was an alternative to the capitalist organization of society. The alternative was in the other pole of the bipolar world that developed after the War. On the one hand, there was the capitalist organization of world society, at the helm of which was the USA. On the other, there was the socialist model, spearheaded by the Soviet Union. (How far the Soviet model was really socialist and not merely verbally camouflaged state capitalism is a question that need not detain us here).

The newly independent countries - the most powerful of which were India and China - were able to choose between the American capitalist path to development and the Soviet socialist path. Indeed, it would have been better for them to evolve their own people-centred democratic model, straddling both free enterprise capitalism and centrally planned socialism, but inclining towards socialism. At the end of the war de Gasperi in Italy manifested an intuition of what this third way might be when he said, My party is the party of the Centre, but the Centre is moving to the left.

An Asian form of socialism is not the dream of an idealist. It can be founded on Asia’s millennial cultural traditions of simple living, sharing and community. Asia led the world in technology until the blight of colonialism descended upon it. It was then that the West raced ahead. The rapid development of the West demanded the underdevelopment of Asia. It is high time that Asia begins to come again into its own.

The external roadblocks on the way to the alternative to capitalist economic globalization are many. Of this there should be no illusion. So in the ancient story did the little David confront the proud giant Goliath, and win. How we may make the story come true in our own day and time will have to be the subject of future discussion.