A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis. CHAPTER 1: INDIFFERENCE (Part 11). This blog is a continuation of the review of The Creation of World Poverty by Teresa Hayter, published in 1990.
INTRODUCTION
The market economies of the West now reign supreme, glorying in their apparent ability to pile up production for ever. Their problems of unemployment, public squalor, pollution and inner city poverty are brushed aside as problems that can be overcome through minor reforms of an otherwise successful capitalist system, lesser evils compared to scarcities in Eastern Europe and hunger in the rest of the world. Not only in the West, but also in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the Third World, and even parts of the left, many people see the market as the only system of economic organization capable of creating prosperity, and inequality and privilege as the necessary stimulus for further growth. Proponents of the capitalist system usually ignore one major reason for its success in one small part of the world. This is that, for the last four centuries, the now wealthy countries of North America and Europe have enriched themselves at the expense of their colonies and dependencies in what is now called the Third World.
The exploitation of some parts of the world by others
The wealth of Asia, Latin America and Africa has been the foundation on which the industries and cities of the West were built. Moreover, over this period, virtually all of the peoples of the world have been incorporated into the capitalist world market. While some of them became rich, the rest became poor. The system has to be judged by its effects in the world as a whole, not in one part of it. The long history of the exploitation of some parts of the world by others is the main subject of this book.
The international inequalities created by this exploitation
The international inequalities created by this exploitation are of course even more glaring than the inequalities within individual market economies. They have given rise to a whole industry of what is euphemistically called foreign ‘aid’. Institutions have been set up whose purpose is said to be to help the rest of the world ‘develop’. They never, or very seldom, or only partially, recognize that the Western governments they serve, and the economic system whose survival they were in reality set up to secure, are themselves responsible for what they see as the Third World’s failure to develop.
A search for more convincing explanations
Their published explanations for the poverty they are supposed to be concerned about are wrong, or non-existent. This book is based on a search for more convincing explanations for the phenomenon of underdevelopment. I hope that, in the process, it may also help to make some small dents in the racism that persists in the West, and which is rooted in this colonial history.
Transferring the burden of adjustment to the Third World
The intensification of the crisis in the world capitalist system in the early 1980’s was reflected in more acute form in the Third World, as the governments and institutions of the West succeeded in transferring much of the burden of adjustment to the Third World. The desperate situation of Third World governments and peoples provided opportunities for Western institutions to impose their ‘remedies’ and to demand ‘market-orientated reforms’.