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GRANMA INTERNATIONAL<br>
Havana. March 9, 2009<br><br>
<a href="http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2009/march/lun9/reflexiones4.html">
http://www.granma. cu/ingles/ 2009/march/ lun9/reflexiones
4..html</a><br><br>
Reflections of Fidel<br><br>
A meeting that was worth it<br><br>
AT the end of the Globalization and Development event, with the presences
of more than 1,500 economists, outstanding scientific figures and
representatives of international organizations meeting in Havana, I
received a letter and a document from Atilio Boron, a Doctor of Political
Science, senior professor of political and social theory, director of the
Latin American Program for correspondence courses in the social sciences
PLED, as well as other important scientific and political
responsibilities. <br><br>
Atilio, a firm and loyal friend, had participated on Thursday the 6th in
the "Roundtable" Cuban television program together with other
eminent international figures who attended the Conference on
Globalization and Development. <br><br>
I found out that he was leaving on Sunday and decided to invite him to a
meeting at 5 p.m. the day before, Saturday, March 7.<br><br>
I had decided to write a reflection on the ideas contained in his
document. I will use his words in the summary.<br><br>
"
We find ourselves facing a general capitalist crisis, the first of
any magnitude comparable with the one that broke out in 1929 and the
so-called `Long Depression' of 1873-1896. A crisis that is integral, of
civilization and multifaceted, whose duration, profundity and
geographical reach will surely be of a greater scope that the ones that
preceded it.<br><br>
"It is a crisis that goes far beyond financial and banking aspects
and is affecting the real economy in every department. It is affecting
the global economy, and goes far beyond the borders of the United
States.<br><br>
"Its structural causes: it is a crisis of overproduction and at the
same time of under-consumption. It is no coincidence that it broke out in
the United States, because this country has been living for more than 30
years from external savings, from external credit and these two things
are not infinite: companies got into debt over their heads; the state
also got into debt over its head in order to deal with not one but two
wars, and not just without increasing taxes, but cutting them. Its
citizens are systematically pushed, by way of commercial publicity, into
getting into debt in order to sustain exorbitant, irrational and wasteful
consumerism.<br><br>
"But in addition to these structural causes others should be added:
the accelerated financialization of the economy, the irresistible
tendency to foray into increasingly risky speculation operations. With
the discovery of capital's "fountain of youth," thanks to which
money generates more money based on the value given to the exploitation
of the workforce, and taking into account that enormous masses of
fictitious capital can be achieved in a matter of days or weeks, at the
most capital's addiction is leading it to set aside any c alculations
or any scruples.<br><br>
"Other circumstances favored the outbreak of the crisis. Neoliberal
deregulation and liberalization policies made it possible for the most
powerful actors roaming the markets to impose the law of the
jungle.<br><br>
"Enormous destruction of capital on a world scale, characterizing it
as a `creative destruction. ' On Wall Street, this `creative destruction'
meant the devaluation of companies listed on that market to reach almost
50%; a company that was previously worth $100 million in capital on the
market now has $50 million. A fall in production, prices, wages,
purchasing power. `The financial system as a whole is about to explode.
We already have more than $500 billion in banking losses, a billion more
is to come. More than a dozen banks have gone bankrupt and hundreds more
are expecting the same fate. At this point, more than $1 billion has been
transferred from the FED to the banking cartel, but $1.5 billion more
will be needed to maintain the liquidity of banks in coming years.' What
we are seeing is the initial phase of a long depression and the word
recession, so much utilized recently, does not capture what the future
holds for capitalism in all its dramatic dimension.<br><br>
"Ordinary Citicorp stock lost 90% of its value in 2008. The last
week in February, it was worth $1.95 per share on Wall Street!<br><br>
"This process is not neutral, because it will benefit the largest
and best-organized oligopolies, which will oust their rivals from the
markets. The `Darwin ian selection of the fittest' will clear the way for
new mergers and business alliances, sending the weakest into
ruin.<br><br>
"Accelerated increase in unemployment. The number of unemployed in
the world (some 190 million in 2008) could rise by another 51 million
throughout 2009. Poor workers (who earn just two euros daily) will number
1.4 billion; that is, 45% of the economically active population on the
planet. In the United States, the recession has already destroyed 3.6
million jobs, half of them in the last three months. In the EU, the
number of unemployed stands at 17.5 million, 1.6 million more than one
year ago. By 2009, it is projected that 3.5 million jobs will have been
lost. Because of their close ties with the U.S. economy, several Central
American states such as Mexico and Peru, will be hard hit by the
crisis.<br><br>
"A crisis that affects every sector in the economy: banking,
industry, insurance, construction, etc. and that is spreading throughout
the international capitalist system as a whole.<br><br>
"Decisions that are taken in world centers and which affect the
subsidiaries of the periphery, generating massive layoffs, interruptions
in the chain of pay, a fall in demand for supplies, etc. The United
States has decided to support the Big Three (Chrysler, Ford, General
Motors) of Detroit, but only to save their plants within the country.
France and Sweden have announced that they will condition aid to their
automotive industries: only the centers located in their respective
countries will be able to benefit. The French minister of the economy,
Christine Lagarde, stated that protectionism could be `a necessary evil
in times of crisis.' The Spanish minister of industry, Miguel Sebastiαn,
is urging `Buy Spanish products.' Barack Obama, we would add, is
promoting `Buy American!'<br><br>
"Other sources of the propagation of the crisis in the periphery
include the fall in prices for commodities exported by Latin American and
Caribbean countries, with their recessive consequences and higher
unemployment.<br><br>
"A drastic diminishment in remittances from Latin American and
Caribbean emigrants in the developed countries. (In some cases,
remittances are the most important item in international hard currency
income, over and above exports.)<br><br>
"The return of emigrants, depressing the labor market even
more.<br><br>
"This is combined with a profound energy crisis that requires the
replacement of the current one, based on the irrational and predatory use
of fossil fuel.<br><br>
"This crisis coincides with growing awareness of the catastrophic
scope of climate change.<br><br>
"Add the food crisis, sharpened by capitalism's attempts to maintain
an irrational pattern of consumption, which has led to taking land
suitable for producing food and allocating it for producing
agro-fuels.<br><br>
"Obama admitted that we have not yet touched bottom, and Michael
Klare wrote recently that `if the current economic disaster turns into
what President Obama has called the lost decade, the result could be a
global landscape full of convulsion caused by the economy.'<br><br>
"In 1929, unemployment in the United States reached 25%, as
agricultural and raw material prices fell. Ten years later, and despite
radical policies implemented by Franklin D. Roosevelt (the New Deal),
unemployment remained very high (17%) and the economy could not climb out
of the depression. Only World War II put an end to that stage. And now,
why should it be shorter? When the 1873-1896 depression, as I explained,
lasted 23 years!<br><br>
"Given this background, why would we now come out of the current
crisis in a matter of months, as some Wall Street publicists and `gurus'
predict?<br><br>
"We will not come out of this crisis with a couple of G-20 or G-7
meetings. If there is any test of their radical incapacity to solve the
crisis, it is the response of the world's stock markets after each
announcement or each law passed for a new bailout: invariably, the
response of `the markets' is negative.<br><br>
"As George Soros attests, `the real economy will suffer the
secondary effects, which are now gaining force. Given that in these
circumstances the U.S. consumer can no longer serve as the driving force
of the world economy, the U.S. government should stimulate demand. Given
that we are facing the threatening challenges of global warming and
energy dependence the next government should direct any stimulus plan
toward energy savings, by developing alternative energy sources and
building environmentally- friendly infrastructure.<br><br>
"A long period of tug-of-war and negotiations is opening up to
define how to get out of the crisis, who will benefit and who will pay
the price.<br><br>
"The Bretton Woods Agreements, which originated in the framework of
a Keynesian stage of capitalism, coincided with the stabilization of a
new model of bourgeois hegemony, which, as a product of the outcome of
the war and anti-fascist struggle, has as a new and unexpected backdrop
the strengthening of the gravitation of trade unions, leftist parties and
states' regulating or intervening abilities.<br><br>
"The USSR is gone; its sole presence and the threat that its example
could spread westward tipped the balance of negotiations in favor of the
left, popular sectors, trade unions, etc.<br><br>
"Currently, China holds an incomparably more important role in the
world economy, but without reaching a parallel importance in world
politics. The USSR, in contrast, despite its economic weakness, was a
formidable military and political power. China is an economic power, but
with little military or political presence in world affairs, although it
is beginning a very cautious and gradual process of reaffirmation in
world politics.<br><br>
"China may come to play a positive role for the re-composition
strategy of countries on the periphery. Beijing is gradually reorienting
its enormous national energies toward its internal market. For many
reasons that would be impossible to discuss here, it is a country that
needs its economy to grow at an annual rate of 8%, whether as a response
to the stimulus of world markets or to those that originate in its
immense only partially exploited internal market. If that turn were
to be confirmed, it is possible to predict that China will continue to
need many products from Third World countries, such as oil, nickel,
copper, aluminum, steel, soy and other raw materials and foods.<br><br>
"In the Great Depression of the 1930s, in contrast, the USSR had a
very weak insertion in world markets. China is different: it could
continue to play a very important role, and like Russian and India
(although these to a lesser extent), to buy the raw materials and foods
that it needs, as opposed to the case of the USSR in the times of the
Great Depression.<br><br>
In the 1930s, the `solution to the crisis was found in protectionism and
world war. Today, protectionism will come up against many obstacles due
to the inter-penetration of the great national oligopolies in different
spheres of world capitalism. The formation of a global bourgeoisie,
rooted in gigantic companies that, despite their national base, operate
in a countless number of countries, causes the protectionist option in
the developed world to have scant effectiveness in North-North commerce,
and policies will tend at least for now and not without tensions to
respect the parameters established by the WTO. The protectionist card
appears to be much more probable when it is applied, as it surely will
be, against the global South. A world war driven by `national
bourgeoisies' of the developed world ready to fight amongst them selves
for market supremacy is virtually impossible, because such `bourgeoisies'
have been displaced by the rise and consolidation of an imperial
bourgeoisie that periodically meets in Davos, and for which the option of
military confrontation is a phenomenally stupid thing to do. That does
not mean that that global bourgeoisie does not support, as it has to date
with the military adventures of the United States in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the realization of numerous military operations in the
system's periphery, necessary for the preservation of the profitability
of the U.S. military-industrial complex and, indirectly, for the great
oligopolies of other countries.<br><br>
"The current situation is not the same as the one in the 1930s.
Lenin (said):<br><br>
`Capitalism does not fall without a social force that makes it fall.'
That social force today is not present in the societies of metropolitan
capitalism, including the United States.<br><br>
"The USA, UK, Germany, France and Japan settled their struggle for
imperial hegemony on the military field.<br><br>
"Today, hegemony and domination are clearly in the hands of the USA.
It is the only guarantee of the capitalist system on a world scale. If
the USA fell, it would produce a domino effect that would cause the
collapse of almost all metropolitan forms of capitalism, let alone the
consequences in the system's periphery. If Washington were to see itself
threatened by a popular insurgency, they would all rush to its rescue,
because it is the last bastion of the system and th e only one that, in
case of necessity, can help the others.<br><br>
"The United States is an irreplaceable actor and unquestionably the
center of the world imperialist system: only it has more than 700
military missions and bases in some 120 countries, which constitute the
system's final reserve. If all other options fail, force will appear in
all its splendor. Only the United States can deploy its troops and its
war arsenal to maintain order on a planetary scale. It is, as Samuel
Huntington said, `the solitary sheriff.'<br><br>
"This `shoring-up' of the imperialist center has the invaluable
collaboration of its other imperial partners, or its competitors in the
economic realm and even the majority of Third World countries, which
accumulate their reserves in U.S. dollars. Neither China, Japan, Korea or
Russia to mention the largest holders of dollars in the world can
liquidate their stock in that currency because it would be a suicidal
move. Of course, this is also a consideration that should be made with
much caution.<br><br>
"The conduct of the markets and savings-holders throughout the world
is strengthening the U.S. position: the crisis is deepening; the bailouts
are demonstrating their insufficiency; the Dow Jones on Wall Street is
falling below the psychological barrier of 7,000 points falling below
the mark it fell to in 1997! and despite that, people are seeking
refuge in the dollar, with the value of the euro and gold
falling!<br><br>
"Zbigniew Brzezinski has said, `I a m worried because we are going
to have millions and millions of unemployed, many people really having a
difficult time. And that situation will be present for some time before
things eventually improve.'<br><br>
"We are in the presence of a crisis that is much more than an
economic or financial crisis.<br><br>
"It is an overall crisis of a model of civilization that is
economically unsustainable; politically unsustainable, without appealing
increasingly more to violence against the peoples; environmentally
unsustainable, too, given the destruction, in almost all cases
irreversible, of the environment; and socially unsustainable, because it
degrades the human condition to unimaginable limits, and destroys the
very fabric of social life.<br><br>
"The answer to this crisis, therefore, cannot just be economic or
financial. The ruling classes will do exactly that: use a vast arsenal of
public resources to socialize the losses and set the great oligopolies
afloat again. Occupied with defending their most immediate interests,
they lack even the vision to conceive of a more comprehensive
strategy.<br><br>
The crisis has not touched bottom," he says. "We find ourselves
facing a general capitalist crisis. There has not been a larger one. The
one that took place between 1873 and 1896 lasted 23 years; it was called
the Long Depression. The other, more serious one was the one of 1929. It
also lasted no less than 20 years. The current crisis is all-embracing,
of civilization, multifaceted. "<br><br>
He immediately adds, "It is a crisis that goes far beyond the
financial and banking aspects and is affecting the real economy in every
department.."<br><br>
If anyone were to take this summary and carry it in his or her pocket,
read it over once in a while or learn it by heart like a small Bible, he
or she will be better informed about what is happening in the world than
99% of the population, where citizens live under siege from commercials
and saturated with thousands of hours of news, and real or false soap
operas or fiction films.<br><br>
Fidel Castro<br>
March 8, 2009<br>
11:16 a.m.<br><br>
Translated by Granma International<br><br>
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