Sunday Times 2
Myth today: Economic growth and structural reforms
In ‘Myth Today’, Roland Barthes speaks of interrogating the myths of our times, bourgeois myths, as the myth of everyday rationality and normality. For him, reason, common sense, everyday images are loaded with political meanings that we are unable to see. We take them as natural, commonsensical and normal. He says this is particularly true of capitalist societies and bourgeois cultures. Political meanings lie underneath the signs, the meaning making system that we live by. It is called the political unconscious. Applying this to economics, I would say bourgeois myths parade as natural economic forces. Economic growth and productivity are two such forces.
We need to turn the critical eye upon the mythology of economic growth and productivity spawned by neo classical and neoliberal economic reforms. I want to read Pathfinder’s article, ‘The Party is Over: no easy options’ in last Sunday’s issue (23 August, 2015) of the Sunday Times with this understanding of mythology. This article and its proposals for new economic strategies, coming on the heels of the change of government, sounds alarm bells for many of us for whom social justice and worker/producer welfare are the fundamental requisites of production, social cohesion and stability, for its emphasis on economic liberalisation. Owing to lack of time and space and my own immediate interests lying elsewhere, given to teaching at a state university much of the time, I am unable to provide a sustained and involved response here to the article, but nevertheless want to raise some issues that could be discussed by a larger body of Sri Lankan people, particularly, the intelligentsia–students, academics, policy makers, trade unionists, professional bodies, workers of all sectors, women’s groups.
The title in itself poses no controversy, since as we all know, there are tough times ahead. However, ironically, after asserting in its title that there are no easy options, the article proceeds to present a rather straight forward programme where the market reigns supreme. It makes a case for an accelerated and unabashed neo liberal package of economic development, a package that demands “a move from the current welfarist model to a laser like focus on productivity/competitiveness [ where] priority should be attached to accelerating the growth trajectory while generating higher value employment.”
It proposes aggressive market oriented reforms that would act through financialisation of production within the current precariousness of financial conditions, globally, and rely on the sheer weight of wages and employment, without the balancing and cushioning apparatus of services and safeguards that generally offer a modicum of security to the working people and the producers of labour. On the fiscal side, the state’s coffers have to be strictly controlled and monitored to pave way for enhanced privatization. What does it mean? Apart from cleaning up corruption and spending on “unsustainable consumption imports such as motor vehicles,” which is wholly welcome, the move to a tightening of fiscal policy implies lesser spending by the government on its people and for its people.
Some of the structural adjustments, sorry, reforms, demanded by the Pathfinder package are: “reversing the trend toward towards an increasingly closed economy (Tariff and para tariff reforms); improving the investment climate; SOE and public service reform; reformulating agricultural and industrial policies and above all strengthening education, training and skills development.” Each one of these items demands the scrutiny of the critical eye and I request those who have familiarity in these areas to interrogate the terms on which these reforms are suggested. I for one have responded to previous accounts of Pathfinder’s policy on education, which I found not just wanting, but illiberal to say the least. I am not alone in this. Many other academics in the university system have challenged the nature of state reforms that would usher corporatism in the education sector.
Here, capitalism accosts us as a purely economic phenomenon in the economism of our times. By economism I mean the tendency to see economic activity as market activity only, not involving people, communities etc. Within the maze of financial flows of neo liberalism, nature is a resource and humanity a commodity. Earlier forms of capitalism have come under much criticism, particularly from cultural and social activists and the intelligentsia. They have been credited with creating alienation between worker and product. The self is isolated and unsupported. None of these strands of critiques has tempered the policy drivers of neoliberalism.
To the contrary, neoliberalism arrives on the scene as a pure and yet superficial operation, that would empower women and youth, create employment and make persons participate in production and enjoy prosperity. Gone are the days of chimney sweepers, who have been replaced by migrant labour in fast food chains or IT parks in “middle income” or low income countries. The ebullience with which neoliberal reforms is greeted masks the nature of what economic growth is ultimately about: Maximizing profit. Within neo-liberality itself, there are no guarantees for anybody, and one forgets labour as the buttress of production. There would be no job security of any kind, and that would be accompanied by decreasing access to public goods. What we are left with then are the precariat, a large body of dispossessed people.
(The writer is attached to the Department of English, University of Peradeniya)