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The call to egalitarianism

Seattle. These days, the city is a byword for messages that don't regularly make it to the front pages of mainstream media. The longest uninterrupted period of growth in the American economy has firmly entrenched stories of prosperity in the visible spaces. Alongside President Clinton's interest in expanding trade, co-operative opinions elsewhere in the world have built parallel messages in London, Beijing and Sao Paulo, as in Mumbai. Pretty much anyone who counts, the pun notwithstanding, is celebrating the momentum of global markets and opportunity. More or less the same economic ideology now spans every conceivable part of the political spectrum.

That would explain a city and a world caught completely unawares by the strength of opposition to the World Trade Organization's recent high-level meeting in the Pacific Northwest. Far from sipping Starbucks over their Windows screens, the delegates were besieged by a motley crew of environmentalists, labour activists, religious leaders, spokesmen for Third World dictators and unattached thugs, joined together in an unlikely coalition. And when the dust had settled, the suits inside the convention centers had fallen far off their self-erected pedestal. The street people, left out of the grandiose functions of the WTO, had clearly won the day, with even Clinton murmuring understanding at their vigorous protest.

And all this at the height of our ongoing worship of laissez faire economies, newly unshackled from the vigorous grasp of bureaucratic governments everywhere, including in India. In the second most populous nation on the planet, the brave new world that beckons beyond the next assembly line plant or the next software contract is riveting, opening doors to a hitherto unknown prosperity. In the few years we have savored it, it has raised the fortunes of the urban upper middle class to dizzying heights and has brought the global consumer society within easy reach. At the doorstep to even greater accomplishment and opportunity, we cannot help but reach toward the possibilities that still beckon.

It must come as no surprise then that most media reports on the WTO in economic magazines and newspapers urge that we press on with the present course, notwithstanding the protests we watched on television. Paul Krugman, among the honorary prophets of this line of thinking, wrote in the New York Times that all things considered, he was for Davos Man rather than the Luddite counter force. Moving forward will bring greater opportunities to those who now appear not to participate in the growing prosperity, we are told. And if that's not sufficient argument, we hear the additional defense that there is no credible alternative to a world based on free markets and fierce competition.

That much is not easily denied and even those virulently opposed to growing global trade have not seriously considered its implications. The lack of perfection in the economic models currently in vogue is not to be read as indication that alternatives are necessarily better. We've already tried forced equality, sham socialism and hereditary feudalism and considering how those fared, we dare not look back on them with much nostalgia, even if it is summoned in the name of egalitarianism.

Capitalism is here to stay and the free market, for all its faults, has one great advantage -- it does not run counter to individual human behaviour, even if it is not suitably tailored to how we act in groups. The maximisation of individual prosperity and security has always been at the very heart of our behaviour. Collectivism, on the other hand, is a contrived thing and is always at odds with our desires. That's not to say it cannot be overcome, but there it is.

Even at that, however, clearly something is amiss. For Seattle was about another story, one that doesn't get told on the pages of the world's leading news magazines and dailies, about a people who have ceased to exist except in the wild imaginings, as Ralph Nader said, of unitarians in the basement of their liberal temples and scholarly castles.

Ordinary people living lives we don't fully understand, with concerns we find to be uneducated and badly informed. And yet these are the very people in whose names we profess the liberalisation of world trade, to whom we promise repeatedly that the opportunities they will reap in the new world order will outweigh any concerns they might have about their jobs today.

Neo-classical economics has become the mainstay of democratic governments everywhere and to fight it on economic principles is a losing battle. Mostly, this isn't because the free market is well founded on sound principles; instead this is because the market presupposes things which are obviously false -- like perfect information, rational purchasing -- and then dismisses them as aberrations to an otherwise perfect model.

Once the incredible has been assumed, the impossible must follow and grand deductions from modern economic theories are little more than self-congratulatory pats on the back that go down well in Chicago and London. At last count, this school of thought had a strangle hold on the Nobel Prize, had garnered a million protesters and managed one capsized hedge fund.

There is a fundamental flaw in competitive economics as it is espoused today. It encourages ordinary people to disregard the consequences of their economic choices by appealing to the lowest common denominator in our lives -- money. When we go into Walmart and see half the store priced at $ 10 or less, how many of us run mind games comparing celebrity brand names to Salvadoran slave workers who stitch the names on to the apparel on sale?

It is conceivable that many people oppose bonded labor, the lack of a living wage, workers being locked up without the right to take breaks and go to the toilet, or other such ridiculous working conditions. But who's to tell us about them? Nike? How much more than the assembly line worker in Indonesia does Phil Knight or any other CEO make? And how much would make you angry? If the top dogs in an organisation made 7000 times the wage of their worker bees, would you say that's normal?

The counterpoint to a society that encourages the maximisation of individual prosperity is that the lack of it naturally breeds envy. All those jokes about Bill Gates aren't just from rivals taking pot-shots at Microsoft. Whilst we shout from the rooftops, encouraging one another to go forth and make the most of our lives, skills and such, we rarely pay attention to the echo this call draws, one that assures those we seek to distance ourselves from, that their despairing lives have resulted in part from the indifference we applaud. And every once in a while, a few of them gather around our fortresses of economic mumbo-jumbo and throw rocks and pillage the Starbucks around the corner.

The call to egalitarianism is not merely communist tripe repackaged as liberal concern. Instead, in a nation as large and as poorly policed as ours, it is a reasonable counterweight to the threat of violent protest and it is an acknowledgement that the rising tide must guarantee everyone access to a minimum prosperity, even if not the achievement of it. Without that, the disenfranchised in the poorer sections of our society who do not reap the immediate benefits of liberalisation cannot be expected to maintain the patience to await their turn at the cup of opportunity.

Us versus them is a status quo we can do without.

Ashwin Mahesh

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