Ian Boyne, Contributor
MARCH 6 marked five years since the death of Jamaica's most controversial Prime Minister and one of the Third World's most forceful and eloquent advocates of change, Michael Norman Manley.
Three decades after his tumultuous leadership in Jamaica, we still can't mention his name without some residual anger, bitterness, painful memory, or, conversely, superlative praise, adulation, intense defence.
Three decades after, we are still bitterly divided over Michael Manley and what he meant to modern Jamaica and the world. It is hard to discuss him dispassionately, worst of all in an election year. But journalists must not shrink from difficult tasks journalism is an inherently risky occupation.
LEGACY
Assessing Michael Manley's legacy is not helped by the fact that the country's intelligentsia has an aversion to reading and intellectual enquiry. Even among media practitioners, the level of ignorance on global affairs is appalling.
The facts bear out that Michael Manley was intellectually and politically ahead of his time; that his profound understanding of the global economy and the constraints of Third World development is even more evident today.
In the late 1960s and 1970s when many conservative economists were optimistic about the prospects for developing countries once they integrated themselves in the international capitalist system, Michael Manley sounded the warning about the limits to Third World development via the trickle-down capitalist route. That was brushed aside as so much socialist nonsense.
In 2001, one of the World Bank's and the West's most able economists , William Easterly, came out with his enlightening book, The Elusive Quest for Economic Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics, which details the failures of capitalist economic development models. In the January-February issue of the economic journal Challenge, Easterly is interviewed. In an article titled The Failure of Economic Development, Easterly says, "The efforts that we as development economists, aid donors and policymakers have made have not worked and the typical developing nation has not seen its living standards rise in the last two decades. These countries have the same standard of living today as they did in the 1980s." Amazing.
Easterly says that generally the developing countries did well in the 1970s because of the commodity boom essentially because of factors outside their control. Which goes to Michael Manley's point long before it became common-sense wisdom of the primacy of the international economy. Globalisation as a word was not known in the I970s when Manley was at the forefront of the campaign for the New International Economic Order (NIEO).
But Manley saw clearly that unless the international economic and trading system could respond favourably to developing country interests, the prospects for sustained growth would be almost nil.
Manley was also a strong believer in an activist state which later would be termed "the developmental state", and is being pushed by, of all institutions, the World Bank! Easterly in the Challenge interview says import-substitution policies and tariffs helped Third World growth in the 1960s. He says this is "mysterious to those who advocate hands-off markets. The 1960s and 1970s were periods of better performance than post-1980 when the neo-liberal consensus reigned supreme."
SHARP INTELLECT
Manley would not see any "mystery" to this. His sharp intellect and well-honed analytical skills made him see what has been abundantly proven in empirical research on the success of the East Asian tigers: The state could not take a backseat, hands-off approach to development and expect growth to just happen through some "miracle".
The brilliant Harvard Economist Dani Rodrik, in a major paper prepared for the UNDP last year and titled Global Governance of Trade as if Development Really Mattered, notes that the Far Eastern countries, usually touted by the free-marketers as models, had "High levels of tariff and non-tariff barriers, public ownership of large segments of banking and industry, export subsidies, domestic-content requirements, import-export linkages, patent and copyright infringements, directed credit and restrictions on capital flows (including foreign direct investment). Such policies are today excluded by today's trade rules". Those policies which helped the Far East to grow were closer to the Michael Manley economic model than to the Washington Consensus. Two of the fastest growing economies in the world China and India have been strongly protectionist. Remember Manley was a strong advocate of export-orientation also. He did not believe in delinking from the international capitalist system. He rejected autarky. Don't put him in the category of the extremists on the left who saw Third World development in terms of disengaging from the West. Manley's slogan (and the Third World's) was "Trade, Not Aid".
It was precisely because he believed so strongly in outward orientation that he advocated so relentlessly and courageously for the New International Economic Order, which put him at odds with the United States. Now we come to the most controversial aspect of Manley's leadership: His decidedly anti-imperialist stance. Manley did not equivocate. He identified the United States as the dominant economic power which had much to lose if radical changes were made.
Manley also needled the IMF and the World Bank as choir boys for the U.S. hegemonists. This earned him the wrath of the State Department and the CIA. Now control your emotions and don't dismiss me as a communist. We have lived to see conservative economists come out against these institutions and, indeed, these institutions themselves have carried out reforms and have taken on board emphases which would have pleased Michael Manley.
In the November-December issue of Challenge, Professor Lance Taylor, Director the Centre for Economic Policy Analysis at New School University, discusses the failure of Argentina in an article titled Argentina: A Poster Child for the Failure of Liberalised Policies? He blames the IMF and the World Bank for pushing the liberalisation of markets and currencies to the detriment of countries in Asia and Latin America. Michael Manley could have told them and he did. Amazingly, this economist comes down to some Michael Manley-type policies as the way out of the current crisis in Argentina and Latin America. Though import-substitution can go too far, he acknowledges, "You have to go toward directed supports to domestic producers in an intelligent way. Some directed kind of directed public policy for local production activity seems essential."
But the interviewer asked a good question: "Is there any way, given the power of the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF/ World Bank), that that could happen?" The United States ,he said, as the leading production and financial centre has a vested interest in pushing for the liberalisation of markets and capital movements. Says Taylor: "If the United States reasserts its hegemonic power, which it held during the 1990s, I do not think there is any room whatsoever for developing countries to adopt the necessary polici'ly criticised for saying the same things. His justification reaches to his grave. Incidentally, last year The Washington Post financial journalist, Paul Blustein, came out with his damning book, The Chastening: Inside the Crisis that Rocked The Global Financial System and Humbled the IMF.
History has absolved Michael Manley in so far as his international advocacy is concerned. What Manley argued, and was dismissed as communist for is now the refrain of conservatives. In one of its own working papers in August last year (Who Can Explain The Mauritian Miracle: Meade, Romer, Sachs, or Rodrik?), the IMF shows that fast-growing Mauritius achieved its successs by going against standard IMF/World Bank policies and that the success is not replicable because of the power of another multilateral the WTO. In a hefty paper titled, Market Access to Developing Countries' Exports, prepared jointly by the IMF and the World Bank, it is pointed out that despite all the talk from the industrialised countries about free trade, their estimated total support for their domestic agriculture industry moved from US$329 billion in 1997 to $361 billion in 1999. This was the kind of hypocrisy and doublespeak from the industrialised North which enraged Manley and brought out his rhetorical brilliance.
But Manley made some tragic errors of his own. His signal failure was not finding a way to placate the ruling class. His rhetoric was unnecessarily alienating, though I believe that our elite is so backward that any talk of justice, however mild, would have scared the hell out of them.
But leadership is about properly assessing the risks in charting a particular course. Manley should have expected the virulence of the local and international opposition and skilfully manoeuvred himself. He failed dismally.
Manley also, influenced by the leftists around him, paid insufficient attention to the need for macro-economic management. The Emergency Production Plan and other leftist fantasies which were encouraged by the University of the West Indies Social Sciences Faculty led him down the garden path. He needed someone like a Carl Stone to bring the balance, but instead Manley clung to some of the Marxist social scientists whose vision was clouded by ideology and prevented them from perception rather than reality. Manley and the others romanticised the masses and needed a good dose of realism. But Manley infused this country with a vision.
He gave us something to live for beyond eking out an existence for our families and ourselves. People were less corrupt in the 70s because more people thought about community and voluntary service. Today we are in a dog-eat-dog society with low social capital for we have no Grand Vision, nothing to get excited about. When Manley talked about giving workers a voice at the workplace and not treating workers as a mere cog in a machine, he was resisted. Today you can't pick up a Harvard Business Review, the leading business journal, without seeing articles about how treating workers well benefits the bottom line. Fortune, the capitalist flagship magazine, runs an annual Best Companies to Work For which highlights progressive companies which treat workers well.
Putting people at the centre of development and recognising the integral, pivotal contributions of women in the process was the hallmark of Manley's thinking. He failed to deliver economic development not for the lack of will. As an upper-class, brown man, he had compassion for the poor downtrodden black majority. His ideas on education, social policy, justice and development, and the role of the state have all been adopted by even the IMF and the World Bank and form the centerpiece of the UNDP's work. Every year its Human Development Report is a justification for some aspect of Manley's philosophy.
Manley made many blunders, many unnecessary enemies. He displayed naiveté in macroeconomic matters . But he had heart.
