Brian Meeks, Contributor This is the final excerpt from Brian Meeks' inaugural professorial lecture delivered at the UWI, Mona, on November 28.
Much of the local debate on globalisation, the New World Order and the like takes a form in which Jamaica is portrayed as the lone bystander on the side of the tracks as the rushing train flashes by. The options are posed as either standing back and vegetating while the future progresses nicely, or hopping on to the fast track of the globalisation train where good things await. In this admitted caricature, there is no critical reading of the tentative and fraught nature of globalisation itself.
It is my proposal, though unfortunately there is little room for elaboration, that what we loosely call globalisation is not just a problematic set of policies, though this is the case, but the symptom of a deeper malaise in the entire world system of production. The central problem facing the world economy has, surprisingly, little to do with inadequate production but, on the contrary, excess capacity and the inability to absorb it.
Modern capitalism has managed to produce more and better goods and services than ever imagined in the history of humanity, though it has achieved this while ravaging the environment and without finding the wherewithal sufficiently to expand the demand side of the equation in order to create buyers for its huge productivity. The failure to do this has led to increasingly desperate iterations of production in search of cheaper commodities and cheaper fuel at the expense of the already compromised environment.
It has also encouraged the emergence of secondary and tertiary markets in paper options and swaptions, weighing onerously on the body of the productive sector. Most of all, there is the highly publicised rush for the cheapest labour sources - the infamous race to the bottom - which is the ultimate counterproductive move. The shift to the cheapest sources of labour, if imagined globally, may increase output and productivity, but at the expense of global demand, exacerbating the very conditions that initiated cause for concern.
This however, is looking at the problem globally, thinking like a state and not from the perspective of the individual CEO whose primary concern is the board of directors' bottom line. It is to the detriment of the entire world that over the past two decades the business of business has been equated with the business of the state. The urgent need now is to reintroduce the business of the state as a legitimate concern; but not the old governmental approach of opacity and hierarchy, but a new one of openness and genuine democracy, both nationally and internationally, in order to effectively face the dire straits that await us around the next bend in the river.
The way forward
The problem facing Jamaica is not just criminality; nor is it simply the need for macroeconomic belt tightening; nor is it that we have got our educational policies wrong; nor is it that the PNP or the JLP is in power and one or the other must be shunted aside. Many of these may provide a partial explanation of the problem. It is certainly true that no plan for the future of Jamaica can be realistic without a determined attempt to combat crime and violence. It is equally hard to conceive a workable economic model that did not in some way seek to shift patterns of expenditure away from consumption to increased savings.
The same applies to education, and it would be a foolhardy analyst who would suggest that a determined educational policy is not central to any model of future development. I submit, however, that the central feature, the one ring to rule them all, is the fact of hegemonic dissolution, the breakdown of an old consensus and the failure to construct a new one.
Consider for the moment Barbados. In 1994, faced with a deteriorating economy and the possibility of IMF-imposed structural adjustment policies, Owen Arthur's newly-elected Barbados Labour Party avoided this well-known and socially damaging path by adopting a novel 'social partners' approach to national development. The Barbadian model has worked, at least to the extent of avoiding the worst ravages of structural adjustment and returning buoyancy and growth to the economy.
Barbados is not Jamaica, however, and the traditions there of national capital, derived from the old settler pattern, are very different from the tradition of the absentee planter fronted by his local attorney, which developed to its highest levels in Jamaica. Equally, the Barbadian working people, with no physical space to expand beyond the boundaries of the plantation, are psychologically very different from the Jamaican experience of free villages and potential escape to the rocky hillsides. A new Jamaican consensus could not look like the Barbadian model, but would have to cut much deeper.
Pent-up energy
It would require compromises on all sides and perhaps an entirely new way of perceiving Jamaica. In the end, however, it would release a wellspring of pent-up energy, currently wasting away or channelled into illegal endeavours. It would give us the best hope of national and collective survival well into the 21st century.
The central tasks in such an approach would be to find pragmatic forms of collective mobilisation and accompanying institutional arrangements that would:
Forge a national strategy based on a critical alliance between those social forces with an interest in the development of the island space of Jamaica, the region and its diaspora.
Establish new parameters for economic and political involvement that would give an unprecedented number of people a stake and interest in the project.
Engage in a thorough revaluation and national acceptance of Jamaican popular culture as a central avenue for inclusiveness and unity.
Form the broadest regional alliances to increase the space for international negotiations, economic manoeuvre and social living.
Link the diaspora in a tighter network with the local population through the forging of new economic and political linkages.
Avoid frontal and potentially debilitating confrontation with the hegemonic power, through strategies of regional unity, mobilisation of the diaspora and broader multilateralism.
What then of the fine print of a new Jamaican consensus? I suggest that the basis for a new political compromise would have to begin with a profound historical act of good faith that would indicate to all that the foundations for a new beginning, a genuine social contract was being laid, though more than one and a half centuries late. This would require:
A process of national reconciliation that would address, fully ventilate and ultimately exorcise the cataclysm of 1976-1980, the spectre of which still broods over the country and inhibits any initiative towards national healing.
A National Reconciliation Commission would be composed of respected scholars, judges and citizens drawn from various spheres of life, both locally and internationally. It would be legally constituted and would have as its main task the full disclosure of the causes of the violence of the 1970s. It would not seek to prosecute as, following the spirit of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, its purposes would, in the first instance, be therapeutic. Its hearings and results would be aired and published widely. In its act of revelation without retribution, it would break with the past and set the template for truth and honesty in political behaviour in further stages of the new national consensus. The work of the National Reconciliation Commission would precede everything else and its success would be contingent for further progress in the building of a national consensus.
A new, unprecedented and extensive land reform measure. Such an initiative would help to alleviate rural poverty, slow the rapid migration to the cities and out of the island and, if accompanied by appropriate food security policies, provide the foundation for new modalities of popular,
democratic development.
Land reform
I now touch briefly on some of the key components in the new approach to the political in Jamaica, beginning with land reform.
The notion of land reform is not new to Jamaica, and its history has been rehearsed and critiqued through a variety of disciplines. Yet, despite the numerous programmes that have been tried, including those such as Operation Pride that continue today, the true measure of success or failure is to be seen in the stark disparities in land ownership where 4 per cent of landowners control 65 per cent of mainly fertile alluvial lands, while the remaining 96 per cent farm 35 per cent of the lands, mainly on the less fertile hillsides.
Any new approach to land reform would have to be conceived within two now well-accepted realities.
The first is that the plantation system is at a crucial crossroads. The second is that Jamaica, with the clear history and potential to feed its entire population, has become increasingly dependent on food imports in the last two decades. The gradual phase-out of the Lomé agreement for preferential access of agricultural exports to the European market will make the production of sugar and bananas - Jamaica's two leading exports - almost unfeasible, given present levels of capitalisation and productivity.
The reason for the maintenance of highly inefficient industries, of course, is the understandable fear of widespread unemployment, worsening rural poverty and mass unrest if they were suddenly to shut down, though prognostications point to this as the probable short-term result anyway.
The other stark reality is the threat that WTO-inspired liberalisation of imports poses to the domestic production of food. Trade liberalisation undermined local red peas, Irish potato and onion production, and has shifted the fruit and vegetable sub-sector from a trade surplus to a growing deficit. Yet, despite these difficulties, small farmers continue to produce a
significant share of Jamaica's domestically consumed food.
This congruence of two imminent crises, one affecting the plantation sector and the other the small farmers, calls for a strategy that can address them both. The answer is to be found in a land reform that would shift significant resources from the crippled plantation sector and transfer it to existing and potential small farmers, who would produce both for the domestic market and for export.
