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Eurocentric perceptions of positive economic change

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By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

IN the last instalment, I showed that the press in Zimbabwe had contributed to distortions of the challenges facing state enterprises and other public entities by failing to place them in the context of the exact same economy and market in which private companies operated.
These distortions reflected linear and fragmented thinking on economic change and the claim of almost every party that it represents the most effective and beneficial economic change for future generations.
This week, there were two stories which caught my attention in the context of the upcoming harmonised elections.
The first was The Sunday News analysis of the MDC-Alliance manifesto saying the document glosses over the fact that the MDC formations have controlled a significant number of town and city councils since 2000.
There seems to be a reluctance on the part of the press and the Alliance to look at that 18-year record for what it is and to examine the real-time experiences of actual communities who have lived under MDC ‘governance’ of ‘change’.
What did ‘change’ mean for the cities and towns during those 18 years?
This is the only way the theory of ‘change’ and development can be questioned through practice.
The other story is an international one, but related to the question of how positive economic ‘change’ is defined and who is seen as responsible for driving it.
This is the Al Jazeera story contrasting what happened as the 2018 G7 Summit in Canada led by the US in contrast to what happened at the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (CSO) led by China and Russia and recently hosted by Chinese President Xi Jinping.
As reported by The Chronicle of June 11 2018, the two summits contradicted long-held stereotypes of the West versus the East which global media have entrenched over decades.
Citing Michele Geraci, Al Jazeera and The Chronicle reported that:
“Asia is playing a very important role.
It’s sending the signal that big changes, the big decisions are being made here.
The West, the G7, which doesn’t include China nor Russia, is kind of struggling not just with the rest of the world but now they start to struggle with each other (especially since the last Global Financial Tsunami and the recent arrival of Donald Trump as US President.)
This is a further triumph for (Chinese President) Xi to be the pivotal player in the region first, but also rising to a more important role within the world.”
What is being overturned are stereotypical views of change, development, modernisation and progress.
Here in Zimbabwe, for example, have the MDC formations lived up to their name, ‘Movement for Democratic Change’, since 1999 and especially since their takeover of a significant number of urban councils since 2000?
Are these formations facing up to the realities which that history now presents to the voters in 2018?
On a global scale, what lessons should young people learn from the recent global financial tsunami which rocked the US and Europe early this decade and the anti-globalisation uprisings in Greece.
These changes demand a new language of ‘development’ and a new way of understanding ‘change’.
The picture of Africa in development studies is that of a people and continent whom God, technology and time abandoned.
The best they can do is try to catch up by benchmarking the white North.
When the former Soviet Union ended in 1989, this same view was extended to socialism, as a system which God and post-modern, neo-liberal times had also left behind.
That is what makes the current Euro-American crisis profound. Why should the South and the East struggle to catch up to a white Goliath who has hit the dead-end of linear capitalism and debt-driven consumption?
David Korten raises this issue in his book The Post Corporate World: Life After Capitalism.
As the reader can see, the problem does not lie in emulating others or comparing our situation with other people’s situations as such. The problem lies in confirming and adopting the eurocentric and linear view of time which means abandoning our relational view of time.
After all, the concept of time is a human construction.
It is not a given object or material like a rock containing gold or diamond or like nitrogen or calcium.
Human beings and society shape time and give it material significance.
The control of one’s own time and space is the local demonstration of true autonomy.
If we control our own space, we can also define our own time in that space.
However, if we lose our space, whoever comes to control our space will begin to define and control our time as well.
That is why African philosophy defines autonomy as ‘…the capacity to come and go in one’s own space, in one’s own time and at one’s own pace.’
When African scholars explain eurocentrism and eurocentricity in history, they examine not just language and philosophy but also definitions of historical time and cartography (map-making) and geography.
Slavery, colonialism and apartheid – all centred on the capture, control and transformation of African space and time for white racist benefit.
However, first, let us look at what I mean by saying ‘time is not an object or given material’.
It is a human construction.
Any reasonable dictionary will give the following definitions of time which demonstrate human construction:
“Continuous passage of existence, recorded by division into hours, minutes and seconds. In the past measurement of time was based on the earth’s rotation on its axis, but this was found to be irregular.
Therefore the second, the standard SI unit of time, was redefined in 1956 in terms of the earth’s annual orbit of the sun and in 1967 in terms of a radiation pattern of the element caesium.”
Even more revealing is the definition of ‘time-warp’ which says, ‘a distortion of space-time as a result of which a person or thing remains stationary in time or travels backwards or forwards in time’.
If a person flies to the East, he may ‘lose’ a whole day. If he flies to the West, he may ‘gain’ a day-or-so.
Moreover: “Universal Time (UT), based on the earth’s actual rotation, was replaced by co-ordinated universal time (UTC) in 1972.
From 1986, the term ‘Greenwich Mean Time’ was replaced by Co-ordinated Universal Time.”
However, the Greenwich Meridian, where the British Royal Greenwich Observatory is, remains that from which all longitudes are measured, and the world’s standard time zones are calculated from it.
It is significant that the Greenwich Meridian and Greenwich Mean Time were adopted in the year of the Berlin Conference, 1884, the year of the conference to co-ordinate imperialism and the conquest of Africa, African space, African time and African thought.
Impact of the adoption of linear time on language
The co-ordination of linear time from the Greenwich Meridian led naturally to the construction of one long queue of humanity waiting to be ‘developed’ according to the inventors of Greenwich Mean Time and the Berlin Conference.
Professor W.W. Rostow’s CIA-funded book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, defined this queue as follows:
“Traditional society which yearns to be modernised; transitional society in which preconditions for capitalist take-off have been created through the intrusion of a foreign power which plays catalyst and driver of the modernisation process; the externally induced take-off itself; the sweep into developed maturity generally taking up the life of about two further generations; finally the diversion of the fully mature economy to the provision of durable consumers’ goods and services, which is celebrated as the stage of high mass-consumption.”
In other words, ‘development’ is supposed to imitate Charles Darwin’s myth of natural evolution.
In our region, Clem Sunter published The World and South Africa in the 1990s.
Sunter departed from the categories of First World, Second World and Third World. He opted for two main divisions: The Triad, which he also called the Rich Old Millions of North America, Western Europe and Japan; and the Non-Triad nations, meaning the rest of the world outside North America, Western Europe and Japan. However, Sunter also introduced a sub-division within the ‘poor young Billions’ of the Non-Triad nations.
Africa, he characterised as the ‘swamp’ or the ‘pit’. Significantly, Sunter described the Triad as distinguished by the fact that it ‘earns two-thirds of the world’s income and has 15 percent of the world’s population’.
This distinction is important because in the current crisis, Western Europe and North America now admit that the demand side of their economies has been pegged way to high for a very long time and must be brought down.
This means the claim to ‘First World’ status was artificially sustained through other people’s resources which can no longer be obtained at the same levels because of the rise of what the West regrets as the ‘rise of economic nationalism’ in all the Non-Triad nations and in the ‘swamp’ nations of Africa as well.
In Confessions of An Economic Hitman, John Perkins is among the most blunt of the whiteman who long ago warned about what we now see in the spread of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement and the uprising in Greece.
The West, especially the US, has been able to flaunt an artificially high rate of mass consumption and appearance of massive wealth by employing large armies of economic saboteurs to create and sustain a global network to siphon wealth from the rest of the world using global “…corporations, banks and (client) governments (the corporatocracy) (who) use their financial and political muscle to ensure that our schools, businesses and media support both the fallacious concept (of First World status) and its corollary.
They have brought us to a point where our global culture is a monstrous machine that requires exponentially increasing amounts of fuel and maintenance, so much so that in the end it will have consumed everything in sight and will be left to devour itself.”
This was published in 2005 by one of the saboteurs warning that capitalism was about to destroy itself.
President Trump is seen by some of his Western colleagues as forcing this self-destruction to come sooner.
In other words, the idea of ‘First World development’ and affluence relied on some cheating and manipulation.
The armies of economic saboteurs placed throughout multinational corporations and the Bretton Woods Institutions after the Second World War till now was: “To encourage world leaders to become part of a vast network that promotes US commercial interests.
In the end, those leaders become ensnared in a web of debt that ensures their loyalty.
We can draw on them whenever we desire – to satisfy our political, economic, or military needs.
In turn, they bolster their political positions by bringing industrial parks, power plants, and airports to their people (even when these white elephants are not needed at all).
The owners of US engineering/construction companies become fabulously wealthy (by obtaining contracts).”
Based on this chicanery, the entire world has been subjected to this linear language which portrays historical time as linear and hierarchical:
“Least developed countries as defined by the UN General Assembly in 2003 comprise 50 countries of which 34 are in Africa, 10 in Asia, one in Latin America and the Caribbean and five in Oceania.”
Then, less developed countries is another category which is defined as: “The countries that comprise all regions of Africa, Asia (except for Japan), Latin America and the Caribbean, plus Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia.”
From the preceding, it is clear who is included in the so-called ‘developed world’, with the Brockhampton Dictionary of ideas saying these are: “The countries that have a money economy and a highly developed industrial sector.
They generally have a high degree of urbanisation, a complex communications network, high gross domestic product of over US$ 2 000 per person, low birth and death rates, high energy consumption and a large proportion of the population employed in manufacturing or service industries.
The developed world includes the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.”
What is the problem with this language?
On the surface, the problem is that these linear distinctions are based on what is called progress which is measured as endless ‘economic growth’.
Perkins himself points out this problem, saying: “The idea that all economic growth benefits humankind and that the greater the growth the more widespread the benefits,” is dangerous.
Another surface problem is what to do when that growth stops or comes down to almost zero in the so-called First World itself and there is growth elsewhere.
But at a much deeper level, the problem is that the idea of development and progress comes from transferring the racist language of evolution from plants and animals to human beings and then from there to culture, technology and whole societies.
Even deeper is the fact that development discourse actually involves reading and re-labelling historical events backwards, that is in retrospect.
When they took place in real history, the so-called phases or stages of economic growth and development which W.W. Rostow elaborated in his 1960 book did not have the names which the Professor assigned them.
What is known is that the rise of England as an economic power followed the English Revolution; the rise of France as an economic power followed the French Revolution.
The rise of Holland followed the freedom of the Netherlands from Spanish rule.
The rise of the US as a world economic power followed the American Revolution and the American Civil War.
The rise of the former Soviet Union as a global superpower followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
Now, the arrival of China as the second largest global economy is partly a result of the Chinese Revolution.
All these peoples were pursuing their emancipation in their own time and space but not following development programmes prescribed by the World Bank, the IMF, the World Trade Organisation or USAID.
There was no Washington Consensus and no University of Chicago economics to prescribe one neo-liberal agenda for the whole world or for a single revolutionary movement.
Now, if there is one thing which the imperial powers want to crush everywhere, it is revolution.
That is why, in 1982, Maimire Mennasmay published a paper called Political Theory, Political Science and African Development in which he lamented the wholesale adoption of eurocentric linear time and language in the field of political science in Africa, which has resulted in ‘the negation of the notion of the human being as historical agent.’
The language used by the African university needs liberation.
As a result, Africans, “are reduced (in political science and development studies) to being spectators engaged in an involuntary movement (and programme) which is unidirectional, objective and mechanical.
In short, such a conception of time cannot recognise (Africans) as moral agents.
It is then impossible for the political scientist to see the historical nature of what is called development.”
Yet this concept and language have been transferred, after the fact, from a certain mode of making and understanding a particular eurocentric experience.
What Rostow and Sunter imply by the linear chronologies and typologies of development they have constructed is the ‘thesis that the end of history has already been achieved by those (called the First World) whose history (read backwards) has produced the grammar of development’.
The African in this linear narrative is not supposed to engage in revolution now because past revolutions elsewhere produced a universal grammar of development which the African only needs to memorise and grasp.
“By dehistoricising social time, the latter (the history of the West) is made to be a universal grammar of development.”
Just as we need to look at what happened to towns and cities under the MDC from 2009 to-date in contrast to what the manifesto says, we also need to read the real-time daily experience of the entire population of Zimbabwe in order to determine which development programmes to foreground and start with and which ones to defer or set aside altogether.
We must develop our own benchmarks just as the Russians and Chinese have done against euro-American pressures to be like Europe and North America.
For instance, population control became part and parcel of the development prescription offered by the North for the South and East.
However, big populations for India and China have in the end proven to be critical for the rise of these nations to super-power status.
Big populations mean big markets for home-grown industry!

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