Neoliberal ordering makes inequality inevitable

The world remains highly uneven and riven by conflict. Neoliberal development produces islands of middle-class prosperity in societies that become more unequal overall. Even the alternative, state-led, export-oriented development is met, in China, by 80,000 violent protests a year by excluded and exploited peasants and workers – so China too seeks alternative development. As well as producing USstyle affluence for a few, neoliberalism has exacerbated the already miserable conditions experienced every day by billions of people who never had it so bad. And as these billions watch their children die in agony so the world’s rich can dine in splendour they commit themselves to social movements that propose alternative development as part of social transformation. In the past, these Third World upsurges of anger and longing were restrained by their forming in countries where the argument could be made, and widely believed, that progress depends on foreign investment … investment from the ruling elite and from global finance capital. In this formation, development could be bought only by bribing financiers with the promise of high returns to compensate for the risk of investing in unequal and volatile societies. Where Third World countries, such as Cuba, persisted in pursuing alternative routes to a different development, the capitalist world under the ‘leadership’ of the USA did its utmost to overthrow their governments, isolate their economies and denigrate their political systems. But now, in Latin America, the continent that suffered most from the ravages of the Washington Consensus, we begin to see what people who hate neoliberalism can do instead, in the way of education for the masses, doctors freely available to the poor, nationalized industries paying dividends to the people, state-supported cooperative enterprises, liberated golf courses turned into green housing space for the homeless, and all those other ‘mad economic practices’ that collectively make up alternative development. These experiments are sustained not by foreign investment but by the revenues from oil and natural gas being returned as investments in the people instead of profits to the elite. As the World Social Forum shows, there is widespread, global support for an alternative to neoliberal policies that deliberately and consciously skew economic growth to favour the investor. Even so, the institutional structure of alternative, counterhegemonic policy formation remains weakly developed. Movements that mobilize millions are represented by theories devised by a relative few, backed by meagre resources and with a precarious institutional existence. To further their end, this book proposes a counter-expertise to produce an alternative development. All that I have managed to do, so far, is to outline the theoretical and institutional structure of hegemonic policy formation, to look at sub-hegemonic subversion of alternative development, and to give some idea of what I take to be the first moments of truly counter-hegemonic developments in Latin America. The really hard work on counter-hegemonic theorization remains to be done. My conclusion is that counter-hegemonic policy formation deserves the thoughts and the theories, the practice and the persuasion, of the world’s activists and intellectuals, those who believe in equality, social justice and real democracy, and think that human beings are capable of finer sentiments in building a far better world.