Caribbean economists: In search of petit-bourgeois utopias (Part 1)

Trevor A. Campbell, Contributor

In a recent Jamaica Observer editorial, "Where have our Caribbean economists been?" the writer took Caribbean economists to task for what was alleged to be a dereliction of the professional duty of that community.

According to the editors: "Our economists have failed since the late 1960s to produce any practical, sustainable policy measures which could have promoted the economic development of the Caribbean."

Their lamentation continues: "Caribbean economists have churned out nothing but criticism with no answers on how to improve the economic development of the region. They blamed the crisis of Caribbean development on foreign investment, multinational corporations, private enterprise, markets, developed countries, the IMF, World Bank, WTO, the Washington Consensus, the CBI, the EPA, natural disasters, globalisation, trade liberalisation, the brain drain and politicians. Nothing wrong with criticism, but they have produced no alternative policy. They should heed Karl Marx's dictum: the point of understanding the world is to change it for the better."

Undoubtedly, these excerpts, and also other parts of the editorial, do contain some important observations about the intellectual orientation and practice of Caribbean-based economists. However, as a whole (especially in the English-speaking areas), the editorial can only be judged as contributing to the perpetuation of several widely held misconceptions about the role that economists play in the development and functioning of the capitalist mode of production.

This is particularly clear in what the editorial alleges to be the role of economists in the occurrence of the periodic crises that are an inevitable feature of the capitalist economy. Not understanding in any deep way the origins and the process of development of capitalism, in general, and the particular way in which it emerged in the Caribbean and other parts of the former colonial world, the editors are demanding that the Caribbean economists become magicians. In other words, they are being asked to "grab rabbits out of a hat," so to speak.

The editors' confusion is most blatantly displayed in the opening sentence: "The economic crisis of the Caribbean, we are convinced, is in large measure caused by an intellectual crisis of Caribbean economists."

For the benefit of the generation that is now coming to political age, I will provide some of the historical context that I hope will help readers to better appreciate the reasons for the intellectual failings of Caribbean economists. I will explain the real basis for their current intellectual crisis and of why they were neither prepared nor capable of providing the relevant scientific guidance to either the regional bourgeoisie or the working class.

Capitalism is not the product of the economist's mind

The first thing that we have to be clear on is that the emergence of the capitalist mode of material production is not the product of some fanciful ideas that sprang forth out of the head of a group of individuals we call economists or philosophers. Capitalist production - like all other modes of social production that preceded it - arose, developed and became consolidated as a result of a long historical period of economic, social and political struggles between and among various social classes. These struggles reflected and do continue to reflect the conflicting needs of the various social classes within contemporary capitalist society.

If we proceed with our examination of the socio-historical nature of the world of material production with these considerations in mind, we might then be able not only to develop a better understanding of causality, but also we will be able to more keenly contextualise the relationship between social classes, economic theories and economic policies.

A limited market in the region for highly trained bourgeois economists

In the concluding segment of his four-part series 'From the Exchange Rate to Economic Growth - Part IV' (The Gleaner, Sunday, December 26, 2010), David C. Wong noted: "Jamaica has never had a bourgeois revolution, and so a modern class of capitalists has never developed." Let me extend this point by saying that the benefits deriving from the successful bourgeois revolutions in Europe were not, and could not objectively be, extended to all of the social classes within Europe, much less to those based in the colonies, where industrial production - the economic base for the political hegemony of the bourgeoisie - did not exist. This implies that there were not many (if any) sponsorships available for the development of a cadre of highly trained bourgeois economists whose primary intellectual focus would have been on the accumulation of capital for the respective industrial corporations and industries that they would be attached to. The handful of Caribbean students who went overseas to do graduate work in economics during the 1950s and early 60s were, in the main, not connected to modern industries when they returned home. They largely became bureaucrats in the colonial governments.

By the mid to late 1960s, a new generation of Caribbean economists had emerged (along with their counterparts in Latin America, Africa and to some extent Asia) who were increasingly linking themselves to a 'new' branch of bourgeois economics called 'development economics'. This specie - which emerged in the immediate aftermath of World War 2 - was essentially a response to the geographical unevenness of the development of the productive forces, an inherent feature of capitalist accumulation that assumed exaggerated forms within the colonies and between the colonies and the centres of the various colonial empires. The United Nations - through its various agencies - became the de facto sponsor of development economics.

Under the leadership of the Argentine economist Raul Prebisch - who served as the Director of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) that later became the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) - a group of Latin American economists that were associated with development economics elaborated on a theory that was designed to account for what they called "the development of underdevelopment". This theory became known in the development economics literature as dependency theory. It is interesting to note, however, that W. Arthur Lewis, one of the more prominent of the development-oriented economists, did not explicitly subscribe to the arguments of the dependency theorists. I will go further into some of these issues in part 2 of this article, particularly as they relate to the emergence of the Caribbean-born UWI-based economists, many of whom enrolled into the dependency school of thought.

It is important to note that by the mid-1960s, it had become apparent to the informed observer that the international division of labour, within the context of the world capitalist system, was undergoing some significant changes. Perhaps the most noticeable of these changes was the fact that industrial capital (capital that is directly involved in the productive process), in the form of light manufacturing, was now being exported to regions of the world that were formerly colonial possessions of the various European empires.

The following two paragraphs are taken from my paper titled 'The Political Economy of Restructuring and the Process of Global Capitalist Integration', which was published in California Sociologist, summer 1992:

"Prior to WW2, the investments of finance and industrial capital (headquartered in the imperialist countries of Europe, US and Japan) in the colonies and former colonies of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, were concentrated on the extraction of raw materials from mines and plantations that existed in their respective territories. These raw materials were destined for the factories that were located in the cities of the imperialist states. The relatively small factories that emerged in the 1930s and 40s in Latin American countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico were developed under the auspices of their respective nascent national industrial capitalist class. The outbreak of WW2 and the disruption of the traditional trade patterns allowed for sections of the commercial bourgeoisie to invest some of their capital in the manufacturing of a few key consumer goods which were previously imported. This expanded the ranks of the industrial proletariat in the cities of these countries.

"After the war, this emerging industrial bourgeoisie would forge links with international banks and overseas industrialists, particularly those based in the US, from whom they purchased the machines (often the ones that were obsolete in the US market) for their factories. Most of the commodities which left their factories were destined for their respective internal markets, as opposed to the world market, where they were not competitive in terms of cost or quality. The bulk of these countries' exports remained in the realm of raw materials (minerals and agricultural products).

"By the 1950s, the industrialisation process had extended to several parts of Asia, notably South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and to a far much lesser extent, Africa. With the coming of the 1960s, the post-WW2 institutions which had developed under US hegemony, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had begun to reshape the economic landscape of Latin America and the so-called Third World. These organisations facilitated the development or upgrading of the physical infrastructure (eg deepwater ports and airports) which made possible the expansion of US-based and other multinational firms into manufacturing across several regions of the Third World. Technical advances in transportation (wide-bodied oceanliners and commercial jet planes with sizeable passenger and cargo space), along with developments in telecommunications, served to accelerate the volume and speed at which commodities, people and information circulated between various points around the globe."

These were the material conditions that laid the foundation for integrating the former colonial regions of the world more fully into the process of capitalist production. In other words, all of the circuits of capitalist production and accumulation, including the manufacturing component (productive capital) were now being generalised/internationalised. This is the essence of the process we term, capitalist globalisation.

In part two of my presentation, I will bring the analysis up to the present situation and provide some definite answers as to "where have our Caribbean economists been" and why they have returned with very little of practical value to offer either the emerging modern bourgeoisie or the working class that still resides in the region.

Trevor Campbell is the moderator of the online forum 'Caribbean Dialogues'. He can be reached at tcampbell@eee.org; Feedback to this article may also be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.