Home > APSC 1998

Imperialism's neo-liberal initiatives

By Malik Miah

[This talk was presented to the Asia Pacific Solidarity Conference, April 10-13, 1998 by Malik Miah, from the National Committee of Solidarity (USA).]

I'm happy to be at this conference for two reasons. One, I'm happy to have the opportunity to hear the different comrades and brothers and sisters from countries in the region for standing up to imperialism and standing up for their own people in this very difficult time of the economic crisis that's hitting Asia.

I'm also happy to be here for a second reason that's not as exciting. As far as I know, the only US organisation that's represented here is my group Solidarity, a small socialist group. Solidarity exists to help organise support for workers and farmers in the US but also political workers and farmers fighting for their rights around the world.
This is unfortunate because if you have a conference on Asia it's important to recognise that the most important imperialist power in the Pacific and Asia is the US. And unless the American people begin to organise and stand up against our government in solidarity with the people of Asia and the Pacific, it gives our government a more open hand to carry out its reactionary policies.

One of the things we hope to do is to take back a report and get it written up hopefully in different newspapers and explain what you are doing here and hopefully set an example in the US.

One thing that is important in discussing the situation in relation to the title of this panel — Imperialism's Neo-Liberal initiatives — is that I don't believe there are any new imperialist initiatives in Asia and the Pacific as far as the US is concerned.

They're only new in the sense they are different packages from what's been carried on in the past. If you look at what the IMF is doing, if you look at APEC, if you look at the World Bank, if you look at the UN, if you look at all the institutions the US, Australia and Japan and the European powers are using today in response to the current economic and political crisis, you will find it very consistent with what they have done when these groups were set up after WWII.

It is important to keep that in mind as we discuss the political reality because if you begin to think that something fundamentally new is happening, you go wrong in understanding what needs to be done in our own countries in solidarising and supporting the struggles of the people in Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and the other countries that are trying to fight back.

The IMF

Let's take the IMF and its role. After the second world war, when the IMF, World Bank and these institutions were set up, they were part of the package Washington created to do two things — to bring about stability for world capitalism, saving capitalism in Europe but also bringing in capitalism into the Third World countries and bringing them into the world market.

The imperialist countries, like the major corporations in the US, could exploit those countries and the workers and peasants of those countries in a more effective manner to bring up their profits.

The role of the UN, ASEAN, NATO and other imperialist blocs was to ``contain communism'' in the world. Now many people thought and that was basically a simple policy; anybody who was not aligned with the US was called a communist.

If you look at what has actually happened, first with the IMF, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the last 10 years with the fall of the Berlin wall, what has actually happened?

Many had the illusion that this would change everything, change US policy, because the Soviet Union no longer existed. In truth, US imperialism and its allies or rivals, like Japan and Europe and Australia, became more bold in their plans to exploit the workers and peasants of Asia, Africa and Latin America, because with the end of the Soviet bloc there was more confidence in imperialist circles that they could reap more profits for their corporations.

In fact, you see that happening now in South East Asia. The IMF plan for austerity has been criticised by many including by many in the US congress from the right and the left. The right because they want even more pounds of flesh, and the left because they say we are too identified with dictators.

But the reality of the policy is what? The IMF cannot give any money to any country unless the US agrees to it, because that is the way that it is set up. Formally, the US has 18% of the vote in the IMF, but when you take all its allies, unless it agrees to any funds to any country, no funds are given. So the IMF policy is basically decided in Washington, which tells you that US policy did not shift with the end of the Soviet Union.

All these trips and discussions about the IMF, particularly in Indonesia, is just part of the political process to get people confused about concerns about democracy. The real policy is to make the conditions worse, so the corporations and the bankers can take out more capital and exploit more the people in these countries. But because the Soviet Union does not exist, they have to put it in a different language and pretend on the democracy question.

OK, politically what was the policy of Washington after WWII? It was to contain communism, but 10 years later after the Berlin wall the policy still is to contain communism. The difference is that it is genuine socialism or communism that they are worried about. This is what they fear about the People's Democratic Party (PRD) in Indonesia, what they fear about the independent labour movements in Korea, what they fear about the students who are beginning to strike and struggle in Thailand, and what they are concerned about in Burma with the different guerilla forces that could develop and go beyond the bourgeois opposition.

What they fear is that these movements can go beyond strictly nationalist directions and become fundamentally popular uprisings against capitalism. The way you get popular uprisings against capitalism, you have to have peoples' uprisings for democracy first, as you see beginning to develop in Indonesia.

It's why the US relations with Suharto has never changed, despite the propaganda and rhetoric by the media pundits. The US has never changed its support for Suharto in this entire period. The most important trip to Indonesia in the last three months was not the trip by the IMF representative, it was not the trip by the State Department, it was not comments by the US embassy in Jakarta; the most important trip to Indonesia, and then on to Thailand and Korea, was by the Secretary of Defence, William Cohen.

His trip got the least amount of coverage, but it was the most important trip if you want to understand US policy in South East Asia today, because who did he meet with in Indonesia? He met with ABRI, the Indonesian armed forces high command, which includes Suharto. He told them, ``Don't worry about it, we support you unconditionally against even the bourgeois opposition in Indonesia''. Now many people think that may not be the case.

In fact, there are many people in the US, and probably in the region, who have illusions that the US and the Clinton administration are maybe for pushing Suharto out of power, because they give lip-service to the democracy question. In fact, when Megawati gave her famous speech in January, which we printed in the newsletter, Indonesia Alert, was that she laid out a call for replacing Suharto.

Now consider, who was on the platform when Megawati gave that speech — the political affairs director from the US embassy on Jakarta. You say maybe that shows the US is for Megawati. No, this is part of the problem with US policy. The US embassy does not determine any policy of any country in the world for the US, their main role is to be the eyes and ears for Washington, write reports, get them back, but the real policy makers have nothing to do with those reports.

The real policy makers, who are in the kitchen cabinet in the White House, are the real power players from the corporate world from Wall Street. They are in the military, in the Pentagon, and they consider Indonesia to be the most strategic country in South East Asia. It is the most important country, and the weakest link in the whole region, because of its dictatorship. They have made the decision that supporting Suharto is more important than anything else. Suharto understands that, which is why he does what he does.

This is why it's important to build a movement in support of these democratic struggles. Thailand and Korea are a little different which is why they're not as weak a link for imperialism, because you have development of independent movements, including bourgeois opposition forces that the ruling class in those countries could turn to, to be the government as you see in Korea today, as you saw in Thailand.

That does not exist in Indonesia. Indonesia's situation is more parallel with what happened in Iran, in the late '70s with the Shah of Iran, which the US had an almost identical policy as you see in Indonesia. They backed the Shah to the bitter end. Then when the popular revolution in Iran finally overthrew him, the US was isolated. They knew all this. The embassy there wrote reports about Khomeini and what was going on in Iran, but they ignored it, because they believed in the status quo, which is the fundamental policy of Washington in the South East Asia-Pacific today.

Defending the status quo means defending Suharto, it means defending crony capitalism, which is just capitalism. Crony capitalism is a bizarre concept. All capitalists are crooks. They write the laws.

The crony capitalists in Indonesia, in Korea, the big conglomerates in Thailand, existed before June 1997, when the crisis developed. If you went to every major news magazine in the world, last January, February, March, the Asian miracle was still being touted on the front pages. All the newspaper columnists crying about crony capitalism were hailing these same people one year ago. Go back and read the magazines.

The crisis happens for many reasons, as has been explained at this conference. Suddenly you have too many goods being produced and being bought profitably. So you have a crisis. Nothing else has changed.

Indonesia's the best example. For 30 years, double digit growth. So what happened? Who did it? The same crony capitalists. The same military. The crisis developed, now there's a problem with transparency and how capitalism is run. So from the US's point of view, there's no change.

The change for them, you would think, is that they know there's going to be revolution, if conditions don't change. If you oppose the IMF austerity plan, there will be revolution. They believe they can put down the revolution. The imperialists always believe they can crush these struggles, and one of their illusions today is that with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of communism, as it was, they don't think there's any way national liberation uprisings, popular revolutionary movements, can ever sustain themselves.

So even if a PRD, or broad front, even if independent unions in Korea get stronger, they believe they can either repress them or buy off the key elements of them, to prevent revolution. If you believe that is possible, your strategy is one of containment. Containment means status quo. Status quo means supporting the old ruling classes, ruling regimes, or, in the case of Indonesia, the Suharto family.

That's why, when you look at the last 50 years, the US has never ever pushed out one dictatorship. Think about it. Remember Mobutu in Zaire. The guy was dying of cancer, ready to fall over. Kabili had his forces coming from all over Zaire. Everyone knew Mobutu was going. Who came in there to try to save him? The US. Down to the bitter end.

What about Marcos in the Philippines? Same thing. The US arranged to take him to Hawaii. That is, the US does not just turn its back on its old dictators, because they still think and believe they can work with them even if it looks like the writing is on the wall.

That's why, when the people take over, you have the big conflicts. You have the media conflicts like you see in Iran, like you saw in Nicaragua, like you'll see in Indonesia. And like you'll see in Korea and throughout the region. But the US policy, despite what is written and what is said, is to maintain the status quo, to use the IMF to extract more capital for their corporations and their banks, and to find a way to talk to oppositions, mainly to know what they think, but also to give information to the regimes.

What do the people want us do? Particularly in the US, where there's not a big movement. It's always amazing when I deal with Asia and Pacific, because half of humanity lives in Asia. The two largest countries in the world are in Asia. So by definition, you would think your priorities would be given. That's not yet the case in the US. But it will become more the case because what happens in Asia directly affects workers in the US, from factories that move over to Asia and the whole economic crisis.

For people like us, the real democrats, we have to use situations like this, to educate our own people about this connection between what happens in our government in the US and the struggles of people abroad. We have to recognise that even our modest efforts, like conferences like this, organising campaigns against Nike and what it does in sweatshop factories, organising solidarity, organising rallies and protests against the IMF, does have an impact.

It does encourage people in these countries and also educates our own people. So as the popular uprisings that will inevitable come in these countries in Asia, as they did in Latin America and other countries in the world, we will have a more educated population in the imperialist countries, a population more willing to move out, and in our case, to make what we did around the Vietnam War question in the '60s and '70s small compared to what could happen today with a population much more aware that the only super power in the world is the enemy not only of the Asian people but of the American people.


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