Dark Victory
The United States, Structural Adjustment and Global Poverty
Walden Bello with Shea Cunningham and Bill Rau
Transnational Institute/Pluto Press, London, 1994

My colleague Walden Bello has always known, and told his TNI colleagues long in advance what would happen in Asia - the IMF could have saved itself billions and its reputation besides had it simply bothered to listen to Walden, which, the IMF being what it is, was beyond the realm of possibility. Others will still find it extremely rewarding to follow in his prescient footsteps. This preface was written in August 1993 when the neo-liberals, however wrong their ideas, seemed firmly in the saddle.

'Dark Victory' sounds like a '40s film title, with brave pilots, courageous sweethearts and a happy ending - the villains punished, the heroes rewarded and everything morally neat and tidy as democracy triumphs over fascism. No such luck here. This book and for that matter the world of the 90s aren't like that. The vile and the villainous are getting their way, overcoming every obstacle, crushing all opposition in their path.

But wait! They too may get their come-uppance in the next millennium; those who appear supremely confident today are in fact running scared; they have overstretched their reach and are in inexorable decline. They have led us into a kind of late, very late, Roman Empire on a global scale and the only sure thing is that at the end of this particular movie, the set will be littered with bodies.

Walden Bello and his colleagues Shea Cunningham and Bill Rau explain here exactly what happened in the 1980s. It happened so fast you could well have missed it if you were looking the other way. Very few scholars have, up to now, attempted to show how all the pieces fit together. Reaganism and Thatcherism were only the tip of this iceberg, a world-wide phenomenon called 'Rollback'.

This strategy, the child of the new conservative Establishment and of transnational, mostly US, capital was to the South what the policy of Containment was to the East. Rollback meant an end to third world pretensions. There was to be no more talk of a New International Economic Order, binding codes of conduct for foreign investors, mandatory transfers of technology or managed commodity prices. The South was to return to that quiescent state from which it should never have been allowed to emerge. The unruly would be disciplined and the rebellious cowed.

Bello et al. build their case with relentless scholarship. The familiar cycle of debt, balance of payments crises and adjustment under the tutelage of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is crisply laid out; its consequences as well. Even those who think they know the structural adjustment scenario inside out will be grateful to Bello for taking on the toughest cases for examination - countries like Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica or Ghana, often cited by the Bank and the Fund as star pupils. The stars are decidedly tarnished when Bello has finished with them. The debt-cum-adjustment crisis is shown for what it is - a protracted war against the poor.

Less well known is the parallel war against that more limited part of the South which is not head-over-heels in debt and is therefore immune to discipline via structural adjustment. Competition from the Newly Industrialising Countries - the famous dragons or tigers - is unwelcome, though their increasingly opulent markets are coveted. Dragons are made to be slain and tigers to be hunted; trade regulations and penalties will do as well as lances and rifles.

The war against the South is accompanied by another war on the home front, this time against the work force inside the United States. Here is quintessential Reaganism on its own ground, bringing home the iron law of economics to the millions: the point of capitalism is not to provide decent jobs at decent wages but to make as large a profit as possible. End of story.

One could wish that Bello et al. had made more of the complicity of Southern élites who, on the whole, lie back and enjoy rollback because they, too, profit hugely from it. A North versus South, Empire versus Barbarian scenario, yes, but another serious player is the transnational elite to match the transnational capital, sitting pretty at the top, with everyone else underneath. The world-as-sphere, North-South, is also world-as-pyramid and those at the apex are not all white.

In these ongoing wars, nearly everyone loses and the slim hope for change lies in the fact that they may decide that they will not lose quietly. A dubious battle indeed that leads to such a victory - be it dark or hollow.