austin-murphy-the-triumph-of-evil

264 THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL
(resulting in production being so focused on the name-brand goods with
marked-up prices and far superior profit opportunities that it might be
difficult to obtain economies of scale for production and distribution of
inexpensive goods).
Already by 1992 the quintile of people living in the world's richest
countries had 82.7% of the world's income and were 60 times better off
than the people in the poorest quintile of countries (Economist, 1992).
Within many of the poor capitalist countries themselves, this enormous
difference is magnified even further. For instance, the quintile of the
richest people in Latin America have 150 times the income of the poorest
20% of the Latin Americans (Smith and Ratner, 1997). Any attempt
by workers (or the poor) to obtain a larger share of the economic pie is
openly attacked worldwide by central bankers, who meet such attempts
to redistribute wealth with threats of higher interest rates (Aalund,
2000), which cause unemployment, a reversal in any trend toward rising
wages, and eventually more poverty (Chossudovsky, 1997).
While the USA's brand of violent domination (and exploitation) of
other peoples is more atrocious than any other in history (as docu­
mented in the Introduction), it should be reemphasized that the cruelty
of capitalism itself is nothing new. For instance, it was capitalism that
transformed all people into objects to be exploited, so that the rich
could accumulate ever more wealth at the expense of others (Marx and
Engels, 1988b ), especially in colonies like India (Gopal, 1963). The
capitalist economic system also caused the Europeans together with the
USA to initiate an enormous and profitable slave trade (DuBois, 1965)
that killed tens of millions of Africans, who not only died in massive
numbers on land and sea in transit to their new jobs but also during
their initial "seasoning" at those jobs (Stannard, 1992). 9 The extent of
the overall exploitation here can be seen from the fact that today's third
world nations had average per capita incomes in 1750 that exceeded
the average of today's developed countries at the time, but the imposition
of several centuries of colonialism (or the forced removal of pro
tectionist barriers against imports from today's developed countries)
has resulted in their average per capita incomes being less than 1/8 that
of the developed nations (which maintained protectionism until they
had gained sufficient income/technological superiority) in 1990 (Bairoch,
1993). Although the enormous current income differential makes
CHAPTER 7 265
exploitative trade with the third world relatively insignificant to the
developed countries today, that contrasts greatly with the situation in
1750 when incomes in the two areas were more equal, and trade with
the developed countries remains a very important component of the low
incomes of the poor third world (putting them in a very weak and even
desperate bargaining position relative to the richer developed nations,
even without considering the daunting military situation).
It is interesting to observe that the Europeans used an economic strat­
egy to colonize Africa several hundred years ago that was very similar
to that employed worldwide by the USA today. In particular, European
capitalists exported a flood of cheap manufactured goods (like textiles)
to Africa, thereby reduced the demand for goods produced locally, and
thus destroyed the African economy (DuBois, 1965). Nevertheless, even
after their economies were destroyed, Africans were able to continue
to make payments for the goods imported from Europe by offering raw
materials and slaves in return. Today, the USA no longer engages in
outright exploitation of slaves and no longer transports labor units to
a new work place in the Americas, but it does continue to accept raw
materials and the production of cheap labor as payment. This exploita­
tion of the cheap labor in less developed countries today is not much
different from the exploitation of slaves earlier, except that the cheap
workers can now stay in their own country and receive wages that are
just enough to buy what slaves in the past were provided with by their
masters (i.e., the people of many less developed countries are transfanned
into wage slaves who must work for the equivalent compensation
of slaves just to stay alive, and that is for the lucky ones who can
find a company that will offer them the "right" to be a slave so they
won't have to starve to death or die of related disease ).10
. In direct contrast to the holocausts caused by capitalism, communism
(m the countries where it was instituted) saved many millions of lives
annually not only by having a more even distribution of food, shelter,
health care, and work (Davies, 1997), but also by generating faster
growth rates than under capitalism, as previously explained in Chapter
1 of this book and as admitted by the IMF (1993) itself. It should also
be emphasized that the faster growth rates in communist countries were
&�lly achieved with 7 -hour work days and reasonable living con­
dlttons (Davies, 1997) that were in stark contrast to the terrible work