Book Review :

The futility of restructuring

Globalization: India's adjustment
Experience by Biplab Dasgupta
Sage Publications, New Delhi
Thousand Oaks - London
 

Review by U. Karunatilake

The sad tale of helping Capitalism to stagger on is historical boredom, but from the Washington Conference in the 1920's to the Washington Consensus in the 1990's whips with various disciplinary techniques have been used to flog the Market.

The author of Globalization, India's Adjustment Experience, Biplab Dasgupta deals with this sentimental journey from the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 and takes us through the various mechanisms of crisis adjustment by which Capitalism has struggled to retain its grip on the World.

Maintaining a sober academic tone and analysis right through, (Dasgupta retired as Professor of Economics at Calcutta University, having been an academic at the Universities of London and Sussex and various UN organisations) he highlights the clumsy attempts of the World Bank, the IMF and their creature the WTO (sarcastically dubbed LPG trio because their brains are bound by 'liberalisation, privatisation and globalization') to keep capitalism on an even keel.

Though a member of the Central Committee of the Indian Communist Party (Marxist) from 1985 Dasgupta maintains academic impartiality throughout his book and gives us the history, methodology and mechanisms of Capital readjustment which have euphemised Imperialism into Globalism, but not solved Capitalism's intrinsic futility.

The word, reform; used evangelistically by the World Bank and the IMF betrays their creature organisations and policy frameworks like the WTO IDA? PFP, EFF, SAL; SECALS, SDR, which flutter like scarecrows in the Post Cold War World without virility to remedy the chronic importance of capitalism. The 'reform' is the exorcism of all other ways of thinking.

The author examines the 'reforms' in the main sectors of the economy, worldwide and specifically in India and they turn out to be a prescribed cover-up for this importance, quack pills, while the ideological groundwork for change and progress is shunned.

The author outlines the various phases of post-World War 2 multilateral intervention, then identifies the MNC's as the HiTech inheritors of Imperialism's jack-boots and goes on to expose the effects of their intervention on Patents, the Environment, Agricultural and Industrial growth, Economic independence, Trade Patterns, Trade Balances, the State sector in the Economy, and the key function of Labour in all this. He finds that intervention in all these areas has had a lot of fanfare but no positive results.

Actually many have had adverse repercussions leaving the overall picture bleak not merely for the developing World but for much talked of 'global village.'

As an economist Dasgupta can see the reason though he does not elaborate, that all these multilateral fronts, adjustments, readjustments, structurings and restructurings, vanguards and rearguards and professional quislings are an anachronistic thrust of 19th century capitalism (in IT make-up) into the 21st century.