Complexity is the Problematique - Musing on Fumani's Developmental Thoughts

Complexity... indeed. This word is certainly the best shorthand that I can come up with in order to capture the ever unravelling dynamic of social, economic and political phenomena we're faced with in an attempt to alter an unjust world.

Just last night I watched a documentary entitled "Life and Debt". It's intention is to shed light on how, since the '73 oil crisis, the IMF has used conditionalities to bankrupt and cripple the Jamaican state and in turn its society.

A refreshing aspect of the film was the juxtapositioning of a high level IMF offical justifiying IMF policies and a former Jamaican Prime Minister shedding light on the back room machavellian machinations of the loan agreements. In their own way, both sounded equally reasonable. (The IMF official looking worse for wear by the end - inevitably, if not justifiably.) I figure the reason the IMF official could sound reasonable to my ears is either due to a healthy serving of the dodgy educational koolaid served at the bastion of African neoliberal education (read: UCT) or simply that there may an empirical case to be made in favour of certain classical neoliberal policies - my qualification being: "under certain circumstances and with certain complimentary policies."

For example, ensuring that a state reduce subsidies or tariffs in order to boost exports may not be so reprehensible a condition. Say for instance, if due attention is paid to the sequencing of tariff reductions within the context of a broader scheme for boosting productive capacity or if the welfare gain for the rest of society as a result of lower prices on basic imported goods will allow the poor to stretch their incomes further.
The catch here though is the underlying motivation behind the condition to reduce subsidies or tariffs. That is, so long as the intention behind such action is to actually strengthen the long term developmental prospects of a nation, such a policy could be reasonable.

However, the documentary did a sterling job in exposing the real underlying motivations of the IMF. Which of course aren't really "underlying" at all if one understands the governance structure of the IMF and the World Bank.

This then led me to question the usefulness of a global trade and financial system where the perversity of unbridled competition, which is restrained within sovereign nations through various policy measures, is left to flourish and run rough shod over the weak(ly competitive). This is hardly a new insight. But what was different for me was to then really question the usefulness of the implicit value system of competition i.e. winners, losers, us and them, and even the values underpinning the supposed fruits of competition i.e. more innovation, more technology, more comfort and convenience, more consumer choice, more consumption,... Which seems all just a recipe for more, more, more, more, and more...

These are just a few tentative paths for inquiry that surfaced. And so somehow, a film about debt in Jamaica led me to pull, however gently, at the seams of an entire paradigm that defines and reproduces our current understanding of socioeconomic value.

And so even if a coherent theory of how to possibly get the downtrodden out of the gutter and finally deliver deserved justice emerges from these few strands of enquiry, an explanation is ultimately still just an explanation. The prescriptions and recommendations it might make, if any, will inevitably generate a new set of unknown and unpredictable social, political and economic phenomena to frustrate or aid the problematique. So finally, what is already and always has been complex will remain just as complex as ever. And ever amen.