(en) France, Organisation Communiste Libertarie (OCL) Courant Alternatif #247 - International, Technical assistance to international development: the other name of captalist exploitation (fr)

(en) France, Organisation Communiste Libertarie (OCL) Courant
Alternatif #247 - International, Technical assistance to international
development: the other name of captalist exploitation (fr)[machine
translation]


On the stage of development assistance behind the NGO patterns and generous donors that 
appear as development actors and thus help to poor countries, hide agencies and much 
darker motives who work in-depth company and recipient countries to establish the 
conditions for efficient and quiet operation. ---- In its time, the USSR had set up the 
international division of labor, which was the exploitation of the economic 
characteristics of its satellites, the uptake of natural resources and labor for the 
benefit of the most favored nation clause according to well known international contracts 
between brotherly countries. ---- In the euphoria of the collapse of the Wall and the 
Soviet empire, we saw the competitive advantage theory be transformed to become the bible 
of preferential purchase of companies located in a vanished empire. It was for 
transnational corporations to get their hands on skills, capital and competitive positions 
in their respective markets.

It also aimed to identify the strengths of the country where they were located. Sectoral 
studies did then consulting firms happiness. Acquire cheaply dominant positions in local 
markets, while anticipating production transfer (relocation) to more competitive labor 
markets was in everyone's mind. The 90s were thus a period of capital movements, and 
violence raging in Eastern Europe was probably equivalent to that of a Wild West full 
conquest. Alongside those earning a substantial part of the population has not only lost 
its bearings and social protection, access to free education and health care, but more 
importantly, has been submitted to the competition of a labor market without thank you. 
Labor standards in the capitalist system were the more ruthless than any protection was 
gone and even the reformist political groups had converted to liberalism and money king, 
with all that this entails corruption and arrogance.

Capitalism develops only ever conquering more territories and markets, by bringing the 
people in the "market", ie in the process of capitalist production and consumption.

During the years that followed the fall of the Wall, international assistance has focused 
on Central and Eastern Europe. Funders have invested heavily in the development of 
capitalist markets and the creation of conditions for profitable exploitation. It has 
supported economic development, the establishment of legal conditions for the presence and 
dominance of transnational corporations were imposed European rules management, economic 
relations and legal rules. But this could not stop there. It was also necessary to 
standardize the methods of management of territories and populations, administrative 
standards and impose Western democracy.

Development projects have covered the whole spectrum of society to impose a model that was 
not always consistent with local conditions and with the level of development of societies.

Integrate with any market price.

Behind slogans touting "democracy", it is the capitalist market, is meant. Donors have 
therefore insisted on not only exploited natural resources, labor and purchasing power 
thus generated, but that the company is "renewed" from top to bottom, to enter the Western 
model. Adapter societies and states of Eastern Europe was ultimately not very complicated, 
since they essentially the same story, except this parenthesis under the boot of "real 
socialism".

The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 led to attempts at transformation of 
a different magnitude. The invaders then developed the concept of "nation building": they 
destroyed everything that has existed and is reconstructed on the model of Western 
capitalist democracy. The earthquake in Haiti was the pretext for the same practice on the 
island that saw the first black republic, according to the accepted term. Treatment of 
weak or failed states, eradication of the model to replace it with another, more favorable 
to exploitation, is not without difficulty. As such, the example of Iraq is significant 
destroying all social infrastructure and is not based on the population, the invader has 
mostly managed to wreak havoc and to lift communities against each other. The civil war 
that ensued destroyed the country more surely that the invasion had done. The irony of the 
story ultimately is that attempting to regain control of a territory not within the 
capitalist world order and full of hydrocarbon resources, the United States' coalition has 
succeeded in the fox in the henhouse. To the chagrin of the invader, the Persian neighbor 
who reigns in Baghdad. It would be interesting to measure the rates of education for more 
than ten years after the invasion and the overthrow of the dictatorial regime of Saddam 
Hussein. Iraq was in the seventies, a country rich in its education system, renowned for 
its universities.

Logic rather than colonial Empire

Unlike the colonialism of previous decades, it was no longer able to impose from the local 
population, and subject to the whims of the old colonialist, but rather to create the 
conditions for operating an accepted and lived as the access to development. It is the 
development that becomes the export product: through donors and implementing agencies of 
development projects, we dangled a completely disconnected mode of life of local social 
and environmental realities. Is allowed to install the idea that the capitalist western 
lifestyle is the only desirable.

A Western request was thus developed artificially by local elites, educated according to 
the dominant model. Thus, it is simply to exploit local natural resources, but also push 
people to consume like Westerners, to reason as Westerners, to accept the Western 
capitalist model as the only possible and the only desirable . Any attempt not to submit 
to the dictates of the "market" is punished by violence. The old post-colonial recipes 
still work when the need arises. It is always possible to reverse a local authority that 
does not comply.

The common idea that the middle classes are the leaven of democracy and political 
stability has served as a screen for the diffusion of capitalist ideology, and the 
establishment of an intense competition for access to fashion capitalist consumption. As 
Negri notes, classical categories of third world and first world can no longer define 
geographically. The Third World is hidden in the Roma camps, in neighborhoods, wherever 
there is high unemployment, access to health care and education is not guaranteed, and 
therefore, both in the developed countries, that 'beyond the oceans. Meanwhile, the First 
World settled in the outskirts of Abuja and Jakarta. These middle-class bureaucrats, 
employees of transnational corporations, educated, enjoy a lifestyle totally foreign to 
their culture of origin and not only adopt a mode of consumption, but also a way of 
thinking where solidarity is absent.

Moreover, this movement is accompanied by the growing impregnation of American Protestant 
churches that preach a moral individual success and measure spirituality in terms of 
material benefits they receive from their followers. So there is a parallel movement of 
cultural impregnation, consumption and colonization of minds. It is obvious that social 
structures destroyed movement is accompanied by an increased influence on the environment. 
All capitals megacities of countries accessing the status of "middle income countries" are 
affected by pollution from traffic. It is not only the result of the massive purchase of 
cars by the middle classes, but especially by the removal of street vendors that haunt the 
town centers during the day and have to go far to return to their slums and use it for 
collective transport or not, highly polluting and dangerous. For example, the movement 
insecure populations towards ever more distant suburbs has increased the share of urban 
influence on surrounding agricultural land (this is the case in Abuja seen first hand), 
but also generated new profession as motorcycle taxi (Okada in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, 
Indonesia ojek ...). In Haiti, the massive arrival of these vehicles to poor commuters was 
accompanied by a tremendous increase in injuries of the lower extremities. These 
populations are rarely impacted positively by the projects of development aid: occupied to 
survive, they do not have access to information.

The Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness to development

Without going into a detailed analysis of the principles that prevail in the allocation of 
aid and everything is organized around an alignment of economic management procedures with 
those prevailing in the OECD countries. The assistance will be more easily attributed when 
local economic systems will be "compatible" with the control of large international 
institutions. Adopt compatible development strategies, allocation systems operating 
according to "best practices" and practice transparency are criteria. The aid 
conditionality appears only hollow, almost like a contradiction of manifest discourse. 
There is no place in the system of multilateral international technical assistance for the 
independence of view, the choice of a non "neo - liberal" system or just an experiment 
outside the dominant conceptual framework.

The technical assistance designed as tool of influence

Technical assistance is designed as a tool of political influence, and every funder 
selects the areas on which he wants to sit this influence. Anecdotally, it is sometimes 
comical, in meetings called donor coordination, to see local players compete to see who 
will support a particular aid sector, to see a project manager itself , wanting to spend 
more for a particular activity ... at all levels, spend more for his implementation 
agency, and especially for his donor is seen. And it is in favor of its donor, it comes to 
spending. Because the aid paid to developing countries has priority to countries who give. 
Indirectly, the return on investment is in the form of transfer of knowledge, thinking, 
and investment, alongside the purely political aspects. When a country asks for help to 
reform its public administration, the agreement of the donor, and the appointment of the 
firm responsible for carrying out the assistance give an idea of the model that will be 
selected. Felted battle fought behind the scenes is also significant power relations of 
the moment: a model supported by an economically shaped country will be easy to "sell" 
abroad, and this will strengthen the influence and therefore the "symbolic value "of the 
model.

The return on investment is immediate

Those millions who are apparently dumped in developing countries, for the most part, never 
leave our shores: apart from budget support, mainly for the benefit of ACP (African, 
Caribbean and Pacific), budgets assistance projects technique are paid to consulting 
firms, specialized in conducting these projects, and that reward "experts" (that is the 
correct term) that lead the activities in the project action plans. Thus, a wealthy 
project with a budget of 1 million euro (depending on the country, it is to be a small 
project, an average project) will actually spend in the country in question that the 
living allowances experts and the salaries of local staff. The value of the project, 
although expressed in currency does not result in a direct injection of funds in the 
recipient country. Which is injected, it is the "intangible value" in the form of advice, 
training, reports ... The only time the audience is reflected in a direct injection, it is 
that of infrastructure projects. When a bridge is built, it actually remains a concrete 
result. That it has the value indicated by the project budget, or has value for the 
population as a tool of change and life improvement is another story.

One of the concerns of the international aid is the low rate of aid effectiveness: Despite 
the Paris Declaration and the intentions that drive it, everyone knows that the aid would 
ultimately brings little change in the lives of people. This marginal change, which is, as 
we have seen, that capitalist standards for operating purposes requires that the 
expression of the hypocrisy of the technical assistance, formerly known cooperation, which 
does Cooperation has the name.

On entering the production process - capitalist consumption, all countries of what was the 
Third World renounce their independence, their political, cultural specificity and to 
follow an independent path to a harmonious development of the companies included in their 
environment. This model, that of the State - Nation plated on tribal social structures, or 
clan, became a caricature of Western democracies. By observing the open corruption of the 
system, one can see the flaws in the system that persists in the West, hidden defects by 
accomplices media. What is to be seen, it is only realistic image and not obscured the 
capitalist system, in all its brutality.

Competition territories

Upgrading territories through administrative reform, the formation of a civil society made 
docile by ideological conformation and by direct or indirect subsidies, through economic 
investment and the capitalist and neoliberal steamroller This upgrade has no other purpose 
than to prepare a flawless operation. In the same way that territories in France are their 
marketing to attract investors, each country appropriates its "comparative advantages" as 
so many products boast and sell in order to attract investors and tourists to itself. 
Thus, the nature becomes a resort for rich ores become so many opportunities to create 
large infrastructure to facilitate operation, the education level becomes the signifier of 
a population subject to the dictates of capitalist production ... So every country is 
preparing its future, which will be an open pit mine, which will be a plant, to be a 
brothel ... Whatever the chosen destination, operation will be smooth, thanks to the great 
equalizer that lurks in technical development assistance.

P.

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