Neal Young ECO 316 10/20/2014  

The Four Horsemen of Globalization 

Globalization, and the inability of countries to fend it off, has brought incredible

wealth to a few and unimaginable poverty to hundreds of millions. A handful of people

have paid for their opulent “off-worlds” with profits gained from having others live in shit.

One in seven people around the world now live in slums. These include renters in

dilapidated buildings, squatters in tin-roofed shacks, “floaters” sleeping on roof tops, and

“caged-men” with barely enough room to lay down. These people have population densities

of hundreds of thousands per square kilometer, defecate in the open, and often starve to

death. Their children, like them, will likely not have access to education, healthcare,

employment or any government benefits. This while corporations make ever higher profits.

Slums expanded as rural communities emptied out into the city centers (and then

the periphery) after extreme “market” forces drove them to do so. A primary culprit for this

is one of the four horsemen of globalization: mechanized agriculture. Capital intensive

farming by western-subsidized corporations reduced the need for labor while lowering

prices to a point where local farmers could not make a profit. These groups became

economic refugees after they were forced off their property and had to seek shelter of any

kind within the cities. Like other aspects of globalization, the benefits of mechanized

agriculture never came to fruition. The loss of subsistence farming, cuts in food subsidies,

lower incomes, and export of much of the food to foreign markets have left these people

hungrier than before.

Newly created economic refugees arrived to find the destruction wrought by the

second horsemen of globalization: premature capital market liberalization. Instead of

protecting infant industry through tariffs and other protections, local producers were

forced to compete with fully developed multi-national corporations. Instead of reinvesting

in the local economy and creating jobs, these corporations exported their natural resources

to high paying customers while personally pocketing much of the profits. This left millions

of workers competing for a handful of poorly paid positions.

People can work, or they can starve. The formal economy cannot provide for the

needs of the poor so many have turned to the informal economy. All work, however, is not

created equal. This shadow economy is rife with abuse, discrimination, and dangerous

working conditions. The meager wages workers receive do not provide them with

economic stability or help them rise above their current state. While not ideal, I would

argue that it is the ‘worst option except for all the rest.’ Increased competitiveness,

fragmentation of existing work, and domination by a few thugs is far from ideal, but it is the

best option they have.

Privatization and Austerity, the last of the four, road in alongside the others to

ensure that little of the profit generated could be used to enrich the poor. National

companies provide subsidized goods, jobs, and revenue for state projects while safety nets

and public spending gave citizens a certain standard of living. Without these, corporate-led

export markets sucked out profits while states were given the greenlight to make debt

payments but not to provide residents with education, healthcare, public housing,

infrastructure, etc.

While millionaires pop up around the world, 30,000 people die every day because of

causes related to sanitation. The picture of poverty becomes real when you look at the

ecology of these slums. In Dharpa (India’s gigantic “garbage dump slum”) toxic industries

converge on a place that lacks even a basic sewage system. These industries are not built in

the city because only the poor are seen fit to suffer from high infant mortality rates and a

life that entails shitting outside, digging through trash laden with aborted fetuses and

watching your children grow up deformed from malnutrition. The high walls of the

“off-worlds” block out the site of this, but their infatuation with the service of the poor

leaves them vulnerable to disease. AIDS, for instance, can be caught by a “patriot of wealth”

as he forces himself upon a young, impoverished servant girl.

Those that don’t live in places like Dharpa end up facing other hazards. Beyond the

dangers and instability associated with living in a pirate subdivision, there is also the very

real danger and instability posed by the environment. Squatters usually find themselves in

land that is not desirable for any number of reasons. These reasons include being located in

areas prone to flooding, landslides, and erosion. If one is fortunate enough to avoid the

natural disasters along with everything else, they are still at risk of being burned alive by

those wishing to clears slums through arson.

With all of this said, one may rightly wonder why a state would unleash

globalization upon itself. The answer is that most of the time the terms of globalization are

imposed as conditionalities in exchange for sorely needed international loans from the

Bretton Woods Institutions. The IMF’s structural adjustment programs (SAPs) promise

massive economic growth through liberalization, “modernization”, and infrastructure

projects. These promises, unfortunately, are little more than the bait used to lure

developing countries (e.g. Bolivia, Panama, Ivory Coast) into enriching their western

creditors (e.g. United States, United Kingdom, Germany). Once on the hook, countries are

essentially owned by the IMF and its members.

Many have pointed to India and China as examples of success stories and, ironically,

they are two countries that have not been “helped” by the IMF. Even so, they have similar

stories of slum development. GDP for both countries has grown incredibly, millionaires

(and billionaires) have been created, and shining skyscrapers in major cities now pierce the

sky. Shining cities such as Bangalore and Shanghai, however, are but “islands of cyber

modernity” in a sea of abject poverty. There are still some 100 million “floaters” in China,

700 million people in India don’t have access to toilets, and resources generated for

poverty alleviation are as likely to be siphoned off as they are to be put to use. If ‘a rising

tide’ was really raising everyone's income there would be much less to complain about, but

the fact is that poverty has increased alongside inequality.

We, the inhabitants of “off-worlds” and the West, are already being touched by the

hell we’ve imposed. With increasing speed American wages are being eviscerated as

globalization, offshoring and work permits force us into competition with massive “reserve

armies.” We are similarly undergoing de-industrialization, we just have farther to fall. Our

debt will allow us to state afloat for a time, but soon the bottom will fall out and we will find

ourselves leveled with our competition overseas.

Our future, needless to say, is rather bleak. As resources are depleted, we will all

find ourselves scavenging for what we can in the garbage of past excesses. Our children will

die in droves, our rights will be taken away and we will be forced to live in shit. If things do

not change, in a short amount of time we will add our own chapter to Planet of Slums. Our

only hope is to cut back on our consumption, advocate for the Asian Model and assert our

own rights in this country. It will be a long, hard fight but complacency will lead to our own

apocalypse.