Cardoso offers hints on reform

By Emmanuel Subangun

JAKARTA (JP): The visit of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, president of Brazil, to Indonesia this week reminds me about a term in the language of development science.

It is a term that interestingly makes it possible for us to say goodbye to our program of reform.

The political reform movement only began in Indonesia two years ago and yet the smell of its demise is very strong these days. Meanwhile, the world is embarking on the 21st century.

The term coined by Cardoso in the 1980s, known as "associated dependent capitalism", was not entirely new thinking in Latin America then but he was the one who managed to mold and give it the specific meaning that it retains to this day.

It means that development in former colonized countries could succeed as long as their industries are managed by the national bourgeoisie with foreign assistance. These former colonies will one day become on a par with its former colonizers.

This thinking actually stems from a critique on another critique held by other Latin American experts who believe that the great stride of global capitalism following World War II only resulted in the "development of underdevelopment".

There is no free lunch in the world. So, the only alternative is the non-capitalist way. It means that the issue is not merely economics in nature but is a political choice in all its totality.

Lurking behind this theory is the "comparative advantage" concept in international trade, popular in the 1940s. If Brazil is rich in coffee, let it develop its coffee industry. If Indonesia is rich in rubber, let it export as much as possible and start a rubber industry from the money it gets from the export of the raw material.

Some experts, however, think that poor countries will remain poor as agricultural commodities will never be able to compete with the price of imported goods bought from industrial countries.

Indonesia experienced this during the difficult years of the 1950s when the price of rubber was constantly declining.

Cardoso, on the other hand, believes that poor countries can still build their industries with foreign cooperation and aid in the form of both cash and technology.

What appears to be possible on paper turns sour however in reality. In the course of its action, Brazil, which attempted to implement this concept found itself in a state where human dignity was disturbed.

In 1964 the military took over power and soon repressed the working class in the name of development while encroaching deep into the nation's economic institutions and laid bare opportunities for rampant corruption in the bureaucracy.

Why the failure? Because the linkage between former colonized countries and their colonizers is more than mere economics. It also encompasses other interests from the dominant classes in both countries.

A coalition of bloodsucker classes in both former colonized countries and its former colonialist countries ensued. In the end whatever power relations there are between the two nations, as well as between societal classes in the former colonial country, is centered on those who have a say on economic growth: multinational corporations in the former colonial country and government officials and cronies in the former colony.

It means that politics turns into a tyranny in the former colony simply because the captains of industry are cronies.

In a book he wrote in 1980, Cardoso called on former colonized countries to do a hard rethinking on the issue of autonomy in order to overcome the above problem.

He reminded us that we were facing structural and global issues which deftly intertwined patterns of dependency and exploitation between societal classes and political repression.

With regard to political reform in Indonesia, in Cardoso's eyes, it seems that it is increasingly being implemented without any regard to the above mentioned "structural and global" framework.

The recapitalization program in the hands of the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency and the International Monetary Fund has come to a halt. In politics, political party leaders are rapidly replacing the privileges of the bureaucrats in the days of Soeharto.

For a head of state and an intellectual who wrote a dissertation on "Capitalism and Slavery" while he was only 31 in 1962, development can not be treated merely as an economic issue. It has and will always be a multi-dimensional issue in which distribution of power plays a crucial role.

Now that the formal government is in the hands of Abdurrahman 'Gus Dur' Wahid while real and substantial power is still in the hands of the New Order, borrowing Cardoso's line of thinking, the reform movement is making its final gasps for breath.

In the name of democracy, the momentum of reformation is lost (a structural issue) and economic control has rebounded into the hands of donors such as the World Bank and the IMF (a global issue). In the end, New Order political forces will return while the economy will gradually shift into the hands of foreign capitalists. The public will remain in their deep plight without an end in sight.

Cardoso, a socialist born in 1931 in Rio de Janeiro and who was the president of the International Association of Sociology as well as a Senator of the state of Sao Paolo will be a timely state guest of Gus Dur's.

Like Celso Furtado, who gave regular seminars at the Social Sciences Institute in Paris in the 1980s, he is a unique type of "engaged intellectual".

And our respected guest can tell Gus Dur how easy "democracy" turns to "democrazy". And how much waste, in terms of time, thought and good-will, we have tossed away for the sake of this nation.

Enough is enough for the hands of political speculators and political hoodlums who are busy muddying the already muddied water.

The writer is a sociologist based in Jakarta.