Gilbert Achcar: Global Inequality and the Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism

⬤ What is your background and how did you become interested in global inequality?

I was born in French-ruled Senegal, which I left at the age of eight in the year it became independent (1960). Both my schooling in a mixed multicoloured environment and the belonging of my parents to an ethnic category – the Lebanese – which was itself an object of racial contempt from citizens of the French colonial power, created in me an early sensitivity to inequality and injustice.

Later on, during my teenage years in Lebanon, this sense took a Christian twist: I became active in the Young Christian Students (Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne, JEC), an international youth movement linked to the Catholic Church. During the 1960s, this movement shifted politically to the left in the context of the global left-wing youth radicalisation that characterised this historical period. My next step, like many of my generation who had been through the JEC, was to become plainly Marxist. That was partly in response to the revulsion against the war waged by the United States in Vietnam, compounded soon after by the shock of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the new round of tragedy incurred by the Palestinian people.

These experiences and ideological evolutions constitute the background of my interest in inequality at all levels, local as well as global and social as well as horizontal. My political interest in global inequality translated into a scholarly interest in development studies and imperialism. In 1974, I started a doctoral thesis on Egypt’s experience in development, which I had to abandon due to the war in my country. I resumed my doctoral studies in Paris in 1990, with a thesis on U.S. imperial strategy written on the backdrop of the first Washington-led war on Iraq in 1991.

When I was offered a chair at SOAS, University of London, in 2007, the purpose of my recruitment was that I set up and convene an MSc programme in Globalisation & Development. This was the final stage in the personal and intellectual trajectory that led me to develop a special interest in global inequality.

⬤ What is global inequality?

There is no singular global inequality, of course: there are many global inequalities. Most people tend to think of global inequality as referring to the inequality between countries and world regions. The initial surge of global interest in this type of inequality occurred in the 1970s. It is in 1974 that the United Nations’ General Assembly adopted its famous resolution calling for a “New International Economic Order based on equity, sovereign equality, interdependence, common interest and cooperation among all States”.[1]

The dominant perception of global inequality is still predominantly about the global fracture between the Global North and the Global South, i.e. between, on the one hand, North America, the European countries including Russia, Japan, and South Korea, with the addition of Australasia, and on the other hand the rest of the world. But this geo-economic perception is inaccurate. For, if the chosen criterion is GDP per capita, Russia would be closer to the poorer category than to the richer, let alone the fact that the rich hydrocarbon monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council belong to the upper tier.[2]

The global inequality that I am most interested in cuts across countries and world regions: it is the social inequality between the world rich and the world poor, both categories belonging to all countries and nations. The attention paid to this specific type of global inequality increased tremendously in the neoliberal age starting from the 1980s. It was highlighted by a powerful symbol: the “champagne glass” image of global economic disparities, first produced by the United Nations Development Programme in its 1992 Human Development Report.[3] Based on economic distribution within countries, the report assessed socioeconomic inequality among the global population taken as a whole, finding a ratio of 140 to 1 of per capita income between the richest quintile of the world population and the poorest quintile. This inequality has immensely worsened since then with the concentration of an ever-increasing share of global income and wealth at the top, in the hands of the 1% world’s richest people as shown by the World Inequality Report 2018 produced by the Paris-based World Inequality Lab.[4]

The places where I have lived and worked as an adult are Beirut, Paris, Berlin, and now London. Lebanon is a country that has itself been characterised by high social inequality, in a part of the world that is deemed to be the most unequal of all. Lebanon provides a window on the global hierarchy: it was theatre to a civil war starting in 1975, which was in part a proxy war between global and regional powers through Lebanese and Palestinian forces. Lebanon was then invaded by its Israeli neighbour in 1982 and the experience of invasion by a foreign state, backed by the USA, is a powerful reminder of the global balance of forces and the global interconnectedness of various types of interests.

My years in Paris were very formative regarding global social inequality. The bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989 was the occasion of a large international mobilisation in Paris to counter the G7 summit held on 14-16 July of that year, near Paris. A massive demonstration ended on the Place de la Bastille, where a huge public concert took place. This was the second major international mobilisation against the globalisation of neoliberalism, which was still in its early phase during those years. The first occurred in Berlin in 1988 in protest against meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. A decade later, the 1999 Seattle mass protests against the conference of the World Trade Organisation led to the birth of what has become known under the name of the Global Justice movement, usually described as anti-globalist by its detractors while key sections of the movement prefer to refer to themselves as alter-globalist, a perspective expressed by the slogan “Another World is Possible”.

A key founder of the World Social Forum (aka the Global Justice Movement) was ATTAC, the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and for Citizens’ Action, founded in Paris in 1998. It was related to the international monthly Le Monde diplomatique, a publication that has been focusing on global inequalities for several decades. I worked with both during my Paris years, and I still write for Le Monde diplomatique. Finally, moving to London concentrated my academic focus on the impact on development of all aspects of globalisation, and therefore on global inequality as explained above.

⬤ What are the main historical causes of global inequality?

The world has never been an egalitarian place, to start with: in the social sense, inequality is as old as human history; in the sense of inequality between large organised communities – what we call states – it starts with the emergence of the first such communities and the fight over territory and resources. On the other hand, the historical civilisational process has seen the development of struggles for equality against systems of rigid formal oppression such as slavery and serfdom. This struggle took religious forms over millennia until the modern era when “equality” became one of the main demands of democratic revolutions – equality in rights and, to a lesser extent, social equality, in addition to equality among nations.

The struggle for social equality progressed sharply in correlation with the industrial revolution and the spread of capitalism, which introduced an unprecedented degree of social differentiation within societies along with massive misery in the initial phase of industrialisation. The severe crises of global capitalism during the first half of the twentieth century gave rise after the Second World War to a competition between two global systems claiming equality in its various meanings as a core part of their value systems. However far this might have been from the reality of both systems, there is no dispute that the three decades that followed 1945 witnessed a massive reduction of the social gap at the global level and within countries.[5]

In this sense, the surge in global inequality that has become such a major topic of attention in recent decades is actually a resurgence of the inequality trend that characterized earlier phases of capitalism. Since the 1980s, we have seen a rapidly widening social gap within countries as well as between countries at the global level. The main historical cause of this resurgence is the neoliberal turn that triumphed globally in the 1980s and 1990s, discarding the Keynesian and developmentalist paradigms that had prevailed in market economies in the aftermath of 1945 as well as the bureaucratic “socialist” systems of Eastern Europe and China. This neoliberal paradigm has been in crisis since the Great Recession starting in 2007-2008, a crisis now considerably aggravated by the ongoing economic catastrophe related to the Covid-19 pandemic.

⬤ What are the most pressing contemporary challenges concerning global inequality and how do we deal with them?

At the time of writing (September 2020), the answer to this question is heavily affected by the consequences of the severe twin global crises of the pandemic and its socioeconomic consequences. Both crises have considerably increased the gap between the world rich and poor as well as between rich and poor countries. The huge numbers of poor and lower-income people in most “developing” and “least developed” countries of the Global South are very much disadvantaged in facing the pandemic compared to the overall situation in most “developed” countries of the geopolitical West in general, and to the global rich, including the rich in their own countries, in particular.

Likewise, the socioeconomic impact of what the IMF has called the Great Lockdown is sharply increasing social inequality at the global level and within countries.[6] Hundreds of millions of people are expected to have permanently lost their pre-pandemic jobs by the end of the first pandemic year, while several hundreds of millions are expected to have gone below the poverty line, with victims of gender and race discrimination being the most affected in both cases. Since the beginning of the pandemic, a few private corporations in sectors such as health, e-commerce, communications, and entertainment have seen their profits go sky-high. These contradictory impacts of the crisis mean that the global rich-poor gap will certainly reach a peak at the onset of the 2020s compared with any previous period since 1945.

It has now become usual to liken the devastating impact of the ongoing pandemic to what the world did endure in the aftermath of the First World War, with the 1918 flu pandemic and the economic crisis that culminated in 1929 with the Great Depression. This huge crisis led to a second, even more devastating, global war. The world managed, however, to overcome that terrible first half of the Twentieth Century with a progressive programme of reconstruction and social reorganisation along with development of the welfare state, a programme funded by a much more equitable taxation of income and wealth than the current one. As a result, the world went through three decades of the fastest development it has ever experienced, along with a sharp reduction in global social inequality.

There will be no harmonious and successful overcoming of the ongoing global crisis without a new shift towards a social and economic paradigm that puts people before profits and is geared towards a massive increase in welfare and a sharp reduction of social and other global inequalities.

References

⬤ What is global inequality?

There is no singular global inequality, of course: there are many global inequalities. Most people tend to think of global inequality as referring to the inequality between countries and world regions. The initial surge of global interest in this type of inequality occurred in the 1970s. It is in 1974 that the United Nations’ General Assembly adopted its famous resolution calling for a “New International Economic Order based on equity, sovereign equality, interdependence, common interest and cooperation among all States”.[1]

The dominant perception of global inequality is still predominantly about the global fracture between the Global North and the Global South, i.e. between, on the one hand, North America, the European countries including Russia, Japan, and South Korea, with the addition of Australasia, and on the other hand the rest of the world. But this geo-economic perception is inaccurate. For, if the chosen criterion is GDP per capita, Russia would be closer to the poorer category than to the richer, let alone the fact that the rich hydrocarbon monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council belong to the upper tier.[2]

The global inequality that I am most interested in cuts across countries and world regions: it is the social inequality between the world rich and the world poor, both categories belonging to all countries and nations. The attention paid to this specific type of global inequality increased tremendously in the neoliberal age starting from the 1980s. It was highlighted by a powerful symbol: the “champagne glass” image of global economic disparities, first produced by the United Nations Development Programme in its 1992 Human Development Report.[3] Based on economic distribution within countries, the report assessed socioeconomic inequality among the global population taken as a whole, finding a ratio of 140 to 1 of per capita income between the richest quintile of the world population and the poorest quintile. This inequality has immensely worsened since then with the concentration of an ever-increasing share of global income and wealth at the top, in the hands of the 1% world’s richest people as shown by the World Inequality Report 2018 produced by the Paris-based World Inequality Lab.[4]

The places where I have lived and worked as an adult are Beirut, Paris, Berlin, and now London. Lebanon is a country that has itself been characterised by high social inequality, in a part of the world that is deemed to be the most unequal of all. Lebanon provides a window on the global hierarchy: it was theatre to a civil war starting in 1975, which was in part a proxy war between global and regional powers through Lebanese and Palestinian forces. Lebanon was then invaded by its Israeli neighbour in 1982 and the experience of invasion by a foreign state, backed by the USA, is a powerful reminder of the global balance of forces and the global interconnectedness of various types of interests.

My years in Paris were very formative regarding global social inequality. The bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989 was the occasion of a large international mobilisation in Paris to counter the G7 summit held on 14-16 July of that year, near Paris. A massive demonstration ended on the Place de la Bastille, where a huge public concert took place. This was the second major international mobilisation against the globalisation of neoliberalism, which was still in its early phase during those years. The first occurred in Berlin in 1988 in protest against meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. A decade later, the 1999 Seattle mass protests against the conference of the World Trade Organisation led to the birth of what has become known under the name of the Global Justice movement, usually described as anti-globalist by its detractors while key sections of the movement prefer to refer to themselves as alter-globalist, a perspective expressed by the slogan “Another World is Possible”.

A key founder of the World Social Forum (aka the Global Justice Movement) was ATTAC, the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and for Citizens’ Action, founded in Paris in 1998. It was related to the international monthly Le Monde diplomatique, a publication that has been focusing on global inequalities for several decades. I worked with both during my Paris years, and I still write for Le Monde diplomatique. Finally, moving to London concentrated my academic focus on the impact on development of all aspects of globalisation, and therefore on global inequality as explained above.

⬤ What are the main historical causes of global inequality?

⬤ What are the most pressing contemporary challenges concerning global inequality and how do we deal with them?

At the time of writing (September 2020), the answer to this question is heavily affected by the consequences of the severe twin global crises of the pandemic and its socioeconomic consequences. Both crises have considerably increased the gap between the world rich and poor as well as between rich and poor countries. The huge numbers of poor and lower-income people in most “developing” and “least developed” countries of the Global South are very much disadvantaged in facing the pandemic compared to the overall situation in most “developed” countries of the geopolitical West in general, and to the global rich, including the rich in their own countries, in particular.

Likewise, the socioeconomic impact of what the IMF has called the Great Lockdown is sharply increasing social inequality at the global level and within countries.[6] Hundreds of millions of people are expected to have permanently lost their pre-pandemic jobs by the end of the first pandemic year, while several hundreds of millions are expected to have gone below the poverty line, with victims of gender and race discrimination being the most affected in both cases. Since the beginning of the pandemic, a few private corporations in sectors such as health, e-commerce, communications, and entertainment have seen their profits go sky-high. These contradictory impacts of the crisis mean that the global rich-poor gap will certainly reach a peak at the onset of the 2020s compared with any previous period since 1945.

It has now become usual to liken the devastating impact of the ongoing pandemic to what the world did endure in the aftermath of the First World War, with the 1918 flu pandemic and the economic crisis that culminated in 1929 with the Great Depression. This huge crisis led to a second, even more devastating, global war. The world managed, however, to overcome that terrible first half of the Twentieth Century with a progressive programme of reconstruction and social reorganisation along with development of the welfare state, a programme funded by a much more equitable taxation of income and wealth than the current one. As a result, the world went through three decades of the fastest development it has ever experienced, along with a sharp reduction in global social inequality.

There will be no harmonious and successful overcoming of the ongoing global crisis without a new shift towards a social and economic paradigm that puts people before profits and is geared towards a massive increase in welfare and a sharp reduction of social and other global inequalities.

To cite this source, kindly cite as follows:

Gilbert Achcar, “Global Inequality and the Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism,” in Key Questions on Global Inequality, edited by Christian Olaf Christiansen, Mélanie Lindbjerg Guichon, Oliver Bugge Hunt & Priyanka Jha, online version September 21st 2020, http://global-inequality.com/interview-series-gilbert-achcar/