Seven Billion Experts—Waiting to Be Heard!

Tom Peters rails against the Central Planners in favour of Seven Billion Experts—Waiting to Be Heard! He argues that the Development policies have failed.

Peters also has a link to a set of PowerPoint slides about this. These are worth viewing in order to see Peter's argument elaborated on.

The underlying assumption is that the development aid has failed. While this is true for the developing countries, development aid has worked wonders for the developed world by increasing the rate of exploitation.

One case in point is coffee. For years, the World Bank recommended that developing countries invest in coffee. So much development occurred that the price of coffee collapsed. And the developed countries benefited from cheap coffee.

So instead of growing food to support themselves, these developing countries now have loans to pay off with a cash crop that does not bring in enough cash.

Now these countries go off to the IMF to sort out their loans. And out comes the cookie-cutter of the Structural Adjustment Program in which the subsidies that make life somewhat bearable are removed and the economy is to be opened up for foreign investment which proceeds to gut the local firms. And now, these countries have a seething mass of angry people. So the governments then need weapons to stay in power. More debt! And more sales to developed countries. What a racket!

Anyway enough jumping on Tom Peters.

The theme of his slides is interesting for Communists especially in our United Front work. The important thing is not to control these organisations but to get people involved. For once people see that they can change little things through their own efforts, they might begin to open up to changing larger things in their life. And they can become more confident about analyzing the structure of society.

We Communists need to become accustomed to "Trying and succeeding on the 37th attempt". The churn of Party membership is mainly due to this continual failing as well as the search for the perfect Party Program.

In all, I think we should view the slides at least in order to refocus ourselves.