e-Con e-News

blog: eesrilanka.wordpress.com

‘Before you study the economics, study the economists!’

e-Con e-News 22-28 December 2024

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In 1770, William Pitt the Elder (then Earl of Chatham), ‘made uneasy

by the first manufacturing attempts of the New Englanders, declared that

the colonies should not be permitted to manufacture so much as a horseshoe nail’

– Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder

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‘Intelligence agencies have been pushing universities:

The Swiss Federal Intelligence Agency’s Technopole Program

wants universities to implement knowledge security’

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‘The securitization trend coincides with the decreasing share of the US,

the EU, & OECD countries in global research & innovation,

& a rising weight of the global South, with China leading the way.’

(see ee Focus)

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The US demand to block certain university subjects to Asian & African students, is being meekly followed by Europe, led by England, rear and tail wagging, despite loud proclamations about ‘free trade’ & ‘free enquiry’ and ‘geopolitical neutrality.’ Luckily for them, while Sri Lanka is not on the lengthening list of countries sanctioned, we can assume that few Sri Lankan students even aim to take on such ‘sensitive’ modern industrial subjects, let alone enable such ‘undesirable knowledge transfer’. The starker truth is that the imperialists have always wished to prevent any type of modern industrialization in our countries:

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‘Yet everything can be military in an engineering school:

…Cybersecurity, robotics, drones , chemistry –

chemical weapons, applied math, artificial intelligence…

Almost all lessons can have dual applications.’

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Citing ‘research security’ concerns, universities are vetting engineering & science students from certain countries, as demanded by the US & European Union governments. Universities have to provide ‘a detailed outline’ of its rules for foreign students applying for masters and doctoral degrees in applied research areas, as well as for invitations to ‘scientific guests’ and new staff appointments. They are also designating certain universities in Asia, blocking their graduates from further study abroad. Many of these now-verboten technologies were in fact developed by the sweat and tears and blood of Asians and Africans.

Meanwhile all the US government NGOs, their thinktanks and economists sing the praises of mythical ‘free trade’ while vehemently opposing industrialization. The US online business journal and ‘lip service’ EconomyNext in Sri Lanka, mostly fabricated by AI algorithms and full of errors, has taken to claiming that ‘Karl Marx, Engels would have approved Sri Lanka Rice Imports for Working Class’ (see ee Random Notes). This is of course just not as simple as that, let alone true. Firstly, Sri Lanka is dominated not by the state-protected mafias but by multinational monopolies like England’s Unilever and the USA’s Proctor & Gamble, and Ceylon Tobacco Co. and US Exxon, etc. Secondly, Marx & Engels show how the early English ‘free-traders’ & ‘protectionists’ worked in tandem to promote slavery, Black & white; sell bread with fecal matter (they called it ‘sophistication’!), employ children under 10, and prevent any reduction in work hours, and to oppose trade unions. Two years after the so-called ‘Victory of Free Trade’ in England, the English state then perpetrated their genocide on the lands of the Sinhala in 1848 … So much for laissez-faire (see ee Focus).

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Welcome to the 350^th (almost weekly edition) of e-Con e-News, which we began in dedication to the work of SBD de Silva, as expressed in his classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, published in England in 1982. Ironically, in that very same year – rather coincidentally and we dare say, in astrological congruence – the English also published another The Political Economy of Underdevelopment by India’s Amiya Kumar Bagchi. Eleven years earlier, Hungary’s Akademiai Kiado had published Thomas Szentes’ The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, in 1971. It turns out, scholars from the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe and Central Asia had developed their own analysis of neo-colonial mechanisms in the world economy, and the role of internal class structure in the Global South.

Soviet political economist Sergei Tyulpanov, for instance, argued that the state had to isolate those domestic forces hindering industrialization (feudal landlords and merchant capital – mafias, anyone?) and create a strong public sector while encouraging the progressive potential of the national bourgeoisie in a private sector. Within this strategy of non-capitalist development, it was crucial that national-democratic parties take charge and not relinquish political power to the bourgeoisie. It turns out that SBD De Silva’s thesis and criticism of ‘dependency theory’ was also the position of many Soviet scholars: the ruling merchant and moneylender class in Sri Lanka is thrilled be the house-slave for the English industrial bourgeoisie, as their commercial puppy dog. So what, pray, is la difference between these 3 books of the same name? ee shall have to explore this matter at another time.

     We may say of such authors, as SBD de Silva noted in the introduction to his inquiry into Sri Lanka’s discontents:

‘This book is not the product of alienated labour.

There was throughout a psychological dimension, involving

a voluntariness and spontaneity of effort – unrelated to

considerations of professional survival or advancement’

So then, let’s examine the contribution of Bengal’s Amiya Kumar Bagchi, who passed last week (see ee Focus).

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Contents:

US & European Universities Block Asian & African Students from Advanced Technology