检验国家秩序，不是多少百万富翁，而是群众是否饥饿

检验一个国家秩序的标准，不是看它拥有多少百万富翁，而是看它的群众是否有饥饿的情况

The Test of a Country Is Not the Number of Millionaires It Owns, but the Absence of Starvation Among Its Masses: The Forty-Fourth Newsletter (2019).

https://thetriContinental.org/newsletterissue/the-test-of-a-country-is-not-the-number-of-millionaires-it-owns-but-the-absence-of-starvation-among-its- 大众四十四通讯-2019/

巴格达， 2019 年 10 月 31 日

亲爱的朋友们，

来自三大洲社会研究所办公桌的问候。

年轻女子走在高速公路上。 她举着伊拉克国旗。 她希望生活在一个她的愿望能够得到满足的国家，而不是被伊拉克悲惨历史的废墟所窒息。 枪声很熟悉； 它已经返回城市，子弹飞向抗议者。 文化民兵组织成员、诗人 Kadhem Khanjar 在 Facebook 上捕捉了正在发生的事情的本质：

我们就是这样死去的。

简单的人杀死简单的人。

在希望的边缘，有弗朗茨·法农所说的“国家赖以生存的古老花岗岩块”发出的枪声。 在抗议的那一刻，当枪声响起时，一切都清晰了。 人们不应该对精英的性格感到天真，他们的微笑掩盖了通过咬紧牙关向追随者发出的指示，他们的“简单人”准备杀死“简单人民”。 在最好的情况下，“花岗岩块”耸耸肩，洗牌内阁，提供适度的改革； 最糟糕的是，士兵们——他们捂着脸，不让眼泪流出来——向家人开枪。

在遥远的伦敦、巴黎、法兰克福和华盛顿特区，精英们闻着，擦掉肩上的头皮屑。 他们在谈到圣地亚哥和巴格达的精英时说，“我们不像他们”，尽管每个人都知道他们是相同的，因为他们不久前才派出机器警察来羞辱黄背心和占领华尔街。

几十年前，智利裔阿根廷作家阿里尔·多尔夫曼 (Ariel Dorfman) 坐在巴黎地铁里阅读海因里希·伯尔 (Heinrich Böll) 的《小丑》(The Clown，1963)。 “这一定是一个悲伤的职业，”坐在多夫曼对面的一名男子说道，他指的是小丑。 多夫曼和那个男人都意识到对方很伤心。 该男子说他来自巴西。 他们因共同的困境而互相拥抱——他们的国家处于独裁之下。 “我很伤心，”该男子说道，“因为我希望我们获胜，但在我心里，我认为我们不会赢。”

这个人谈到了现实的坚硬外壳，即精英们根深蒂固地固守在花岗岩块中，不愿让人类粉碎它并释放出人类道德的最佳品质。 尽管两人都想赢，但两人都明白这一点。 正是对胜利的渴望驱使超过一百万人走上圣地亚哥（智利）的街头，正是这数百万人唱起了维克多·哈拉（Victor Jara）的歌曲El derecho de vivir en paz（“和平生活的权利”）， 1971 年，贾拉为胡志明和越南人演唱了这首歌。两年后，智利独裁政权逮捕并残酷杀害了贾拉。

El derecho de vivir en paz，2019 年 10 月。

本月，成千上万的人在圣地亚哥的街道上唱着《哈拉》，旋律既悲伤又挑衅，表明了哈拉的平反。

1916 年 12 月 22 日，M. K. 甘地在阿拉哈巴德（印度）的缪尔中央学院经济学会发表演讲。 在这里，甘地提出了一个衡量文明的简单标准——他说，“衡量一个国家秩序的标准不是该国拥有百万富翁的数量，而是该国群众是否有饥饿现象”。

一百年后，这句话仍然令人震惊，只有一个修正——不是百万富翁，而是亿万富翁。 主要银行瑞士信贷发布了全球财富年度报告。 本月发布的最新报告计算出，仅世界最富有的1%人口就拥有全球总财富的45%，而最富有的10%人口则拥有全球总财富的82%； 下半部分财富持有者——即人类的 50%——所拥有的财富不到全球总财富的 1%。 这个小百分比（1%）构成了花岗岩块的核心。 超过一半的最富有的人居住在北美和欧洲； 拥有超过 5000 万美元的超级富豪、超高净值人士中，恰好有一半居住在北美。 Wealth-X 的 2019 年亿万富翁普查显示，美国有 705 名亿万富翁，远远超过人口普查中接下来的 8 个国家的亿万富翁人数总和。

智利是经济合作与发展组织（OECD）国家中不平等率最高的国家。 它的亿万富翁将钱分散到所有主要政党的口袋里，产生了这样一种观点：民主就是从主要资本主义集团筹集资金，而不是将人民的愿望转化为政策。 Angelinis、Paulmanns、Cuetos、Solaris 和 Luksics 可能支持不同的政治派别，但最终——无论谁获胜——这些亿万富翁及其企业集团才是决定未来发展的人。

政策并从中受益。 这就是为什么超过一百万人走上街头演唱维克多·哈拉 (Victor Jara) 的原因。 他们想要和平生活的权利，掌控自己生活的权利。

甘地的标准不仅涉及超级富豪的数量，还涉及那些每天与饥饿作斗争的人。 几个月前，世界卫生组织发布了一份关于饥饿问题的报告，报告显示，至少有8.21亿人晚上饿着肚子上床睡觉。 这是一个可怕的数字。 但这还不够。 联合国机构的研究发现，估计有 20 亿人（四分之一的人）处于中度至严重的粮食不安全状态，这意味着他们“无法定期获得安全、营养和充足的食物”。

所以，我们到了。 根据甘地的简单公式，世界没有通过考验。

智利被阿根廷和玻利维亚包围。 在阿根廷，总统选举将马克里驱逐出境，他因重返国际货币基金组织而受伤。 玻利维亚的埃沃·莫拉莱斯第四次连任。 尽管他们面前的“政策空间”仍然有限，但他们的胜利意义重大。 埃沃一直在努力扩大这一空间，尽最大努力推动玻利维亚走向进步。 智利的增长率为 1.7%，而玻利维亚的增长率为 4.2%。 但这些数字还不够。 帝国主义的压力限制了左倾政府将人民的愿望纳入治理逻辑的能力。

联合国贸易和发展会议 (UNCTAD) 最近发布的贸易和发展报告回顾了贸发会议自 1964 年成立以来一直在说的话：全球南方国家需要巨大的政策空间“以追求其国家优先事项”。 “政策空间”的概念最初由贸发会议于 2002 年提出，随后在贸发十一大 2004 年《圣保罗共识》中获得正式地位。 该术语汇集了三个相互关联的原则：

国家主权平等原则（《联合国宪章》第 2.1 条）。

发展权原则（《发展权宣言》，联合国大会第 41/128 号决议，1986 年）。

给予发展中国家特殊待遇的原则，特别是提供特殊和差别待遇（《发展权利宣言》，联合国大会第41/128号决议，1986年，第4.2条）。

确实，即使“政策空间”缩小，政府仍保留一些重要工具。 然而，这些工具常常因国际货币基金组织和世界银行等跨国组织设定的“优先事项”、贸易协定、七国集团的压力以及长期迷失方向的主流经济学专业而受到削弱。 如果左倾政府一意孤行，他们就会受到制裁威胁的进一步削弱。 但“政策空间”还不是一个充分的问题； 更大的问题是缺乏资金。

阿根廷和玻利维亚等政府左倾的国家根本没有能力为本国人民通过选举确定的优先事项筹集资金。 选民可能会对紧缩政策说不，但正如希腊人所发现的那样，他们的声音比银行业和帝国主义国家的力量要小。 对于希腊人来说，这是三驾马车（国际货币基金组织、欧洲央行和欧盟）。 贸发会议的最新报告指出了通过创建国有公共开发银行（PDB）进行融资的重要性。 Jomo Kwame Sundaram 和 Anis Chowdhury 根据该报告提出了 PDB 的机制：

为公共银行提供更多资本以扩大贷款规模，包括通过直接融资。
通过明确的政府授权、绩效指标和问责机制来支持开发银行业务，并重视财务标准之外的其他标准。

防止 PDB 服从短期商业标准。

鼓励资产估计为7.9万亿美元的主权财富基金引导资源支持PDB。

确保银行监管机构正确理解公共银行（尤其是PDB）的独特使命。

近几十年来，各国央行通常通过“通胀目标制”，摆脱对价格稳定的狭隘关注，从而发挥更大胆、更积极的发展作用。

大众经济工人联合会（CTEP）和大祖国阵线的胡安·格拉布瓦（Juan Grabois）向《人民快报》讲述了阿根廷新政府面临的挑战。

巴格达路上的年轻女子、圣地亚哥高唱维克多·哈拉的人们、阿根廷和玻利维亚的选民、雅典街头的资深抗议者——他们希望政府制定符合他们愿望的政策。 他们希望这些政策能够减少饥饿人口和亿万富翁。 他们想赢。 他们不想像多夫曼和他的巴西朋友一样——悲伤是因为他们想赢，但又担心赢不了。

每隔几

几年来，地球上的人们站起来并宣布全球起义已经开始。 几个月后，他们的希望破灭了，而公式仍然是一样的——更多的亿万富翁，更多的饥饿人口。 但是，总有一天，阳光会普照，历史的天使会与之微笑； 阳光将融化古老的花岗岩块，我们将拥有和平生活的权利。

维杰

The test of orderliness in a country, is not the number of millionaires it owns, but the absence of starvation amongst its masses

https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/the-test-of-a-country-is-not-the-number-of-millionaires-it-owns-but-the-absence-of-starvation-among-its-masses-the-forty-fourth-newsletter-2019/

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Baghdad, October 2019.

Dear Friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

The young woman walks down the highway. She carries the Iraqi flag. She wants to live in a country where her aspirations can be met and not suffocated by the detritus of Iraq’s tragic history. The sound of gunfire is familiar; it has returned to the city, with the bullets flying towards the protestors. The poet Kadhem Khanjar, a member of the Culture Militia, takes to Facebook to capture the essence of what is happening:

That’s how we simply die.

Simple people kill simple people.

At the edge of hope lies the gunfire from what Frantz Fanon called ‘the old granite block upon which the nation rests’. At the moment of protest, when the gunfire starts, clarity arrives. One should not be naïve about the character of the elite, whose smiles camouflage the instructions given through clenched teeth to the henchmen, their ‘simple men’ ready to kill the ‘simple people’. At its best, the ‘granite block’ shrugs, shuffles its cabinet, offers modest reforms; at its worst, its soldiers – their faces covered to prevent the tears from showing – fire at their family members.

Far away, in London, Paris, Frankfurt, and Washington, DC, the elites sniff, they brush the dandruff from their shoulders. ‘We are not like them’, they say of the elites in Santiago and Baghdad, although everyone knows that they are identical, for they had not long ago sent out their robocops to humiliate the yellow vests and Occupy Wall Street.

Decades ago, the Chilean-Argentinian writer Ariel Dorfman sat in a metro in Paris reading Heinrich Böll’s The Clown (1963). ‘Must be a sad profession’, said a man sitting across from Dorfman, referring to the clown. Both Dorfman and the man recognised that the other was sad. The man said he was from Brazil. They embraced each other for their common predicament – their countries under dictatorship. ‘I am sad’, said the man, ‘because I want us to win, but in my heart, I don’t think we will’.

The man spoke of the hard crust of reality, the sense that the elites are entrenched in their granite block, unwilling to let humanity shatter it and release the best of human ethics. That is what both men understood, although both wanted to win. It is the desire to win that drove more than a million people into the streets of Santiago (Chile), and it was these millions that sang Victor Jara’s song, El derecho de vivir en paz (‘The Right to Live in Peace’), which Jara sang for Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese in 1971. Two years later, the dictatorship in Chile arrested and brutally killed Jara.

El derecho de vivir en paz, October 2019.

That thousands sang Jara on Santiago’s streets this month, the melody both sad and defiant, suggests the vindication of Jara.

On 22 December 1916, M. K. Gandhi gave a lecture at the Muir Central College Economic Society in Allahabad (India). Here, Gandhi offered a simple measure for civilisation – ‘the test of orderliness in a country’, he said, ‘is not the number of millionaires it owns, but the absence of starvation amongst its masses’.

A hundred years later, the phrase remains electric, with only one emendation – not millionaires, but billionaires. The major bank Credit Suisse releases an annual report on global wealth. The current report, released this month, calculates that the top 1% of the world’s population alone owns 45% of total global wealth, while the richest 10% owns 82% of total global wealth; the bottom half of the wealth holders – 50% of humanity – accounts for less than 1% of total global wealth. This small percentage, the 1%, forms the core of the granite block. More than half of the wealthiest people live in North America and Europe; exactly half of the ultra-wealthy, the Ultra-High Net Worth individuals who have more than $50 million each, live in North America. The Billionaire Census 2019 from Wealth-X shows that the United States has 705 billionaires, far more than the combined number of billionaires in the next eight countries in the Census.

Chile has the highest inequality rate amongst the countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Its billionaires scatter money into the pockets of all the major political parties, generating the view that democracy is about raising money from the major capitalist blocs rather than about raising the aspirations of the people into policy. The Angelinis, Paulmanns, Cuetos, Solaris, and Luksics might support different political fractions, but at the end of the day – whoever wins – these billionaires and their conglomerates are the ones that set the policy and benefit from it. That is why over a million people came onto the streets to sing Victor Jara. They want the right to live in peace, the right to control their lives.

Gandhi’s standard is not only about the number of ultra-rich, but also about those who struggle each day with hunger. A few months ago, the World Health Organisation released a report on hunger which showed that at least 821 million people go to bed at night hungry. This is a ghastly number. But this is not enough. Studies by the UN agencies find that an estimated 2 billion people – one in four people – are moderately to severely food insecure, which means that they ‘do not have regular access to safe, nutritious, and sufficient food’.

So, there we are. According to Gandhi’s simple formula, the world fails its test.

Chile is surrounded by Argentina and Bolivia. In Argentina, the presidential elections ejected Macri, who was wounded by his return to the IMF. Bolivia’s Evo Morales held his seat for a fourth term. Their victories are significant, although the ‘policy space’ before them remains limited. Evo has fought to widen that space, to push as hard as possible to move Bolivia in a progressive direction. While Chile’s growth rate stumbled at 1.7%, Bolivia grew at 4.2%. But these numbers are not enough. The pressure of imperialism narrows the ability of a left-leaning government to admit the desires of the people into the logic of governance.

The recent trade and development report from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) recalls something that UNCTAD has been saying since its formation in 1964: that the countries of the Global South need significant policy space ‘to pursue their national priorities’. The idea of ‘policy space’ was first developed by UNCTAD in 2002, and then it gained official status in the São Paulo Consensus of 2004 at UNCTAD XI. The term brings together three linked principles:

1. The principle of the sovereign equality of States (UN Charter, article 2.1).
2. The principle of the right to development (Declaration on the Right to Development, UN General Assembly Resolution 41/128, 1986).
3. The principle of special treatment for developing countries, notably the provision of special and differential treatment (Declaration on the Right to Development, UN General Assembly Resolution 41/128, 1986, article 4.2).

It is certainly true that even with the narrowed ‘policy space’, several important instruments remain with governments. However, these instruments are often blunted by the ‘priorities’ set by multinational organisations such as the IMF and the World Bank, by trade agreements, by pressure from the G7, and by the mainstream economics profession that has long lost its way. They are further blunted by threats of sanctions if left-leaning governments go their own way. But ‘policy space’ is not a sufficient problem; the greater problem is lack of financing.

Countries like Argentina and Bolivia – with left-leaning governments – simply do not have the ability to raise funds for the priorities set by their own people through elections. The electorate might say no to austerity, but – as the Greeks found – their voice had less power than that of the banking industry and the imperialist states; for the Greeks, this was the troika (the IMF, the European Central Bank, and the European Union). UNCTAD’s latest report points to the importance of financing through the creation of state-owned Public Development Banks (PDB). Drawing from the report, Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Anis Chowdhury lay out the mechanism for the PDBs:

1. Provide public banks with more capital to scale up lending, including through direct financing.
2. Support development banking with clear government mandates, performance indicators, and accountability mechanisms valuing other criteria besides financial ones.
3. Prevent PDBs from being subordinated to short-term commercial criteria.
4. Encourage sovereign wealth funds, with assets estimated to be US$7.9 trillion, to direct resources in support of PDBs.
5. Ensure that bank regulators treat public banks, especially PDBs, with appropriate understanding of their distinctive mandates.
6. Free central banks from their typically narrow focus on price stability, usually by ‘inflation targeting’ in recent decades, to take on bolder, pro-active development roles.

Juan Grabois, Confederation of Workers of the Popular Economy (CTEP) and Frente Patria Grande speaks to People’s Dispatch about the challenges for the new government in Argentina.

The young woman on the road in Baghdad, the people singing Victor Jara in Santiago, the voters in Argentina and Bolivia, the veteran protestors from the streets of Athens – what they want is for their government to produce policies that come from their aspirations. They want these policies to produce less hungry people and less billionaires. They want to win. They don’t want to be like Dorfman and his Brazilian friend – sad because they want to win but fear that they won't.

Every few years, the people of the planet rise up and announce that the Global Intifada has begun. A few months later, their hopes are crushed, and the formula remains the same – more billionaires, more hungry people. But, someday, the sun will shine, and the angel of history will smile with it; the sunbeams will melt the old granite block and we will have the right to live in peace.

Warmly, Vijay.