Q&A: ‘‘The Market Is Not a Deity And We Are Not At Its Mercy’’

• Faith Manuel interviews former president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and anti-apartheid cleric Dr. Allan Boesak (cape town)
• Friday, March 20, 2009
• Inter Press Service

In 2004 the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) adopted the Accra Confession, a stringent critique of the neoliberal capitalist world order. The planet and human society are regarded as in a crisis because of neoliberal beliefs that ‘‘unrestrained competition, consumerism and the unlimited economic growth and accumulation of wealth are the best for the whole world.’’

These beliefs further are, according to the Accra Confession, that ‘‘the ownership of private property has no social obligation; and that capital speculation, liberalisation and deregulation of the market, privatisation of public utilities and national resources, unrestricted access for foreign investments and imports, lower taxes and the unrestricted movement of capital will achieve wealth for all.’’

Moreover, neoliberalism is attacked for suggesting that ‘‘social obligations, protection of the poor and the weak, trade unions and relationships between people are subordinate to the processes of economic growth and capital accumulation.’’

The Accra Confession criticised neoliberal globalisation for ‘‘claim(ing) to be without alternative, demanding an endless flow of sacrifices from the poor and creation. It makes the false promise that it can save the world through the creation of wealth and prosperity, claiming sovereignty over life and demanding total allegiance, which amounts to idolatry.’’

After the confession was adopted in Accra, the capital of the West African country Ghana, tensions emerged among churches about the confession.

As a way of developing a mutual understanding on these issues, South Africa’s Uniting Reformed Church and Germany’s Evangelical Reformed Church are working together on what has become known as ‘‘the globalisation project’’.

The three-year-project is aimed at seeing how best to popularise understanding of neoliberal globalisation through churches, congregations, church ministers and civil society organisations so that ordinary people can begin to talk about and take responsibility for these issues.

The Accra Confession followed a model adopted by South African black reformed churches. In 1982, they adopted the Belhar Confession which condemned apartheid. At the time, cleric and founder of the anti-apartheid United Democratic Front Dr. Allan Boesak led the process.

The globalisation project is headed by Boesak and his German counterpart Johann Weusmann, the deputy president of the Evangelical Reformed Church. They recently held their second joint meeting where academics and civil society representatives presented papers, along with theologians.

Faith Manuel spoke to Boesak, who heads the project in his capacity as professor extraordinaire at the Beyers Naudé Centre for Public Theology of the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa.

IPS: Is the global economic crisis an affirmation of what the churches warned against back in 2004?

Allan Boesak: The WARC foresaw some of these things in 2004 and warned against it. We spoke about idolatry - this thing of acting as if the market is God; that the market ‘‘dictates’’; or how the market will ‘‘respond’’, as if the market is some deity and as if we are all at its mercy.

So now we will show that this deity has feet of clay. The effects of the crash of the financial markets in Europe are now clear for everyone to see.

The financial crisis is the direct result of the unfettered desire of global capitalism not to be regulated; the so-called free market, that basic thing that says the market dictates everything. People and their needs don’t count. The market will respond.

The market will do this and the market will do that - this is what the church in 2004 called idolatry. There has almost been enslavement to the demands of capitalism over the last few years.

IPS: Let us talk about the build up to the globalisation project and the ideas behind it?

AB: The WARC remains sensitive to issues of justice and injustice and issues of our responsibility in the world on different levels and different matters. So we began to think of this phenomenon called globalisation driven by global capital.

What do we say about war and peace and the role of the churches - the so-called war on terror? What happens if everybody buys into militarisation? Well, for a country in the third world, it is quite simple. Every single dollar spent on guns means we cannot spend it on health, education, job creation, putting food on the table.

The effects of these things over the last few years have been horrific. There is no other way to describe it. The churches raised their voices to say there are only a few people in the world benefiting from globalisation; a few rich countries in the North.

In under-developed countries you have an elite class that’s benefiting but the masses remain poor and are getting poorer. The gap between rich and poor countries has grown and also the gap between rich and poor within poor countries like South Africa.

IPS: What are the issues that you have touched on in your deliberations thus far? Where are you now?

AB: We discussed issues like this bizarre phenomenon that the European Union as a block of Northern, rich, powerful nations come and hold trade negotiations with South Africa as a single country, one-on-one, and they call that ‘‘bilateral’’.

We have put on the table things like the financial markets that used to rule the world and which have, since we begun this project, collapsed. We have spoken about global militarisation, about the impact of globalisation on gender. So, we are halfway there.

The advocates for globalisation say, ‘‘it is like a tsunami. You cannot stop it. Governments have almost no power’’. The South African government (for instance) has ‘‘no power’’ because transnational corporations only have to threaten that it will remove its investments and close down factories.

We have discovered that it is not true that national governments have no power. It means that our people in a democracy are not disempowered.

The discouraging part is that we are halfway through and discovered all the things that we will not have time to give attention to but which are all crucial. For instance, we will not be able to look at the very important question of what the role of religion is in all of this.

IPS: So what are the alternatives?

AB: The church is beginning to understand that neoliberal capitalism is not what it pretends to be. It is not an unchangeable turn of history that nobody can do anything about.

We are beginning to see that, if it is true that we can reclaim our democratic space in our own countries where we live and work, that means we can help our people to understand how to begin to challenge the situation - whether it is through protest, whether it is through education, whether through critical reading of the media, whether it is by coming together as churches.

IPS: Where to from here for the project?

AB: If I have my way and the project has its way, our final report will not just be delivered to our two churches but it will go to the WARC and all its member churches next year.

We also asked (Emeritus) Archbishop Desmond Tutu and he has said, yes, it is a good idea if we hand it over to The Elders, of which he is the chairperson and then, through The Elders, we are hoping to take it to the United Nations. (The Elders is a group of world leaders formed by, among others, Tutu and Nelson Mandela, to provide guidance on global problems.)

So we can take it up to a world stage and say this is how these churches responded to challenges of our responsibility as citizens of the world to what is happening in and to our world and to our people in the world.

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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