The volume's opening list of 33 unfamiliar acronyms (IDA, NIC, SAL, SAP, etc.) discourages further reading, but this small densely written exploration of structural adjustment and its toll (complete with a fine index and glossary) merits perseverance: It is as informative and challenging as tomes three times its length.
Author and activist Walden Bello (Executive Director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy in Oakland, CA) sets out "to confirm analytically and empirically the widely shared sense that the collapse of the South and the greater insecurity in the working and living conditions of most people in the North were consequences of the same thing - a sweeping strategy of global economic rollback unleashed by Northern political and economic elites to consolidate corporate hegemony in the home economy and shore up the North's domination of the international economy."
Bello is quick to disavow any overt conspiracy. His tightly-reasoned and fact-filled material relies for explanation instead on a "much more complex social process in which ideology mediates between interests and policy." Accordingly, chapters tackle such matters as "Liberalism and Containment," "Reaganism and Rollback," Resubordinating the NICs," and "Adjusting America."
Disavowing pessimism or fatalism, Bello insists progressive forces can still successfully mount an effective movement for an alternative future. He remains hopeful that the "universalizing logic of labor solidarity, community, equity, and ecological sustainability" can overcome "the increasingly destructive combination of corporate expansionism, political counter revolution, and tribal retrogression in the North."
Educators will find Bello's analysis of the war against the poor in Chile, Costa Rica, Ghana, and Mexico compelling and alarming, especially when he links it to the on-going negative "U-turn" in worker well-being in this country. He will perplex, however, with his total neglect of ILO and AFL-CIO overseas efforts, both before and since the Cold War (neither organization makes the index).
This notwithstanding, Bello would probably have us conclude about "the battle for the 21st century," as does writer Susan George in the book's lively forward, that the "vile and the villainous ... are in fact running scared; they have overstretched their reach and are in inexorable decline."
Dark Victory: The United States, Structural Adjustment, and Global Poverty. By Walden Bello with Shea Cunningham and Bill Rau. London, U.K.: Pluto Press (Westview Press), 1994. 143pp. $39.95 (hc)
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