Donald Trump Digs Up Stalin’s Command Economy Toning Down Globalization’s Theme Song

 

US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on different countries have plunged the entire world into a restless situation like never before. Besides his abrupt announcements about tariffs, Donald Trump has also issued official statements which have triggered hue and cry among geopolitical experts in Canada and Denmark. Donald Trump is on the verge of baffling the longstanding cooperative ties and partnership between the White House and the European Union (EU) with a number of executive orders which have caused jitters to ruling authorities in Europe, China, Bangladesh and South American countries.

Donald Trump is riding an unchained racing horse which is flouting the basic economic policies of the globalized world we have been living in for more than three decades. The economic framework spearheaded by market economy in the wake of the fall of Soviet Union has come under categorical threat since Donald Trump walked in the Oval Office a few months ago. Market economy is globalization’s theme song. From market economy, the westerners showed the rest part of the globe the pathway leading to market politics and thus turning the whole world into a marketplace where everything goes on sale. However, the cracks and chasms which have meanwhile emerged and have started widening between the United States of America and its allies are emitting signs of a different world order under Donald Trump’s ruling period.

The international economic steps Donald Trump has already taken or declared have in one way or another resurrected the phantom of Joseph Stalin’s “Command Economy” which transformed the then Soviet Union into a superpower with the passage of time. But Joseph Stalin (1878—1953) picked a euphemistic term for “Command Economy”. He promulgated and executed a theory he named “Novaya Politicheskaya Ekonomia” (New Political Economy) which very soon came to be known as the Stalinist version of Command Economy. The concepts and dictums of Command Economy turned out to be so much successful across Soviet Union that Britain started becoming a “Russophile”—an admirer of the achievements secured by Russia.

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925—2013) stated in her election manifesto that she was interested to implement certain takeaways from Joseph Stalin’s version of socialism being impressed by the successful breakthroughs Soviet Union achieved after vanquishing the formidable German Nazi Army in World War II. Margaret Thatcher spoke very high of socialism with out-of-the-way appreciation for Stalin’s ruling term in Soviet Union in some of her speeches during the election campaign in Britain during 1979. Those times were the heyday of Soviet Union when Russian language became the lingua franca all the way from Prague to Hanoi. France and Germany became highly concerned about Margaret Thatcher’s inclination towards Stalin’s statecraft and the socialist definition of economy. Secret meetings between German, French and British politicians took place in third countries in order to restrain Margaret Thatcher from producing another Soviet-like country in West Europe while East Europe was totally Kremlin’s hunting ground.

Margaret Thatcher eventually failed to materialize Stalin’s economic theory in the United Kingdom but erudite students and teachers of international political studies are very much aware of the tensed spell of time politicians in Britain and some other European countries were going through with the specter of Joseph Stalin appearing before them by day, and may be even at night while they were sleeping with troublesome trepidations at the back of their minds.   

Grossly turning against market economy would be an imbalanced way of looking at the world’s socio-political vista. The uninterrupted movement of goods, technologies, ideas and innovations during last few decades were broadly facilitated by market economy and the music it played to entertain the neoliberal pioneers of globalization. During the late 1990s, globalization was not a very popular terminology in the west. We can recall the violence-packed demonstration that took place in Seattle in the United States in 1999 in which thousands of American youths clashed with cops and yelled out heated watchwords against the western leaders’ ploy to convert the world into a huge one-stop-mall where money could buy anything and everything.

The worst victims of market economy have been lagging behind countries located in South Asia, Africa and South America. Market economy came to be called a synonym for “Crony Capitalism” in these countries which have been hammered and ravaged with autocracy, civil wars, corruption, crackdown on mass media, unethical political gambits etcetera. Commoditification, the mainstream tool of market economy, jeopardized the foundations on which ethics and moral values stand. Commoditification stands for judging everything as a commodity, as a business product which can be purchased or sold out just with money. We can see in the current world how ideologies, faith, love, secrecy and loyalty go on sale every now and then under another tricky banner “The  Free World” which, according to capitalistic kingpins, facilitates democracy and human rights. But the more the idea called “The Free World” was being exercised in under developed countries, the more those countries started becoming dens of tyrants, bandits, demagogues and monstrous human rights violators. These things happened for the most part in poor countries which were persuaded to follow the economic and political prescriptions that were handed down from the White House, Pentagon, Brussels, US State Department, Downing Street and aid agencies mobilized by these powerhouses. These aid agencies have been given an amusing pet name—development partners! 

Noted antiestablishment author Arundhati Roy interpreted democracy under the billboard of The Free World in the following words in her book An Ordinary Man’s Guide to Empire “Democracy is the Free World's whore, willing to dress up, dress down, willing to satisfy a whole range of tastes.” What happened in Bangladesh in broad terms since 1991 up to 2024 is a precise embodiment of these words from Arundhati Roy. The Free World also allows fraudsters and oligarchs to transfer billions of dollars illegally from their home countries to Canada, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Malaysia, Singapore, United Arab Emirates etcetera. Some countries over last few years have paid a gruesome price for following the west-propagated capitalistic rulebook like Cyprus, Zimbabwe, Lebanon and Greece whose financial administrations were devastated by crony capitalists and these countries declared themselves bankrupt in 2016 and 2017.

Going back to Joseph Stalin, his New Political Economy was not much different from ex US President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” which was declared and implemented from 1933 to 1938 while the United States was swirling in the middle of the vortex of the Great Depression. If closely studied and juxtaposed, a wide range of identical features can be marked out between the policies and doctrines in Joseph Stalin’s New Political Economy and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. They both aimed at pulling out their respective countries from the debris of economic crisis and administrative woes.

I am writing this article at such a time while two next door neighbours—India and Pakistan—have locked horns once again over Kashmir. Kashmir is actually a highly efficacious tapestry for both India and Pakistan. Governments in both these countries have been aptly successful in covering up their failures, atrocities, misgovernance and absolute absence of rule of law by resorting to the unresolved Kashmir issue when something goes wrong either in New Delhi or in Islamabad or at both places. Pakistan has been going through a tattered political turmoil since 2023 when former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan was placed inside prison. The streets and highways have been till today trembling with countless numbers of protesters demanding Imran Khan’s immediate acquittal from all cases.

To look on the other side of the coin, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi failed to slice a good figure from the immediate past parliamentary elections in India. Narendra Modi’s far right political party Bharatiya Janata Party (BKJP) lost in some key constituencies. Even in the midterm elections in some Indian states, BJP did not perform well which has sparked worries among BJP leaders including Narendra Modi himself. BJP is also scared presuming what’s going to happen in the state elections which are just round the corner.

Under these circumstances, both the rulers in India and Pakistan need something badly to deflect the eyes of their people to another stage show. Kashmir has been the readymade theater of fixed political matches for both India and Pakistan since the very inception of these two countries. Ordinary Kashmiri people are the round-the-year prepared scapegoats to be slaughtered to make amends for political blunders committed by heavyweight Indian and Pakistani demigods.

So, the actions already taken by Donald Trump are without doubts about to toll the bell for market economy and the pedestal on which west-tutored globalized concepts are erected have also started feeling the tremors of an unprecedented methodology in the making to run the world beyond hackneyed capitalism.


Mahfuz Ul Hasib Chowdhury is a
contributor to different English
newspapers and magazines.