The idea of models of identity conjures up many different social structures, such as national, ethnic, racial, or class identity, all of which might be seen as affecting the human identity of different individuals or even of the same individual at one and the same time. Placed in the context of post-communist societies, this idea suggests a state of crisis for societies that once were fixed in one, namely, communist, identity, but now have been cast adrift in search of a new identity. More of their own doing, this requires choice from among many possible identities, or the creation of a totally new identity amid the constellation of identities already asserting themselves in world history. This, no doubt, is the crisis being lived in Eastern Europe and in Yugoslavia on which we reflect from the standpoint of emerging or re-emerging identities, some of which are in serious conflict with one another. But this is not the crisis I would like to reflect upon here.

I would turn rather to another crisis of human identity which all face in these waning years of the 20th century, here in Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia as well as in the rest of the world. It is a crisis that can affect very seriously whatever else we might do in establishing or maintaining our human identity. I refer to the more general problem of human identity in the face of a model with which all have to contend, not only, here in Yugoslavia, but also in Asia and Africa, in Western Europe and in North and as South America. It is the model of a global economy which looms over us all and is experienced as oppressive and as a threat to their human identity by people throughout the world.

This model must not be ignored in contending with other less ominous models in striving for a more human society, though it tries to mask itself as an open society or free market system. It is intent on exercising universal control over human affairs in seeking its own particular end of profit-making. This model is not unlike the former communist power, except that it shuns the public light of devious ways, whether countries rich or poor.

This model has long been known. It was recognized as oppressive to people’s identity from its very inception by the economist and moralist, Adam Smith. He spoke of the pernicious effects of high profits on wage earners, and of the inequalities arising from the nature of wage employment as well as monopolies as conspiracies against the public (Cf. The Wealth of Nations, ch. X). In the 19th century, K. Marx analyzed its effect on the proletariat — the class of workers in Europe who were never supposed to benefit from the economic system, though they were essential to its development (Cf. Capital, BK. I, part II). More recently it has been analyzed for what it did as colonialism in Africa by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth and in Latin American by Enrique Dussel who switched from developmental to liberation thinking. It is still the object of analysis in developed countries by people conscious of its oppressive nature and of how it exploits many who are defenseless and marginalized even in supposedly well developed countries.

It is important now to analyze this model from the standpoint of societies in transition from a communist to a post-communist model. For, one must not naively suppose that these societies are moving from a totalitarian model into an open society or a free market or free trade system without any semblance of domination. Rather, the post-communist societies are only moving back into a more universal market system, a more universal trade zone already occupied by economic forces bent on seeking their own advantage in a way that is no less totalitarian than the defunct Communist forces. It is important to raise consciousness about these forces in the global economic system among post-communist societies if they are to emerge with their own identity on the sense of world history and escape the fate of the third world countries at the hands of the first world.

The communist system having collapsed in its opposition to the capitalist first world system, there is no longer a second world and post-communist societies find themselves in the same relation to the first world as do third world societies. They have been reduced from a second to a third world, status directly dependent on the first world which controls the global economy. Looking back from where we now stand, the communist system dating back to the Bolschevik Revolution 80 years ago can be viewed as only an interlude of opposition to global capitalism.

This can be illustrated by returning to the 1950s and 1960s after World War II. It became evident that the market system, as it existed in the U.S., for example, was still plagued by the monopolistic tendencies feared by Adam Smith. It was not at all a wide open system of supply and demand which excluded monopoly from the free play of market forces.

Some economists began talking of the existing system as one of imperfect competition with some kind of monopoly. There had always been a certain suspicion of large firms in the U.S. since their emergence late in the 19th century under the leadership of men like John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie. But that had not prevented more and more of them from emerging and coming to dominate most industries. It was noted, for example, by John Kenneth Galbraith, in his book, American Capitalism, that wherever a few giant firms dominated a particular industry, competitive market structures did not exist, and that such domination by a few giant firms was found in most segments of industry as of finance.

The only way some semblance of free market could be preserved in such circumstances was by developing countervailing forces on the part of consumers and workers, in addition to government anti-trust regulation. In spite of these countervailing forces, however, it was noted that, as firms grew larger and larger in any particular market, such as oil, automobile or beverages, there tended to be less and less of them. The few that remained — sometimes 5 or 6 even only 2 or 3, where previously there had been dozens if not hundreds of firms — tended to exert ever greater domination over the market. Thus they controlled things pretty much to their mutual advantage, even though they stopped short of perfect monopolies by merging into one firm. Even without explicit collusion among the few leading firms, which was against the law, they managed to keep prices within a range acceptable to all of them and to prevent from entering their market competitors who might try to undercut their prices or challenge their total control.

They were able to keep other competitors out by the sheer size of their operation, made possible by the gigantic size of the American market. This enabled gigantic firms to develop by a process of eliminating smaller firms which in turn enabled them to dictate what would be brought to market and at what price. In every segment of the American economy, it was always the same phenomenon of concentration in a few large firms at the head of the market and the exclusion of others.

Suits brought against the large firms for violating anti-trust and price fixing laws were defended against by powerful legal divisions to prolong the procedures and wear down the government lawyers. As a result charges were either dropped or reduced to such trivial proportions that the firms could easily absorb them as part of the cost of doing business. This is happening today in the way the three or four large tobacco companies defend themselves against suits charging that they knowingly undermined the health of American citizens.

This constituted an oligopolistic system where only a few large firms enjoyed any real freedom of competition. These firms were free to decide what to bring to market and what price to charge; no one else could enjoy such freedom except in some small market that the large firms had not yet taken over. But that amounted to less than 10 percent of the American market; well over 90 percent of the huge American market was under the control of less than 200 or 300 large firms. The only thing they did not completely control was the labor market, because of the strongly independent unions at the time, but the firms were able to raise their prices automatically to compensate for any added labor costs.

During the time of co-existence, interesting comparisons were made between the American economic system and the communist economic systems, both being centralized planning system. The communist system was public or state capitalism under the control of people devising first-year plans with public scrutiny both at home and abroad. The American system was private and much more hidden from the public eye, but no less real and effective for being hidden (Cf. John R. Munkirs, The Transformation of American Capitalism: From Competitive Market Structures to Centralized Private Sector Planning, Sharpe, 1985).

This private sector planning system consisted mainly of an interlocking system of directors among a few large financial and a larger group of industrial firms that could control over 90 percent of what was being produced. Several hundred to a thousand of these directors sat on multiple boards and came into contact with one another regularly at different board meetings of this central core of large firms, or perhaps even a thousand or more. They were not much more numerous than their counterparts in the inner core of the communist parties devising their own five-year plans.

The planning and domination on both sides of this competition between two large centralized economic systems was of the same nature. The American model won because the communist model was more inefficient, collapsing as a capitalist system from within. The American system has not yet collapsed and shows no sign of losing its totalitarian grip on the world economy.

Under the Bretton Woods monetary agreement at the end of World War II America became the supplier of goods to a world ravaged by war. In America there was plenty of work, wages were good, and a great abundance of goods was brought to market at an affordable price. The rest of the world, especially Europe with the exception of the communist bloc, was digging itself out of its economic hole with the help of financial aid from America and goods that financial aid bought from American firms. In this way financial aid distributed abroad was reintegrated into the oligopolistic system.

But goods were not the only thing being exported by these large firms, who were naturally the first in the international market they were creating. They were exporting also their own way of doing business according to their model of oligopoly. When Europe and Japan began to re-emerge as economic powers in their won right in the mid 1970s, they discovered that they could enter into the existing competition only by developing such systems of their own. They were able to do so easily because they had a model to follow and were unhampered by anti-trust and price fixing laws. In fact, for these latecomers to the system, governments became part of the planning system along with the large national firms, yielding a mix of competition for markets in these foreign lands. There arose, then a set of large new oligopolistic firms in Europe and Japan which could and did compete successfully with large American firms in various markets. The net effect of this was to extend the oligopolistic market system to the entire world and to transform it into a totalitarian system, now capable of totally disposing of the corresponding totalitarian communist system.

I may seem to be exaggerating the totalitarian aspect of this global developing global system, for were there not more firms large enough to operate freely in this world system, and did not these new firms restore a certain competitiveness to the market? It is true, large American firms began to encounter a kind of competition from the outside which they had never encountered within the American market. Large European and Japanese firms were able to encroach on their market as had no one else for decades. The large American firms were now experiencing real competition for the first time from large foreign firms that could undercut their prices and remain in business.

Nevertheless, the new firms operating in the world market were still relatively few and also quite large, not only in relation to their own national markets, but more importantly also in comparison to the entire economy of smaller nations around the world which could be eliminated from competition. The ability of the European and Japanese large firms to remain in competition with the other large firms was conditioned by their size. What we had then was only a slightly larger set of large firms competing, and more recently merging, with one another on a world-scale and dominating a single world market. If we look at the way the more recent arrivals operate in the world market, we find that they have reinforced an oligopolistic system that was once dominated by large American firms adding and merging with a few more large firms from other nations. In other words we still have the same model of economy functioning as a supra-national global system which is no longer just American or Japanese or European but simply worldwide, beyond and national boundaries. At the core of this system is till a fairly restricted club of large firms which holds sway, not only over workers, consumers, and smaller firms throughout the world, including post-communist societies, but also over nations large and small.

I cannot describe this global system here, but would simply refer to a book which has described how it emerged with the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1974 and 1975 and how it has developed since then into an international monetary system. Subject to all sorts of speculation, it survives its ups and downs with the help of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), quasi public institutions originally set up to protect the monetary interests of large firms operating on the international credit markets. I refer to The Money Mandarins: The Making of A Supra-National Economic Order by Howard M. Wachtel, a U.S. labor economist.

In the world today we have a single interconnected system of large firms in competition with one another that plans economic activity on a worldwide basis. It reaches out in every direction around the globe, North and South, East and West, into formerly communist countries as well as into other emerging markets from its centers in New York, London, Tokyo, Frankfurt, or Singapore. It exchanges billions of dollars electronically all day and night, while different parts of the world sleep and carry on their daily activities. The system is constantly on the watch to implant itself in new places, like Yugoslavia or Africa, by what is called investment. In realty this becomes a means of dictating what is to be done in countries where it takes hold through what are called structural adjustment programs. Wherever they see a potential market for themselves, whether it be in China which is still a communist country, or Bosnia-Hercegovia, the large firms are interested in being the first to enter. At the same time they remain on the watch to keep themselves in an advantaged position where they are already implanted.

These firms preach an ideology of free market and free trade around the world, but in this world market only they are free to operate as they see fit: not consumers, not workers, not smaller local firms, nor even supposedly sovereign nations caught in their web, from Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, to the U.S., the largest and richest nation in the world. These megafirms are really supra-national in their power. Though when they are in trouble they can count on the help of national government because they are so large that they have become essential to the economic system of the particular nations. Perhaps, more exactly, the economic well-being of the nations is reduced to the survival of the oligopolitic system, even to the detriment of their people.

They are against all barriers and for whatever advances free trade, like the European Monetary Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement, because they know that only they are in a position to take advantage of such agreement. They are the first to rush in to take advantage on both sides of any border, often at the expense of workers, consumers, smaller firms, or even nations. President Clinton was refused "fast track" trade negotiating authority by the American Congress because the American people no longer trust him to protect their interest in his rush to do the bidding of the large multi-national corporations, all of which are able to take advantage of the situation by trading from both sides of any border at the same time.

These large firms are now truly multi-national through subsidiaries in the many nations usually eager to welcome them into their territory. Each firm then does business with itself and for itself, in competition with other large firms. They absorb smaller firms on either side of the border as with the recently privatized firms in former communist countries. This leaves very little space for other, more genuinely entrepreneurial firms to operate. It shows little concern for the consequences of those operating policies on the social good of the local communities where they are located in order to take advantage of low wages and weak environmental protection laws no longer available elsewhere.

This story could include the recent crisis in international financial markets and its effects on what are now called emerging markets rather than nations. These nations now have to submit to new strategic adjustment programs imposed by the IMF in order to keep certain large key firms afloat in the global market, while others are let go because of their excesses in lending or borrowing. The development program imposed by the IMF on South Korea forced it to give up a large part of its autonomy and ability to compete on world markets to international financial and investment institutions.

This is all part of an ongoing process that is truly supra-national in the sense that it is something above nations. Nations themselves, large and small, are caught up in the ebb and flow of this monetary system around the globe which dictates who is up and who is down and who is reduced to stagnation in the backwaters of the system. Everywhere the economy prevails over every other aspect of human life. It is not an economy that benefits the poor as well as the rich or the common good of nations as well as the private good of large corporations. Rather it is the oligopolistic economy that grows at the expense of the poor and the marginalized for the benefit of an ever shrinking number of large multi-national corporations. Meanwhile nations are losing more and more of their sovereignty and their ability to act in view of their own public good to these new sovereign powers hidden from the public eye by the IMF.

Nations and communities with different identities around the world must become conscious of this threat to their identity in order to maintain and preserve their own human identity. For this overpowering leviathan lurks in the shadows of world affairs ready to take over wherever it can find an opening through the privatization of public goods or underdevelopment. Even development can be used through the many strategic adjustment programs imposed by the IMF.

The important thing is to recognize that there is this global economy that operates as a system in the world and that this system is quite supra-national. It is in the hands, not of public, but of private interests seeking their own private good, whether it be their own enrichment or the perpetuation of their power to control assets, and thereby to control entire populations. This system spreads its influence by what are euphemistically called investments, which are deemed necessary for the underdeveloped parts of the world, but which are also a means for maintaining a flow of wealth from the periphery to the center. Investments and financial aid, especially as organized by gigantic corporations and the IMF are ways of binding the hands of those on the periphery ever more tightly to the demands of the central power. Worse still, they are ways of reducing everyone to economic pawns in a gigantic monetary chess game and robbing them of their human identity.

As human beings we do not have to give in to this global economic process. There are still ways, economic as well as ethical, to get around its efforts to control human beings around the globe for its own private benefit. In poor countries as well as rich there are ways of entrepreneurship that can be found, in Eastern Europe as well as in other parts of the world. There as ways of fighting back locally against the economic and cultural invasion of the oligopolistic system. It is for different communities to devise these ways by their own initiative, so that the economy of each country serves the good and the prosperity of its people, as well as that of large multi-national corporations. My intent here has been to underscore a danger which Eastern Europeans in general have to face as diverse human communities as regards the economy. It would be a mistake to think that there is no freedom in a socialist economy and that there is only freedom in a market economy. In fact there could be less freedom for former communist societies in the so-called free market economy than in the former state capitalist systems. All will depend on how weakly they act as human beings in the world economy.

This is no longer just a "superficial, coercively centralizing liberalism and cosmopolitism of French and German origin," as Mazaryk saw it; it is new fact of life that has emerged in the world at large. Global capitalism in the guise of gigantic corporations which conduct their affairs across national borders manage to bring the political powers of various nations, large and small, to do their bidding, no matter what it costs the citizens of these nations. This fact has given rise to a certain anomie with regard to what we are as human beings. We must keep this clearly in mind if we are to reaffirm the primacy of the political and the spiritual over the economic, of social justice over corporate individualism, and of the common good over private profit. Both locally at the periphery in Third World and former communist countries, and at the center in the U.S. and Western Europe, the common good of people — something rational and spiritual, as well as economic — is also being sacrificed to the mammon of iniquity. It is important to remain conscious of this imminent danger to our human identity in the form of an oligopoly of large multi-national firms in order to take action against it, even as we struggle to find our diverse new cultural, racial, ethnic and national identities.