Capitalism delivers the goods

The G8 summit in Germany has attracted the usual mob of Neanderthal troublemakers intent on exercising the riot control skills of local law enforcement agencies. Against what, precisely, are "anti-globalisation protesters" protesting, that justifies regular scenes of violent disorder wherever the G8 decides to hold its summit meetings?

The benefits of global capitalism will be clear to one man at least. The unfortunate Pole, Jan Grebski, who has just awoken from a 19 year coma after being hit by a train in 1988 shortly before the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe the following year. Dominic Lawson comments:

Last weekend he told Polish television that "when I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere. Now there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin." According to his wife, Gertruda, "Jan was so amazed to see the colourful streets. He says the world is prettier now."

Among those who do not share Mr Grebski's view of the comparative state of the world, almost 20 years after the fall of Communism, are the thousands of "anti-globalisation" protesters whose rioting in Rostock at the weekend caused injuries to 430 German policemen. Organisers of the demonstrations, who had merely planned to disrupt the G8 summit in nearby Heiligendamm, apologised to the police for the violence and, according to the FT, "distanced themselves from the estimated 2,000 militant activists involved".

They distanced themselves from the violence, but not from the aims. It would be difficult for them to do so, such is the inchoate nature of the anti-globalisation movement. It encompasses everything from anarchists to extreme reactionaries who believe that the world took a wrong turn with the invention of the tractor. One thing they all have in common, however, is a virulently expressed anti-Americanism.

I believe them when they say that this is not racist, that they do not have a quarrel with Americans as individuals. What they hate - incoherently and therefore violently - is what America itself stands for: capitalism. They are the successors to those in the West who sympathised with the Soviet-backed dictatorships in Eastern Europe, who believed that such an absolute lack of economic and political freedom was a much better system than the free-for-all which unaccountably had not produced a revolution by the "oppressed masses" in the US...

The "enemies of globalism" ... are motivated not so much by sympathy with the losers in a free market, as by hatred of the winners. If the price of a system which banned winners is an absolute fall in living standards for everyone, that is a price they are willing to pay: or rather, a price they are willing for all of us to pay.

It should almost go without saying that it is similar factors which have caused Africa to lag so far behind the rest of the world economically: corrupt, self-serving governments that use absolute political power to extort economic benefits for their supporters at the expense of the people as a whole - Zimbabwe is the example with which we are most familiar. It should go without saying, except that the anti-globalisers blame it on America. Since the US is the biggest aid donor to Africa - albeit a much smaller donor per capita than some other countries - this viewpoint amounts to a pathological condition, rather than a political one.

The anti-globalisation movement is deeply flawed and deeply reactionary: the economic Luddites who tour the world pursuing G8 conferences have nothing constructive to contribute. The history of the twentieth century, as shown in the experience of Mr Grebski, shows that capitalism delivers prosperity, socialism delivers misery. The world needs more of the former, and less of the latter. Not everybody needs to be hit by a train to discern this fact.