Liberia is a third world country with over 80percents of its approximated 4miilion citizens living on less than one dollar a day. The country's economy is dependent on the extractive industry. Industrialisation is lacking. Merchandise agriculture is an illusion. Extreme trade deficit is an economic culture. The service and commercialised sectors are dominated by foreigners. We only receive taxes and rent from the sale of state assets to private foreign investors, which makes it impossible to mobilize enough capital to independently fund the construction of roads, dams, schools, hospitals, and etc. Our budget accounts for 85percent recurrent expenditure. Investment in public goods is dependent on foreign aid, loans, and grants. So how can your alternative work in the case of Liberia?
Worker coops, if implanted in Liberia and built upon ancient traditions of work in Liberian culture, could be the basis for a political movement that could finally confront its neo-colonial status and chart an independent course of development from which it is, as you well put it, blocked. Part of that blockage is the lack of a strongly based social movement able to wage the necessary fights with the foreign powers and their local, domestic partners. And that lack needs an economic mass base which the development of viable worker coops in alliances amongst themselves might provide. The movement beyond capitalism that worker coops signal in the advanced industrial countries has its parallel in the opportunity for people in places like Liberia, to move in similar ways. Then too, perhaps alliances, and mutual supports among worker coops globally could enable them to hep one another's growth.
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