Misery and the Myth of the Post-Colonial
Mark Wood
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • February 1992 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 1 No. 4 (pp. 10-11,15) | ||
| • August 27, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
In the November 13-27 A.O. the Post-Colonial Forum attacked the “myth of overpopulation” and offered a series of solutions to redress the problems of hunger, poverty, and misery in third world countries. However, these solutions would, I will argue, prove ultimately insufficient to solve these problems because they derive from an incomplete theory of the material relations that produce them. In the following text I will both indicate what I see to be the specific limitations of the Forum’s position and advance what I believe is a more complete and hence politically productive explanation of the causes of massive suffering in third world countries.
Last year the number of people who starved to death was estimated to be between 14-18 million. Every two days the same number of people died of hunger as the total number of soldiers killed in ten years of fighting in Vietnam. For every hour we sat in class, listening to lectures, taking notes, learning about our world, more than 1500 human beings perished from lack of food and three quarters of these were children under the age of five (The Hunger Machine: 12) The numbers are expected to rise this year.
Further, these numbers do not include the hundreds of who suffer from extreme malnutrition, living their entire lives on the edge of death. The evidence appears overwhelmingly to support the widely held conclusion that the earth’s resources cannot sustain so many people and hence that the only way to eliminate third world misery is to limit the number of people (of color) being born in the third world.
Interestingly enough the Reverend Thomas Malthus drew the same conclusion almost two hundred years ago when he attempted to explain why tens of thousands of people were starving to death in England. The fact that so many people are living in dire poverty, argued the parson, is the product of one simple and unalterable natural law: population grows geometrically while the means of subsistence grow arithmetically. In short, there is a constant tendency for a(n ever growing) percentage of the population to exceed the resources necessary to provide for that population. Because this is a natural law it asserts itself with the same ferocity at all times, in all societies, and under all conditions. This law, said the Christian, is “an evil so deeply seated, that no human ingenuity can reach it” (Essay: 26). Malthus’s theory of population — a theory J.M. Keynes felt was in “the English tradition of humane science” — means that every society will, sooner of later, become overpopulated and will, as a result, have an always growing percentage of its population who suffers from lack of sufficient resources to sustain themselves.
While most people today couldn’t tell you who Malthus was, they’ll give you a “Malthusian” explanation for why so many people suffer so much misery around the planet. For example, its is not unusual to hear someone say that disasters, such as famine, which cause thousands, even millions of deaths are only “nature’s way of telling us there are just too many people for the earth to sustain.” In short, the problem is rooted in natural not social conditions and is therefore, with the exception of limiting the number of people being born, a problem beyond human control.
However, Malthus’s Christian economics were valid only by ignoring the fact that thousands were starving in England at the same time that English workers were producing wealth in excess. In short, Malthus did not explain starvation and population in relationship to society as a whole. Hence, he advanced partial and ultimately inadequate solutions to the problems associated with overpopulation solutions the minister could, no doubt, live with as inevitable forms of punishment for the Fall of man. An analysis which examines starvation and population in relationship to society as a whole makes it possible to see that the causes of third world and for that matter first world misery are not simply natural but social in origin and that Malthusian conclusions are nothing more than ideological myths—stories that mystify the material conditions that generate massive misery and thereby stories that support the continued existence of this misery.
The social origin of these problems becomes obvious when we consider that, contrary to minister Malthus’s misanthropic logic, last year alone enough food was produced to feed over six billion people (the number projected to inhabit the planet in the year 2000). Yet, at the same time, millions of tons of grain were burned to artificially sustain high prices on the world market so that a few large agribusinesses who hold a monopoly on food production could make a profit. Add to this the following: in Africa, where starvation has been particularly acute, less than one-third of the arable land is under cultivation; 800 billion dollars worth of social and natural resources are consumed every year in arms production (in addition to the social and natural resources and millions of lives that are destroyed through their use), while more than 50 million people are employed in arms production globally, and one out of four scientists and engineers use their skills to invent new technologies of death and destruction; 26 billion dollars worth of resources will be used and millions of people’s talents and skills will be employed to produce advertisements which quite often attempt to convince us to purchase commodities that we not only may not need but are actually harmful to us and certainly harmful to many of those living around the planet (statistics from: The Hunger Machine by Jon Bennet and Susan George; Ending Hunger by The Hunger Project; and Eat Your Heart Out: Food Profiteering in American [sic.] by J. Hightower).
In short, a majority of the world’s population is hungry and poor at the very moment when food and (other forms of) wealth are being produced in abundance. In addition, many of the people who live in poverty today are also the people who are producing much of the world’s wealth (not unlike the situation of workers in Malthus’s England). Since first and third world countries exist in one world and are linked to, produce and are products of each other, to understand why third world countries suffer mass misery it is necessary to understand how they are linked to, produce and are products of first world conditions of existence. This requires that we understand how capitalism works because capitalism is the dominant mode of social organization on the planet, linking first and third world countries together in a complex chain of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption.
Capitalism is driven by competition between capitalists. Those who survive this competition do so because they are able to make more money from their investments than their competitors — they are able to produce more money than they originally put into production and to do so at a rate of return which is higher than all others. There are several means by which the capitalist seeks to maximize his return but the essential ones are by cutting workers’ wages and by replacing workers with machinery. Both of these strategies lower the cost of production so that when a commodity is sold the capitalist pockets that much more of the total value (represented in monetary form) of that particular commodity. Because he shells out less to the producers for producing “his” commodities he gets more when he sells them on the market. The one who gets the most for the least is, as pointed out above, the one who survives to compete tomorrow and the ones who don’t survive are quite often absorbed by those who do. It is through this process of competition that wealth is accumulated and increasingly concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, eventually taking the form of monopoly in which certain areas of production are controlled by only a few large corporations. Today, monopoly is the rule with transnational corporations controlling production, distribution, exchange and consumption on a global scale.
In the last twenty-five years the global production of food has come increasingly under the control of transnational agribusiness corporations. Like all capitalist corporations food corporations must produce the highest rates of profit or perish. To do so these corporations search for labor to produce food at the lowest possible wages and replace, whenever possible, human labor with machinery.
Sudan, a country which has suffered and continues to suffer from massive starvation, is a case in point. Under British rule, Sudan functioned largely as a gigantic cotton plantation. After political independence the Sudanese converted much of this land to food production for indigenous consumption and within several years were meeting most of their basic subsistence needs and even exporting food to other countries. However, the legacy of colonialism, as the Forum points out, presented immense barriers to development of the Sudanese nation. The Sudanese had to borrow money from capitalist institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to purchase the means for developing their country’s infrastructure. These institutions were only too happy to help. However, their assistance was predicated upon one condition: that the Sudanese reconvert a major portion of their crops to cotton production for export and sell off large tracts of land at prices acceptable to transnational agribusinesses.
Due to Sudan’s relative underdevelopment (in relation to the first world) and the continued existence of social classes with conflicting material interests (large land owners, relatively privileged government officials vs. small farmers and peasants) the Sudanese government agreed to the terms set by the World Bank, turning over millions of acres of land to wealthy Sudanese businessmen and transnational agribusiness corporations. Jon Bennet and Susan George point out that “land traditionally used by peasant farmers and nomads was, through various ‘edicts’ passed to the commercial sector in the space of only a few years” (Machine: 59). This meant a total transformation of social relations (relations between people and between people and their means of social existence) in Sudan. Formerly self-sufficient small farmers were “stripped of their traditional means of support” and became “simply components of production” (ibid). Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese were displaced and owning nothing more than their own power to work were forced, under penalty of death, to sell themselves on the market.
This meant that their lives were now determined according to the value of their labor power a value which varied with every fluctuation in the price of cotton on the world market. People who once exercised direct control over the means of subsistence were now dependent on forces largely outside of their control. Not only were millions of Sudanese people unable to produce their means of subsistence directly they now had to work to produce cotton for someone else in order to earn a wage to purchase food.And finding work in Sudan is even more difficult than finding work in Syracuse. This is so because modern machinery has replaced hundreds of thousands of workers, rendering the value of their labor power zero, rendering their existence superfluous — a surplus population.
This surplus population becomes a wandering reserve army of labor in search of work and food to survive “men, women and children cannot live on cotton alone.” Neither food nor wages are adequate to meet the needs of the Sudanese people and as a result the Sudanese suffer from massive starvation and malnutrition. Last year over 200,000 Sudanese people starved to death and this year the number is expected to be even greater.
However, from the capitalist’s point of view things in Sudan couldn’t be better. The excess supply of labor power relative to demand lowers the value of labor power, thereby lowering the cost of cotton production. In other words, where cheap labor in Sudan brings horror to thousands of Sudanese who cannot afford food on the wage they make and death to thousands more who wander through the desert without work, without hope and without food, it brings pleasure to the capitalist who may not (and rarely does) know the social costs of his investments but knows that profits from this year’s investments in cotton production are up and hence this year and hence that his business will survive to compete next year.
The example of Sudan could be multiplied a thousand times (e.g. the millions of Mexicans who migrate north to the cities and to the United States and Canada in search of work are the result of similar transformations). Displacement of traditional self-sustaining farmers, transformation of these farmers into wage laborers, replacement of millions by large scale machinery, and conversion of food crops for indigenous consumption into cash crops for foreign consumption are the essential means by which the majority of people on the planet have been “thrown” into conditions of agonizing hunger, abject poverty and absolute misery.
This is the secret of what is called “overpopulation” under capitalism. Overpopulation is in fact socially produced surplus population, population which exceeds the means of employment—not resources — and who are reduced to a “bank” of labor-power from which the capitalist can make “withdrawals” and “deposits” as fits his needs — that is, the need to make money. In these situations the people do not own or control the means of social production (e.g. land, machinery, information) and therefore are prevented from planning production to meet their basic needs. Rather, the land and tools used to work the land are owned and controlled by transnational corporations who plan production according to the central need that drives all capitalist corporations: the need to make money.
The only sufficient strategy, then, for eliminating poverty, hunger and misery in third world countries would be for people living in those countries to gain control of their own social and natural resources and rationally organize them to meet their own collective needs. In short, the only sure means to end hunger, poverty and misery is to replace private ownership with social ownership of the means of social production, the basis of social existence. Further, while such a transformation in property relation is possible in the third world without a similar transformation taking place in the first the former cannot be sustained without ultimately doing the same in the latter (as witness Chile under Allende, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas and Egypt under Nasser). The only way that third world misery can be alleviated once and for all is to eliminate capitalism on a global scale and this can only be done through a cooperative alliance of workers from every nation in the world.
But it is precisely on this point that the Post Colonial Forum falters. In their “Myths” the material origins of poverty and hunger fade into the haze and mist of categories like “the West” and the “post-colonial.” The Forum refers to an entity called “the west” but never attempts to explain who, what or where this entity is. Does the West refer to the geographical spaces occupied by Western European and North American countries or to the religions, morals, ethics, philosophies, aesthetics, politics and economics produced in these countries? Even if we assume it refers to the latter the invocation of a monolithic “West” and its other, the “non-West,” still reduces differences within these spaces, wherever they are, to the same. For example, the politically significant difference between the ruling and ruled classes, differences which exist in various forms and at various levels of development in every country, are rendered invisible. By obscuring this difference the basis upon which an international alliances between oppressed groups might be based is lost.
If “the West” refers primarily to that mode of social being which developed fully in western European countries during the nineteenth century, then today it must include Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, and any other country in which this mode is dominant. If this is what it refers to then it would be more accurate and therefore politically productive to use “capitalism” and “imperialism” rather than “the West” and “non-west” and subordinating the latter concepts to the former so that notions like “the West” are made historically concrete. Without doing so it becomes extremely difficult if not impossible to grasp the economic roots of poverty, hunger and misery and hence more difficult to uproot them in practice.
By not addressing these roots you end up arguing, as the Forum does, that problems associated with overpopulation can be solved by providing “adequately available and locally grown food, education for women, health care and a genuine participation of the poorer masses in shaping their everyday lives” without identifying the social relations that must be transformed to make these provisions a reality. Hence, even with all the changes suggested by the Forum one thing remains the same: the continued existence of the poorer masses. The goal is not to end private ownership and control of the economy but to alleviate the worst effects of this form of ownership — it is, in short, to dull the edge of “sharply class polarized societies,” not to abolish classes completely.
Which brings us to the question of the concept of “post-colonialism” itself. While the concept of post-colonialism may be justified as marking the point at which colonial countries won political independence it elides the fact that the many, if not all, of these countries continue to be subjected and subordinated to first world, imperialist countries such as the United States, thereby rendering their independence nominal at best. The I.M.F., World Bank, imperialist states and capitalist corporations dominate their political institutions and economic relations, often with the help of local government officials, bourgeoisie and other parasitical classes. In concrete terms this means that most people on the planet are subjected to the will of first world capitalist states and corporations (a will regularly exercised through extreme violence; e.g. the U.S. military actions against Panama, Grenada, and Iraq) and, as a result, are prevented from exercising mastery over the conditions of their own existence. Given this fact and the intensified efforts of imperialist countries to keep third world countries under their thumb I would suggest it is much more accurate and therefore more politically productive to use neo-colonial rather than post-colonial to describe the real relations which structure the political institutions and economic relations in most third world countries today.
More than 25 years ago Malcolm X pointed out (because, unfortunately, such things need to be pointed out) that capitalism can only survive by sucking blood from someone. In fact, capitalism is alive today largely by sucking blood from people of color and especially women of color in both third and first world countries. Notions like “post-colonial” and “the West” (and other idealist notions, such as the theologically inspired couplet “the Same” and “the Other”) mystify the parasitical nature of capitalism and lead us to believe, wrongly, that the real task facing humanity is to purify ourselves of every element of “western” culture.
So why does the Forum advance an explanation of mass misery that does not directly address the role of global capitalism in the production of this misery? In part because concepts like “the West” and, increasingly, the “post-colonial,” unlike historical materialist and materialist feminist concepts, are readily available and widely circulated in first world academies. In addition, the claim that the “West” cannot speak for the “non- West” is now taken as commonsense: what right do we, as representatives of the “West,” have to speak for people from the “non-West.” To assume otherwise is to commit the crime of “Orientalism,” the most “insidious” form of colonialism. Obviously only those who are from the “non-West,” who bear the mark of “the Other,” can speak for and represent the genuine aspirations and interests of people from oppressed countries.
However, to suggest that a shared national, or for that matter shared racial, ethnic, gender, or religious, identity guarantees a transparent (epistemological) relationship between “representatives” and the “represented” is to ignore the ways in which all representations are shaped by class differences and material interests. The Forum points out that the “lower classes react to the specific nature of their material existence.” In fact all classes react to and are shaped by the specific nature of their material existence and are inclined to represent the world in ways which reflect and reproduce this existence.
First and third world intellectuals occupy materially privileged positions relative to the laboring classes within their respective nations i.e. while their wages are still determined by the ruling class, the content of their labor time is is not as directly determined by that class as it is for other workers. Hence, intellectuals occupy a contradictory and crisis ridden space in which, while they may sympathize with oppressed workers, they also have a objective, material interest in maintaining the very system that oppresses those workers.Third world intellectuals have the added burden of being from dependent and oppressed nations and, as a result, “feel the heat” from capital on one side and from their nation’s laboring classes (wage workers and peasantry) on the other even more intensely than first world intellectuals. Caught between the interests of first world capital and their own country’s capitalist class, on the one side, and the interests of workers on the other, third world intellectuals are under intense pressure to represent the interests of workers in a way that doesn’t threaten global capitalism. One of the most useful ways of doing this is to represent this struggle as a battle between the “West” and the “non-West,” between “the Other” and “the Same,” or between “western” and “traditional” forms of development. Thus, for example, the Forum argues that “borrowed and misconceived models of western ‘growth’ and ‘development’ must be set aside and instead encourage grass roots self-determination.” In both instances the question of who owns the land, machinery, information both within and across national boundaries goes unasked and is therefore never placed on the political agenda.
Walking the line between the interests of capital and the interests of the laboring classes is never easy to do and “breaking up” (with) global capital is even harder to do. The ongoing battle between the oppressing and the oppressed classes means the middle ground occupied by first and third world intellectuals has been, is and will always be under capitalist society rife with crises, putting a constant demand on intellectuals to manage these crises through strategies which reconcile, if only for the moment, the irreconcilable interests of capital,and workers — that is, a constant demand to reconcile the irreconcilability of a mode of social existence based on exploitation and a mode of social being based on real equality.
An increasingly popular management strategy among first world intellectuals is to make (the) crisis itself the solution. (e.g. in various forms of deconstruction and Foucauldianism). Chaos, irrationality, and contingency are posited as the basic substance of the universe and so any attempt to “impose” order, rationality, and necessity are rejected as totalitarian. The very project of emancipation is rendered absurd by claiming that, for example, “whoever loses wins and… one loses and wins on every turn” (Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 20).
Such imaginary and reactionary philosophical resolutions obscure the fact that an order of death and oppression exists whether we “posit it” (in language) or not and that the capitalist class does “win” and at the expense of the working class with every turn of the wheel of production In the end, however, even strategies which suggest that suffering itself is the sine qua non of human existence and that the struggle for mastery is a totalitarian fantasy cannot hold back the collective energy of oppressed people everywhere struggling to abolish the conditions that produce their suffering and become masters of their own destinies. In order for first and third world intellectuals to facilitate such a change they must abandon concepts and philosophical systems that mystify the economic roots of misery and make the question of who owns, controls and plans the use of social and natural resources on the planet a fundamental question in all theoretical work concerned with human emancipation.
