There was
a post at
Tiger Beatdown titled "Occupying Europe, when the colonizer reclaims wealth", by Flavia Dzodan. Anyone familiar with leftist discourse knows what's coming from the title, but to prime myself for some intellectual activity this week (I'm writing this Monday morning), I'll go through the motions with it. What I'm trying to do is criticize the worldview that I perceive is behind the text.
A long time ago, when I took a course to become a
kickboxing instructor, I was taught to give feedback in the form of a metaphorical hamburger; a prime example of the
McDonaldization of education, if you will. The idea is that first you give positive feedback (a bun), then criticism (the meat), and finish off with more positive feedback (the other bun). I like the metaphor, because to me, it implies that the positive reinforcement equates with the useless carbohydrates of the buns, while the criticism is the meat of the whole thing. That's an anachronism, as the example was given at a time when any Finnish person would have thought that "
karppaaminen" ("low carb-ing") refers to
a type of fish.
In the spirit of this advice, I'd like to start by saying that I very much approve of the author's criticism of "importing" the 99% slogan from the US "Occupy" movement. As a European, I am in general dismayed that so many European political movements seem to be importing agendas directly from North America. For example, it's recently become something of a meme here in Finland to rail against tax breaks for the rich; indeed, I've even seen people claim that our entire budget deficit is caused by tax breaks granted since the early nineties. According to an
authoritative study, the opposite is true: tax progression has remained essentially the same, while taxes on low- and medium-income earners have fallen considerably more than for high-income earners. But because tax breaks for the rich are on the agenda in the US, the same must be true here.
However, there is a fundamental issue I disagree on:
The European Union’s wealth is the wealth of Empires. Mainly the British, Dutch, Spanish, Belgium, French, Italian, Austro-German and Portuguese empires. This is the wealth built on the backs of the African slave trade and the colonization of lands as distant from each other as the African continent, the Americas, Asia and Australia. This wealth is made of unspeakable suffering and economic deprivation for those in the colonized territories. This wealth is also made of resource depletion and subjugation of native populations. This wealth that never belonged to Europe to begin with.
In other words, all you Occupy Whatever protesters with your bizarre neo-swastikas: you're not being leftist enough. All that evil financial capital was created by robbing the Third World:
The very same wealth people now Occupying these public European squares reclaim as their own, demanding it is re-distributed while it was generated as a result of Europe’s occupations in the first place. And yet, none of this is examined or contextualized. Most people operating under the illusion that this wealth they are reclaiming is rightfully theirs, that they are entitled to it.
Though the author gives us the "very basic premises of dependency theory", cribbed from the Wikipedia page, and dresses up these claims with it, what becomes obscured is that dependency theory is, first and foremost, a theory on the current relationships between countries and markets in the world system. It is not, and does not justify, the historical claim that current European prosperity is "made of unspeakable suffering and economic deprivation for those in the colonized territories". This is a much broader claim, and one that I take great issue with. Many dependency theorists do advocate such a historical worldview, but the difference between the theory of international relations that is dependency theory and that historical worldview must be kept in mind.
**
This claim was formalized as the theory of the "development of underdevelopment" by sociologist Andre Gunder Frank in the article by that name. His specific claim was that the underdevelopment of Latin American countries was not caused by "the survival of archaic institutions and the existence of capital shortage", but by the international capitalist system, which exploited them for profit.
It's important to see this criticism in context. Frank, and dependency theory in general, was reacting against views of development that saw underdevelopment as principally the fault of the underdeveloped countries themselves, either because they hadn't managed their economic development properly, or even because they were racially inferior. The latter view has been put forward recently here in Finland, and figures in Finnish discussions on development aid, for instance.
While much of the dependency theorists' criticism of existing models of economic development was good and necessary, Frank threw the baby out with the bath water when he claimed that underdevelopment is entirely caused by the world system. If this was true, then Hernando de Soto's (the economist, not the conquistador) reforms would have had no effect. De Soto has led the way in improving standards of living in developing countries precisely by removing antiquated obstacles to economic development and improving the ability of ordinary people to participate in the economy. His success has shown that such obstacles do play a vital role in restricting economic development. By reforming property rights and arguing for a decriminalization of coca growing, de Soto managed to make life so difficult for the Shining Path Peruvian Maoist terrorist organization that they tried to kill him. Read more about de Soto here.
Despite endorsements from people like Kofi Annan ("Hernando is absolutely right") and Bill Clinton ("the world’s greatest living economist"), de Soto infuriates left-wing commentators precisely because he's offering a capitalist solution to underdevelopment. Perhaps the most eloquent defence of de Soto I can offer is to link to the Grauniad, which dedicated a "review" to attacking de Soto, but managed to offer no concrete criticisms whatsoever beyond accusing him of being a front man for international capitalism.
De Soto's work quite concretely demonstrates that legislation and culture in the underdeveloped countries do play a major role in restricting development, even today. To lay everything at the door of a faceless, ill-defined "international capitalism", a left-wing hobbyhorse similar to the Stalinist "international bourgeoisie", is at best a single-cause fallacy.
As a historical view, the idea that Western development is caused by non-Western underdevelopment is fundamentally absurd. It rests on a zero-sum view of world wealth, where Western prosperity cannot be the result of progress within Western society, but must be created by taking resources from other societies.
To take a fairly specific example, it has long been a commonplace for certain leftists to assert that the British "industrial revolution" was built on profits from imperialism and the slave trade. However, it has been pointed out by David Richardson that less than 1% of the domestic investment in Britain during the Industrial Revolution was made up of profits from the slave trade. Furthermore, while it's indisputable that the Atlantic slave trade had a grave human impact on Africa, the idea that it impoverished and destroyed the entire continent is ridiculously exaggerated. It obscures, among others, the fact that there were also Africans who themselves made a considerable profit from selling other Africans into slavery. In my opinion, the bald generalizations offered by supposedly "post-colonial" Marxists that cast all white people as aggressors and all black people as helpless victims are just as racist as the racist views they purport to replace.
Even some Marxist historians like Bill Warren agree:
There is no evidence of a process of underdevelopment…The evidence rather supports a contrary thesis: that process of development has been taking place…and that this has been a direct result of the west.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that the economic development of the entire world, at any stage, is a direct result of anything done by the West, but the simple truth is that throughout the history of the world, all societies have developed economically, and some societies have developed faster than others. This speed has varied, and indeed at times turned negative, and the forms the development has taken have also varied. Development and "undevelopment" have both taken place at all times and in all cultures; there is no truth to the racist ideas that only white westerners can bring about economic prosperity, or that African culture - as if there were such a thing as an "African culture" - is somehow inherently inimical to development.
At its heart, economic development is endogenic. This is not to suggest that exogenic factors can't play major or even decisive parts in specific processes, but it's long since become obvious to me that these kinds of rejoinders of the blindingly obvious are necessary when writing about anything even remotely political. But historically, it has primarily been the endogenic development of a culture or society that determines what its economy is like and how prosperous it is. There is no single cause; the circumstances a society is in, including various environmental variables like natural resources and climate, power relations within the society and of the society with others, cultural and economic structures within the society and a bewildering array of other factors, conspicuously including decisions made in and by the society, determine what path of economic development it takes. If unraveling this was easy, then economic history wouldn't be an academic discipline.
It's precisely the complexity of economic development that makes single-cause explanations like "international capitalism" or the blithering nonsense of Jared Diamond's guns, germs and steel so inadequate. They attempt to reduce a massively complex series of interrelated historical processes to a single cause, and frankly, when they go beyond that to assert that this single mechanism still functions today and people offering alternative views are on its payroll, they enter the realm of conspiracy theory.
These zero-sum theories don't make any sense on their own merits. If the underdevelopment of the so-called Third World is entirely a result of Western capitalism, does this mean that before the advent of the Age of Discovery (which, frankly, is an appallingly Eurocentric term), fundamental global inequalities of wealth didn't exist? If so, how did the diabolical Western capitalists acquire the means to appropriate the wealth of other nations? Surely they had some competitive advantages to start with. These zero-sum views reduce world economic history to a simplistic nonsense of a pillaging West and a pillaged Rest, and don't hold any water when faced with even an elementary knowledge of history.
Even worse, by casting the entire "Rest" as a unitary block of victimized cultures, they completely deny the rich history and heritage of, say, Arabic and Islamic culture, not to mention China, by reducing them to simple victims of Western imperialism who, unable to defend themselves, succumbed to the superior invader. No thought is given to the notion that these societies have their own history and their own processes that might be worthy of study. This simplistic view of the other as an eternal, impersonal suffering victim in fact reinforces the very Eurocentric, orientalist orthodoxy that its proponents claim to oppose.
**
The Tiger Beatdown article goes deeper into the land of conspiracies in its account of the Libyan civil war:
And now, to prove that none of this Dependency Theory is a thing of the past, in a very recent display of neo-colonial power, NATO forces, the pan European military arm, occupies Libya, a former Italian colony, supporting the “good guys”, the rebel insurgent group whose idea of justice was to sodomize Gaddafi minutes before his execution (Warning for extremely graphic content). Europe, once again, behind the pillage of bodies outside their territory, because that’s another concept that Europe laid out the foundations for: the idea of what Judith Butler very aptly named “the non grievable” lives.
By implication at least, the author seems to be claiming that the Western intervention in Libya is grounded in economic policy, and is part of this transfer of wealth from the Rest to the West. This is utterly ridiculous. No arguments or facts in its favor are advanced, beyond simply stating that the intervention occurred. And surely, if we are to mention atrocities committed by the rebels against al-Qaḏḏāfī, we might also remember that his regime was hardly benevolent? It seems odd to posthumously cast the Libyan dictator as a victim of Western economic repression, but these are the strange lengths to which Marxist conspiracy theories will go.
The leftist attitude to Western intervention is frequently a sort of Catch-22. If the West intervenes in a country like Libya or Iraq, then the intervention is an instance of Chomsky's "New Military Humanism"; an exercise in economically motivated power politics that in itself proves how evil and acquisitive the imperialism that is Western capitalism is. If, however, the West does not intervene, as in Syria or most conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, then its callousness and disregard are proof of how evil and acquisitive the imperialism that is Western capitalism is. In the eyes of these critics, the West is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't.
**
To end on some more positive feedback (the lower bun of this hamburger, if you will), I'd like to turn to racism again.
All European Empires were built on this notion of “the Other”, the non human that was only good in so far as she could produce labor and resources and, in turn, more children to be exploited. Nowadays, these ideas constantly framed as “the immigrant menace” and the inevitable raising of xenophobia and racism; European governments passing laws demanding more and more stringent requirements to access a documented residency status. The non Western immigrant that did manage to acquire a residency, forced to learn the language of the country or risk deportation. The old colonial practices now enforced on European territories under the guise of “cultural preservation” and “integration”.
Again, I can't agree with the Marxist notion that "the other" is economically defined, or that the other is acceptable as a producer of labor and resources. To proper racists, the racially constructed Other is inherently repulsive and must be kept away, not from economic interests but from pure political prejudice. In Finland, for instance, the main anti-immigrant party is also heavily in favor of reducing Finnish dependence on international trade and, at worst, almost a striving for autarchy. Certainly this view doesn't see the immigrants as economic resources to be exploited: on the contrary, pseudo-Fascist movements see the immigrant as a threat to the health and integrity of the "national body". In my opinion, to see European racism as economically motivated is senseless, as such a theory as to its origins and motivations entirely fails to account for its political manifestations without pseudo-conspiracy theories of "false consciousnesses".
However, in the context of the current European "debate" - which it hardly is by any sensible standards - on immigration, it's important to highlight the very real racist nature of these policies of "assimilation". Fundamentally, they insist that immigrants have no right to their own culture or language, but must abandon their identity and take on a new one, imposed by the hegemonic culture. In other words:
Nowadays, European States (the Netherlands and Denmark are two such examples) have laws that demand Non Westerners learn and speak the local languages or risk fines or, failing to comply, eventual deportation. Their right to occupy a space subject to assimilation.
This is precisely the kind of immigration policy that Finnish political racists are advancing: immigrants must "assimilate", i.e. give up their identity, or be forcibly deported or otherwise penalized. We should recognize that this is inhuman. For instance, a Finnish racist movement states in its election program for the previous election that everyone has a right to their own culture and language. They then go on to state that immigrants must assimilate and abandon their own culture, or be deported. It could hardly be made clearer that to these movements and their supporters, immigrants aren't people at all. In Finland, even the biggest left-wing party, the Social Democrats, campaigned with a slogan calling for immigrants to assimilate.
So I would like to take this opportunity to give my unqualified support for the demand that the "Occupy" movement, in Europe at least, concern itself with the "others" of our society as well:
Travelers and Roma people constantly evicted from European spaces, their right to Occupy anything denied while a complacent media enforces their status as “Other” and as such, undeserving of the right to inhabit spaces that should be reserved for legitimate Europeans. Because, let’s be clear here once and for all: only people who are legitimized by the State can occupy anything. The rest, the undocumented immigrants, the refuges, the Roma, the asylum seekers, had their right to occupy revoked. However, the European Occupy movement is not widely addressing this deprivation and their role, as rightful subjects, in it. Instead, I insist, the movement claims a bigger portion of the tainted pie.
To echo the point I made earlier in my Finnish-language blog post on transgender rights in Finland, Mahathma Gandhi has reputedly said that a nation is measured by how it treats its lesser members. I object to the idea that, say, the non-cisgendered or immigrants are somehow "lesser" members of society than the more outwardly conforming, but I'll again suggest a rewording: a movement for socio-economic change can be judged by who it wants to enact socio-economic change for. So far, the Occupy movement is a movement of the mainstream, for the mainstream, and the Others remain marginalized.
