World View: Poverty entrenchment (2002)

From the January 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Poverty eradication” programmes in Africa only act to further entrench manufactured poverty

In Africa it has become imperatively fashionable for governments to embark upon “Poverty Eradication” programmes. It is an initiative forced upon them, as usual, by the World Bank and the IMF. And the rapidity with which the programme is gaining momentum is so great that it will be no surprise to see, in the foreseeable future, ministries being created to take charge of Poverty Eradication.

What is “Poverty Eradication”?

It is a term that the “experts” at the IMF/World Bank drawing rooms coined to add to two earlier terms – “Poverty Reduction” and “Poverty Alleviation”. In spite of the semantic differences of the three terms, they are meant to be one and the same and as such they are used interchangeably. By these terms the “experts” in the West and their cronies in the South simply mean helping the poor and vulnerable in society to get out of their poverty. To achieve this goal, they adopt a three-dimensional strategy. In the first place there is what they call “capacity building”. This concerns efforts at reaching out to the poor and sensitising them on their poverty. It stems from an arrogantly elitist and childishly paternalistic notion that the poor do not know that they are poor or why they are poor. So they sink huge sums into organising seminars and workshops during which they try to let the poor “realise their potentials”. But that the organisers are mere parrots repeating their masters’ voice is clearly discerned through the hollow and meaningless phrases they use anywhere in Africa that they meet – “civil society”‘; “grassroots groups”; “gender equality”; “empowerment”; “awareness”, etc.

The second strategy they use is what they call their “social service window”. Under this category such “social services” as erecting waiting sheds at village clinics and health centres; constructing dwarf-walled sheds to be used as classrooms; organising the villagers to dig pits to bury rubbish; periodic clean-up campaigns in and around the market or church or mosque etc, and are what they pursue.

The third component of poverty eradication programmes involves the provision of small-scale loans which they euphemistically call “grants” to groups or individuals. It takes two forms: in cash or in kind. The latter is realised through the provision, on credit, of a milling machine; a kiln (for pottery); a tractor or ploughing services and provision of imported seeds for those in agriculture; or providing biogas facilities to provide household fuel for lighting and cooking, etc.

The kitten gift 

There is a popular parable among the Dagbamba of northern Ghana which is similar to the story of the Trojan Horse. A man wanted to help out a friend who was going through hard times. He gave the poor fellow a kitten so he could sell it when it grew up. The poor man was very happy with the gift but it did not take any length of time for him to realise that the gift was after all a curse. He used whatever little money that came his way to buy milk for the kitten while he himself kept starving.

The poverty reduction/alleviation/eradication scheme tells a similar tale. In the first place the amount of cash and material devoted to the programme is usually appallingly infinitesimal. On the individual level, the amount of money loaned out to a person is always not enough to start a viable business. As such the money soon evaporates into thin air and the beneficiary is now left with the more burdensome task of repaying the loan. I saw this kind of situation myself when as an elected member of the municipal parliament in Tamale (Ghana) in the early 1990s, I organised the women of my constituency into a group. A NGO (the 31st December Women’s Movement) in collaboration with a financial institution in town, approached us with the aim of granting our women soft loans under the Poverty Eradication Scheme. The funds came from IFAD. Ten of our women were to benefit from the programme. However the NGO who were our benefactors would only assist us on condition that the tenth person was one of them (the NGO). Our women agreed. The amount per head was fifty thousand cedis, about US$70.00 at the time.

The whole programme ended with some of the beneficiaries being threatened with court action. None of them benefited from the project.

In Gambia it was recently reported that the micro finance officer, Mr Mohammed Jammeh, boasted that the Social Development Fund which is responsible for poverty alleviation had disbursed 3,022,275 dalasis to 6,129 individuals between 1999 and October 2001. This means that on average each person received less than 500 cedis, the equivalent of about $30. How can one start a business with less than $30?

The story is equally grim with groups or associations who are assisted collectively. Here the funding agencies normally make these groups to contribute an initial amount to which the benefactors add whatever they have to dispose of. The total amount is then used to set up the project – usually kilns for pottery; looms for weaving projects; food processing projects; ploughing services or even tractors, land, imported seeds (cowpea, cotton, cashew, etc). In most cases women are the beneficiaries or target groups. Contrary to the initial hopes that are whipped up by the donors, a good lot of these projects end up as white elephants. Those that get going usually benefit only the leadership of the target groups and the officials of the implementing agencies. But most often than not petty squabbles arise and eventually the projects collapse.

Competitive markets 

Even where a few projects manage to see the light of day, their relative successes are negated by the capitalist globalisation of production and distribution of products. Needless to say the end products of these poor, mostly rural, folk have to compete against goods dumped cheaply from the West. Here again the case of the women at the Nalung Weaving Project in Tamale reveals a lot. These women were trained to weave material for smocks. After the training they were sold looms on credit. Their main input for their business was thread which they could only buy from the capital, Accra, about 500km away. Two problems soon arose. First to sell at a price that would enable them to cover the cost of production meant that no-one would buy as it was seen to be rather exorbitant. Secondly the quality of the thread used, which was even imported, was of an inferior quality and consequently the cloth woven was far inferior to the type produced by the traditional weavers. Added to these was the presence, in the markets, of relatively very cheap second-hand clothes from the West.

In Gambia there is something similar taking place, at the Bakau Women’s Horticultural Project. These women toil morning and evening and produce vegetables. They all harvest at the same time and so prices are very low as a result of glut. Even the onions and shallots they produce are shunned in favour of onions from the Netherlands. No wonder therefore that the women keep marking time economically. As for those who are into cash crops such as cashew, cotton, cowpea, groundnuts etc, the least said about them, the better, considering the pitifully disadvantaged bargaining power of the producers of primary products (in the poor countries) under the current capitalist world economic arrangement.

Wasted energies

One other factor which needs highlighting in this hoax of poverty eradication is the magnitude of human resources deliberately channelled into such unproductive, in fact retrogressive work. Millions of people world-wide are enticed into taking part in this futile venture. Having been made poor by the system, the people, like a drowning man who will cling to a straw, keep flocking to the system only, each time, to be hoodwinked. But more agonising is the fact that people who champion this global ruse are the elite who, most often than not, know they are engaged in an activity which is worthless to the target groups. These elite are the staff of government ministries and agencies (NGOs). They pilfer items and embezzle funds meant for the projects in addition to their bloated salaries. In short they are used as willing tools in the entrenchment of poverty.

Ending poverty 

Experts of development studies are often heard saying that “the poor will always be with us”. That may be why we see the phrases “poverty alleviation”; “poverty reduction” and “poverty eradication” as being the same. Their confused use of terms gives expression to the real nature of the capitalist system – a system of legalised deceit and thievery.

But even what the sentence quoted above, tries to conceal is the fact that these poor that we have with us are growing in number and intensity. As more and more people join the class of the poor, the poverty grows worse and worse. In other words, global poverty is increasing both horizontally and vertically. All this, in spite of the alienation/reduction/eradication propaganda.

Poverty is caused by the unjust economic order prevailing in the world today. The wealth and resources of this world – land, factories, transport and communication, etc – are owned and controlled by a few people, who use these resources to make more wealth. They majority own nothing but their ability to produce. They are therefore forced to work for the few idle owners. These workers are paid wages just enough to keep them alive in order to continue to work.

As long as such production relations persist, more and more people will continue to join the ranks of the poor. For just as the IMF and the World Bank and the West give loans to poor countries in order to get them more into economic crisis, so do the peanuts these institutions trickle down as loans to poor women and groups only serve to deepen their poverty.

The only choice lies in a radical change in the ownership and control of the world’s wealth and resources. There must be collective rather than today’s minority ownership. Control over social wealth must be democratic with all having an equal say in the management, production and distribution of the products of human labour. Under such a system, everybody gets involved in determining what to produce; takes an active part in the production process; and finally has a free and equal access to goods and services. It is only then that poverty will be eradicated (not even alleviated nor reduced – empty phrases). Then there will be no room for some to have more than they need whilst others have less than they need. Attaining such a society is our collective responsibility.

Suhuyini

Tourism: sea, sand – and land speculation (2006)

From the March 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

We all need a break from time to time but do we ever stop to consider the impact and negative effects on the local communities where we choose to spend our hard-earned leisure time? Do we stop and consider what kind of holiday the people who are servicing our needs on our holiday get, if at all?

The majority of employment opportunities created by tourism worldwide for local populations is that of the low-paid service sector kind. Rarely regular work, and for a few months of the year only with no health insurance or pension contributions and no promise of job security. No thought of a holiday for them – just will there be enough money to last through the lean months, to feed the family, buy new school clothes and books for the kids, or fuel for the winter?

The following observations are based on eight years of being domiciled in a part of south west Turkey.

The small town in whose administrative area I live is but one example of what is happening at an ever-increasing rate in many areas of Turkey and other parts of the world too – a headlong rush to develop anywhere, anyhow, the primary criterion to make as much money as possible in as short a time as possible and never mind the consequences. As everywhere, the few get richer whilst some of the poor sell family land during the boom expecting a one-time sale to provide benefits and long-term security for this and the next generation, expectations far exceeding realistic possibilities in many cases. Teenagers are sent to study at one of the many tourism schools or colleges in order to learn English well enough to enter the world of work in the service sector.

Traditionally, farming was the major occupation in this area, mostly small owner-occupier farms with a few animals. Crops are cotton, maize, sesame, citrus fruits and salad crops. Plus there has always been a small fishing community. Electricity arrived about forty years ago, at about the same time as a tarmac road from the nearby small market town. At that time tourism was virtually unknown, more a backpackers’ destination for those prepared to camp out or have access to only basic facilities. Now this has become a destination of choice. A week or two of guaranteed sun, cheap accommodation, food and booze, family holidays, adventure, discos and dancing. Tree-covered mountainsides with fabulous sea views are being cleared to be crowded instead with concrete holiday villages. Rivers, reed beds and formerly remote coves are being polluted by the influx of too many people too much of the time. Marinas, golf courses, all-inclusive hotels and the inevitable infrastructure needed to connect them to highways and airports; huge road widening projects, tunnels through mountains – great for GDP and jobs in the short term, catastrophe for the environment in the long term.

Now, however, the latest developments move in another direction. Prime farming land is being turned into housing estates for incomers as it is in other areas currently seen to be ‘good value’ (i.e. cheaper than Western Europe), e.g. Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania etc, etc. The western working class, or some of them, can now afford to saddle themselves with a second mortgage/home, can invest in property in order to cash in later or offer their property for holiday let and probably pay no tax on earned income in either country. There is a feeling of well-being, having succeeded in obtaining a level of affluence once only dreamed of, an affluence entirely dependent on the system continuing to keep them in paid work for years to come. The incomers are perceived as wealthy, their ‘second home’ here being much bigger and more luxurious than the locals’ single, existing and often shared, home. The difference in average wages between host country and the home country is such that it adds to the illusion of everyone in Europe being wealthy. Both sides are guilty of being unaware of the other’s actual living costs. The incomers aren’t familiar with the real (lower) monetary cost of things here or of the actual wages to be had and the locals think the visitors have unlimited money to throw around if they don’t question the prices quoted or constantly comment on how cheap everything is in comparison with western Europe; a mix which causes problems of rip-offs and frauds, imagined and real, followed by mistrust on both sides. Resentment is growing. In a national, daily Turkish newspaper there was an article recently referring to ghettoization which said, roughly translated, ‘Don’t be surprised to wake up one morning to find GO HOME BRITS scrawled on your wall.’

This aspect of ‘foreigners’, i.e. Europeans, letting their property through the internet or privately but admitting only to owner-occupation (although the truth is clear to others in the neighbourhood) has begun to be a bone of contention with local hotel, boarding house and restaurant owners who see their own business potential declining and income reduced as a consequence of unfair competition. Legitimate businesses have overheads not encountered by private individuals and undeclared income in the capitalist system is seen as theft and unfair advantage.

Outside the central area (where most development has taken place and little farmland remains) some families are keen to sell land to cash in before the bubble bursts but they can only sell it once. Once sold there is no possibility to farm it and herein lies another problem. Why would anyone want to sell good productive farmland? The farming sector is suffering from the unfair market place and falling prices for producers. Tomato crops are being ploughed into the ground. The area once prized for cotton sees less of it grown year by year. Foreign subsidised imports are cheaper for the textile industry. Unless they have a large family to work for free the farmers can’t afford to pay pickers (last year at £4 a day) and the crop is left to rot. Some farmers and/or their children are moving into the tourism sector and allied occupations, occupations with low pay and no security. Government, however, has policies regarding tourism numbers etc., as do governments the world over, all seen as large £, $ or Euro signs. It’s the fastest growing industry and therefore to be prized and commended. The money comes into the country; where it goes after arrival is not of primary importance. Laws have been relaxed allowing (encouraging?) the sale of land which was formerly protected from development, even in environmentally sensitive areas.

The rich get richer, the poor – well, we know about that one….

According to received wisdom, for ‘richer’ read ‘more money’, ‘more buying power’, ‘ownership’ and for ‘poor’ read ‘less money’, ‘less buying power’, ‘dependence’; a scale of measurement based on one factor only.

A brief scan of television advertising by the tourism agencies of a number of countries shows a large representation from those ‘poorer’ countries. As is to be expected, only the positive side is promoted, the advertisers seeking to trick potential travellers into seeing only what the advertisers want them to see and often carefully protecting them from seeing the ‘real’ country when they arrive by arranging suitable tours and escorted visits which skirt the worst areas, i.e. the areas where the majority of the population have to live and work. ‘Incredible India’ portrayed as rich in culture, diversity, history; ‘Malaysia, Truly Asia’ steeped in ancient culture with a rich variety of wildlife and welcoming nationals to serve all your needs; ‘Jordan’- history, architecture, wild, exciting landscapes and outdoor activity; ‘The Maldives’ destination for outstanding hospitality, crystal clear sea and mouth-watering cuisine. No mention or sight of the teeming millions living in abject poverty in huge slums with no access to clean water; or of undemocratic repressive regimes, or of sensitive environments being degraded to build first-world standard accommodation and golf courses, or of human rights abuses. Just bring us your money and let the ever-increasing divide grow some more.

Who’s to blame? The ‘rich’ working class of the West? No, they’re guilty of having been duped by the system they live under to believe that they have a good life, even while they’re complaining about working too many hours, worrying what will happen to their pension, trying to live up to the expectations thrust on them by the capitalist media. The poorer working classes of the countries now being subjected to tourism can hardly be blamed either for trying to improve their lives and living conditions. Why shouldn’t they have a piece of the pie?

Both sections of the working class are to be blamed for one thing though and that is for not recognising that they aren’t on different sides, they are one and the same. They all need employment, a job or a handout on a regular basis. Without this they are finished. No holiday. No home. No food. No clothes. No nothing. They are to be blamed for not recognising it is the capitalist system itself that is to blame, that causes the divide between rich and poor, of whatever level, that actively works to set one section of the working class against another, to prevent them from working together against the system. How else could such a pernicious system prevail? When the working class of the world eventually understand this we’ll be well on our way to achieving our goal.

Janet Surman

Foulness: A pretence that all is well (1971)

From the June 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

The government named Foulness as the place for the airport, and everybody lived happily ever after. The people of Stansted, Nuthampstead and Cublington were relieved; the airlines dreamed of expansion; the Secretary for the Environment was photographed in front of a traffic jam and spoke about “a country fit to live in”.

The saga of the Third London Airport is indeed a mass of make-believe. It began in 1965 when the government — Labour then — announced the airport and Stansted, Essex, as its site. Protests and objections made a national issue over the implied annihilation of beautiful rural surroundings. A crowd of Labour MPs were to be rebels against the proposal, until the Party Whip was applied and they almost all trotted through the lobby to vote in favour after all; a note of imitative deference to grazing flocks, at any rate. Then an Enquiry, a Commission, and other thoughts as to the site. The Isle of Sheppey, Nuthampstead, Cublington were named in turn. For each, the Stansted protests were repeated in kind and intensity. Eventually opinion settled on Foulness, helped by a commercial proposition for reclaiming its marshlands, and the final decision was the one believed-in. The whole affair is seen as some kind of triumph: for the protesters, for democracy, for concern over the quality of life.

The fact is that an accessible site for a modern airport cannot be found without destruction and making life intolerable over a large area. The town or village named is almost insignificant in the bone-shaped contour twenty-five miles long which is the pattern of activity round an airport such as the one proposed. Stansted is in itself no beauty-spot or haven: an uninteresting place on a trunk road, suburbanized by a mass of spec-built estates. Its surroundings, however, are miles of arable farm land sprinkled with villages and hamlets. (At an early stage in the Stansted row the government amiably agreed to re-align the intended runways in case jet-roar cracked the spire of Thaxted church, ten miles away.)

In the past, because the problem was smaller, there was no trouble over this kind of thing. Industry made noise, smoke, smells which rendered life dismal and disgusting. The automatic answer, however, was to place industry on the sides of cities where the proles could endure it without disturbing the well-to-do; or create areas where the same principle applied. An airport is too large to make such distinctions, though there are echoes of them in the satisfaction over Foulness — it is, after all, in the estuary below muckiest London, the nearby conurbations an East Enders’ seaside resort and a new town of Council blocks. True, there were airports before the war. But those were the days of small, less noisy planes which represented romance and trips for the rich, and there was even a certain social prestige in living near an aerodrome.

The voice of the objectors at Stansted and the other country places was predominantly the voice of the well-to-do and the socially satisfied: landowners, professional people, commuting executives, and those who had gone out of cities for a bit of peace and quiet. There is nothing discreditable in that — cities are nerve-wearing places, and a home away from them is many people’s dream. Nevertheless, there was another view of which little was heard. Had a plebiscite been taken in the area to be affected by Stansted, or any of the other rural sites, it would almost certainly have produced a strong majority in favour of the airport. For the world of leafy lanes, thatched cottages and golden cornfields is also the world of bread-and-scrape wages — farm and road labourers taking home eleven pounds a week, and their wives doing charring for their betters to try to make ends meet. For such people, the transformation of rural life appeared no tragedy. The tragedy is, indeed, that their hopes would have been disappointed: the well-paid jobs would not have materialized for them, the hoeing and ditching exchangeable only for shovelling cement on runways.

All the same, there was a certain instructiveness in the militancy of the anti-airport protesters. Respectable Citizens who condemn strikes and disparage political demonstrations talked of non-co-operation. At Cublington there was something about home-made weapons for a siege. One may see this as what people will do to protect their property or their stakes, but it is also a lesson on a political theme: the capacity to agitate, obstruct and paint slogans on walls isn’t after all exclusive to industrial workers.

What was taken for granted from the outset was that a Third London Airport was necessary. The aim of the objectors in each place was simply to direct it elsewhere — self-interest fostered by the government’s condition that opponents of Stansted at the Public Enquiry must put up an alternative site: a version of Divide and Rule. This exemplifies one of the great inescapable dilemmas of capitalism. Commerce is pre-eminent, making the life of society dependent on the flow of commodities. Their production and consumption are compulsive; yet the by-products and consequences are endless social problems which are treated as if they can somehow be separated from their cause. Thus, society wants a proliferation of cars without a traffic problem; industrial benefits without pollution; chicken on Sundays but not factory-farming; air travel without the effects which gigantic airports have on life.

The problem is exacerbated by the shape of cities, where interests and rights and expedients cross one another in a tangle from which there is no extrication. As soon as the Foulness decision was announced, plans and speculations and hopes for the airport and its influence on the near environment were laid down. The first plan, official, is for what would anyway be an obvious consequence — a new conurbation of a million people in south-east Essex, virtually completing the extension of London to the coast. The hopes were expressed in an article in the Sunday Times (2 May) by Professor Colin Buchanan: for this extension, the whole corridor from Foulness “to the gates of the City of London” to become an area of magnificent buildings and high-quality living.

The simple answers to Professor Buchanan’s hopes are in two other articles on the same day. In the first — in the same issue of the Sunday Times, in fact — three aviation writers summarize practical prospects for the airport. Almost their last word is:

  But in the end it is the airlines and their demands for the future that should dictate the shape of Foulness. They will, after all, be the most important financial ingredient in the scheme.

Of course that is so. And in that connection it is worth noting that though the big scheme has gone elsewhere, commercial airlines have developed the existing Stansted airport since 1965 and are quite likely to want to continue doing so.

Still more to the ultimate point are remarks made in an interview in The Observer by Peter Walker, Secretary for the Environment. Amid much piety over preservation, pollution and the need to be “much more positive and professional” about traffic problems, he says:

  If suddenly we find in a National Park the world’s greatest platinum mine, which will transform our balance of payments and enable me to get a massive amount more money from the Treasury for all sorts of new projects, I couldn’t say now I would refuse permission . . . If I decide against mineral development, to some extent I’m making a judgement against the national prosperity of the country.

Professor Buchanan’s observations are put in perspective by qualifications like these; but they also show remarkable insensitivity to what life is like for most people. He speaks, for instance, of great benefits Heathrow has brought to the west side of London — “new industries attracted, a vigorous, indeed over- vigorous housing market created, the higher paid executives of firms and airlines settling and spending their money in towns and villages in a 20-mile arc thrown west of Heathrow, and new hotels cramming themselves in near the West London Air Terminal”; and urges that Foulness should bring eastern London “a chance to get some of these goodies”.

“Goodies” — really? Does Professor Buchanan seriously argue that life in the crowded, traffic-harassed region of Heathrow airport is highly desirable? Extraordinarily, he makes no mention whatever of noise. The Observer editorial on Foulness utters similar hopes to his, but with a less enchanted view of Heathrow: “It may seem illogical that an airport should bring such benefits to the east of London when its presence to the west is rightly held to do such harm. But London puts its best face to the west, where the noise hazard is becoming intolerable.” It has been said, and illustrated, often enough that ordinary conversation is barely possible in houses in some areas round Heathrow because of aircraft noise.

The piece about “higher paid executives” settling twenty miles from Heathrow is a remarkable piece of misdirection, so ingenuous as to border insolence. The higher-paid do this, indeed: twenty miles is probably the minimum, the distance being in direct proportion to their means to get as far as possible from delectable Heathrow. Some of the bitterness at Stansted and Cublington came from employers and executives who had chosen — because they could afford — to live in pleasant surroundings a long way from what their workers had to put up with. One can be sure that the higher-paid will live as far from Foulness, too, as they can. Modern enterprises do, of course, lead to better working-class housing, but the point here touched-upon is vital. Working people are disabled over housing not only by its common inadequacy, but also in regard to mobility. Only the better-off can choose where they live.

Air travel is, on the whole, a luxury today. Some of its necessity as passenger transport may be questionable. There is a prestige element in it; and, as with other mechanized forms, an accelerated central process tends to disguise long preliminary and after-processes which often reduce what is actually gained in time. Nevertheless, it remains essential for humane and informative purpose at least. The principal problem today is not airports as such, but the size of aircraft — and this is a subject of international competition, bigger meaning better in commercial advantage.

There is no sense in saying society can do without the aeroplane. It is perfectly possible, however, to envisage and plan cities or regions incorporating airports which do not make life insufferable for everyone round them. Perhaps every airport should be a coastal one, and every plane a smaller one; perhaps a forgotten version like the flying boat offers an answer; certainly technology already knows answers to many of the problems. The possibilities are numerous enough, but their condition is a different motivation of society. The criteria for airports and air travel now, and all the things one thinks are amenities, are cost and commercial efficiency. Given the continuation of those as social measures, the airports will blight life round them. Foulness will be Heathrow again.

The alternative is to change society so as to make human choice and need the measures for innovation. Our environment is not a government department: it is the world in which we live, and technology offers us means for it to be a good world. It is not because it is still capitalism’s world. The first step to changing it is to reject the make-believe with which monster airports and squalid lives are supposed to be made acceptable, and see that the choices offered by capitalism are no choices at all.

Robert Barltrop

On the beach (1979)

From the June 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Everyone — that is, every City Editor, every investment analyst — loves a growth industry. It usually doesn’t matter what the growth is about; the firms which supplied the ovens and the gas to the Nazi concentration camps must have been a growth industry. What matters is growth — the vision of an ever-developing, ever-expanding and therefore, it is assumed, an ever more profitable business.

One of the great growth industries of recent times is the tourist trade; sometimes, as if it were a political theory, called tourism. Six per cent of total international trade is attributable to tourism — more than iron and steel and surpassed only by motor vehicles, chemicals and fuel oil. The World Tourism Organisation, who may be supposed to be not entirely impartial in the matter, claims, “Tourism is no longer a cottage industry . . . today [it] has developed into a major industry".

Britain, advertised as a place where the scenery varies from the simply pretty to the dramatic and where there are buildings dating back to the Roman occupation, is one of the world’s big tourist attractions. Last year 11.72 million tourists came here, to stare at the scenery, photograph the buildings and dazedly shell out their cash to the riotously charging barrow boys of London. During that same year, 12.86 million people travelled abroad from Britain. Those who came in here spent £857 million more than those who went out spent abroad a bias on the balance of payments such as to please any City Editor.

For a favourable balance of payments, like a growth industry, is everyone’s favourite. This (although there are arguments that even by the standards of capitalist accounting the advantages are often more apparent than real) is one of the inducements for the ‘developing’countries to build up a tourist trade. In these cases, the state takes a close interest in the trade; there is usually a Ministry of Tourism and some impressive government subsidies and investment as well as other help. Sometimes the capital for the development has other sources. One American travel firm planned to take over an entire African country, with “no economy, no nothing” and to “merchandise it . . .  so the entire country is run as a beautiful place’’. (The money was to come from Rothschilds.)

Lego
This drive to ravage some defenceless part of the world into a paradise for the tourist trade gives tourism a bad image. The industry has its apologists, whose efforts sometimes have a note of desperation:

  Anyone concerned with the motivation of travel has to realise first that he is reaching deep into one of the major conflicts of the human mind; a desire for sameness, the return to the womb, if you wish; conflicting with the motivation to reach out and discover the world. In a sublimated fashion, a trip is therefore a form of birth or rebirth. (Dr. Ernst Dichter, Address to the Department of Travel, Kashmir, October 1967.)

Rather closer to the reality of the balance sheet the trade says it aims to supply hopeful people, on their annual release from the job with a little money to spend, with the Four Esses — Sun, Sea, Sand. Sex. And in pursuit of the profits to be made from that, the tourist trade has invested millions into ships, aircraft, motor coaches, airports, roads, beaches. It has raised hotels which all appear as if they have been built from the same Lego set, where among the palms and the sunbrellas workers can lie roasting like fowls on the spit, hoping to take a sun tan back to the office.

Behind the illusions, tourism has had a dramatic, even drastic, effect on the social fabric of the places it has invaded. In 1955 Torremolinos was a tiny, poverty-stricken village on the south-east coast of Spain. Then the developers’ eye fell upon it and now the Lego is everywhere, the Thomas Cook brochure describes it as ". . . exuberant [with] all the essentials of a modern resort: bars, boutiques, restaurants, beer cellars, clubs, golf courses, yacht marinas . . . One observer has summed up this trend:

  Tourism . . . is no less an industry than steel manufacture and its introduction into Alpine valleys has been no less destructive of total population patterns and traditional culture than if each hotel had been a blast furnace. (The Geography of Recreation and Leisure, Cosgrove and Jackson.)

Pollution
This aspect is beginning to worry the tourist trade, and much of the writing on it is now concerned with a call for something called a Tourism Policy, by which is meant a controlled development of tourism. It also worries the ecology lobby. The summit of Mount Snowdon is literally being worn away by the millions of feet which trample over it. In the season, a city like London suffers exhaust fumes made even denser by the fleets of taxis, cars, buses, coaches needed to move the tourists from one box office to the next. Outside the city the big jets scream to and from the airport on their carpet of noise, a 707 at take-off generates the same sound level as all the world’s population shouting in unison — and this can happen every few minutes, nearly every hour of every day.

But for the present the pollution which it causes is a lesser worry for the tourist industry. Of more immediate concern, because it offers an imminent threat to profits, is the bogey of saturation. If too many people visit the same place and overwhelm the available facilities, they may have the kind of experience to persuade them not to buy that holiday again. London, which lies fourth in the league table of saturation, measured by tourist nights spent per 100 residents, is getting near that point. Moving around the city in the summer is difficult, almost impossible, as the visitors from abroad add their weight to the rush-hour miseries of the travelling workers. In Westminster Abbey the crush is so great that an admission charge has been imposed, and after paying to go in the visitors are channelled along roped-off routes with no waiting allowed to look at anything.

This illustrates a contradiction of tourism which (although it may not occur to the Ford worker inflicting his Spanish on some hapless English-speaking bartender on the Costa Brava) is typical of capitalist society. Tourism has grown from the pressures of industrial capitalism. It was the concentrations of urban life — factories, close-piled slums, relentless exploitation — which spawned the need to get away from it all as well as the faster and more efficient means of doing so.

It took some time for the workers to establish that a holiday is an essential part of the recreation of their labour power. As this need is now accepted, and as many workers now get three or even four weeks break each year, the tourist industry has grown to market that recreation. This can assume some startling forms but who cares, as long as it sells? So holiday camps marshall their millions into obedient queues and into nerve-wracking competitions to find the funniest face in the place. Package tours take care of everything except stomachs abruptly overfull of unusual food and booze. Jet planes pack in their economy passengers as tight as a bus, easing the discomforts with the plastic smile of a leg-weary hostess. Somewhere among all this gusty enjoyment, say the industry’s salesmen, batteries are recharged; the line at Ford’s flows freer for it.

So big business is interested in an efficient holiday industry and the tourist trade has answered this by itself becoming big business. It is becoming increasingly harder for the small firm to survive. The British hotel industry is dominated by companies like Trust House Forte (who try to promote a cosier image by advertising that all their employees wear unctuous smiles) and Grand Metropolitan (who also own Express Dairies, Watneys and the Express Newspapers). Behind them is some of the latest, most expensive technology, Holiday Inns has a central computer link-up which is said to be the world’s largest private communications network.

In package holidays, three firms — Clarksons (the largest in the world), Thomsons and Horizon account for over half the business originating in Britain, leaving the rest to seventy-odd smaller operators. Governments offer a wide range of subsidies (in Britain a grant of £1,000 was available for every hotel bedroom completed before 1973), tax allowances, low interest loans and so on. They also invest a lot of money directly in the trade; two-thirds of the airlines in the IATA are wholly or partly state owned. At the same time, governments impose laws on safety and consumer standards, many of which can be met only by the bigger operators. The 1971 Fire Precautions Act, which laid down regulations about fire safety in hotels, caused thousands of small hotels and guest houses to close or to change their use.

Jaws
These laws are designed to prevent the profit motive running riot to the point of being counter-productive and to encourage a more orderly investment of capital in the industry. A bad experience, caused by a rush to get a quick profit, can damage the industry overall; and that is the sort of thing governments are supposed to prevent. The film Jaws showed how tills operates, and there are many examples of it in real life. In 1962 the Swiss ski resort of Zermatt suffered an epidemic of typhoid caused by its neglect of the water supply in favour of building hotels, ski lifts and the like. In 1973 the typhoid bacteria was found in the water in Miami. The authorities could not ignore the problem, as had happened at Zermatt; they advised everyone to boil all their water but refused to use words like ‘contamination’ which, although accurate, might have damaged their holiday bookings.

Workers who spend their lives on the treadmill of exploitation need to buy a holiday once in a while, to restore themselves. The industry which sells these holidays is now big business and operates under all the contradictions of any capitalist enterprise. The rush to invest in tourism has proved environmentally damaging — although the ‘environment’ is usually an essential part of the commodity which the industry sells. In some ‘developing’ countries the tourist trade has been built up at the expense of other industries which, by the standards by which capitalism judges profits —might well prove to be more worthwhile. A mess which is typical in a society where wealth is turned out to make profits and not to satisfy human needs.

There is a final irony. Holidays are about illusions, about forgetting reality for a while. But the trade which markets those illusions is itself being forced up against its own reality. And it is not always having a lovely time.

Ivan

Development: the shattered illusion (1997)

From the August 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

The stereotype is that we live in a world of haves and have-nots: a prosperous "First World" alongside an impoverished "Third World".

The reality, however, is more complicated. For wherever you look you will find rich and poor people alike. Indeed, the growing disparity in GNP between rich and poor states in recent years has been matched by the growth of inequality within each. That said, there arc undeniably huge differences in material circumstances of the average worker in Britain and their counterparts in, say, Bangladesh. But how did this come about and what, if anything, can be done about it within global capitalism?

Modernisation
Since the Second World War there has been a concerted effort by national governments and international agencies to "develop" the so-called Third World. At the outset this was linked with de-colonisation; it would help make political independence more "meaningful". According to the prevailing "modernisation" theory, development meant less developed countries passing through a scries of stages mirroring the economic history of developed countries. But while favourable circumstances had allowed the latter to reach the final stage of "mass consumption", a number of internal factors prevented the former from progressing towards "take-off into self-sustaining growth”.

Most important was a supposed shortage of capital. This had to be tackled on two fronts. Firstly, savings as a proportion of GNP had to be increased. As the "propensity to save" was thought to be highest among the rich, gross inequalities were justified on the grounds that they facilitated savings. Secondly, as less developed countries were thought unlikely to generate sufficient capital internally, foreign capital needed to be mobilised for inward investment along the lines of the famous Marshall Plan which helped rebuild the war-torn economies of Western Europe.

For modernisation theorists, this shortage of capital necessitated a policy of "unbalanced growth": concentrating investment where it realised the greatest return and hence the most rapid accumulation of capital. Following the example of the First World countries, developing nations embarked on a programme of industrialisation. At a time when Keynesian orthodoxy still held sway with its implicit distrust of unfettered markets, a policy of import-substitution was pursued to protect budding industries from foreign competition behind a wall of tariffs.

As well as promoting rapid growth, industrialisation was supposed to assist the structural transformation of these countries’ economies. Typically, these were thought to exhibit an essentially dualistic structure: a small modern urban-industrial sector alongside a large traditional, mainly pre-capitalist, rural sector. The latter was supposedly characterised by low productivity and an abundance of surplus labour. Industrialisation would enable this surplus labour to find employment in the modern sector and indirectly help boost local agriculture: the exodus of labour from the rural areas would draw farmers into the emerging cash economy, compelling them to buy agricultural inputs, like machinery and fertilisers, to meet the growing demand for food in the towns. In due course, the benefits of economic growth hitherto confined to the modern sector would automatically "trickle-down" to the impoverished backwaters: the "dual economy” would be replaced by a structurally-integrated modern capitalist economy.

It was not long before cracks in this scenario began to appear. The prohibitive costs of agricultural inputs meant many small farmers were unable to increase output, while growing labour shortages caused by urban migration seriously impaired the productivity of traditional labour-intensive farming. As for the urban sector, modern methods of industrial production, being highly capital-intensive, required only a relatively small workforce. Thus, increasing urban migration in fact led to rising unemployment while the importation of these First World technologies imposed a growing debt burden.

Dependency

By the 1960s modernisation theory had reached an impasse. A new scenario of development emerged: dependency theory. Contrary to the previous conventional wisdom that the economic backwardness of less developed countries was attributable to their incomplete incorporation into global capitalism, it was portrayed instead as an inevitable consequence of capitalist penetration of the Third World which left it increasingly dependent on the First. This shifted attention from internal to external factors affecting the development of national economics.

For dependency theory, the "world trading system" was a hierarchical order in which the dominant or "core” countries with their technological, economic and political superiority, are able to impose their needs on the "peripheral" countries. These dictate that the latter should become markets for the products of industrial countries, not rival producers, supplying them with raw materials for processing into finished goods. In short, industrial development and economic diversification in the less developed countries became effectively blocked within an externally imposed global division of labour.

The basic mechanism that condemned them to a state of perpetual "underdevelopment" has been said to be the continual outflow of economic surpluses—notably in the form of debt repayments and expatriated profits. So, far from foreign aid and investment compensating for the lack of local capital, they caused this to happen. This had been compounded in recent years by the declining terms of trade with the value of Third World exports falling sharply against manufactured imports. Political independence made little difference to their plight: it simply enabled the First World to divest itself of the cost of administering these territories while co-opting an emergent class of "comprador bourgeoisie" into this process of neocolonial exploitation.

To break this stranglehold less developed countries would have to "delink" as far as possible from the international economy and pursue "self-reliance", while nationalising the economy to staunch the likely outflow of capital this would incur. In short, a marriage of convenience between Third World nationalism and Leninist state capitalism.

However such an approach has been problematic for several reasons. Firstly, the structure of production which many of these countries inherited was heavily oriented towards exportation of cash crops or minerals and could not easily be re-oriented towards local needs. Secondly, an autarkic policy favouring economic diversification has to contend with local markets being insufficiently large, particularly in small countries, to justify investment in certain lines of production where economies of scale may be critical. Thirdly, increasing state intervention is likely to lead to the growth of an unproductive bureaucracy, further impairing an already impoverished economy while increasing the scope for corruption.

Getting worse

The 1970s oil crisis made matters worse for the less developed countries by massively increasing import costs but in the short term it produced a flood of "petrodollars" loaned to them via western banks. Between 1973 and 1981 these loans increased nine-fold. The spending spree this unleashed helped maintain relatively high growth rates though much of this investment tended to be channelled into grandiose projects which did little to alleviate poverty.

Then, as the long post-war boom petered out, the bubble burst. The 1980s in particular witnessed a steep decline in Third World incomes. Growing poverty led to eruptions of popular unrest to which governments responded with increased military repression. Yet ironically increased military spending only exacerbated the problem, diverting scarce resources away from development projects. In the 32 poorest countries in the world (apart from India and China) such expenditures amounted on average to twice what was spent on education and seven times that on health.

Global recession also signalled a profound change in the political climate. Growing disenchantment with Keynesian policies in the late 1970s and the sudden collapse of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s ushered in an age of "market triumphalism". Blind faith in market forces replaced blind faith in the efficacy of state intervention.

The concept of development had by then already undergone a subtle mutation. No longer crudely equated with GNP growth it began to also incorporate notions of redistribution and empowerment. In this broader sense, development came to be increasingly linked with concern for the environment, following the emergence of the environmental movement in the early 1970s.

As the global economy went into recession interest in environmental issues diminished but it re-emerged in the late 1980s under the rubric of “sustainable development". Popularised by the 1987 Brundtland report Our Common Future, sustainable development meant a form of development that met "the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". Environmental deterioration and economic decline were perceived as being mutually reinforcing. Since poverty caused people to over-exploit their natural resources, a more equitable distribution of wealth would help ensure more sustainable use of those resources. Although this represented an advance on earlier environmental thinking, it failed to address the real problem: it is not the poor who are the main culprits of environmental vandalism: more often than not they are victims of destructive decisions made by remote governments and multinational corporations who in turn are driven by the logic of market competition.

Contradictions

Yet it was this self-same logic which the less developed countries were now being urged to apply. With the growing threat of debt defaults in the early 1980s, the IMF and World Bank took on a more aggressive role as watchdogs of international capitalism. Structural Adjustment Programmes were imposed in exchange for rescheduling debts and further aid. This involved privatisation of state enterprises, public spending cuts and price liberalisation. If the stated intention of such reforms was "economic stabilisation", their real purpose was to ensure that these countries were better able to fulfil their debt obligations. To that end, greater emphasis was placed on boosting exports with the less developed countries reverting to their traditional role as suppliers of raw materials as prescribed by the theory of comparative advantage within a global trading system progressively shorn of protectionist features.

Predictably, the results have been disappointing. But then that is the nature of reformism: “solving" one problem within capitalism only seems to generate another. For example, while the new GATT treaty prohibited developing countries from dumping subsidised food onto Third World markets, this meant the less developed countries having to pay more for food imports. More expensive imports means getting ever deeper into debt which in turn intensifies the drive towards export production at the expense of domestic food production. Furthermore, with many other producer countries in the same boat yet prevented by free trade agreements from forming cartels to bargain for higher prices, the markets for such exports are soon saturated. So, prices decline and hence also the capacity of less developed countries to service their debts. It's a case of protectionist swings or free market roundabouts.

Meanwhile, the problems of poverty and environmental destruction escalate in tandem. The same pressures that force governments to inflict austerity programmes on populations in the name of “structural adjustment” compel them to drastically cut their meagre environmental protection budgets—at a time when the drive to increase exports poses a growing threat to the environment. Similarly, the increasing mobility of international capital in an era of free markets has enhanced its bargaining position vis-a-vis labour in both developed and less developed countries alike while enabling it to circumvent even limited attempts by states to impose environmental cost constraints by relocating (or threatening to relocate) to countries where environmental standards may be lower.

Not that things could have turned out much different given the nature of capitalism. There can be no turning back to the discredited models of development of the past. State interventionism could never provide a solution to poverty and environmental destruction. Even if this were theoretically conceivable, capitalism's globalising tendencies have put paid to that option. Arguably, the neo-liberal order we now have is the irresistible outcome of such tendencies but in any event it too can offer no hope of real progress.

In short, the system has exhausted every possibility of meaningful development. To move forward the dispossessed majority across the world must now look beyond the artificial barriers of nation-states and regional blocs, to perceive a common identity and purpose. There is in reality only one world. It is high time we reclaimed it.

Robin Cox

Who Benefits from Aid? (1971)

Book Review from the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rich Against Poor, by C. R. Hensman. (Allen Lane. The Penguin Press. £2.95.)

The Postwar world has seen a shift in policies to the Third World. As imperialism left the scene, "aid" came into fashion.

This book emphasises how the aid process conceals a process of exploitation as great as the earlier imperialism. While Western governments pride themselves on their charity to the starving millions, the truth is that their role is no more one of benevolent altruism than was that of the old-style pawnbroker.

Like the pawnbroker, they take a fair whack in interest charges: Ghana is still paying off Nkruman's debts at a crippling rate (medium-term loans alone take 20 per cent of her entire budget). Aid-giving governments would prefer to see their customers come again than to set them properly on their feet financially.

So the developing countries will never become "developed" while seven-eights of the aid they receive is directed at supporting the military and political rulers of these countries. Only one-eight of aid given by America is actually of a purely economic nature, and even then, it is not directed at alleviating poverty, but has what Hensman calls an "anti-development" role.

As a former Brazilian Minister of Economic Planning wrote:

This development of which we are so proud has brought about no change at all in the living conditions of three-fourths of the country's population. Its main feature has been a growing concentration of income, both socially and geographically . . . The majority of the Brazilian population has reaped no benefit  . . . Because of the anachronistic structure of Brazilian agriculture, it has led in many regions to a relative increase in the rent from land, thus rewarding parasite groups. Similarly . . . a variety of subsidies—in the name of development—have very often put a premium on investments which . . . favoured a still greater concentration of income in the hands of privileged groups.

Aid, then, plays its part in helping the rich get richer and forcing the poor into ever deeper poverty. 

This is on the whole a useful book, covering a lot of the ground. Hensman is especially thorough in discussing the Indian sub-continent, Latin America and America's history and contemporary scene. But there are many notable gaps: Africa and the Middle East are barely mentioned, and the Green Revolution not at all.

While unsympathetic to Russia, he is typical of the unscientific leftist in viewing China through ludicrously rose-coloured glasses. Lyrically, but without supporting evidence, he tells us that in China the poor are free.

Again typical of a woolly sheep of the left is his style. He uses many undefined terms loosely—terms such as rich and poor, development and anti-development, proletarian democracy and the war on poverty—and when he starts to argue the case for the "abolition of anti-development", it is far from clear what he is proposing.

His conclusions, after assembling a mass of interesting information on sordid international capitalism, are astonishingly naive and jejune. He exhorts his readers to boycott products made by "exploited" or "sweated" labour; to make contact with their fellow-poor (possibly by infiltrating aid agencies?) and finally to overthrow the bosses and establish "proletarian democracy". Only then can the developed nations "stand beside the poor in sympathy and solidarity".

In no way does Hensman examine what is meant by exploited labour or the nature of an exploiting class. He does not explain how a closer acquaintance with the bourgeois classes of Karachi and Calcutta, Delhi and Bombay—a cannibal breed who exploit their own kith and kin as viciously as any colonial power—could improve international working class solidarity. As for his revolution—presumably along Maoist lines—Socialists see no merit in a society still dependent on the labours of a wage slave class, with mankind still divided by barriers of nationality and a continuance of today's divisions between the haves and have-nots.

The book has other faults: Hensman has provided a grotesquely inadequate Index (e.g. no mention of Russia/Soviet Union, and although he refers to Swift's "modest proposal"—about Irish depopulation—one finds no reference in the Index, either to Swift or to Ireland). A book of this sort should also have a bibliography—especially at this price. 

Charmian Skelton

Material World: Greenland - To Modernize or Not? (2015)

The Material World Column from the February 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

For much of human history, capitalism was not humanity's economic system. For 95 percent of human history, primitive communism was the economic system, hunter-gatherer communities without classes, sharing wealth communally. Various pockets of primitive communism still live on around the world and one example is the traditional Inuit communalism. We should, however, think twice about using such a pejorative term as ‘primitive’. How could people last for thousands of years in the most inhospitable climate on Earth if they aren’t geniuses? The Inuit figured out how to turn bones into tools, how to turn skin into warm clothing, how to feed their families for generations. They have learned to adapt to nature which has allowed them to thrive for centuries.

In American Nations, Colin Woodard describes the Inuit culture and lifestyle. Most tribal land in the far north is owned in common under a form of title that prevents it from ever being sold to an individual or exploited in such a way that diminishes its value to future generations. There is no private property, although an individual family has three personal possessions: a tent, coverings and a sled. Everyone is allowed to responsibly use the people’s shared land, but it is thought the height of absurdity that any one person should ‘own’ it. Inuits still hunt, fish and gather and the food plus the implements associated with them are generally regarded as common property. If a hunter kills a seal, it’s handed over to whoever needs it. Villages have communal larders that anyone can access — free of charge or accounting — because food cannot belong to one person. It is the Inuit custom that you should never thank someone for food ‘Up in our country we are human!’ said the hunter. ‘And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow.’

Alliances between non-relatives are formed and maintained through gift giving and the showing of respect. An example of this is the often repeated but rarely understood offering of a man’s wife. It is a form of gift giving where a head of household offers the opportunity of sex with the most valued adult woman of his household. The woman has the power to refuse, in which case respect will be through a different gift. Community ties are strengthened during the winter months, because individuals would not be able to survive the long harsh winter without the help of others. Throughout the winter, there is a continuous series of communal feasts. After large animals are caught, such as whales and walrus, the entire district is invited to the feast. In Labrador, Greenland and throughout the central regions, when the resources of a house have surpassed the ‘normal’ living standards, this wealth must be re-distributed to poorer individuals. If the tribe engages in a commercial enterprise, the proceeds belong to everyone.

Modernisation

Today global warming is unlocking potentially lucrative revenues from natural resources under Greenland's seabed and icecap, which according to international experts is home to large oil and gas deposits as well as other minerals. Do you go on trying to preserve what is left of the old Arctic hunting and fishing culture, although it’s already so damaged and discouraged that it has contributed to the highest suicide rate on the planet (one in five Greenlanders tries to commit suicide at some point in their lives)? Or do you seek salvation in modernisation and economic growth (while keeping your language and what you can of your culture)?

One of the party founders of Inuit Ataqatigiit (Community of the People) has opted for the former. ‘If you want to become rich, it comes at a price,’ says Aqqaluk Lynge who didn't want to pay that price, and under the Inuit Ataqatigiit administration (2009-2013) all mining was banned in Greenland. Apart from the environmental costs of large-scale mining operations, Lynge said, the many thousands of foreign workers they would bring in would have a devastating impact on what is already a very fragile Greenlandic culture.

The Prime Minister who took over in April 2013, Aleqa Hammond of the Siumut (Forward) party, chooses the latter. She thinks modernisation has gone too far to turn back and it is better to gamble on solving the current social problems (like suicide) by enabling everybody to live modern, prosperous lives. The Siumut government has issued more than 120 licences for mining and petro-chemical projects including a huge $2.5 billion open-cast iron-ore mine that would produce 15 million tonnes a year.

Few Greenlandic Inuit have the skills or inclination to acquire senior jobs in all these enterprises, and most will not want the hard, dirty, dangerous jobs of the workers in the mines and on the rigs. The rampant alcoholism and drug use, and the suicides that plague the Greenlanders are unlikely to be cured by throwing money at them as compensation for a life without meaning and the eventual extinction of their communal traditions.

ALJO