Will “The Last Hottentot” hold us back? (1948)

From the October 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

Among the many problems that hinder the workers from understanding Socialism the problem of how it is possible to establish Socialism, in face of the “backwardness” of sections of the world’s population, occupies a prominent place. It really springs from the same patronising root as the complacent idea, “Of course I can understand but the poor mutt next door hasn’t the mental capacity to do so.” The strange part of it is that, lumped in with this “backward” section, are peoples responsible for many of mankind’s most brilliant achievements during the last two thousand years or so, some of which were accomplished when the people of these islands were running about unclothed and with painted bodies; of such are the Egyptian, the Arab, the Turk and the people of India and China. The place of “honour,” amongst the “backward” sections, is occupied by the negro, and yet it is just the negro who explodes the fiction of racial grades of mental capacity. Let us take one or two outstanding examples of this.

Toussaint L’Ouverture, a West African negro slave, organised the slave revolt at Haiti in 1797 and revealed himself to be one of the foremost generals of his time, defeating an army consisting of 20,000 of Napoleon’s veteran troops, expelling the French, British and Spaniards from Haiti, and inaugurating a period of peace and prosperity on the island. His “cultured” Western opponents, unable to upset the negro regime, eventually invited him on board a man-of-war for a conference, under a solemn promise of immunity, but, when they had got him on board, put him in chains, and he died in captivity.

Booker T. Washington was an American negro slave boy who had no chance of learning the simple elements of reading arid writing until he was fifteen, after the Emancipation Act of 1864, and even then he only learnt from other negroes in voluntary classes; yet he became an accomplished writer of English and a lecturer on many subjects. In the opening lines of his book “Up From Slavery” he wrote that he did not know when he was born or where, but he had a strong suspicion that he was born at some time somewhere!

Within the space of a century, in spite of the multitude of disabilities suffered by the negroes in America after the abolition of slavery, they have produced front rank workers in the fields of industry, science, art and literature. The Maoris of New Zealand, and other “backward races,” reveal similar mental capacity when they are drawn within the social orbit of modern nations. While walking along one of London’s main streets, during the early part of the year, the writer saw a group of young men and women from West Africa who were in London attending a conference. The girls, who had typical African faces, were slender, beautiful and charmingly dressed—obvious products of advanced culture, no different from their Western sisters except in colour and vivacity. Comparing them with the pictures of West African women in travel books was like comparing a chic Parisian woman with a hardworking peasant woman of the provinces. It was obvious that the social circumstances of these African girls were not those of a backward community, and it was this that made all the difference.

There is no fundamental difference in mental capacity between any sections of the world’s population; there are only differences in the quantity and diversity of the information acquired, which depends upon the particular social circumstances. Take a group of babies from anywhere on earth, even from the Hottentots and Bushmen of Africa, put them in circumstances where they can acquire the requisite knowledge and they will rival the best the West can produce in achievement in different directions. Go into any main street in a thickly populated area and you will see crowds of people, all of whom can run, jump, sing and so on. Here and there some will run better, jump better, sing belter, but all are capable of doing these things if they are physically sound. So it is with thinking. All over the world there is a general average mental capacity which, given the opportunity, can quite competently acquire modern culture—and the elements of Socialism. The opportunity lies in the existence of social conditions favourable to the development of Socialist ideas.

The full span of human life is only a tiny fraction of the span, of organic life on this planet. In the womb of time it took millions of years for the earliest organism to develop into the human organism; in the womb of its mother months are sufficient for the embryo to pass through similar phases to develop into a child. From childhood to manhood the boy or girl can absorb the achievement of his own particular section of mankind. In the advanced nations they absorb what is advanced, as the miner’s or cotton-operative’s daughter or son, who has passed through a university, has proved; in the backward nations they absorb what is suitable to the way they live, much of which is outside the mental horizon of advanced nations. A Hottentot or a Bushman, armed with his few simple tools and weapons and his bush craft, can live in the African bush; a white man can only live there if he transports modern equipment and leans on the native. Transport a Hottentot baby, just after birth, to the centre of London, rear him in a family like other London children and he will grow up like them in mental culture. Transport a London baby, just after birth, to a Hottentot family and he will grow up like them in mental culture. The Hottentot only becomes what he is today because of his primitive surroundings, and traditions associated with those surroundings. A child born anywhere on earth is born with a brain of the average capacity of mankind. How the physical and mental capacities develop afterwards depends upon social circumstances; alter the social circumstances and the mental development is different. In other words the capacity is similar but the acquirements are different. All the basic discoveries of mankind which made civilisation possible, fire, tools and weapons, pottery, metal-working, agriculture, writing and so forth, were made by sections of mankind which, according to present standards, would be regarded as backward.

What are called backward races are not backward in mental capacity; they live in circumstances that are primitive compared with the circumstances of highly developed nations. While they remain outside the orbit of modern production, or only serve it from outside, they remain tied to primitive ways and traditions. Once they become absorbed into capitalist civilisation, that is to say, once they take part in building up capitalism on their own account, then they cut the cord that ties them to the past. The negro in America has done this, Japan has done it, Russia, China and India are doing it now. Japan became a first class modern nation and Russia is on the threshold of a similar condition. Everywhere native populations are stirring restlessly, struggling to cast off the shackles of the past in order to enter into the heritage of today; and it is being accomplished at a pace that increases in speed as time passes. One nation learns from another and the backward learn from the forward, borrowing not only capitalist methods and ideas, but also the aspirations of the working class that is subjected by Capitalism. What took the Western nations centuries to accomplish the East is accomplishing in decades. The old protest, that Socialism must wait upon the intellectual development of the backward nations, is losing power as the world is being transformed into one level of development and Socialist ideas are penetrating everywhere. In the last half-century vast areas of the East and West have made tremendous strides along the capitalist road, and the rate of progress multiplies; in thirty years Russia has developed from a ramshackle semi-feudal empire into a first class world power, India is undergoing the birth-pangs of a capitalist state which will transform its primitive village economy and obliterate the traditions associated with this economy, the same may be said for Burma, as well as other of the, until recently, “backward” areas.

One thing is clear. The main resources of the world are now contained within the boundaries of nations that are either highly developed capitalistically or are on the verge of becoming so. Even the primitive agricultural communities of India will soon be overwhelmed as India gets upon its capitalist feet. There is, therefore, nothing to hold back the inhabitants of these advanced nations from uniting in a world Socialist commonwealth. In such circumstances what would be their attitude towards groups that might have lagged behind? Quite obviously it would be one of helpfulness; supplying these backward groups with everything they needed, physically and mentally, to bring them up to the general level as participants in the new world social order; and the assistance would be given free, with a generous regard for the traditions and feelings of those who had not yet cast off the cramping heritage of the past.

No, it is not “backward nations” that are clogging the footsteps of social progress but lack of understanding amongst worker’s of the “advanced nations,” and part of this lack of understanding is comprised in the patronising view that some are endowed with a mental superiority that marks them out as the chosen people. All human kind are similar parts of one mental piece, and when they get the opportunity they show that it is so.

There are no fundamental mental barriers to the acquisition of knowledge essential to the establishment of Socialism. What are apparently mental barriers are in reality social ones. These are fast disappearing as the social system that has made possible the production and safeguarding of sufficient means of existence to provide comfort for the whole of the world’s population draws all the inhabitants of the earth into its orbit.

Gilmac.

Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Despite the Pentagon’s repeated failures to pass audits and various alarming policies, 81 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives voted with 200 Republicans…to advance a $883.7 billion annual defense package. 

(Common Dreams)

In Iran, the mandatory hijab law has been a contentious point of resistance ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1978. But it has become much more widespread in the past two years after the killing of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by the morality police for not wearing a hijab correctly, and died in custody. Women have been at the forefront of this resistance, engaging in protests as part of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. It has called for the abolition of compulsory hijab laws and an end to gender-based oppression. But rather than acknowledging these acts as legitimate political protests, the Iranian state has increasingly sought to frame them as symptoms of individual mental illness. 

(The Conversation)

Yet another gruesome gang horror has played out in Haiti, as at least 184 people — most of them elderly — were variously slashed, hacked or shot to death on the orders of a warlord who’d been advised that aging slum residents had used sorcery to give his son a severe illness. Interim Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé called it ‘a barbaric act of unbearable cruelty’. The brutality was reportedly ordered by Monel ‘Mikano’ Felix, who leads the Wharf Jeremie gang. The carnage took place on Friday and Saturday in the densely populated seaside slum of Cité Soleil, a neighborhood in the capital city of Port-au-Prince which The Guardian has called Haiti’s ‘most notorious slum… Much of the slum is an open sewer…infant children bathe in water contaminated with sewage. The stench is unbearable’. 

(Zero Hedge)

As temperatures rise because of global warming Arctic areas that were previously frozen may become navigable, and natural resources more easily exploited, setting off competing claims. Blair said: ‘This growing access is already enticing nations to the region, heightening security challenges and geopolitical competition’. China and Russia are working together to gain control over the region, say analysts. 

(Financial Times)

The mosquito has determined the fates of empires and nations, razed and crippled economies, and decided the outcome of pivotal wars, killing nearly half of humanity along the way. She (only females bite) has dispatched an estimated 52 billion people from a total of 108 billion throughout our relatively brief existence. As the greatest purveyor of extermination we have ever known, she has played a greater role in shaping our human story than any other living thing with which we share our global village.

(Penguin Random House)

Malaria killed almost 600,000 people in 2023, as cases rose for the fifth consecutive year, according to a new report from the World Health Organization (WHO). Biological threats…climate and humanitarian disasters continue to hamper control efforts…Officials said a $4.3 billion annual funding shortfall was among further challenges. 

(Mother Jones)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Socialist Sonnet No. 138: Barbarism or Socialism? (2024)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

Barbarism or Socialism?

A hundred, more, gangs on Haiti shows,

Under idyllic Caribbean skies,

The true nature of raw free enterprise

Untroubled by any effective laws.

Wherever the market determines goods,

Drugs or guns or both? And then nothing stirs

Unless so willed by armed entrepreneurs

The poor look up to as their Robin Hoods.

While terror roams the streets in four by fours

The limits of government are revealed,

The power of profit’s no longer concealed,

As the powerless huddle beyond their doors.

Barbarism or Socialism? The voice

Of Red Rosa echoes still with that choice.

 D. A.

Tiny (URL) Tips (2010)

The Tiny Tips column from the December 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The corporate clout of the mining industry trumped political ideology in Canada when members of all political parties helped to narrowly defeat a bill late last month that would have imposed standards on Canadian mining companies operating in developing countries:

[Dead Link.]

Up to 200,000 Haitians could contract cholera as the outbreak which has already killed 800 is set to spread across the battered Caribbean nation of nearly 10 million, the United Nations said:

[Yahoo News, Dead Link.]

A Christian woman has been sentenced to hang in Pakistan after being convicted of defaming the Prophet Mohammed:

[Daily Telegraph, Dead Link.]

Unemployed workers will be barred from claiming benefits for up to three years if they repeatedly refuse job offers under radical plans to reform the welfare system:

[Daily Telegraph, Dead Link.]

Israel will begin constructing a barrier on its border with Egypt within the next two weeks. The government has said that the central purpose of this fence is to keep the growing number of illegal migrants from infiltrating the country:

[Link.]

Six years after it first debuted, the $1,000 frittata at Norma’s in New York’s Le Parker Meridien hotel continues to draw attention. Called the “Zillion Dollar Lobster Frittata”, the dish is made with six eggs, lobster claws and 10 oz. of Sevruga caviar:

[Fox Business News, Dead Link.]

Poor ‘Will be pushed out of southern England'. Bath, Chelmsford, Newbury and Maidstone are among towns that will become “no-go” areas for the poor within 15 years because of the coalition government’s plans to cut housing benefits. The claim, made by the Chartered Institute of Housing, followed the Archbishop of Canterbury’s intervention. He said he was worried by the proposal of Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith to threaten the long-term unemployed with benefit cuts:

[The Week, Dead Link.]

Some 42,389,619 Americans received food stamps in August, a 17% rise from the same time a year ago, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which tracks the data. That number is up 58.5% from August 2007, before the recession began. By population, Washington, D.C. had the largest share of residents receiving food stamps: More than a fifth, 21.1%, of its residents collected assistance in August. Washington was followed by Mississippi, where 20.1% of residents received food stamps, and Tennessee, where 20% tapped into the government nutrition program:

[Link.]

Proper Gander: Exploitation at work (2023)

The Proper Gander TV column from the April 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

When we buy a product, it’s easy not to think about the long journey it has made to reach us, through the combined effort of countless people across the world. A cup of tea often starts out in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, where its tea leaves are grown and picked before being sent on for processing and packing. The workers who pick the leaves which eventually end up in our morning cuppa tend to be women living close to poverty. Like many in the primary sector, their work on the tea plantations involves lengthy, repetitive shifts for low pay, made even worse for them by a culture where sexual abuse is common.

This was the focus of a disturbing edition of BBC One’s Panorama: Sex For Work: The True Cost Of Our Tea. The documentary investigated plantations in Kenya owned by two British companies – Unilever and James Finlay & Co – which produce half the tea drunk in the UK, sold under brands such as PG Tips, Lipton and Sainsbury’s Red Label. Researchers interviewed a hundred women tea pickers, and as many as 75 said they had suffered sexual harassment by managers at their workplace.

Heading the programme is journalist Tom Odula, but credit should go to the undercover reporter who put herself at risk by applying for work on the plantations. Much of the documentary comprises footage filmed on a hidden camera by ‘Katie’. This shows that women being pushed into having sex with senior staff is rife, despite the problem being recognised at least as far back as 2011. Then, a report was published by the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations about the extent of sexual abuse in Unilever’s operations, which led to them introducing a new ‘zero tolerance’ policy and reporting system. These are put to the test when Katie applies for a job at a Unilever plantation and gets asked by a Divisional Manager, Jeremiah Koskei, to meet in a bar. There, she records him talking about how they could spend the night at his home, following a pattern described by other women seeking work on the plantation. ‘It felt pretty transactional’ says Katie later. Despite rejecting his advances, she gets employed and is assigned the gruelling task of weeding for up to 10 hours a day, at a rate of the equivalent of £25 for a six-day week. When Katie asks for different duties, supervisor Samuel Yebei sees this as an opportunity to pressure her to sleep with him in return. After she resists, he gives up, and five weeks later she hasn’t been moved to a better role. One of the women Odula interviews says that she was in such a desperate situation that she was coerced into having sex with Yebei to keep her job and then contracted HIV. We’re told that one reason Yebei has got away with his behaviour is that he is close to Koskei, but complaints have been dismissed before they even reach them. When Katie reports them both to the company’s sexual harassment officer, instead of looking into the matter he just advises her to protect herself. While the documentary was being made, Unilever sold its tea brands and fields to a venture capital company, now operating as Lipton Teas and Infusions, which has suspended the two managers pending an investigation.

A similar culture was found in plantations owned by James Finlay & Co, whose tea is sold by Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Starbucks. Odula speaks with a woman (already suffering from an injury from her work) who refused to have sex with a manager in order to get a job, and regrets that her daughters didn’t make the same decision. She reported harassment but hasn’t had a response. Many of the women interviewed name John Chebochok, a recruiter for James Finlay & Co, as a predator. Katie goes to meet him for a job interview, which she is told will be held in a hotel room. There, he says he will give her money and a job if she has sex with him, which escalates to him pinning her against a window before he gives up and goes. After three months of undercover reporting, Katie quits the plantations and receives counselling. Finlays later said it suspended and reported Chebochok to the police, and is now investigating whether its operation has ‘an endemic issue with sexual violence’.

Panorama’s report from Kenya recalls exposés of similar practices in other organisations. Women in Haiti in poorly paid jobs making clothes for American brands were pressurised by their managers to have sex or have their contracts ended, according to an article published by the Guardian (23 June). In Congo, more than 50 women alleged that aid workers, including some from the World Health Organisation, had demanded sex from them to get or keep jobs as cooks, cleaners and community workers during an Ebola crisis (Reuters, 29/09/20). As in Kenya, the poverty the women were living in often meant they had little choice.

The hierarchies which are built into the capitalist structures of organisations put people like Chebochok, Yebei and Koskei in positions of power. And the wider economic system makes people – women who rely on wages from any work they can get, in this instance – vulnerable to being used by this predatory type of man for their own gratification. Because these managers are enforcing the exploitation of the women through their employment, they also feel entitled to exploit them sexually. They see and treat the women as objects because the system creates the conditions in which this can happen. Reforms and a shift in culture may eventually lessen the threat of sexual abuse for women such as those on the plantations, but won’t address the root cause of the problem.

Mike Foster

Tiny (URL) Tips (2009)

The Tiny Tips column from the November 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

 Who would have thought a wee little packet of fake blood could threaten to unravel an entire culture. But so great is the threat of the “Artificial Virginity Hymen” — a kit that helps women fake their virginity — that prominent Egyptian conservatives are calling for an all-out ban. Not only that, they are also demanding the exile of anyone who traffics it.

[Link.]

  

“What creationists believe about human origins we get from the Bible,” said David Menton an acclaimed anatomist and also a creationist. “The creation of the world takes place on page one of the Bible. If you throw out the first page of the Bible you might as well throw out the whole thing. If you can’t live with the first page then pitch out the remaining thousand pages.”

[Link.]

  

The gap between wealthiest 10 percent and the rest of America is worse than at any time on record. Two thirds of all income gains from 2002-7 went to the top 1 percent. The Walton family alone is worth more than the bottom 100 million Americans combined. Wal-Mart is a major player in the “dead peasants insurance” game; it’s alleged that dead peasant insurance payouts are used for executive bonuses:

[Dead Link.]

  

Amnesty International has highlighted a case of a man facing execution in Texas. The human rights group has revealed a Texas man faces execution after jurors at his trial consulted the Bible when deliberating his fate:

[Dead Link.]

  Israel is making preparations to carry out military attacks in Iran after December, a French magazine reported overnight Wednesday:

[Dead Link.]

  

That Haiti needs the attention cannot be overstated. Unemployment hovers at around 70 percent, experts

say, and over half of the population lives in extreme poverty. Violence broke out in June as students demanded an increase in the minimum wage to $5 from $1.75 — which were daily rates, not hourly ones. Haiti’s extremely low labor costs, comparable to those in Bangladesh, make it so appealing:

[Link.]

  

When the Berlin Wall crumbled, East Germans imagined a life of freedom where consumer goods were abundant and hardships would fade. Ten years later, a remarkable 51% say they were happier with communism. About the same time a new Russian proverb was born: “Everything the Communists said about Communism was a lie, but everything they said about Capitalism turned out to be the truth.”

[Dead Link.]

  

We are fast approaching the time of the next great battle over evolution. The Neo-creationists will be corporations, and they will argue that they could not possibly be descended from human beings…The rape case of Jamie Leigh Jones was just a logical step forward in the long-standing Republican effort to lock Americans out of the nation’s courthouses, an effort undertaken on behalf of corporate supremacy. A woman is gang-raped by her fellow employees at government contractor KBR. The company says her contract prohibits her from seeking justice in court.

[Dead Link.]

The Plundering of Haiti (1945)

From the October 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Haiti was, on the eve of the French Revolution, the richest of all European colonies, for it accounted for no less than two-thirds of the overseas trade of France. Its wealth, drawn from its plantations of sugar, cotton and coffee, was derived from the merciless exploitation of half a million slaves. This island has always reeked of cruelty. The Spaniards exterminated a million natives before they had recourse to the African slave trade. The French were able organisers, but they, too, relied on the lash and reckoned that it paid them to work a negro to death in seven years." 

—H. N. Brailsford, Observer, June 17th, 1945.

Material World: A forlorn and forgotten nation (2022)

The Material World Column from the September 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once described as the ‘Pearl of the Caribbean’ and known as being the world’s first black ex-slave republic, Haiti is now the poorest country in the western hemisphere. According to the World Bank , in 2020 Haiti had a GDP per capita of US$2,925, the lowest in the Latin American and Caribbean region, less than a fifth of the average of US$15,092.

Nearly half of the 11.4m population is food insecure including 1.3 million who are facing the UN’s level 4 classification. Level 5 is the worst level of hunger classification – famine. Resources for humanitarian aid are running out in Haiti and the World Food Program is already facing a shortage of at least US$39 million in funding for Haiti operations.

The country is also enduring political instability following the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse compounded by a devastating earthquake that followed in August.

News media in 2021 showed US Border Patrol guards on horseback whipping Haitians desperate to enter the United States via Mexico and many migrants and asylum seekers have been flown back to Haiti despite having nothing to return to. At the time, it led to the resignation of a senior career diplomat, Daniel Foote, who was the US special envoy for Haiti, in protest over the deportations which he described as ‘inhumane’.

It is a policy that has persisted. The USA in the first seven months of this year forcefully repatriated more than 20,000 Haitians compared to 19,629 for all of 2021, according to statistics from the United Nations’ International Office for Migration.

The numbers of people desperate to flee by attempting the dangerous sea journey to the United States have increased significantly and many have drowned. The US Coast Guard’s website notes that migrants intercepted at sea can be returned to their country of origin ‘without the costly processes required if they had successfully entered the United States.’

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, herself of Haitian origin, said recently, ’I’ve known this president for a very long time. This is very personal to him. He cares about the people…’ (aol.it/3Qru4lW).

One as young as she may not be blamed for not knowing that back in 1994 when Biden was a senator, he said, ‘If Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot in terms of our interest.’

Gang warfare between rival factions, mainly the G9, G-Pèp and the 400 Mawozo in Cité Soleil, an impoverished and densely crowded shanty-town of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, has left many people dead. Outside the urban areas Kokorat San Ras control the highways, extorting and ransoming trucks and buses with impunity, forcing aid agencies to rely on expensive air transport for their supplies.

At least 155 kidnappings took place in the month of June, compared to 118 in May, according to a report released by the Center for Analysis and Research in Human Rights. Families have no alternative but to remain trapped inside their homes, unable to go and fetch food or water.

According to the UN, between 8 and 17 July 2022, over 471 people were killed, injured or unaccounted for. Around 3,000 people have also fled their homes, including hundreds of unaccompanied children, while at least 140 houses have been destroyed or burnt down.

Mumuza Muhindo, head of the local Doctors Without Borders, said, ‘It’s a real battlefield. It’s impossible to estimate how many people have been killed’ (bit.ly/3zJRo7M).

Restricted access to basic health, nutrition and water and sanitation services as a result of escalating violence, coupled with soaring food prices, inflation and food insecurity in Cité Soleil, leave one in five children suffering from acute malnutrition, and one in 20 children living in Cité Soleil at risk of dying.

‘We cannot sit idly by and watch children suffer from malnutrition and its complications,’ said Bruno Maes, UNICEF Haiti Representative (uni.cf/3Jz6OzW).

But that is exactly what is happening.

Haiti’s ruling class are indifferent and do not have a sense of belonging to Haiti, says Leslie Voltaire, a prominent Haitian. ‘They don’t care, because it’s not their country, they have houses in Santo Domingo, Miami, every weekend they go to Miami to buy their things and come back’ (Link).

Some small good news is that the UN Security Council belatedly voted to ban the sale of small arms and ammunition to what it calls ‘non-state actors’ in Haiti.

ALJO

Material World: Do They Know It’s Capitalism? (2011)

The Material World column from the August 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Everybody knows that, despite the best efforts of scientists, nobody can predict the next natural disaster with any confidence. That’s one reason why planners and decision-makers don’t take better precautions, a fact which gives critics good reason after the event to mount their telescopic hindsights and take aim. Given the same science, socialism would obviously be no better at prediction. The question is whether it would be more careful in taking precautions.

The United Nations currently tries to take a formal Health & Safety approach to the subject, with risk assessments, control measures and all the other tedious but important policies workers know from the workplace (UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction at http://www.unisdr.org/who-we-are/what-is-drr). But, as workers will know from their own workplaces, the devil is in the enforcement. In a private property society one simply does not have the option of moving a population from a high-risk area to an adjacent low-risk one. Nor is the UN able to force national governments to comply where spending money is involved, despite the financial costs of ignoring the problems. According to the UNISDR, the year 2011 was already, by July, the highest ever loss-year on record, largely thanks to the Sendai earthquake, but the general trend is worsening: ‘the risk of economic loss is now rising faster than wealth creation’. According to an Oxfam report last year, 250 million people a year are affected by natural disasters of which around 98 percent are weather-related. And they are getting worse. The rate of weather disasters in poor countries has tripled since 1980, one suspected cause being climate change (http://www.350resources.org.uk/ 2011/05/23/).

But how ‘natural’ are these natural disasters? The report’s author is scathing on the matter: 

‘There is nothing natural about poor people being on climate’s front line. Poverty, poor governance, patchy investment in the preparation and prevention of disasters all stack the odds against the most vulnerable. The future is going to be very bleak for millions of poor people without a shake-up of the ways we prepare and respond to disasters, and without real progress on reducing poverty and addressing climate change.’

In its obsessive attention to individual bank balances, capitalism cannot even respond properly when a ‘natural’ disaster threatens not thousands but millions, when the imminence is well established, and when the cause is known and the solutions are straightforward.

People older than 40 will clearly remember the Ethiopia famine of 1984-5, the iconic, tragic pictures, the gut-wrenched reports from seasoned reporters fighting down tears, the gradual, dawning realisation by the whole world of a disaster of biblical proportions, the Live Aid concerts, Feed the World and Do They Know It’s Christmas? The UN estimated that eight million people were affected in that famine and that one million died. It seems almost beyond comprehension that, in spite of the songs and the sentiments and the coins in the tin, the world could allow the same thing to happen to the children and grandchildren of those survivors.

At the time of writing the developing crisis in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan and Djibouti is not on any front pages yet already is being described as the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. With up to twelve million people affected it threatens to dwarf the 1984-5 famine. Nature, in one of its typically mercurial moods, decided to prolong its dry La Niña cycle so that the rains have failed for the last three successive rainy seasons, making it the worst regional drought in 60 years. As famine takes hold, local food prices have rocketed, exacerbating the problem. Regional fighting in Eritrea and Somalia has complicated matters further, while the Ethiopian government response has been poor and Somalia’s government response has of course been non-existent.

Yet the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has been predicting this crisis for months: ‘The FAO repeatedly issued warnings about the effects of La Niña, but few contingency plans were put in place. That is why there is a shortfall of about 40 percent in the money needed to tackle the crisis’ (New Scientist, 9 July).

It surely can’t only be socialists who understand that the main reason for this disaster-in-the-making is that the people concerned are black, they’ve got no money, they’ve got nothing anybody wants, and that’s why they’re going to die. It can’t have escaped notice that disasters which strike poor people are always more disastrous than those that strike the better-off. Any lingering doubts on this question should have been dispelled by the events of the recent Haiti earthquake.

Haiti was of course hit by a natural disaster nobody could foresee, followed by cholera unfortunately brought in, it seems, by a UN contingent sent there to help. But Haiti, the poorest country on Earth, is nevertheless on America’s doorstep, under the eyes of the world’s press, and images of spectacular urban destruction helped motivate the world to action. It is also a small country, easy to cover from the air, with a road system. The Horn of Africa is remote, huge and inaccessible, and besides there is nothing spectacular or newsworthy about hunger. It hides behind the news like perpetual background noise, audible but not quite loud enough to make it onto our busy agendas.

Until it surges into the limelight on those rare occasions when ‘perfect famine’ conditions combine to force it into the headlines. And then everybody blames the victims for overbreeding because they can’t be bothered to find out the real reasons, and bungs a tenner to Oxfam because they can’t be bothered to find out the real solutions. And they won’t blame the social system, because like the weather it’s just a fact of life, it’s always there and it can’t be changed.

But humans have already managed accidentally to change the global weather system. The urgent task for socialists is to make humans realise they can deliberately change the economic system too. Such a realisation will be too late for the people starving right now in East Africa. But it would make sure that nobody ever starves again, anywhere. Nature is not our worst enemy, capitalism is. Feed the world? First, free the world.

Paddy Shannon

Material World: Dedicated to serving the rich: the reality of aid (2010)

The Material World column from the March 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

“CARE: Dedicated to serving the poorest of the poor.” So reads a wall poster at the Haiti offices of the “humanitarian” agency CARE International. The offices are housed in a mansion in a wealthy district up in the hills above Port-au-Prince, at a hygienic distance from the poor people they are “dedicated to serve”.

Well, you can’t expect the respectable ladies and gentlemen who administer aid to live and work down in the filth and stench of the shantytowns. Of course, you can’t blame the poor for the lack of sewers, but still…

The aid administrators realise that they need the assistance of people who do know something about the poor and are capable of interacting with them. So they hire specialists called anthropologists, who acquire the requisite knowledge and skill as trainees by living for a time among poor people (formally in order to gather material for their Ph.D. theses).

But some trainees “go native”. They come to sympathise with their temporary neighbours and feel the urge to talk about inconvenient realities that they have discovered. This annoys the administrators, who label them “idealists” and say they have “a negative attitude”. It would be quite unsuitable to appoint them to responsible positions in aid agencies.

An eye-opening book has just appeared, written by just such a chatterbox: Timothy T. Schwartz, Travesty in Haiti. No publisher would touch it, so he published it himself.

Charity for the rich

Very little aid ever reaches the poor, let alone the poorest of the poor. This is partly due to the practical difficulty that the poorest areas also have the poorest infrastructure (roads, storage facilities, etc.). But mainly it is because those who are supposed to distribute the aid sell most of it and pocket the proceeds.

In some cases, aid goes directly to the rich. Schwartz describes an “orphanage” run by an American reverend where the “orphans” have parents who could easily afford to provide for them. The place is really an elite boarding school. Meanwhile, naïve churchgoers back in the States, most of them ordinary working people, fork out to support the “poor orphans” they have “adopted”, send them gifts, and even pay for their college education. The poor in rich countries give charity to the rich in poor countries.

The more aid, the more misery

Schwartz’ most important finding is this. When the flow of food aid into Haiti increases, the overall result is that malnutrition becomes more widespread, not less. Why? The great majority of Haitians are small farmers, dependent on selling food to meet their non-food needs. Typically, natural disaster prompts the decision to send food aid, but by the time it arrives the emergency is over and the country may well be right in the middle of a bumper harvest. The effect is to drive prices down further, causing enormous misery throughout the rural areas.

It seems commonsense. If you see hungry people on TV, so you give money to buy and send them food. But capitalism has a perverse logic of its own that has nothing to do with commonsense. Reactions that ignore that logic are liable to do more harm than good.

Some experts and charities – notably, Oxfam – advocate aid in the form of cash transfers. Then food for distribution can be bought locally instead of imported, strengthening rather than undermining the local peasant economy. Local supply would also be quicker and easier to organise.

Nevertheless, most aid agencies, and especially those like CARE that are dependent on Western governments, keep on shipping in food. They even require their national affiliates to cover operating expenses by selling part of the food received locally (“monetised food”).

Expanding export markets

US overseas food aid began in 1954. Until recently it was openly justified as a foreign policy tool and means of promoting American business interests. In particular, it has expanded export markets for US agriculture. Dumping surpluses abroad has helped the US and the EU maintain prices and profits on their domestic markets.

According to the website of the US Agency for International Development, aid was used to transform Egypt from a food exporter in competition with the US into a net importer of food with a low-wage industrial sector. Since the 1980s Western governments and financial institutions pursued the same strategy in Haiti. The country was turned from an exporter into an importer of rice, sugar, and other crops, while 100,000 peasants abandoned the land to work for $2 a day in assembly plants, mostly US-owned, making T-shirts, jeans, and the like for the American market. This new industrial sector has now also largely collapsed, leaving Haiti to depend increasingly on the Columbian drugs trade.

A striking illustration of the commercial interests underlying aid is the fate of the Haitian pig. Farmers used to rely on a small black pig well adapted to conditions in rural Haiti. USAID had these pigs exterminated under the pretext of fighting a swine fever epidemic. The Haitian pig was replaced with a large white pig from Iowa that had to be fed large quantities of imported US corn.

Do they know?

Do the aid administrators understand what they are doing? It is clear from Schwartz that they understand very well. When he “reveals” his sensational findings, they do not argue that he is wrong. They just advise him that if he wants a job he should stop saying things that the US government does not want to hear. They know who they really serve.

Stefan.

In Material World February issue we didn’t mean to write that the poll showed that people with high incomes were more likely to be favourable to the word “socialism” than those with low but the opposite, so:

“Women are slightly more likely than men to prefer ‘socialism’; people with low incomes (under $40,000 per year) more than twice as likely as people with high incomes (over $75,000); and blacks almost twice as likely as whites, with equal proportions favouring ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ (31 percent each).”

The Haitian Tragedy (2010)

From the April 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Haiti spent more, in 2008 servicing the country’s debts than it did on health, education and the environment.

In our February issue (Haiti—an un-natural disaster) we noted that the earthquake in Haiti, and similar disasters, are presented as unavoidable disasters; and that, to some extent, this is true. But we stated that it is not a coincidence that the number of victims is clearly related to the degree of their poverty. This was true regarding the Asian tsunami and the Katrina hurricane in New Orleans.

Seumas Milne also says (Guardian, 21 January) that “It is uncontested that poverty is the main cause of the horrific death toll: the product of teeming shacks, and the absence of health and public infrastructure.” In his view, this is the direct consequence of an uniquely brutal relationship with the outside world—notably the US, France and Britain, stretching back centuries. There is some truth in this, although not all Haitians were, or are, poor.

Says Milne:

  Punished for the success of its uprising against slavery and self-proclaimed first black republic of 1804 with invasion, blockade and a crushing burden of debt reparations, only finally paid off in 1947, Haiti was occupied by the US between the wars and squeezed mercilessly by multiple creditors.

For decades, the US backed the dictatorships of the Duvaliers. Just 30 years ago Haiti was self-sufficient in its staple of rice. In the mid-1990s, however, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forced it to slash tariffs, and the US dumped its subsidised surpluses on Haiti. Most of the peasant farmers were forced out of business, squatted in Port-au-Prince, and many will have died in the earthquake. The United States also imposed lending conditions on the country, forcing the government to privatise the already minimal health, education and public services, and cut back the minimum wage.

The Duvalier Dictatorships and the CIA

From 1957 to 1971 Haiti was ruled by François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and, following his death, by his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc”, both “anointed” “President for Life”. The US trained and armed Haiti’s counter-insurgency force, although much American military aid was covertly channelled through Israel.

After “Baby Doc” was forced into exile to France in February 1986 (in a US Air Force jet), the United States continued, now quite openly, military aid, supplying the Haitian Army with trucks, communications gear etc. in order “to maintain order”. Between the departure of “Baby Doc” and the date scheduled for elections in November 1987, the administrations were responsible for the deaths of more civilians than “Baby Doc” managed in 15 years of dictatorship. Meanwhile, the CIA managed to “spring” from prison two of Duvalier’s notorious police chiefs, and send them into exile, saving them from certain execution.

Haiti has never had a mass, reformist working-class party. In 1930 two “intellectuals”, Max Hudicourt and Jacques Roumain, attempted to form a communist party, but it was largely stillborn. In 1946 a clergyman by the name of Félix d’Orléans Juste Constant, founded the Parti Communiste d’Haiti (PCH). It too disbanded the following year. Shortly after a rival quasi-communist party, the Parti Socialiste Populaire (PSP), was founded. It disintegrated rapidly by 1949. But in 1959 Roger Gaillard, a former member of the PSP, founded the Parti Populaire de Libération Nationale (PPLN), which claimed to be a mass, nationwide organisation; it was badly weakened by police harassment and repression by 1965. It was basically reformist, with much in common with Fidel Castro’s 26 July movement.

Aristide the Priest

At the time of “Baby Doc”’s flight to France, there was one man who did have a mass following, particularly in Port-au-Prince. He was Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest and advocate of “liberation theology”; but looked upon by opponents, both in Haiti and in America, as a revolutionary, but in fact a populist reformer. He denounced the upcoming military-dominated elections, and urged his followers to boycott the elections, saying “The army is our first enemy.” He was condemned by the Vatican.

The elections were scheduled for the 29 November 1987—the CIA funded a number of candidates. In the event, the elections were postponed ostensibly because of unrest and violence in the country. According to William Blum in Killing Hope, “…the candidate favored by the military government was declared the winner in balloting widely perceived as rigged”. Writing in 1994, Blum continued:

  There followed more than two years of regular political violence, coup attempts and repression, casting off the vestiges of the Duvalier dictatorship, and establishing a new one, until, in March 1990, the current military dictator, General Prosper April, was forced by widespread protests to abdicate, and was forced by a civilian government of sorts, but with the military still calling the shots. (p. 371)

Pressured by the United States, the Haitian government called an election later in the year. Reluctantly, Aristide became a candidate of a coalition of reformist organisations. Despite intimidation, Aristide was victorious with 67.5 percent of the vote. He took office in February 1991, after a coup attempt against him failed in January.

And so Jean-Bertrand Aristide became President of Haiti.

But he did not even get any reformist legislation enacted by Parliament. Nevertheless, the military was much concerned by the arrest of a number of para-military thugs, his policies against drug smuggling, and his attempts to depoliticise the army. Aristide was, however, not anti-business. He encouraged American capitalists, and to please the IMF, he fired 2,000 government workers.

It was all to no avail. In less than 8 months, on 29 September 1991, Aristide was successfully deposed by a military coup, in which hundreds of his supporters were massacred and thousands fled to the Dominican Republic. He was saved from being murdered by the French ambassador. The new military dictatorship was largely supported by the local bourgeoisie. And the Vatican immediately recognised the government. The Bush Sr administration unofficially gave its blessing. Haiti was back to “normal”.

Aristide’s Return

In the summer of 1993 the United Nations mediated talks between Aristide, living in exile in Washington, and the Haitian military government; the leader of the junta, General Cédras, would step down by October, and Aristide would return as president. But October came and went without the military permitting Aristide to return. Indeed, they stepped up their repression of his supporters, including the assassination of his justice minister, Guy Malary. Meanwhile, the CIA spread rumours in Haiti that Aristide was mentally ill. It was not true.

An organisation of American States (OAS) human rights team accused the Haitian military regime of “murder, rape, kidnapping, detention and torture in a systematic campaign” to terrorise all those Haitians wanting a return to democracy. Amnesty International reported the same. The Clinton administration in Washington wanted the military out of power, but without actually having to do anything, including invading the country. Nevertheless, changing tactics, the CIA, with numerous agents in Haiti, launched a major covert operation to topple the military regime. It was not a success. But change was a’coming.

In September 1994, the Clinton administration told the Haitian military leaders they had just four weeks to resign. The US would have to take control. Yet again. So, on 19 September US forces began to arrive in Haiti. Initially, they were welcomed by the majority of the population; they first arrested, disarmed and also shot many of the former Haitian military; and permitted some of the leaders to escape into exile. And they sealed off, and protected the homes of many of the local capitalist élite, “Washington’s natural allies” (Los Angeles Times, 1 October 1994).

Jean-Bertrand Aristide returned to Haiti in mid-October, courtesy of the US army. He received, in the words of William Blum, a reception of “joyous celebration”. But, unbeknown to a majority of his supporters, he was somewhat different Aristide who had, three years previously, been disposed and exiled to Washington. In the words of the Los Angeles Times (1 October 1994):

Almost every aspect of Aristide’s plans for resuming power—from taxing the rich to disarming the military—has been examined by the US officials with whom the Haitian President meets daily, and by officials of World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other aid organisations. The finished package clearly reflects their priorities. Aristide has obviously toned down the liberation theology and class-struggle rhetoric that was his signature before he was exiled to Washington.

Indeed, Aristide embraced market economics with zeal and enthusiasm. He also agreed to publicly announce that he would not attempt to stay in office to make up the time he had lost in exile. So much for the firebrand priest—even as a reformer.

Haiti—a Client State

In Killing Hope William Blum claimed that Haiti’s international function will be to serve “transnational corporations” by opening the country up to further investment and commerce, with minimum tariffs and other restrictions; and offering itself, primarily in assembly industries, and as a source of export labour. He added: “What appears to be certain is that the rich will grow richer, and the poor will remain at the very bottom of Latin America’s heap.” Under Aristide’s successor, it can only get worse. As Seumas Milne observed, new IMF loans require Haiti to raise electricity prices, and to freeze all public sector pay, where the majority exist on less than two dollars a day.

Infant mortality rate is about 80 per 1,000 (neighbouring Cuba’s rate is 5.8). Around 50 percent of Haiti’s adults remain illiterate. Former president Bill Clinton wants to build up Haiti’s export-processing zones,. But, as Milne comments, “… more sweatshop assembly of products neither made nor sold in Haiti won’t develop its economy nor provide a regular income for the majority”. Haiti currently owes the IMF around a billion dollars. Gary Young, writing in the Guardian (1 February), reported that Haiti spent more, in 2008, servicing the country’s debts than it did on health, education and the environment.

Meanwhile, the United States pours thousand of heavily-armed troops into the country (yet again). and “The Street”, a US investment website, says that the earthquake provides such American corporations as General Electric, Jacobs Engineering and Flour, with the opportunity and potential to benefit. Of course.

Following the earthquake, a commentator on French television advised his viewers and listeners that “Haiti is not a suitable place to take a vacation.” He can say that again.

Peter E. Newell

Haiti – an un-natural disaster (2010)

From the February 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Earthquakes are inevitable, but the death toll is not

The earthquake in Haiti and similar misfortunes are presented as unavoidable natural disasters. To some extent, this is true. But it ignores the consequences of the deliberate pursuit of profit at the expense of environmental protection. It is not a coincidence that the number of victims of recent disasters such as the Asian tsunami and the Katrina hurricane and now Haiti are clearly related to the degree of their poverty.

The reality with earthquakes is they kill only if we let them. They are inevitable, but the death toll is not.

It is collapsing buildings that take lives, not tremors in the ground. Throughout the animal kingdom, creatures have adapted to survive in their surroundings, but in our environment, where earthquakes are a fact of life, though nature challenges us to do something to protect ourselves, capitalism compels us to surrender safety to monetary profits and savings. No matter how severe earthquakes are, if buildings were properly built in the first place, then the vast majority of people would survive.

This does not happen under capitalism, particularly in poorer countries, since the unavoidable pressure to make and save money affects what does, or more importantly, does not happen. There are pressures to build quickly and slapdashly to meet housing needs by landless labourers forced by poverty to find work in urban areas; inferior materials and construction methods are used in accordance with market forces, with poor people getting poorly-built homes; building inspectors are persuaded by politicians or back-handers to ignore breaches of rules so that businesses get the cheap employees they want and workers get hovels they can afford; landowners lobby governments, hand over party ‘donations’ or resort to simple bribery to have new housing built on their land, even if it is unsuitable or downright dangerous. With, moneyless, socialism human needs and safety come second to nothing.

Though seismologists don’t know precisely where or when earthquakes may strike, general areas of risk are identifiable. In a socialist society, how we respond to this information would be very different. There would be far greater freedom for those in danger to move to safer areas—action under capitalism that can involve huge financial losses from writing off unsafe homes, shifting businesses to where workers then live, adapting that region’s infrastructure to aid in exploiting the new workforce etc. And those who, for whatever reason, chose to reside in seismic zones, they would then have access to the best buildings capable of withstanding the most powerful of quakes.

Although Japanese and Californian architects have designed ‘active buildings‘, some on top of massive rubber shock absorbers or with computerised counterbalancing systems that identify and counteract seismic shocks, what’s the likelihood of such sophisticated technology being used under capitalism on multi-storey dwellings in poverty-stricken areas for workers on subsistence wages? Using superior designs, building methods and materials, there is no reason why populated areas should suffer any loss of life or major disruption after experiencing very powerful quakes.

The surviving victims of the disaster in Haiti need food, fresh water, clothing, medication and many other items. Some of those needs are being met, but not nearly enough. Governments of the richer countries have offered niggardly help. Ordinary citizens, appalled by the extent of the tragedy as revealed by the media, have responded generously to appeals by the charities. In times of natural disasters volunteers are never lacking, nor slow to offer assistance, whether practical or monetary. Humans are endowed with the ability to sympathise and empathise with their fellow humans. Humans derive great pleasure from doing good, are at their best when faced with the worst and will go to extraordinary lengths to help alleviate the suffering of others.

Most natural dangers are well known and socialism would not need to leave communities exposed to them. This would avoid many disasters. Also, contingency plans would exist throughout the regions and at a world level for the relief of any catastrophe. Emergency supplies of food, clean water, medical supplies would be maintained at strategic points whilst machinery, equipment and helpers would be moved quickly to the area of crisis. The present appeals for money are a pathetic substitute for the availability of real resources and the freedom that communities in socialism would have to immediately use them.

We have access to more comprehensive information and news coverage about world disasters than any previous generation of humans, and yet it appears that people don’t feel driven to bring about an end to such catastrophes. It seems our society has been influenced to believe that nothing can be done. That big death tolls from quakes, volcanoes or droughts are inevitable. What efforts do the media make to change this, by explaining both capitalism’s culpability and socialism’s solutions? If people don’t understand, then all there will be are yet more channel-changing ‘Not-another-disaster. There’s-nothing-I-can-do’ indifference.

– from the Socialist Party’s blog Socialism or Your Money Back .

Tiny Tips (2010)

The Tiny Tips column from the February 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The migrants are managed by a Mafia-run employment system, the caporalato, that operates like a 21st century chain gang. Saviano says that those who object to low wages or poor working conditions are simply eliminated — and not just by a pink slip. “It’s a military system. The farm and factory owners employ the Mafia caporali to bring the workers. The immigrants wait on the roads, the caporali pick them up and take them to the work. If they complain, they get killed.” 

[Dead Link.]

Despite more than a dozen international conventions banning slavery in the past 150 years, there are more slaves today than at any point in human history:

[Dead Link.]

Civil freedoms around the world lost ground for the fourth straight year in 2009 with Iraq improving, Afghanistan falling back and China acting as if it were under siege by its own citizens, Freedom House said on Tuesday. Bahrain, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Yemen moved into “not free” category, raising the total to 47 from 42 in 2008. The number of electoral democracies fell from 119 to 116, the lowest since 1995: 

[Dead Link.]

Workers at a Sussex-based electronics firm were today left “devastated” after being told in a video message that manufacturing at their factories is to end and 220 jobs moved to Korea and the Czech Republic:

[Link.]

Zuma famously likes to spend as much time as possible among his cattle in his native homestead at Nkandla, in northern KwaZulu-Natal province, where he is building a huge palace. In South Africa, R3m (£250,000) buys a pretty decent house, but Zuma’s new house there is costing R65m (£5.4m). ..It is a strange sight. Zuma, brought to power with the support of the ANC left, the trade unions and communist party, is ever more imitative of the Zulu monarchy – even down to the leopard-skin attire. It may have nothing to do with socialism, but then nor do, or did, the quasi-royal dynasties of many communist states such as the Kims of North Korea, Romania’s Ceausescus and the Zhivkovs of Bulgaria. And it should not be thought that these contradictions are embarrassing to Zuma. On the contrary, he is having the time of his life: 

[Link.]

One of the most callous reactions to the Haiti disaster thus far has come from televangelist Pat Robertson, who told viewers of his Christian Broadcasting Network on Wednesday morning that he knew the real reason for the quake: The country’s long-standing pact with Satan: 

[Dead Link.]

It has emerged that Kim Kardashian, the American reality television star, commands at least $10,000 per post. Many of Kardashian’s tweets are mundane - “I must have pinched a nerve in my neck . . .  I need a massage” - but when she mentions advertisers such as Nestle or the fast-food chain Carl’s Jr, she receives four-figure sums:

[Dead Link.]

Islands in the Doldrums (1962)

From the June 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Oil and sunshine 

Keeps the Yankees looking fine: 

Oil and sunshine, 

With a glass of local wine

Oil, sunshine, and Yankees. Perhaps the composer of this recently popular calypso was more interested in the local wine, but he summed up the importance of the West Indies in the modern world neatly enough.

Trinidad’s oil is the most important mineral product of the West Indies. Sunshine and a satisfactory rainfall allow crops (the most important being sugarcane) which form the basis of most of the islands’ economy. Lastly, the American Government keeps a stern, albeit paternal eye on the Caribbean as an important “outpost of democracy” and guardian of the eastern approaches to the Panama Canal.

But what are the West Indies? The term is in fact little more than an abstraction. To British people they mean those collections of islands forming the West Indies Federation. The French refer to les Antilles and mean particularly the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique and French Guiana. Then there are the islands of the Dutch West Indies, the ’‘independent” island of Cuba, the American Virgin Islands, the twin “independent” states of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and the American satellite state of Puerto Rico. And what about the neighbouring mainland countries: British Guiana and British Honduras, Dutch Guiana (Surinam), and the Central American states bordering on the Caribbean? Do not their strategic positions and trading potentials label them as parts of the West Indies?

The truth is that the West Indies are a widespread collection of islands (Jamaica and Trinidad are 1,000 miles apart), possibly associated with countries on the South American mainland, with different cultural backgrounds, with people speaking many different languages, and having different economic affiliations to European and American colonial powers.

Little wonder that a succession of fact-finding committees and international committees of experts, have been sorely tried to propound a solution, within the framework of capitalism, for the ills of this economic, cultural, and political hodge-podge. And, as we shall see, problems there certainly are, especially for that section of the West Indian population which must seek an employer in order to live—the working class.

If the West Indies’ future is uncertain and unpromising, at least their past may be described with some accuracy: a past that exemplifies colonial expansion, capitalist accumulation of wealth, and the subjugation of a working class, with all the romance and colour of a Hollywood movie.

Search for Gold

The recorded history of the West Indies starts with their discovery by Columbus at the end of the fifteenth century. Columbus believed, and claimed, that he had found islands off the coast of Eastern Asia—hence the name West “Indies.”

The islands were already inhabited by tribes of aboriginal Indians, the Arawaks and the Caribs. These unfortunate Indians (the only "original” West Indians, despite Negro nationalist propaganda) were either destroyed or subjugated by the European settlers.

Following Columbus' various expeditions, the then strong Spanish crown founded a Spanish empire in the Caribbean and South America. Cuba and Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) were the bases from which forces sailed for the conquest of Mexico, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the lands in South America.

The driving force was the search for gold. More and more Spanish settlers arrived in quest of this, bringing with them the Spanish form, of municipal government (the cabildo), vestiges of which later continued under British rule. They also brought agricultural stock—rice, citrus fruit trees, bananas, and, most important of all, sugar-cane. Local crops were limited, the most important being maize, cassava (bread-stuff), and tobacco.

The search for gold proved fruitless on the whole but in the words of Parry and Sherlock, “The story of sugar is a continuous thread running through the whole history of the West Indies.” Because most of the West Indian islands are hilly and therefore have limited areas of arable land, the only economical crop was found to be one which gave a high yield per acre and a high price; it was mainly

because of these factors that sugar and not cotton became the staple crop. Furthermore, sugar can be grown by unskilled labour and does not exhaust the ground.

The shortage of labour (both skilled and unskilled) to grow, harvest, mill, and process the crop (sugar-cane must be milled and processed soon after harvesting) became a pressing problem for the Spanish land-owners: there were virtually no “free” labourers, very few “forced” labourers, and the Arawaks and Caribs were either extinct or unfitted for life as agricultural labourers. The first batch of Negro slaves from the West Coast of Africa to supply these labour needs were shipped by the Spanish to the West Indies early in the sixteenth century.

The forty-year period of economic and territorial domination of the West Indies by Spain was broken by the outbreak of war with France in 1536, and from that date France, Spain, Holland, and England were in more or less constant conflict over possession of the islands, trade routes, and trading rights. Admirals Drake and Hawkins were the most illustrious of England’s band of official pirates. Unofficial pirates, or buccaneers (the most famous being Captain Morgan), operated with the approval of colonial governors against Spanish settlements and shipping, and were paid by booty.

Islands were captured and re-captured. Barbados was the only island taken by England which never changed hands. Jamaica was taken by the British in the middle of the seventeenth century; this was a great prize, for a contemporary described Jamaica as “lying in the very belly of all commerce.” Trinidad was captured from the Spanish by the French, and by the British from the French in 1797, during the Napoleonic wars. Eventually, mainly because of superior sea power and possession of the only two naval dockyards (Port Royal in Jamaica and English Harbour in Antigua), Britain became the dominant imperialist power in the Caribbean.

The growth of the trade in sugar and the trade in men went hand in hand.

French and English settlers soon discovered that, along with cotton, West Indian tobacco (which was found to be inferior to the Virginian type) were not profitable crops; for reasons already given, and because the demand for it in Europe was growing steadily, sugar became the main crop.

Considerable capital was needed to establish a sugar factory, and a plantation had to be large enough to keep the factory supplied with sugar-cane; it is thus easy to see why the small sugar-cane holdings were soon swallowed up by large estates and why eventually the industry fell into the hands of a few capitalists. Today, for example, all the large estates and ail the factories in Trinidad are owned by Tate and Lyle.

Indentured Labour

There was soon a cry for labour to work the estates and the factories. First of all, indentured (“free") labourers were brought from Europe, with the promise of smallholdings at the end of their contracts (if they lived that long). When virtually all the arable land had been swallowed up by the large estates, the supply of indentured labourers rapidly dwindled. Political prisoners (“Royalists" and Irish) and convicted felons were shipped: these were dubbed “white slaves” by the Negroes and were treated as badly as, if not worse than, the Negro slaves. But these were not enough to satisfy the needs of the profit-hungry sugar owners and so, like the Spanish and Portuguese before them, the French and English planters had to buy slaves, mostly Negroes from the West Coast of Africa.

The slave traders were as anxious to sell their human commodities as the plantation owners were to buy them. By the middle of the seventeenth century a steady stream of slaves was leaving Sierra Leone, the Niger Delta, and the Slave and Ivory Coasts to face disease and death in the overcrowded slave ships, and an uncertain future of back-breaking toil at the hands of the rapacious sugar planters. Barbados had a few hundred Negroes in 1640, but by 1645 there were over 6,000, and in 1685 no less than 46,000.

There were few white sugar owners and overseers to control this rising black tide of resentful, sullen and undisciplined slaves, many of whom came from warlike tribes. Soon isolated uprisings caused severe penalties to be imposed; typical of such repressive acts of legislation was the French Code Noir.

The slave trade was one of the most profitable enterprises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—for the owners of the slave ships. The death-rate among the crews of the “slavers” was usually about the same as among the slaves they carried. Although the Spanish started the slave trade, eventually four countries (Portugal, Holland, England, and France) gained control. There was much competition between the various powers over the monopoly of such a lucrative business and to put a stop to keen Dutch competition Charles II of England granted a charter to the “Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading into Africa” in 1663. This slave-trading organisation later became the Royal Africa Company, about which Parry and Sherlock say: “Several members of the royal family were shareholders in this enterprise, which was to supply the English sugar colonies with 3,000 slaves a year at an average price of £17, or one ton of sugar, per slave. The purchase price in Africa at that time was about £3.”

The first European war to be fought over the West Indies began in 1739 between England, Spain, and France. It was frankly called a “war of trade,” and was dubbed “the war of Jenkin’s ear” after an English sea captain who complained to parliament of Spanish hindrance to his trading activities in the Caribbean. From this time the three powers fought intermittently until the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, and many islands changed hands. For the English ruling class, this was a golden opportunity to cripple French sugar production by destroying both crops and machines and by capturing slaves. This period of imperialist skirmishing (which included the Seven Years’ War) was influenced, to the disadvantage of the English ruling class, by the American war of Independence, which drew English military and naval reserves from the Caribbean.

Plantation System

Despite wars and rumours of wars, however, for the sugar owners in the West Indian islands, the eighteenth century was probably the period of greatest prosperity. But it was also during this peak period of “plantation economy" that the seeds of future economic problems were sown, problems which teams of economic “experts,” government committees, etc., are attempting to solve to this day. The most important defect in the plantation system was monoculture, the growing of one crop. Other features were slavery, absentee ownership (most plantation owners lived in England and left the running of their estates to bailiffs), and the dependence of the traders on markets in the outside world.

To make matters worse, economic problems in the Caribbean have periodically been accentuated by natural disasters (hurricanes, droughts, and epidemic disease, such as cholera and yellow fever), from which some islands have taken years to recover.

However hard the planters tried, they were powerless to prevent their slaves learning about the world outside the slave compounds. It was thus inevitable that at the turn of the nineteenth century “leaders” emerged from, the ranks of the slaves: men who had heard the rallying cry of the French Revolution. “liberty, .equality, and fraternity,” and preached that this slogan should apply to slaves as well as to the plantation owners.

Slave Labour

Unrest and rebellion spread among the slaves and in 1791 the slave population of the northern plain of Saint-Domingue (later to be renamed Haiti) revolted, systematically firing some fields and houses and murdering the white inhabitants. Out of this bloody rising, during which both sides acted with the utmost savagery, arose the first Negro slave leader to prove himself competent both as a military commander and as a politician—Toussaint "L'ouverture.”

Movements for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade had for some years before the uprisings also been gaining strength in liberal circles in Britain. Various governments declared the slave trade illegal between the years 1808-1820 and slavery was abolished in all the West Indian colonies, except the Spanish, by the middle of the nineteenth century.

The erstwhile slaves soon found that they had exchanged one form of slavery for another. As one historian points out, “the Act which abolished slavery did not emancipate the slaves . . . As a social institution slavery disappeared . . . and it came back as a system of industry, the negroes . . . having to work as slaves for so many hours a week.”

Slavery was also a very mixed blessing for the plantation owners. It is true that the owners were reasonably assured of a constant supply of labourers who could not leave the plantations: following “emancipation” many ex-slaves left for more congenial work or to run smallholdings. But slave-labour was not very productive and the slave owners were bound to feed, clothe, and shelter their slaves. Sugar farming is largely seasonal. but the owners could not dispense with their slaves after the crop was harvested and processed as they now can with their wage-workers.

Michael La Touche

[To be concluded]

Tiny Tips (2011)

The Tiny Tips column from the June 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The African nation of Congo has been called the worst place on earth to be a woman. A new study released Wednesday shows that it’s even worse than previously thought: 1,152 women are raped every day, a rate equal to 48 per hour. That rate is 26 times more than the previous estimate of 16,000 rapes reported in one year by the United Nations:

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The textbook’s “Origin of Life” chapter details lab experiments that have failed to create life from inorganic materials, concluding that there is a huge gap between “life” and “non-life”. But from there it makes the considerable leap that biological explanations for the origin of life are discredited.

“[T]he legitimate scientific hypothesis,” it argues, is that “life on Earth is the result of intelligent causes.”

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A United Nations report on the cholera outbreak that has sickened 300,000 Haitians since last fall, killing nearly 5,000, finds evidence to suggest that the disease may have originated at a United Nations military camp north of the capital, which spilled raw sewage into a tributary of the Artibonite River.

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Indian environmentalist-philosopher Vandana Shiva has said for years that microfinance is only a solution in a particular context. “But credit, loans and money circulation cannot solve the problems of alienation,” she stressed. “Privatisation of water leading to a high cost of water could be financed by flows of credit, but the solution to access is really about the basic right to water.”

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Migrants are crammed into catastrophically damaged vessels that would normally end up as scrap. Few have radios and GPS is non-existent. If the weather turns without warning, as it so often does in the Mediterranean at this time of year, a crammed and barely stable craft quickly becomes a sinking coffin. The result is a weekly litany of deaths on a scale that would lead the front pages of every European newspaper were the victims white…

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Despite growing controversy about the cost and relevance of aircraft carriers, navies around the world are adding new ones to their inventories at a pace unseen since World War II. The U.S. — with more carriers than all other nations combined — and established naval powers such as Britain, France and Russia are doing it. So are Brazil, India and China — which with Russia form the BRIC grouping of emerging economic giants.

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Doomsday predictor Robert Fitzpatrick remains in Times Sq. facing the reality of his false claims of apocalypse. He said: “I don’t know what happened. I don’t understand. I did what I had to do. I’m just surprised – I obviously haven’t understood it properly because we’re still here,” he said. “Let’s just say I’m surprised that nothing has happened – everything in the bible indicated it.”

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