The crusade for gold (1963)

Book Reviews from the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Conquest of New Spain. Bernel Diaz. Translated by J. M. Cohen. Penguin Books, 6s.

Chronicles of the Crusades. Villehardouin and Joinville. Translated by M. R. B. Shaw. Penguin Books, 5s.

Many books have been written about Hernando Cortes and the conquest of Mexico. Many more still have been written about the Crusades. But very few books on either event came from those who were there at the time, and even of these only a handful have survived.

Penguin Books have recently had the happy idea of publishing translations of three of these personal histories. In the first, The Conquest of New Spain, Bernal Diaz, a humble soldier in the Cortes expedition, gives his account of how several hundred Spanish adventurers with a few dozen horses invaded the powerful Aztec empire, overthrew its ruler Montezuma, and conquered his capital of Mexico. The second book, Chronicles of the Crusades, combines two stories: of the Fourth Crusade seen through the eyes of a French feudal lord, Villehardouin, and of the Seventh by a later compatriot Joinville.

Roughly three hundred years separate these two periods, three hundred years which saw the final crumbling of feudalism before the forces of expansion in which the discovery of the New World played such an overwhelming part. The books reflect the deep gulf between the two societies, but even more interesting and striking is the way they reveal the factor common to both of them—the drive of economic interest.

All three histories purport to be written by religious men. Both the chroniclers of the Crusades tell us frequently of their Christian mission, of their joy at the “taking of the Cross" against the Saracen and the infidel. And throughout his story Diaz tells us again and again of the way he and his companions shattered the Mexicans’ “heathen idols” and of how they tried to get them to see the “true faith.” All their disasters (and they were many) were sent by God to punish them for their misdeeds, and their escapes and triumphs were due solely to his intervention.

But through all three stories comes the asides, the complaints, the intrigues, the reproaches, the admissions, that make it clear that whatever the ostensible reason for their campaigns, the real motive was wealth, land, booty, and loot.

Gold is the word that weaves its way into every thread of Diaz’s story. Gold was what he and his companions were after, the fabulous mines in the west which would make them rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Every settlement through which they passed on their long road to Mexico was assessed in terms of the gold it possessed; every present given by Montezuma in an effort to buy them off was meticulously valued in pesos. Gold was the prize for which they went through innumerable and fantastic hardships and for which so many of them died—to have their hearts torn from their still living bodies and their limbs thrown to their opponents to feast upon. And, supreme irony of all, and as so often happens, it was the leaders and rulers who got most of the spoil and Diaz and his fellows nothing.

Our two Crusaders tell the same story. It was the Venetian merchants who supplied the ships and provisions for the Fourth Crusade—at a good price, plus one-half “of everything we win." And whatever may have been the depth of religious conviction of the two authors, it is certain that most of their companions embarked on their adventure for the booty to be won and the lands to be conquered. The Fourth Crusade, in fact, never got further than Constantinople and ended in a bloody struggle between the French and Germans against the Greeks who were, incidentally, also Christians and whose lands bad been seized by the Crusaders. As for the Seventh Crusade, the feudal barons who left so eagerly in search of loot and land were soon tempted to leave their “saintly king Louis'’ in the lurch when they found the opposition keener than they had expected. Louis himself was captured and had to buy himself back to France at the cost of a heavy ransom. The whole campaign was in fact a fiasco, ruined by the greed of the big feudal lords and their primary concern for their own economic interests.

It should be remembered that the wealth to permit these feudal aristocrats to go out on their jaunts, either for religious or just for mercenary gain, was extracted from the vast inert, mass of Western European serfdom. Then, as now, a small minority of privileged lived on the backs of a majority who did all the useful work of society, pawns who were passed from one feudal lord to another as the tide of battle fluctuated between the various warring actions.

By Diaz's time this system had virtually broken up and a new one was evolving. He was only one of many who thought to get rich quick by volunteering for expeditions to open up new lands. The old order was disappearing and the world becoming bigger, but much of it was illusion. Most of them died, or came back crippled or broken with disease. Their leaders, true, often shared the same hardships but did have somewhat of a better chance of looking back and considering them worthwhile. But the real winners, as always, were the big men behind the scenes who financed the expeditions—and, of course, the rulers of the time who couldn't lose anyway because they were automatically entitled to a fifth of everything that was going.

Courage, adventure, cruelty, and privation—these two books recount such things on a scale to make us marvel. But, underlying everything, they confirm once more that then, as now, history was shaped by economic interest. The holy cross might have stood out brightly on the banners, but it was the urge for gold, land, booty, and profit, that burned in the breasts of most of those who fell in behind.

Stan Hampson

World View: Religion, racism and class (2002)

From the August 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The absurd claim of racism is that people’s behavioural, physical and cultural traits conform to a certain fixed and immutable pattern; and this determines the superiority or otherwise of a group in relation to others. This is an outlook that has been used to justify some of the most unspeakable and horrendous crimes against humanity, sometimes leading to killings of genocidal proportions.

In Eduardo Galegno’s Open Vein of Latin America, he recounts that before foreign conquerors set foot on the soil of the land the Indians totalled no less than 70 million. But a century-and-a-half later, they had been reduced to 3.5 million; and in 1685 only 4,000 Indian families remained of the more than two million that had once lived between Lima and Paita. Yet Archbishop Linan by Cisneros exposed how some of the church elders had perfected lies into a fine art. He said: “The truth is that they are hiding out, to avoid paying tribute, abusing the liberty which they enjoy and which they never had under the Incas.”

Racism however is flawed on a number of counts, not just for its barbarism and irrationality. Its fundamental arguments are basically weak. Where are those people who conform to racial purity, let’s say in terms of colour? You will meet a lot of dark-skinned people in Africa, but you will no doubt also come across light-skinned types in southern Africa and eastern Nigeria. How can one also argue that the Yanamani Indians or the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert are less intelligent than people in Norway or Japan. The two groups live in different material conditions, and these varied environments impose on them tasks and solutions that respond to their peculiar circumstances. In spite of the gaping loopholes in racists’ theories racism has been used together with religion to justify the enslavement of other people.

Islam, Christianity and Hinduism 

The Arabs and their Muslim counterparts, according to Dais Brion, were the first people to develop a specialised long-distance slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa. They were also the first people to view blacks as suited by nature for the lowest and the most degrading form of bondage. Rotter’s pioneering work and the research of Benard Lewis reveals that for medieval Arabs the blackness of Africans suggested sin, damnation and the devil. Arab scholars most of the time also invoked the biblical curse of Canaan to explain why the sons of Ham had been blackened and degraded to the status of natural slaves as punishment for the sins of their ancestors.

By the 10th century some Muslim writers asserted that Ham begot all blacks and people with crinkly hair and that “Noah put a curse on Ham according to which the hair of his descendants would not extend over their ears, and they would be enslaved wherever they were encountered”. Benard Lewis also quotes a 13th century Islamic historian from Iran who concluded that the Zanj (blacks) differed from animals only because their two hands are lifted above the ground and that many have observed that the ape is more teachable and more intelligent than the Zanj.

In the 17th century Father Gregorio Garcia detected “Semitic blood” in the Indians, because like the Jews, “they are lazy, they do not believe in the miracles of Jesus Christ, and they are ungrateful to the Spaniards for all the good they have done to them”. When Bartolome de Las Casas upset the Spanish court with his fiery denunciations of the conquistadors’ cruelty in 1557, a member of the Royal Council had replied that Indians were too low in the human scale to be capable of receiving the faith. Another justification for holding other people as slaves was found in Leviticus 25:44 which said, “Both they bonds-men and they bonds-maid, which thou shalt have, shall be the heathen that are round you; of them shall ye buy bonds-men and bonds-maids.” But the most popular text on the matter is found in Genesis 9:25 which says, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be to his brethren.” Some slave-owners went beyond the bible arguing that it might be wrong to enslave Christians, but that the Negro was not a human being and therefore could not become a Christian. One pious lady said, when asked if her Negro maid was to be baptised, “you might as well baptise my black bitch.” While Bishop Berkeley put the same idea into philosophical language when he said, “Negroes were creaturs of another species who had no right to be included or admitted to other sacraments.”

Similarly, racist sentiments are expressed in the Rig Veda, the Hindu scriptures of ancient India. Indra, the God of the Aryans, is described as “blowing away with supernatural might from earth and from the heavens the blackskins, which Indra hates”. The account further reports how Indra “slew the flat-nosed barbarians, the dark people called Anasahs. Finally, after Indra conquers the land of the Anasahs for his worshippers, he commands that the Anasahs are to be flayed of (their) black skin.”

The first distinctive feature to be noted in religion and racism is their appeal to a two-category system which presupposes a basic division of mankind into an “in” group and an “out” group. In addition, this fundamental division is supported, initiated and sanctioned by God himself. God has a special concern for the “in” group, and it receives his sustaining aid and grace. By contrast he is indifferent or hostile to the “out” group. In the final analysis God does not value all men equally, consequently he treats them differently. And this difference is not accidental but central to his will and purpose. The two-category system is correlated with an imbalance of suffering in which the “out” group suffers more than the rest of the people. In the account of the Rig Veda, for example, we know that God has less affection for the Anasahs because they suffer more than the Aryans. It is also evident from holy books like the bible and the Rig Veda that God’s favour or disfavour is correlated with the racial or ethnic identity of the group in question. God’s wrath and hostility are sometimes even directed at the physical features of a particular ethnic or racial community.

In the bible Yahveh often sides with the Israelites in the murderous campaigns to grab land from the Jebusites, Canaanites, Philistines, Amalekites in the same way that he was used to justify colonialism. Similarly in African traditional religion the God of a particular ethnic group assists it to overcome its enemies and brings prosperity to the “in” group. It stands to reason that whilst there is no rock-solid evidence to support the claim that God created man, there is enough justification in the materialist assertion that God is an invention of man. This is grimly illustrated by the fact that while Saddam Hussein was calling on God to help the Iraqis in the Gulf War, George Bush was doing the same thing. No God caused the death of the young men who were slaughtered; but the misguided beliefs and the greed of the ruling class.

Production and production relations 

Consequently the “out” and “in” scheme of analysis has nothing to do with God. It is a manifestation of the concrete and material world of humans reflected in their consciousness in the process of the production and distribution of wealth. Ultimately, production and production relations determine the ideas individuals have about themselves as a group, and about society at large in matters of morality, religion, metaphysics, etc. And it is only when we have identified and understood the material assets and constraints of a society, how it produces goods to meet its material needs, how the goods are distributed, and what type of social organisation sprouts from the organisation of production that we would have come a long way to understanding the culture and religious views of that society.

If the production relations are such that makes it possible for a minority to appropriate the end-product of the labour of the majority the views of the minority become the dominant ones in society, whilst the opinion of the majority are suppressed. The ownership of the means of production is thus important in understanding people’s perception of social phenomena – religion, philosophy, art etc. Bearing this in mind, we shall find that religious perceptions in any class-divided society are not neutral, but a tool in the hands of the dominant class in its struggle to maintain its control over economic surplus. Religious and all manner of spurious ideological theories are contrived by the ruling class or its representatives in the intellectual community and church organisations to keep the downtrodden perpetually entrapped in the vicious circle of exploitation.

As children in a predominantly Catholic community, we used to be told that God was surrounded by a host of angels with archangels. God was the boss and each angel and archangel had a specific assignment to perform in heaven. This was a world-view that sought to give blessing to the master-servant relationship that existed in the feudal era and class society in general.

Some quotations in the bible are also anti-worker if applied in today’s circumstances. Take for instance the saying, “But I say unto you, that ye resist no evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy cheek, turn to him the other also.” I suppose that when the Accountant General’s Office slashed as much as a 100,000 cedis from my salary in March, I should have responded: “Please my Lordship why are you so generous with me? Take 400,000 cedis more.” This would have been submissiveness stretched to its idiotic limits, and an invitation to exploitation and despotism. It could mean an acceptance of wage slavery, a system that is inimical to working people’s interests.

The New Testament also advises us to despise and deprecate worldly things in lieu of heavenly rewards. What would this mean for those who have already made material gains here on Earth? If people like Bill Gates are also God-fearing they would have a double reward; one on Earth and the other in heaven, whilst the God-fearing poor will have only one. As for the poor who are not God-fearing the extent of their loss and damnation is inestimable. The end result of these teachings if employed in a class society makes the working people docile and facilitates their exploitation by the owning class.

Convenient smokescreen

But this is not all. It also calls forth the other forms of alienation which are not strictly economic, but are organically linked to it. It is important to note that racism and religion tend to elevate the culture and other virtues of the dominant class; and denigrate that of the oppressed. But the class character of this domination especially becomes difficult to unmask if the oppressor class has a different racial background from the oppressed, as was the case during the heady days of apartheid and colonialism. Skin pigmentation and other physical characteristics subsume the class dimension of the problem, and exploitation is seen through the binoculars of race. One therefore develops a superiority or inferiority complex, depending on one’s physical traits; and the fundamental issue which is class exploitation is lost. Given these circumstances racism becomes a convenient smokescreen with which the ruling class masks its exploitation of labour. Eventually the attention of the working class is diverted from the real causes of its predicament; and a section of it becomes a pliant tool of the ruling class in its attempt to entrench the capitalist system.

The effect on that section of the working class which does not share similar physical characteristics with the owning class is to deny itself as different from the dominant class. It identifies and shares the convictions, doctrines and other attitudes of the dominant class which oppresses it. Guilt and an inferiority complex promoted by the dominant class and imbibed by the oppressed become the result of this process. Consequently the attempt to escape this inferiority by denying and condemning oneself becomes a lifelong struggle.

Let’s consider this for one moment. It is important to note that for many Christians, the traditional African religious individuals is superstitious and worships idols and several gods; there is only one God, though he has a son begotten by the Holy Spirit. This god is white, his angels are white; and when the saved finally go to heaven, they will wear white robes of purity. But the devil is black; his angels are black; sin itself is black and when the sinful finally go to hell, they will be burnt to black coal. It is surprising that the African converts sing in pleading terror: “Wash me Redeemer, and I shall be whiter than snow?” And is it any wonder that some Africans buy skin-bleaching creams to lighten their dark skins? Is it also surprising that so-called educated and enlightened women often buy red, blonde or brunette wigs to hide their black hair or spend hours on end in hair saloons trying to make their hair curly and long?

Christianity even denies the African the right to their name. A name is a simple symbol of identity. But the African convert would normally be required to discard his African name and give himself such good Christian names as Smith, Verwoerd, Robert, James, Julius, Ironmonger, Winterbotham, Elizabeth, Summer, Winter and sometimes Autumn. This business of getting new names has its roots in slave property relations, where the person of the slave was the property of the owner to be disposed of and used as the master deemed fit. So slaves were branded with the master’s name.

The same story is true in art, dance, music, drama etc, but the ultimate objective in class society is one – to control the productive forces and appropriate economic surplus irrespective of the exploiter’s race or tribe. Economic control however is much more difficult to attain without political control. Political control is therefore established through proxy governments. Even then the vampire system finds that economic and political control are incomplete without cultural and hence ideological control. So the system employs religion and bogus theories like racism to ensure the mental castration of the worker be he European, Asian or African.

Adongo Aidan Avugma

The Great Discoveries and their economic effects. (1926)

From the February 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

When civilisation was concentrated round the Eastern end of the Mediterranean, Phoenician ships from Syria pushed further and further westward, trading; and colonising as they went, and preventing the too credulous Greeks from intruding by spreading tales of the quite mythical sea monsters they had met on the voyage. They eventually reached the Atlantic and coasted south-west round Africa, and tradition has it that their ships made call at Britain for supplies of Cornish tin. Of this we are not sure and we know still less about the Scandinavian voyager, Leif, son of Eric the Red, who it is said reached America in the year 1,000.

But in 1492 Christopher Columbus, fortified by nothing more definite than his inability to believe “that the sun shines upon nothing, and that the nightly watches of the stars are wasted on trackless seas and desert lands,” sailed westward across the Atlantic to look for a route round the world to India and the East, and hit upon the West Indian Islands. This was the era of the Great Discoveries.

Five years later, after half a century of persistent Portuguese exploration of the West African coast, Vasco de Gama succeeded in passing the Cape of Good Hope and in opening direct sea communication with India. By 1500 the Portuguese were settled in Brazil and there followed innumerable explorations from end to end of the Atlantic shores of North and South America. In 1520 Magellan had rounded the southern tip of South America and found a sea route to Eastern Asia, although the voyage of over two years cost the lives of Magellan and half his crew. We read of repeated attempts during the succeeding centuries to find sea passages to the North of America and Asia.

To understand the effects of this era of expansion, we must consider the economic condition of Europe in the preceding centuries, and its relations with the East.

Over the greater part of Europe “natural economy” as distinct from “money economy” still prevailed. That is to say, food and clothing were in the main produced for use in the immediate neighbourhood ; trade, and the use of money, were comparatively rare, and limited to luxury goods. The exceptions were the great trading and manufacturing towns which had sprung up at convenient centres for the collection and distribution of commodities, and on the most important land or sea trade routes.

The sea trade was in the hands of merchants of Genoa and Venice and other Italian towns, and of the Hanse towns in the Baltic. The Hanse traders dealt chiefly with Russia, Scandinavia, and the Baltic lands, and were interested in raw materials such as wool, which they obtained from England, corn which they supplied to many Mediterranean nations, and fish.

The Genoese had a monopoly of the South Russian trade which came overland round the Black Sea bringing silks and spices from India and China. The spices were valued highly because it was only by their liberal use that the meat of those times could be made really palatable.

The Venetians, too, dealt in spices, drugs and other Eastern products transported by caravans which entered Egypt from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. These spices were grown in the East Indian Islands and reached the termini of the caravan routes in the ships of Arab traders who held undisputed sway over the Indian Ocean.

Both Genoa and Venice brought their luxury wares to depots such as Antwerp, where exchange took place with the Hanse merchants. Overland routes ran up the Rhone to Paris; over the Alps and down the Rhine ; and from Venice via Augsburg and Nurembourg to Hamburg and other Baltic centres.

Both groups of merchants made regular calls at English Ports, and the bulk of European trade was in their hands. It was this trade which gave political importance to the cities and was the cause of their rivalries. The chief source of the merchant’s wealth and the goal of every adventurer’s ambition was the East, which up to that time had not been directly and easily accessible to Europe.

During the 15th century, owing to the advance of the Turks into Europe, the whole of this trade was endangered. In 1453 Constantinople fell to them and the Genoese routes were altogether barred; while the Turkish approach to Egypt threatened also the activities of the Venetians. It was the Turkish invasion which was the immediate cause of the desire to reach India by sea, and consequently of the great expansion during the 16th century.

The marked increase of exploration had the effect, which was of great importance afterwards, of giving rise to a new tradition of more daring and skilful seamanship in Portugal and Spain and later in Holland and England. The discoveries caused the shifting of the centres of commerce from the Mediterranean to those countries with an Atlantic coast; the drying up of the overland routes to the Baltic and the consequent decline of the Mid-European cities ; the abandoning of much of the caravan communication with Asia; and the sapping of the vitality of Venice and Genoa. Spain, Portugal and England were thus encouraged to build their own mercantile fleets.

The Portuguese established an Indian Empire and gained control of the East Indian spice islands and a monopoly of the traffic in the Indian Ocean. The amount of trade increased enormously, but the distribution of the wares in Europe was conducted and financed by the Dutch, who obtained the bulk of the profits and laid the foundations of their own later financial supremacy. It was the Portuguese monopoly of the Indian Ocean and the endorsement of their claim which they obtained from the Pope, that induced the Spaniards to finance Columbus in his attempt to reach India by sailing westwards. The discovery of America was, however, not used by Spain to develop commerce. The finding of gold and silver and the extensive mining of the latter which began in 1530 enabled Spain to prosper for a while on a different basis. She attempted to make the new world merely a source of bullion monopolised by her, and to keep this bullion inside the mother country. The result of the monopoly and exclusion of foreign traders was to incite Dutch and English freebooters to attack the bullion ships, and the bullionist policy at home was equally disastrous in the long run. There was a world rise in prices as a result of the inflow of gold and silver, but instead of allowing the food and other industries to profit and grow by satisfying the big demand from the new colonies, the sheep-owning families who were the ruling class deliberately hampered them.

Then, owing to an anti-foreign agitation, due to a mistaken notion that the presence of foreigners in the country had caused the rise in prices, the Government expelled those who had been their best artisans and merchants and without whom industry declined. Spain then became largely dependent on supplies of fish, corn, and manufactured goods from Holland and England, this again stimulating the economic development of the latter.

The rise in prices had a generally quickening effect on trade outside of Spain, and not only did this affect the trading nations and their industries, but it materially speeded up the introduction of money in place of “natural economy.” This was the immediate cause of the peasant war in Germany in 1525, owing to bitter disputes about the money value of labour services. The war set Germany back economically, and the other advanced nations benefited by the removal of a rival. The working out and decline of her mining industries also affected Germany adversely. Accumulation of capital, which was rendered easier by the abundance of gold and silver, led to the opening of new commercial and industrial enterprises in the East and the New World as well as in Europe.

This growth of capital, the consequent greater power of the merchants, and the new contact with the non-Christian East were also the causes of a revival of slavery and had a depressing effect on the condition of the peasants and wage earners in Europe itself.

England rapidly changed from a wool exporting to a wool manufacturing nation and before the end of the 16th century her commerce was largely carried on in English ships; both the Venetian and Hanse fleets having ceased to call.

The high prices which ruled universally, and the particularly high price of wool due to the demand from Flanders and from home manufacturers were the chief causes of the great decrease of arable and increase of pasture farming in England, a process assisted by the suppression of the Monasteries and the dispersal of their lands in 1536. This agricultural revolution which was in progress up to 1600 had the effect of driving many thousands of tenants and labourers off the land into the towns, where for a long time there was no demand for their services. In the meantime vagrancy grew to be a serious problem and the Poor Law became a permanent national institution.

Great trading companies to East and West were formed and out of the strife of the early buccaneers an English merchant fleet was built which eventually surpassed that of the Dutch, and was to be the foundation of England’s future commercial and naval power.

The development of shipping and the demand for timber from Russia opened up communications with that country and materially hastened its internal political and economic growth.

New East coast towns like Boston and Hull grew up for the Baltic trade, while Bristol flourished on the trade across the Atlantic. England now became the centre of the Christian world, owing to her admirable position as a depot. There was a corresponding decline in the commercial monopoly previously exercised by Jews in the Eastern Mediterranean.

With the rise of her commerce and banking, Holland also carefully developed her agriculture, and her success in the use of root crops and grasses which for the first time made it possible to keep stock alive during the winter, was of great importance to England and other countries which later learned from her example.

For Europe as a whole the results were important and lasting. The need for big accumulations of capital to join in the new commercial enterprises, which were of an unprecedented size and expense, and the need for adequate protection against attack in distant waters, gave an urge towards national instead of city organisation. This was the economic basis of the new nations and Empires, Portugal, Spain, Holland and England.

The great increase in sea voyages, the new experiences and the new knowledge of navigation obtained from the Arabs gave an added importance to overseas trade and, as has been seen, destroyed the old Mediterranean and overland trade routes.

In its turn commercial activity created bigger markets and a steadier demand for raw materials and industrial products, which reacted immediately on the hitherto small and unprogressive industries. Local isolation tended to be broken down as bigger areas were drawn into the sphere of commerce either as sources of supply or as consumers of Colonial and Eastern goods. The use of money became everywhere more general with its disintegrating effect on the old Manorial relationships, and banking began to be of new importance as a support of industry.

In short, the discoveries began the era of industrial and commercial activity which continued without essential change till the Industrial Revolution.

Edgar Hardcastle

Perspective on Guatemala (1954)

From the August 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is called the land of eternal spring and appropriately so, for Guatemala does not know the changes of season such as we have in England. It is a country in which you are almost always in sight of a mountain or a volcano. It is the land of the marimba and the quetzal bird and of ancient intricately ornate architecture. Of dictatorship and malnutrition. Of lemongrass and citronella oil, quinine and cinnamon. Of cotton, chicle, coffee—and bananas. It is also a country regarded by United States Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as a possible danger to the peace of America.

Guatemala lies on the narrow connection between the land masses of North and South America. It is bordered by Mexico, British Honduras, Honduras and El Salvador. The Caribbean Sea lies to the east and southwards is the Pacific Ocean. It is a country about as large as England with a population of 3½ million—roughly the same as Yorkshire. Over two million of these are the religious, superstitious Maya Indians, who are unable to read or write, and live on maize, kidney beans and dried fish. The climate is agreeable enough to have attracted many American vacationists. The main port is Puerto Barrios, situated on the eastern coast and connected by an important railway to the capital Guatemala City. Through the country runs the Pan American Highway, which ribbons along the entire isthmus of Central America. A fertile plain stretches for about 40 miles inland from the Pacific; here are rich banana farms, cornfields and grazing lands.

The country's chief exports are coffee, bananas, chicle, essential oils and honey, of which coffee is the most valuable. Chicle is a latex which is bled from wild sapota trees and forms the basic ingredient of chewing gum. Guatemala has little mineral resources and so is not an industrial nation. Her principal imports are machinery, textiles, petroleum and vehicles. Most of her trade is with the United States.

The early history of Guatemala has been obscured by the passing centuries and the destruction of records in the Spanish conquest of the 16th century. We do know that by about three thousand years ago an advanced civilisation had cleared the jungle, raised crops and built splendid cities, which have left their ruins as evidence of greater days. Over two thousand years ago the Mayas had developed a calendar as accurate as the Gregorian (adopted by Great Britain in 1752) and were working a mathematical system which was the first to use the concept of zero. Around the year 900 the Indians for some reason emigrated to the Guatemalan highlands and the jungle overgrew the deserted cities. The civilisation declined and the Mayas split into warring tribes.

In 1523 the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez sent a small band of conquistadors under his lieutenant Don Pedro de Alvarado from Mexico into Guatemala. There was little in the divided native tribes to resist the Spaniards’ superior equipment and military technique and by 1524 the country was under Spanish control. With the conquistadors came Roman Catholicism and the Inquisition. The Catholic Church assisted in the suppression of the country. In 1593 Pope Alexander VI issued a bull giving Spain sovereignty over Central America, including Guatemala. When the Spaniards found the resistance of the Rabinal Indians too fierce for them. Padre Bartelome de las Casas and other priests penetrated the Indians and won them over by missionary work. Incidentally, it was agriculturally-inclined Padre Tomas de Berlanga who introduced the first rootstocks of the banana plant from which have grown the huge plantations of the United Fruit Company of Boston, U.S.A.

The story of the Spanish conquest is re-told at the Maya fiestas, when masked Indians perform the Dance of the Conquistadors. The dance, to the music of the marimba—an instrument like an outsize xylophone—is an endurance test lasting for several hours. It represents the 1523 hand-to-hand battle between Alvarado and the Maya chief Tecum Uman, in which the Indian lost his life. This was a crucial victory for Alvarado.

The decline of Spain loosened its hold upon the Americas and in 1821 Guatemala was able, like other South American countries, to declare her independence. Then followed a succession of revolutions and presidencies, each relying upon bloodshed and tyranny for its position. In 1873 Justo Rufina Barrios deposed the ruling president and established a dictatorial government. Barrios did much to develop the resources of Guatemala and when he was killed in 1885 he was a national hero. The port of Puerto Barrios is named after him. His death was followed by more revolutions and a procession into and out of the presidential chair. In 1931 General Jorge Ubico was elected to power.

Ubico led a pitiless dictatorship which dissolved the trade unions and gave power to the landowners, greatest of which is the United Fruit Company. When he was forced to resign in 1944, Ubico left less than two per cent. of the population owning 78 per cent. of the land. For six years Guatemala was ruled by three army officers headed by Dr. Juan Arevalo, until in 1950 Jacob Arbenz was elected president Now, in face of the invasion, Arbenz has fallen and the presidential procession has started again.

The invasion came after several weeks of pressure from the U.S.A. The resolution sponsored by Mr. Dulles at the Caracas conference last March was directed against the Arbenz government and provided a legal weapon for future use. More essentially, America has for some years refused to sell arms to Guatemala, who not unnaturally took her custom elsewhere. The arrival at Puerto Bgrrios of weapons from Poland touched off a fine panic in the State Department and provoked the American request to Britain and other countries to allow the right to search their ships. Thus was quietly buried the traditional American lip-service to the freedom of the seas. When Guatemala was attacked America, tongue in cheek, denied the evidence of an invasion. On the other side of the table Russia forgot about Eastern Europe and came out in defence of the rights of small nations. As The Economist put it, rather neatly, it was “war through the looking glass . . .” with “. . . all the words . . . the wrong way round.” But that is nothing new.

What are the reasons for the conflict in the little Central American state? Well, first there’s the Panama Canal, the vital snip of the scissors which cuts America in two. A glance at a map will show the importance of the canal as the short cut between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. As the quetzal bird flies, Guatemala is 800 miles from Panama and is separated from it by several countries which are friendly to the United States.

Then there’s the United Fruit Company, which owns most of the banana plantations of Guatemala. The company says that it has lost control of 400,000 acres in the recent land nationalisation; it is in dispute with the government over the scale of compensation. Its local legal representative is Dr. Juan Manuel Galvez, President of Honduras, whence came the invaders of Guatemala. Apart from its landholdings, the United Fruit Company owns the dock and harbour installations at Puerto Barrios. Through International Railways of Central America it has virtual control of the entire Guatemalan railway system, including the busy line from Puerto Barrios to Guatemala City. It is noteworthy that the first warnings about Guatemala came from the State Department at the same time as the early expropriation of United Fruit Company land. Foreign control is also strong in the field of electric power, four-fifths being supplied by a company subsidiary to an American firm.

What about Russian interference? Well, the Arbenz government could not be described as a follower of Moscow, although it did suffer the influence of Guatemalan Communists. There was in Guatemala an active opposition with its own newspapers. The Arbenz regime was crudely nationalist—an outlook bred from its attempts to break the American near-monopoly of the country’s wealth and develop a modern industrial state from a semi-feudal country. In competition with the foreign companies the government was building its own wharves at Puerto Barrios and, with the help of a United Nations Technical Assistance scholarship in highway construction, had commenced work on a heavy-duty road from the port to Guatemala City. A state-controlled power station costing nearly £2 million is also under construction.

It is a story by now familiar enough. Along with the bananas and coffee Guatemala has grown its own exploiting class who aspire to own their country’s wealth free from foreign interference. They expressed themselves in a nationalist party which found the American companies as the first obstacle to its plans. So it ran foul of the U.S. State Department. For Central America has for a long time been dominated' by American investment and influence. And in her conflict with Russia the United States cannot allow this power to be challenged and the security of the Panama Canal threatened. An. unfriendly Guatemala was bound to suffer the attention of Mr. Dulles. The Land of Eternal Spring has felt the first wintry blast of the cold war.

Ivan

Blogger's Note:

The original map from the August Socialist Standard was a bit basic, so I grabbed a replacement. In the 1954 map, Belize was still known as British Honduras.

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]

Latin America (1961)

Book Review from the September 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Latin America—The Balance of Race Redressed, by Halcro Ferguson for the Institute of Race Relations. (Oxford University Press, 7s. 6d.)

With the exception of The Times and The Economist the only British newspaper that regularly covers Latin American affairs is The Observer, which has in Halcro Ferguson a highly informed student of what is going on "south of the border.” His first book is therefore a welcome addition to the limited literature available on the racial aspect of that part of the world.

It is regrettable that the author makes no attempt to define his meaning of the term race. It is far too “loaded” a word to leave to the reader's personal interpretation. Fortunately, there is nothing in present day Latin America to compare with the specific discrimination on grounds of colour to be found in the Southern States of America or the Republic of South Africa. It would be a mistake, however, to think this is due to some kind of moral superiority. Discrimination and indignity have many forms. From Mexico down to Paraguay the Spanish speaking descendants of the conquistadors have exerted a repressive social, religious and linguistic domination over their Indian subjects whose pre-Colombian culture was by no means inferior to that of their conquerors.

Mr. Ferguson likens the break-away of the Spanish colonies under the leadership of Bolivar and San Martin to the current White-Settler and “Colon" quarrels with the home country, although as he himself shows the social gap between the élite and the masses was not a principle of racial superiority. What it does mean is that as the countries of Central and South America undergo their national bourgeois revolutions we are likely to witness the rise of the Indian majority as a key political factor with the subsidiary demand for literacy and equal rights of language. A situation not unlike India once the English no longer held sway.

We must register a point of disagreement. Despite the fact that numerically the peasants were preponderant in both Mexico of 1910 and Russia of 1917 it is an error to equate the respective struggles of that period. In the words of Rudolf Sprenger, “The Russian Revolution was a bourgeois revolution without the bourgeoisie. Leadership: the intellectuals. Weapon of attack: the proletariat. Mass-basis: the peasantry.” In Mexico's case it was not a question of a fundamental change in the social basis of society, which is what we understand by the word revolution. Rather was it one of the last of the great peasant revolts so tragically doomed to failure by the inexorable laws of social development.

Eddie Grant