from OPEN VEINS, Galeano

In 1812, British traders were reporting to the Foreign Office that, in Argentina, they had succeeded in replacing German and French textiles, and Argentina’s domestic production as well, which was strangled by the “free-trade” port. The same occurred, with variations, elsewhere in Latin America.

From Yorkshire, Lancashire, the Cheviot Hills, and Wales poured an endless stream of cotton and woolens, iron and leather, wood and porcelain goods. Manchester’s looms, Sheffield’s foundries, Worcester and Staffordshire potteries flooded Latin American markets. Free trade enriched the ports which lived from exports, lifted sky-high the extravagance of oligarchies determined to enjoy every known luxury [tolerated by the colonial masters as a perk for the overlords as long as they kept the population in line] but ruined budding local manufacture [deliberately] and frustrated expansion of the internal market. Latin American manufactures continued fitfully, with one foot in the grave and with no possibility of sustained long-term development.

In Chile, one of Spain’s most far-flung possessions, isolation at first favored the development of industrial activity from the beginnings of colonial life. It had spinning mills, textile mills, and tanneries; all the ships of the South Seas were equipped with Chilean rigging and cordage; it manufactured metal objects, from retorts and guns to ornaments, fine tableware, and clocks, and built boats and vehicles. But, like Brazil’s textile and metal works, which took their modest first steps in the eighteenth century, they were wiped out by foreign imports. Latin America’s big ports, through which the wealth of its soil and subsoil passed en route to distant centers of power, were being built up as instruments of the conquest and domination of the countries to which they belonged, and as conduits through which to drain the nations’ income. While ports and capitals strove to be like Paris or London, behind them stretched the desert. In the twentieth century peasants flee from their villages in the mountains and on the plains and flood into Buenos Aires to offer their labor: like the peasants of other poor provinces, they get no further than the city’s outskirts, where they settle down beside 700,000 other inhabitants of the “villas miserias” and make out as best they can with crumbs from the great capital’s banquet table.

“Fortune” magazine, in 1967, assessed the “enticing new opportunities” which the Latin American Common Market opens to northern business: “In many a boardroom, the common market is becoming a serious element in planning for the future. The magazine cited examples of “rationalizing” or “expanding” operations by corporations such as ITT, General Electric, Remington Rand, Otis Elevator, Worthington, Firestone, Deere, Westinghouse, Air Brake, and American Machine and Foundry. In 1962, Raul Prebisch, a vigorous advocate of a Latin American common market and free trade, nonetheless wrote: “An argument I often hear, from Mexico to Buenos Aires, is that the Common Market will offer foreign industry opportunities for expansion that it does not now have in our limited markets. It is feared that the benefits offered by the Common Market will be taken advantage of principally by foreign industry and not by national industries. I shared and share this fear, not only in imagination but because I have verified the reality of that fact in practice.”

In fact, the Central American Common Market, another effort to join the deformed economies of five countries, has served to blow down with one puff the national producers of cloth, paint, medicines, cosmetics, and biscuits, and to expand the profits and trading orbit of many major U.S. corporations.

from EMPIRE OF COTTON, A GLOBAL HISTORY, Sven Beckert, 2014

In large parts of Africa, observed Thomas Ellison as late as 1886, “indigenous cotton has from time immemorial been both grown and manufactured, and the natives are for the most part clothed in fabrics of their own production.” Yet, while local and regional networks persisted, they would never again flourish. These smaller networks were undermined by the ever-widening veins of European capital and its commodities.

Tench Coxe [American political economist] understood that process already in 1818: the export of British piece goods to India, he perceptively observed, would force Indians “to turn to raising cotton instead of making piece goods they cannot sell [because of the flood of cheaper British goods—-goods, one might say, consciously deployed, not only for profit, but as weapons of destruction and coercion].

A growing number of rural cultivators turned into poorly paid wage workers in the world’s cotton fields. They were the least powerful. Becoming a wage worker was a measure of their defeat. In Egypt, by 1907, nearly 40 percent of all agriculturalists had become landless laborers. In India as well, the number of wage workers on cotton lands tended to increase across the nineteenth century. The greater orientation toward cotton agriculture resulted in an ever-increasing percentage of land devoted to the white gold. In northern Mexico, too, wage-labor swept the cotton fields. After1884, landowners in La Laguna made use of new railroads and a new irrigation infrastructure to build a huge cotton-growing complex, making it Mexico’s most important commercial agricultural area. Tens of thousands of workers populated the fields as the rural population, many of them migrants from elsewhere in Mexico, increased from twenty thousand to two hundred thousand between 1880 and 1910, with an additional forty thousand migrant workers arriving during harvest time. Many of these workers eventually arrived in La Laguna on private rail lines, packed like cattle in boxcars. Since there was no land available for these migrants, there was no possibility of engaging in subsistence agriculture.

Creating markets for metropolitan manufacturers was a conscious project of colonial administrations. The global South was to be a market for metropolitan industry, not a competitor, and a supplier of raw materials and labor, and both required the destruction of indigenous manufacturing. Despite individual resistance and collective protest, the overall trend was unwavering and ultimately devastating.

Next Post: The Consequences.

THE CURSE OF “MONOCULTURE”

From Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano, 1971:

“Sugar had destroyed Brazil’s Northeast. The humid coastal fringe, well watered by rains, has a soil of great fertility, rich in humus and mineral salts, and covered by forests. This region of tropical forests was turned into a region of savannas. Naturally fitted to produce food, it became a place of hunger. Where everything had bloomed exuberantly, the destructive and all-dominating latifundio [large, privately owned, commercial landed estates, usually raising cash crops for export] left sterile rock, washed-out soil, and eroded lands. At first there had been orange and mango plantations, but these were left to their fate, or reduced to small orchards surrounding the sugarmill owner’s house. Fire was used to clear land for cane fields, devastating the fauna along with the flora: deer, wild boar, tapir, rabbit, pacas, and armadillo disappeared. All was sacrificed on the altar of sugarcane monoculture. In the city of Recife in the Northeast, a third of the population lives in miserable hovels; in one district, more than half the babies die before they are a year old.

“And some people rank coffee almost on a par with oil in its importance on the international market. With Brazil’s abolition of slavery in 1888, an army of ‘free’ farmhands would accompany coffee on its travels. The Rio Paraiba became the country’s richest area, to be quickly ruined by a plant whose destructive form of cultivation left forests razed, natural reserves exhausted and general decadence in its wake. Previously virgin lands were pitilessly eroded as the plunder-march of coffee advanced.

“Coffee is also basic to the economies of El Salvador and Haiti. ‘Monoculture,’ [an economy forced to rely largely on the export of one crop or other raw material] makes it necessary to import the beans [as well as] the people’s only source of protein—-corn, vegetables, and other foods the country had traditionally produced. A quarter of all Salvadorans die of severe vitamin deficiency. As for Haiti, it has Latin America’s highest death rate, and more than half of its children are anemic. The wages Haiti requires by law belong in the department of science fiction: actual wages on coffee plantations vary from $.07 to $.15 a day!

“In Colombia, also, coffee is king. According to a Time magazine report in 1962, only 5 percent of the price yielded by coffee on its journey from tree to U.S. consumer goes into the wages of the workers who produce it. The price breakdown is as follows: 40 percent for middlemen, exporters, and importers; 10 percent for transport; 5 percent for publicity by the Pan-American Coffee Bureau; 30 percent for plantation owners; and 5 percent for workers’ wages.

“In the Unite States and Europe, coffee creates income and jobs and mobilizes substantial capital; in Latin America it pays hunger wages and sharpens economic deformation. It provides work for more than 600,000 people in the United States; those who distribute and sell Latin American coffee there earn infinitely more than the Brazilians, Colombians, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Haitians who plant and harvest it on the plantations. [The 3rd World ‘participates’ in global capitalism the same way that the victim, with puncture marks on its neck, participates in vampire-ism.]

“The United Nations published [in the mid-1950’s] the results of a study of nutrition in Colombia: 88 percent of Bogota [the capital city] schoolchildren suffered from avitaminosis, 78 percent from riboflavinosis, and more than half were below normal weight; avitaminosis affected 71 percent of workers and 78 percent of Tensa Valley peasants. The study showed ‘a marked insufficiency of protective foods—-milk and its derivatives, eggs, meat, fish, and some vitamins, and salt.’ It is not only the flash of gunfire that reveals social tragedy. Coffee locked the region firmly into the [capitalists’] world market.”

from How Europe underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney, 1972

[Walter Rodney, from Guyana, was an internationally acclaimed author, historian, and social and political activist in pursuit of African self-determination and advancement. In June of 1980, he was killed by a bomb placed in his car.]

“In recent times, economists have been recognizing in colonial and post-colonial Africa a pattern that has been termed ‘growth without development.’ That phrase has now appeared as the title of books on Liberia and Ivory Coast. It means that goods and services of a certain type are on the increase. There may be more rubber and coffee exported, there may be more cars imported with the proceeds, and there may be more gasoline stations built to service the cars. But the profit goes abroad, and the economy becomes more and more a dependency of the metropoles. In no African colony was there economic integration [inter-connected branches of economic development], or any provision for making the economy self-sustained and geared to its own local goals. Therefore, there was growth of the import-export sector, but the only things which developed were dependency and underdevelopment.

“A further revelation of growth without development under colonialism is [as was previously noted as well in the countries of Latin America] the over-dependence on one or two exports. The term ‘monoculture’ is used to describe those colonial economies which were centered around a single crop. Liberia was a monoculture dependent on rubber, Gold Coast on cocoa, Dahomey and southeast Nigeria on palm produce, Sudan and Uganda on cotton, Tanganyika on sisal. In Senegal and Gambia, groundnuts accounted for 85 to 90 percent of money earnings. In effect, two African colonies were told to grow nothing but peanuts.

“Every farming people has a staple food, plus a variety of other supplements. Historians, agronomists, and botanists have all contributed to showing the great variety of such foods within the pre-colonial African economy. There were numerous crops which were domesticated within the African continent, there were several wild food species and plants of Asian or American origin. Diversified agriculture was within the African tradition. Monoculture was a colonialist invention.

“And, at all times, the price fluctuations (which were [and are] externally controlled) left the African producer helpless. From a capitalist viewpoint, monocultures commended themselves most because they made colonial economies entirely dependent on the metropolitan buyers of their produce.”

Next post: Free and open markets?

To Begin:

From an August 27, 1962 report in Newsweek:

Just a few hours by jet from New York or Chicago live more than 200 million people in the vast reaches of Latin America, and it is doubtful whether one-tenth of them know what it is like to go to bed with a full stomach. The great cities glitter opulently—Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Mexico City; but beneath the glitter and in the hinterland are odious and despondent slums where liquid-eyed Indian children scrounge for scraps and handouts while their parents labor for wages of twenty cents a day or less. This is the wasteland of the Western hemisphere, a land of misery whose poverty is as stark as any in the world.

In April, 1968, George W. Ball, U.S. diplomat, banker, and U.S. ambassador to the U.N., wrote:

“At least for the next several decades, the discontent of poorer nations does not threaten world destruction. Shameful as it undoubtedly may be, the world has lived at least two-thirds poor and one-third rich for generations. Unjust as it may be, the power of poor countries is limited.” [With all its arrogance of power, this is about as close to a confession and apology there ever will be for the U.S. and Europe exploiting, impoverishing, and humiliating hundreds of millions of people for generations with the clear implication that this arrangement is the “natural order of things” and is expected to continue indefinitely. And continue it has, though one doesn’t hear much about it. But I’m sure the people all felt much better after hearing Mr. Ball speak.—-My comments.]

THE “GREAT” PYRAMID—-THE VIEW FROM THE BOTTOM

From Inside the Third World, by Paul Harrison, 1984

“I remember the hunger of little boys in Kano, northern Nigeria—-their sad faces covered in the white, flaky skin of kwashiorkor [malnutrition caused by lack of protein in the diet]. They had learned by heart the common West African beggar’s plea, ‘Dash me money.’ I ate some cooked cassava for a snack and accidentally dropped a piece on the ground. Half a dozen of them leapt on it like a pack of wolves and fought each other desperately for it.

“The distribution of the whole world’s income is more unequal than even the most grotesquely unjust of individual national distributions. In 1976, the industrialized countries made up only 24 percent of the world’s population, but raked in 78 percent of the income. The ‘developing’ countries—-76 percent of the people —-got only 22 percent of the income. The average ‘developing’ country remained at around 7 percent of the average income of western countries. Latin America, southern Asia, and Africa represented a smaller percentage of western incomes in 1975 than they did in1950.

“Two thirds seriously poor, two fifths destitute: these are the people who are gaining least, and often actually losing out, as their countries ‘‘develop.’ This immense army, legions of the damned in this life, is the bottom layer in the great international pyramid. They are the very crux of the development issue, for if development is to mean anything, it must mean the eradication of this great mass of suffering. In India, the building sites of Bombay or Calcutta are full of seasonal laborers. They live in ragged tented camps like the hordes of Genghis Khan. The landless laborers of Rajasthan move to Delhi or Ahmadabad for the dry season, when there is no work to be had on the land—-and their women and children go, too.

“The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that in the early 1970s there were 455 million people in the Third World getting less than the minimum intake of food required to keep body and soul together in the long term.

“Private property in land is an extremely dangerous institution for the welfare of the poor. It leads to social polarization, increasing degrees of inequality, and grinding poverty among those without adequate access to land. Almost everywhere in Asia it is the same story of commercial and technical progress, coupled with an increase in landlessness and poverty, and the death of the traditional systems that provided social security for everyone.

“The incidence of illness in the poor countries is on a scale quite unimaginable to the incubated westerner. Threadworms infest one billion people, trachoma and hookworms afflict half a billion each. Infant mortality takes a terrible toll. In the poorest districts a baby may have little better than a sixty-forty chance of survival. Parents have learned to live with infant mortality and accept child illness and death stoically; it is one of the tragedies of their lives. Illness in general can be looked on as a kind of disease that thrives in the environment of poverty and perpetuates it. Simply wearing shoes, for example, would prevent parasites like hookworm from penetrating the feet. People in the Third World do not go barefoot out of ignorance or for cultural reasons. If the poor do not wear shoes, it is for one reason only: they cannot afford them.

(My next post, # 3, will come in the next few days.)

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This Substack blog is dedicated to posing and answering the most fundamental and critical question on earth: Does global capitalism deserve the right to exist? It is beyond dispute that capitalism runs the world, and has predominantly run it for about the last 250 years and, further, that it has shaped the world in its image. While we know elements of capitalism have been traced back almost to the Middle Ages, we place its effective beginning as the system we roughly recognize today at 1775, when the first Industrial Revolution was underway. The steam engine had been invented and improved and, along with the cotton gin, the power loom, new iron production processes, etc., was, by the early 1800’s, having a trampoline effect on capitalism. This jump started manufacturing and the factory system which was a catalyst for the banking and credit industry. And so on.

Of course, emergent capitalism had already accumulated a great deal of capital from slavery and the slave trade, and would continue to do so, both in Europe and in the U.S. This in itself stands as stunning testimony that it has no more of a conscience than does rain.

It’s impossible to reasonably contend that the shocking conditions in the world are not the result of those 250 years of the economic rule of capitalism. Capitalism’s track record is the record of those shocking conditions. The powers that be shudder to use or even acknowledge the word “capitalism” because they know that, among broad strata of the people, it has come to be the dirtiest word in our language. (The word came into wide use in the late 1800s.) It calls to mind too much of the ugly truth of what this deceitful and rapacious economic system has meant for the condition of the world and the vast majority of its people. The political leaders and commentators are fond of using the terms “free market,” “free trade,” “free enterprise,” and even “democracy” to label the ruling economic system, thereby hoping to lend it a sound of dignity and render it seemingly benign, and thereby hope to obscure its reality.

Of course, capitalism didn’t invent suffering and exploitation, although it probably has set the world record for it. If, or because, there was poverty, oppression, lack of medical care, and war, etc., during the 1600’s, does that mean we hold those ruling structures of those times responsible for the horrors that are clearly prevalent today? Or are we supposed to insist that it’s just the result of “human nature”? If we answer “yes” to either of those questions, we will get broad and enthusiastic applause from the powers that be, along with their great relief that our finger of guilt is not pointed at them and their political and economic system.

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The argument by some, usually by those in the richer countries, that capitalism has primarily been good for the world, is patently false by even a casual survey of the destruction and deprivation left in its wake for at least two-thirds of humanity, and some say it’s more like three-fourths. But the fact that a slice of humanity has benefited from capitalism is not just important but essential to its staying power for, without that slice, the system would have long ago been swept into the dustbin of history. The continued support by the satisfied majority of the populations in the top capitalist countries is the main factor in its social, political, and economic endurance.

As for the reasoning that, if capitalism spread spontaneously across the globe in the first place, doesn’t that mean it must have been the “natural” instinct of humanity? No, it doesn’t , because, for the most part, it didn’t spread spontaneously. It was imposed. What spread spontaneously was ferocious opposition to it everywhere throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Today, still, that imposition survives, due to overwhelming economic and military power.

Behind the foregoing is a veritable ocean of evidence. Capitalism indicts itself. We hope to give voice and context to much of that evidence as we continue with our next post later this week.