The beastly face of capitalism
Capitalism came into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”, writes Issa Shivji. And the bottom line which drives capitalism in Africa is profits and accumulation. Africa offers both with relative ease and apparently little resistance.
The Asian Tsunami was a great human tragedy; so was the invasion of Iraq. In both cases, the US-led financial capitalism found a great opportunity. The opportunity was to “reconstruct” these far flung societies in the image of a neo-conservative ideological world-view: total hegemony of capitalism under the supremacy of the United States, euphemistically called globalization. Condoleeza Rice, the American Secretary of State, unashamedly described tsunami as “a wonderful opportunity” that “has paid great dividends for us.” What was this opportunity?
The answer is given by a group called Thailand Tsunami Survivors and Supporters which says for “businessmen-politicians, the tsunami was the answer to their prayers, since it literally wiped these coastal areas clean of the communities which had previously stood in the way of their plans for resorts, hotels, casinos and shrimp farms. To them, all these coastal areas are now open land!”
Some 80 per cent of the victims of tsunami were small fishing communities. Little has been done to restore their lives and communities. Instead, the likes of the World Bank, now headed by a neo-con called Paul Wolfowitz, is pushing for the expansion of tourism and industrial fish farms. Herman Kumara, head of the National Fisheries Solidarity Movement in Sri Lanka, warns that his country was now facing “a second tsunami of corporate globalization and militarization.” He says: “We see this as a plan of action amidst the tsunami crisis to hand over the sea and the coast to foreign corporations and tourism, with military assistance from the US Marines.”
Mr. Wolfowitz was the US Deputy Secretary of State when Iraq was reduced to rubbles and Iraqis to corpses by the “coalition” forces. Bodies had been hardly buried before consulting firms started rewriting Iraq’s investment laws and selling off public companies. One of the corporations which bagged big “reconstruction” contracts, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, another country under “reconstruction”, was Halliburton. Halliburton is a giant oil-service company which has been awarded, under dubious circumstances, billions of dollars worth of military, defense and so-called reconstruction contracts by the US government. The US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, is the former Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton.
The transition from the bi-polar world, where we had two super-powers and two competing world views, socialism and capitalism, to the uni-polar world where monotheism (the single god being the god of capitalism, Profit) prevails, has been strewn with wars, conflicts, destruction, death and crass ideological propaganda, double-speak, double standards and blatant lies. Seen from a historical standpoint, this should not come as a surprise. After all, the transition from Britain’s imperial hegemony in the first half of the last century to that of the US itself involved the Great Crash of the 1930s, the rise of racist fascism, and two World Wars. From the ashes of WWII emerged the bi-polar world in which the US established its supremacy of the capitalist camp bringing Japan and Europe firmly under its wing. There too followed “reconstruction” which gave a new lease of life to capitalism. (By the way, US assistance for reconstruction was confined to Europe only. Both Japan and the then Soviet Union reconstructed through their own resources and efforts.)
In Europe, the Soviets and the US carved out their respective spheres of armed control while restricting their disputes and conflicts to the ‘war of ideas’ called the Cold War. In the rest of the world, they fought, directly or by proxy, hot wars to assert their spheres of influence. Between 1944 and 2004 there were at least 21 hot conflicts in which the US was directly involved; of these, 11 after the end of the Cold War. These include the gruesome Vietnam War in which hundreds of thousand were literally burnt to death by napalm and the two Gulf wars (still ongoing). In the Vietnam War, US forces sprayed some 21 million gallons of dioxin herbicides, including 800 pounds of Agent Orange, to destroy the foliage so as to flush out guerrillas. The Vietnamese and American troops are still suffering from the after effects of that deadly herbicide.
In the first Gulf War, the “coalition” forces rained bombs on Iraq equivalent of some 11 Hiroshimas. In the second Iraqi war no doubt even more bombs were thrust into the heart and soil of Iraq.
Capitalism came into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” Witness the first genocide ever of the Native Americans and the vicious slave trade which destroyed the social fabric of African empires and depopulated the continent. It has since maintained itself by wars, death and destruction. It brought the peoples and the resources of the tri-continent (Asia, Africa and Latin America) under its hegemony through colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism whose newest edition is christened globalization.
Imperialism is inherent in capitalism just as war is inherent in imperialism. Just as the economic crash of South East Asia in the late 1990s was used by American corporations to hive off the assets of South Korean conglomerates and re-establish their control of the Asian economies, so the tsunami disaster has been used to globalize their coastal and water resources.
In Africa, the so-called aid and debt have been used both as a carrot and a stick. You switch them on and off as necessary. A nationalist African or third world government determined to retain its resources for its people would be threatened with cutting-off of aid and would certainly not find itself among the beneficiaries of debt cancellation, while a pliant and obedient state would get more aid and its debt may just be cancelled. Of course, nothing of this happens without strings attached. Debt cancellation goes hand in hand with more loans (since one is now credit-worthy) and aid is invariably used to create markets and an enabling environment for the multinationals which have a voracious appetite for Africa’s copper, cobalt, oil, timber, diamonds and gold and bio-resources and of course cheap labour.
The bottom line which drives capitalism is profits and accumulation and Africa offers both with relative ease and apparently little resistance. We are good converts to the religion of globalization. Colonialism was enabled by converting us to Christianity to save our souls and steal our resources; globalization teaches us to commoditize, marketise, and privatize to save our skins from poverty. In the process, the majority of us end up being deprived of both souls and skins while a few among us adorn “imported” souls and alien skins. Fanon called it Black skins, White masks.
Whoever said, ‘capitalism with a human face’! Yes, capitalists surely have a human face like the rest of us; a few may even be humane. But capitalism is faceless and colourless. It is defined by a drive; an insatiable drive for profits. “Accumulate, accumulate! That is the Moses and the prophets!” of capitalism.
© Issa Shivji. Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
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