Jeremy Seabrook | ukwatch.net

The Poverty of Nations

Ellie Keen — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:37:23 +0000

Why do the richest societies on earth constantly harp on their poverty? There is apparently never enough money to do all the things we would like to do. Every institution in Britain complains about “resources” (a word always qualified by “limited” and now a synonym for money) – the BBC, universities, the health service, educational provision, policing, the fight against crime, and especially, of course, the war on poverty. Scarcely a day goes by without some sombre warning about budgetary constraints, the non-existence of the bottomless purse and the illusion of the free lunch.

To a visitor from outside our market society (an increasingly implausible tourist in a globalised system), the rhetoric of perpetual indigence might come as a shock, given the highly material excesses that accompany it. We are always having to tighten our belts, make sacrifices, go without, cut our coat according to our cloth. There is always some privation to be endured, some penny-pinching measure to take, some curtailment of our plans. Treats must be foregone, merited rewards postponed. The present panic over the impending (or avoidable) “recession“ has expressed itself in apocalyptic terms – this is a time of mortgage famine and credit drought, a tsunami of bad loans, people drowning in debt, “the stench of fear and insecurity” according to one market analyst, an imagery of sickness and debility, of plagues, contagion and collapse.

This solemn perspective is bound to be reflected in people’s view of the world. There is never, even at the best of times, enough of anything to go round, and not only money: there is also a lack of recognition, a want of respect, an insufficiency of regard, an absence of consideration, a shortage of appreciation. Celebrities never get quite enough attention; the famous are always in search of more publicity. Even the rich – whose incomes have grown prodigiously in our time – dwell, not upon the power their money bestows upon them, but on all the things they still cannot afford. There is always someone in a better position, with greater prestige, of higher status and regard in the world. A state of chronic wanting, if not want, is now the common condition of early 21st century humanity.

The most privileged people on earth dwell upon the coveted goods, sensations and experiences from which the slenderness of their means estranges them. Why has the wealth of the rich world set up such an unassuagable obsession with what remains always just out of reach? How does our plenty produce such a feeling of penury, our prosperity of deprivation?

Of course, economists, like philosophers, have answers. The satisfaction of basic needs, it is claimed, simply reveals second-order wants and desires, while the fulfilment of these only uncovers new, hitherto unsuspected layers of need. The answering of these, in turn, lays bare yet more abstruse yearnings. It is all perfectly explicable. This, the grim justification goes, is human nature, the one, the only, unalterable in a world in which every other aspect of nature is supremely malleable.

Human longing has always been without limits. Throughout recorded time, the richest have professed themselves unsatisfied, even when their wealth and power were absolute. They lamented that they could not command love or longevity; they could not acquire characteristics they did not possess; could not purchase health or attain contentment. This serves as a useful last word, and sets a term to argument.

Questioning this last resting place of conventional wisdom is overdue. The limitlessness of human desire has rarely been a preoccupation of the poor, whose longings have concentrated on the material qualities of the full belly and protection against the elements. Aspirations towards the infinite have, in any case, usually been taken care of by religion, which traditionally warned against attempts to aim for what cannot be realised in this world; exhortations to which the mighty have usually assented, although this has rarely prevented them from seeking the satisfaction of their own every whim in the here and now.

What are the insistent fangs of insufficiency that gnaw at the heart and psyche of everyone in the rich world, if not the internalised mechanisms of the need for perpetual economic growth? Human need and economic necessity have changed places, so that no one can say with any certainty where the circulation of the blood ceases and the cashflow begins, whether the rhythms of the heart mimic moments of boom and bust, or how the rise and fall of our life’s breath follows the seasons of production and consumption. Our version of “human nature” is a very particular one, for it demands conformity with the nature of capitalism.

The universal sense of impoverishment in rich societies is simply the subjective expression of an objective need for more; a need as vast as it is impersonal, for it is the essential characteristic of a system and not of humanity. We are all poor in this scheme of things, for our own frail individuality is pitted against measureless engines of global production. It is now our destiny to gain as much of this abundance as we can cram into one poor limited lifetime. To frame our response in moral terms, as some do, is mistaken. Greed, avidity, eagerness for experience, sensation and novelty are names, not of vices or virtues, but of the urgencies that we inhabit and which inhabit us – the impulse towards perpetual growth and increase; “development” it is sometimes called.

This is the mirror image of a now archaic urge not to lay up treasures on earth where moth and rust do corrupt; for the amassing of treasures in this life is now our human purpose, the using up of as much of the earth’s substance as can be contained in that cramped, overcrowded space that our lives have become; for in this way, we serve the greatest need of all, which is the unstoppable energy of economic growth. The cultivation of continuous dissatisfaction and constant disappointment is the motor of this majestic machine.

“The poor you shall have with ye always” used to be regarded as a sorrowing biblical comment on the natural state of things. Whether or not it ever was “natural”, it has certainly been brought to a high art by human contriving; so much so that we have, through the mysterious alchemy of wealth, all become poor; a poverty destined to remain forever incurable, since it is inseparable from the peculiar dogmas of wealth-creationism; a faith from which few people in the world now dissent.

More Money, More Problems

Tim Holmes — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 22:07:47 +0000

You don’t have to be a dogmatic Marxist to recognise the intimacy of the relationship between economy and society. This relationship is generally thought to be symbiotic: when the economy is successful, society is peaceable and orderly; only in economic adversity does society suffer.

The origins of belief in this sentimental attachment are not far to seek. The last time it broke down dramatically in Europe, the virulent ideology of Nazism grew out of the wreckage. After the war, it became axiomatic that as long as the economy grows, we may expect society to progress in sympathy. Accordingly, all political effort has been concentrated since 1945 upon ensuring that the economy functions well. Despite setbacks, this has been more or less achieved, never more so than in the past decade of sustained expansion.

Despite the acknowledged closeness of the relationship between them, however, economy and society are now increasingly treated as though they were separate spheres, autonomous and independent. The economy has been elevated: its workings, its ability to “perform”, its health and its needs, are tenderly nursed. Even “talking the economy down” has become a kind of blasphemy. Wise men and women pore over indicators, signs and portents to anticipate any signs of faltering or sluggishness. Markets, which are its expression in the world, are frail tremulous things, sometimes nervous, shaky, uncertain, but also liable to sudden euphoria and exuberance. Dismal and cheerless at one moment, they are resilient, swift to rally and revive.

The economy now has the status of a cult. This is clear from the financial pages of the press, which are demarcated from “news”, and presented in almost scriptural terms, far removed from those in which mundane social affairs are described. The economy must be made safe from contamination by the fallout, as it were, from society.

Yet despite a long period of unprecedented prosperity, something has occurred which demonstrates a disturbing divergence between the “successful” economy and what David Cameron calls a “broken society“.

It now appears that not only a failing economy can produce human misery, even one praised as a paragon of success also has the power to misshape human purposes. There is no need to rehearse the issues which scar the richest societies in the world – addictions, violence, crime, emotional and psychic disorders, obesity and the diseases of excess, loss of cohesion and community, abuse of resources and so on. But whenever these evils are addressed, the smooth, continuous expansion of the economy must be protected. It must not appear as a causal factor in the multiplying wrongs that beset us. Beyond the taint of scandal, it is sequestered from a destructive scrutiny that might dare to call things by their proper names.

Given the prohibition on economic causality, how are we to account for the afflictions of a society in which the creation of wealth has been brought to such a high degree of perfection? An old ideology is invoked, which shows continuity between a rooted Christian tradition and its bastard offspring, the sanctified economy: for human nature is at fault. It is as though we are not worthy of the merciful bounty of the infinite economy, just as poor sinners, at a less sophisticated stage of human development, were felt to be unworthy before God.

Human nature is the alibi for economically determined social ills. There has certainly been no shortage of space devoted to the abjection of humanity. The newspapers are full of the fallen state of disgraced people: paedophiles and prowlers roam the land, rapists and robbers, muggers and murderers, gangs and mafias, feral children and irresponsible parents, alcoholics, junkies, crazies, predators and perverts.

The “answer” offered by politicians with their fading power and diminished authority, is exhortations to “change the culture”, promote marriage, encourage people to act responsibly, above all, spend more money on youth services, parenting skills, respect for the elderly, community values, cohesion and tolerance – the very things economic “success” has squeezed out of daily life and experience. These “remedies”, presented as moral crusades, without agency or motor other than the “change of heart”, are as vain as they are ineffective; their only merit is that they distract even the most discerning eye from the source of the ills, namely the serene and spotless economy, which goes about its unshakeable business, fixed as the stars in their courses.

In the early industrial era, despite the benign power of the hidden hand (whose?), it was clear that industrialisation imposed coercive disciplines, poverty, want, squalor, ignorance and disease upon the mass of the people. A harsh penal code, below-subsistence wages and the remorseless compulsions of mechanised production schooled a wasting peasantry that had lived by the rhythms of season, into the iron laws of industrial life. It was known that “the economy”, despite the wealth it produced, also brought cruel visitations of cholera, child mortality, exploitation and slum living. “Social” questions were then inseparable from the economy.

In our time, the economy is promoted as the healer of the evils it had produced. The creation of much more wealth is the panacea for all the afflictions of humankind. Although the primordial importance of wealth-creation is scarcely contested, society remains uncured of old scourges, and is all but overwhelmed by new ones.

The second coming of political economy required a relaxation of the draconian disciplines associated with the first industrial period: the freedoms of deregulation, liberalisation, the mobility of money and goods demanded the abolition of rules that governed the almost military severity of industrial production. These changed economic doctrines are bound to have had repercussions in the arena of society.

Yet we shrink from the social consequences of these economic shifts. The erasure of industrial coercion, the advent of a version of plenty, the avalanche of wealth have altered the character and psyche of the people: born into a culture of wanting and desire, people are now urged, not to curb their appetites and save for the future, but to live lustily in the here-and-now, to pamper and spoil themselves, to buy and to spend. What a contrast with the punitive labour of toilers in mill, mine and factory. The new sensibility that has come with these changes is as estranged from a hungry, stunted proletariat as this was from the slow, credulous country people out of which it was conjured.

The sicknesses of economic excess mirror those of insufficiency and want of an earlier era. The society of bingeing, excess and disorder is not a manifestation of some hitherto concealed aspect of human nature, but reveals rather, the nature of capitalism, which must grow and expand in perpetuity or perish.

Until we examine more closely the relationship between economy and society, there is little chance of mitigating the evils which politicians vainly deplore, wringing their hands and talking of changing cultures, as though this were as simple as a change of clothing or of decor.

We may have overreacted to an excess of determinism that governed Marxist and socialist views of the world but in our haste to dissociate the blessings the economy showers upon us from the taint of a confused and fragmented society, we have created too stark a division between them. To invoke human nature as the root of all the disagreeable consequences of the way we work and live is about as helpful as primitive magic. As long as shielding the economy from scrutiny takes precedence over sheltering humanity from its ravages, we shall continue, in one way or another, to be tormented by them.

Laissez-Unfair

Tim Holmes — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 01:32:11 +0000

Most people agree that the growing gulf between rich and poor is dangerous for society. It pulls sections of the people so far apart that they seem to inhabit different cultures. The sense of shock expressed by the media at the shooting of an 11-year-old boy in Liverpool is an intensification of the increasing discomfort of a well-to-do majority with the existence of an “out of control” class in the derelict places on the social periphery.

Government has tried vainly to address the wealth gap, but its efforts are pitiful, compared with the extravagant rewards distributed upon its favourites by the free market. The metaphors used by official Britain – the rising tide that lift all boats, the level playing field – are euphemistic evasions of the deeper ideology. This determines that poverty can be healed only by the creation of much more wealth; that is, economic growth in perpetuity. But this model actually makes poverty incurable: when being poor is defined as having less than 60% of average income, it will robustly survive any amount of wealth-creation.

Concern has focused on the excluded, people taunted and tantalised constantly by goods, services and experiences available to those with money. How can their participation in the mainstream be engineered? How can they be integrated into a society from which they feel themselves in permanent exile? These have been been the troubling questions for policymakers, philanthropists and mitigators of poverty.

That this may be a mistaken approach does not occur to those who have elevated the creation of wealth into a kind of primal myth. This is the greatest obstacle, not to a solution to the issue of divided Britain but also to a definition of the problem, which nevertheless stares us in the face with the reproachful smile of children killed without reason.

The most destructive consequence of inequality is that the two cultures, those of the haves and have-nots, are both tainted. Inequality, permitted to grow and extend itself under the banner, hoisted once more, of laissez faire, gives us the worst of both worlds. We see not a people content in the prosperity that could be brought to all but one corroded by excess on the one hand and insufficiency on the other.

The triumphant achievement of capitalism – to produce a majority of beneficiaries in rich societies – is calculated to guarantee stability and continuity. Most people will continue to vote for the maintenance of a system that rewards them. (This is what makes parties “electable”). But under the influence of a permanently growing economy, no one ever feels quite rich enough. This feeds a “need” for yet more economic expansion. But this is the very mechanism that leaves millions of people stranded on the desolate margins.

And these also threaten the wellbeing of the mainstream: although the rich may live in separate areas and live in the enclosures of home, car, work and places of leisure, there are still intersections where the lives of the privileged are crossed by those they fear – the prowler in the subway, the attacker on the underground, the watcher in the dark on the brief walk from car to front door.

Fear of violence, mugging or personal attack is the other side of guilt: there is no necessity for people to exist in joyless and ugly environments of graffiti-scarred estates, shuttered shops, abandoned cars and streets swirling with rubbish; of used-up goods and discarded young people.

We are all products of the same culture of a savage individualism. Those who successfully gain the prizes congratulate themselves on their merit; the unmeritorious – the “losers” in the elegant argot of the age – are supposed to contemplate their absence of merit and to acquiesce in it fatalistically. But human beings invited constantly to consider their own expendability and lack of a function cannot be expected to yield without a struggle to this bleak evaluation by others of their lives.

The cult of violence is an aspect of a cult of inequality; the uneasy coexistence of people in a world over which people feel they have forfeited all control. What can you do about it? The problem is one of how to respond to excess – fabulous fortunes self-administered by fat cats or heaped upon people of modest talent and minimal achievement – as well as to drug wars and postcode gangs that resort to the knife and the gun to redress private grievances that are beyond social remedy.

The pitiful inadequacy of politicians in reaction to these developments is shown in the paltry “policies” they propose: curbing the sale of alcohol, control of guns, further criminalisation of the excluded, yet more restrictive legislation. The effects of their interventions are negligible. The politicians speak of “cultures”, as though these were biddable and susceptible to their will. Cultures are dynamic and arise out of the existing relationships in society: they have their own momentum and their own rituals, some of them very bloody.

A radical interrogation of the sad events of recent months is disallowed, for the roots may prove damaging to the holy of holies: the economy, which has performed so well for the past 15 years; the economy, which we approach with reverence, and to which we look for meaning and deliverance. Governments that for the past generation have insisted upon deregulation and liberalisation have also disinterred from its shallow grave the ideology of laissez faire, in which the fate of the poor has become a kind of waste product in the universal generation of wealth.

That there is something deeply flawed with this version of human improvement ought to obvious. Prosperity waits to be salvaged from a wasteful consumerism, a sense of belonging from a degraded individualism, and disciplined restraint from self-indulgence. Lives can be ruined both by insufficiency and excess as humanity is pressed into the service not of a force of nature but of an economic order that showers its rewards with promiscuous disregard for where they may fall.

Violence, drive-by shootings, gang warfare, drugs, alcoholism, obesity: these obsessions and addictions cannot be “cured” by administrative measures, reforms, constant “modernisation”, legislation, crackdowns or zero tolerance of this or that behaviour. The evil lies deeper. In the past year, the income of the richest fifth grew by 1.5%, while that of the poorest fifth fell by 0.4%: small figures, but given the existing abyss between them, a considerable contribution to our inexorable reversion to what Disraeli, over 150 years ago, called two nations, “between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy”.

A Place Like Home

Tim Holmes — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 20:10:15 +0000

A House of Commons public accounts committee report (pdf) adds weight to the belief that town and city centres in Britain have become “no-go areas” at night. Edward Leigh, chair of the committee, said: “No civilised country should have to put up with what can seem like an occupying army loose on the streets.” The cost of anti-social behaviour is put at £3.4bn a year.

Is this another moral panic? Is it true? Or is it merely a response to the changed function of the central urban area? The decay of the industrial economic purpose of many towns has led also to deterioration in the physical urban fabric. This summer, I went home to Northampton, where even the main streets are now characterised by ephemeral shops that open and close within months, leaving in the abandoned doorways dead leaves, polystyrene cartons and broken glass. Tattoo parlours, adult stores, gaming shops with rows of fruit machines alternate with bars, mobile phone outlets and building societies. Many fine buildings have been demolished. The market square – once one of the most beautiful in Britain – has been vandalised over half a century by councillors committed to what they understand to be “progress”.

The central area has been “landscaped”, but few people linger on the specially provided benches in front of the 17th-century church. The vanished shops have been enclosed in malls or relocated to the far periphery, where there are acres of car parking. The central area is often desolate and under-populated, windblown pedestrianised streets scoured by dust in the cool summer breeze.

Only at night is the town full of life: bars, clubs, restaurants full of young people, who set out to get “wasted”, “rat-arsed”, “legless” or “smashed”. And, as they make their unsteady, volatile way through the streets, it is inevitable that some will be hurt; the sirens of ambulances wail, as they bear to A&E the casualties of fun. This nourishes a vigorous folklore among the middle class and elderly that the town is a dangerous place: “Don’t go into town at night,” is the repeated warning, and the tales people tell one another reinforce the impression of a desperate wasteland, lawless and unmanageable.

Not all stories of violence are apocryphal. A murder hunt begins as a disabled man in his 70s is found lying in his flat, having been tipped out of his wheelchair and kicked by raiders, who got away with his wallet and a mere hundred pounds. A man in his 50s was attacked on his way home after a night out. He is beaten and kicked, and left, bleeding, on the pavement. As he tries to crawl towards his house, a car pulls up. Two people get out; they rob him and drive off. He is taken to hospital and is quickly discharged, sent home in a taxi, although he has an undiagnosed fractured skull and blood clot on the brain.

It is difficult to argue with such testimonies. They seem to offer conclusive evidence that everything has changed for the worse. It used to be a lovely shopping centre. County people used to patronise the local stores, purveyors of groceries to the gentry, haberdashers, fishmongers and gentlemen’s outfitters. Look at it now. The lament – familiar across Britain – is of the decay of community, the settlement of strangers in the central streets, not only foreigners, but the homeless, victims of addictions, the mysterious emergence of a menacing underclass. People used to look out for each other. Now we don’t even speak the same language.

Fear has banished the majority to out-of-town estates, enclosed communities fortified by alarms, bolts, deadlocks, all the apparatus of an elusive security. In spite of this, it is in these middle-class places that the vanished sense of community has taken refuge. Here, people do indeed keep watch over one another, look after their property while they are away and do the shopping for the infirm and elderly. I stayed with my cousin on such an estate. At 8.30pm one evening the phone rang. A neighbour was calling: she noticed the upstairs curtains were drawn and the car still in the driveway. She feared someone might be ill, and wanted to know if everything was all right.

Fear of the criminal, the violent and drunken predator leaves the town centre to the exuberant, pleasure-seeking young. These feed paranoid fantasies of those in beleaguered exurban worlds, beset by vandals, fiends and the nameless menace of an unknown young generation: an imprisoning ideology of anxiety. An elderly relative who lives in fear of being mugged in Northampton had never been attacked at home; her only experience of violence was in Tenerife.

Violence does indeed occur; but it is mainly between young people themselves. For the most part, the town centre is rowdy, uninhibited and noisy but it is not the site of daily muggings, violence and knife crime of popular imagination. The young are merely fulfilling the role in a scenario already written for them by those who live in the conviction that the world has been in a state of precipitous decline ever since they can remember.

There has been no decline: the function of the town centre has changed, that’s all. It is now a playground for the institutionalised – and highly conservative – rebelliousness of a new generation. Their desire to shock and frighten is the principal weapon of a radicalism that threatens no social upheaval; for outside of drinking hours they work in estate agencies, banks and building societies, in shops, as carpenters and builders, drivers and care assistants. The central area, terra incognita to their elders, is for them the quickest way out of town – just as the pubs on every street corner once were.

The fearfulness of one generation colludes with the scariness of another: the secure suburban fortress depends upon the exhibitionism of a youth that poses no social threat at all. Mutual dependency of the two groups creates a more or less stable symmetry. While the mature and the respectable shake their heads and say the world has gone to the dogs, the young triumphantly declare, by their assertive revolt against nothing, that they are the dogs to which the world has gone.

Half a century ago, most townspeople worked in the ubiquitous shoe factories. Many of these buildings have now been transformed into “loft dwellings”. Churches and chapels have become, in a profane “conversion”, bars and restaurants. Even the Essoldo cinema is now a block of luxury flats, while the art-deco Savoy is home to the Jesus Army.

The function of the town is less obvious than it was. No one quite knows what its economy is based on. It is one of Britain’s largest ports, thanks to the freight terminal a few miles away – not a small achievement for a place in England as far away from the sea as it can be. The local authority, the health service and retailing are major employers. It is also a warehousing and distribution centre; bars, cafes and clubs are also generators of jobs. Its reason for existence – proximity to agriculture of tanning and leather – has gone, just as has happened in other towns and cities of Britain. Its purpose is now to serve nocturnal, especially weekend, revelry. It has been delocalised in every way: virtually no daily necessities are provided here, but are wafted in from a distant elsewhere, the cargo cult of consumerism.

The youthful culture of sex, drink, music and fun simply caricatures the more sedate hedonisms that complement and deplore them: the barbecue and the dinner-party, the foreign holiday and the second home, the higher reaches of the housing ladder and the garden centre. It is a separation of convenience: the division between young and old overlaps with other parallel lives, between black and white, rich and poor.

The antagonisms are an illusion, for few contest the common base on which both depend. But while the young flaunt their youthful – and often wasted – energies, leaving the central area a place of piss-smelling doorways, blots of vomit and a scattering of bloodstains each weekend, and the stolid majority pursue their private, more muted pleasures and telling each other horror stories of muggings, violence and disrespect, between them they sustain a static and highly conservative society.

A New Narrative

Tim Holmes — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 21:30:55 +0000

It is significant that Sir Nicholas Stern has presented the dangers of climate change, in terms of an “economic” threat to the world. It is more usual to see the workings of the economic system as a challenge to the resource-base of the planet. This dexterous turnabout manages to preserve the primordial importance of the economy over the conditions that sustain life itself. There are good reasons for this volte-face.

The present ecological crisis – the threat of climate change, pollution of the elements indispensable for life, resource-depletion and loss of biodiversity – is itself a consequence of efforts to resolve earlier economic conflict. In the early industrial era, the most intractable issue was the alienation of an impoverished labouring class, which grew out of a wasting peasantry to serve the factory system. The enduring poverty and exploitation of these people seemed inevitable, destined to remain forever deprived of the most elementary necessities of survival.

The question that preoccupied ruling elites was the reconciliation of the working class to a society from which it seemed permanently estranged. This took on greater urgency as the 19th century advanced, workers learned to combine and organise, and the struggle between capital and labour defined itself more clearly. The potential power of the workers made wealth and privilege fearful, an anxiety increased by the writings of Karl Marx, the organisation of political parties under the influence of his sulphurous revolutionary prophecies, and aggravated subsequently by revolution in Russia in 1917 and in China just over 30 years later.

Clearly, the survival of capitalism depended on attaching its people more securely to itself, and on its ability to lure them from the temptations of socialism. This it did very effectively indeed, by the creation, not only of the welfare state, but even more significantly, of the consumer society, which overwhelmed the people with the riches it showered upon them in an avalanche of rewards, prizes, offers and free gifts – the very opposite of the impoverishment without end forecast by Marx.

Of course, this required an abusive exploitation of resources, the effects of which were not, at the time, foreseen: in the economic calculus, the treasures of the planet were merely “raw materials”, a factor of production, just as labour had been, until labour threatened to revolt.

Now it is the “raw materials”, the natural world itself, which is in revolt against an industrial system that threatens to return the planet to chapter one of Genesis, when “the earth was waste and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

The response to the internal problems of industrialism led directly to the appearance of an external contradiction of even greater magnitude: it is now a question not of reconciling a refractory and potentially subversive people, but of reconciling the planet itself to the system which weighs with such fateful violence upon it.

This also shows that the victory of capitalism over socialism, following with the downfall of the Soviet Union 15 years ago, far from being the ultimate triumph it was made out to be, was merely a temporary distraction from the menace to the world of a competitive struggle between two aspects of the same system. It was not just a crisis of socialism, but of industrialism itself.

Since the collapse of communism the only system left in contention, instead of reflecting on its purpose and direction, and modifying its values, swiftly sought to occupy the space evacuated by its vanquished rival. So spectacular has the wealth been arising from this exuberant expansion, that almost no country in the world has failed to follow the same version of wealth, progress and development.

In the process, intensified resource-use, contamination by 40,000 or so chemicals in the global environment, the effects on climate, the consequences of the uninhibited extension of global capital, now threaten the world beyond anything previously wrought by human activity upon earth.

That the beneficiaries of this process have become addicted to its continuation into perpetuity only intensifies the danger. Democracy has come to mean the ability of governments to sustain the voracious system that knows nothing of limits, since it promises infinite economic growth in a finite world. It is predicated upon the limitless dilation of appetite in a world whose limits were officially recognised at least 30 years ago – first by the limits to growth of the club of Rome in 1972, then by the North-South Brandt Commission in 1983, the Brundlandt report in 1987 and the South Commission in 1990.

It is common wisdom that no government can expect to be elected if it fails to guarantee the rising income which alone ensures continuity of the only version of freedom now on offer – that freedom to go on consuming like there is no tomorrow, surely the most self-fulfilling prophecy ever formulated by the reckless accountants of the calculus of permanent growth and expansion.

A way of life which embodies exorbitance, waste and excess now bears down upon a perishing resource base; and with the demands of the “Asian giants”, India, China and the rest, no alternative path has been crafted to the well-beaten track of their mentors. Yet they are now expected to bypass the very processes whereby the west became rich, and which it still preaches to the rest of the world.

What a savage paradox, that a way of life, conceived to ensure social peace when first established, should engender conflict, violence and resource-wars, now that it has spread to the whole planet.

It is not the salvaging of the social and economic system that should be at the heart of the current emergency, but a reassurance that the resource base upon which all systems depend will be conserved, so that it may provide a secure sufficiency for all humanity for an indefinite future.

This cannot be assured by horror stories about the monetary cost, by technological fixes, by faith in conquering other worlds, by belief in the redemptive capacity of science, or the ingenuity of humanity to promote limitlessness in a bounded world. It requires an alternative and convincing story of survival, an energising myth that will inspire collective action, a narrative that tells of a different kind of emancipation; just as capitalism once promised undreamed of wealth that would cure the ancient human scourge of poverty, and as Marx told the workers to unite since they had nothing to lose but their chains. These old myths have served their purpose, and no longer carry a plausible guarantee of liberation. This age awaits its empowering ideology, its renewal of hope, its fable of deliverance.

It is not the know-alls, experts, scientists, or the brains swimming in the aimless circularity of high-powered thinktanks that will rescue us. It is, however, just conceivable, that a modest myth, which speaks of a joyful frugality, an austere delight in the rediscovery of the riches of human resourcefulness allied to restraint in the use of material resources, might do so. But that would require an act of faith to transcend former ideologies of hope, which have been reduced by events into the gloomiest counsels of despair. This is, of course, scarcely the province of bureaucrats, however worthy. It belongs to the transforming power of faith in ourselves to rise to the urgency of what now stares us in the face.

The Dance of Imperialism

eddie — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 17:16:41 +0000

When King Leopold II of Belgium created his Congo Free State, following the West Africa Conference in Berlin in 1884-85, he claimed to operate in the interests of philanthropy. Bismarck himself asserted that the European powers had much careful solicitude for the moral and physical welfare of the native races, and he hoped Leopolds private fiefdom would bring to the people of Congo the advantages of civilization.

Leopold employed Stanley to promote his interests, which he painted in the colours of altruism. When the fortune which Leopold anticipated from the investment of his own money failed to materialize, methods of extracting wealth became more severe. Whole villages were forced to provide ivory and wild rubber for agents and representatives of the King. An account of atrocities against the indigenous peoples was published in 1903 by Roger Casement, British Consul in the Congo. Forced labour, brutality and depopulation of villages had indeed produced the wealth but Leopolds philanthropy was shown to be fictitious. The Belgian Government formally took over the territory as the Belgian Congo in 1906.

This was not the first time what had begun as a private commercial venture had been nationalized. In the early imperial age, Britain was celebrated for its informal empire. It readily subcontracted colonial excursions to private companies, since it had no wish to incur the expenses of official administration of overseas territories. The earliest of these, the East India Company, was granted a royal charter in 1600. For two and a half centuries its servants made fortunes, while the company effectively came to govern large parts of the sub-continent. Only after the first war of independence in 1857 was direct imperial rule established in India.

This experience did not prevent British governments from granting other companies the right to trade in Africa. Entrepreneurs and adventurers set out with blank treaties with which they would wring concessions from local rulers. As inducements they took supplies of glass beads, brass rods and coarse calico, but also of arms and alcohol commodities which subsequently played such a fateful role in the history of Africa.

The struggle for spheres of influence between the European powers led to what was known as the Scramble for Africa: McKinnons East Africa Association, Rhodes British South Africa Company, Goldies Niger Company were chartered to run territories, many of them covering hundreds of miles behind a commercial front based on river or coastal trade. They lacked the means of administering them, but were creative in devising coercive methods of producing valuable commodities. The work of these private interests on behalf of European nation states led to intense competition for territory. The imperial powers took over extensive tracts of land, naming them protectorates and colonies, which they ruled directly until the movement towards decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s.

The humanitarian intention of King Leopold II was reflected in the other states of Europe, moved by a desire to raise up the hapless inhabitants of the continent. Commerce, Christianity and civilization were their benign alliterative goals. They had one supreme example of the backwardness of Africa: since Britain had abolished slavery in 1833, many missionaries travelled, with the zeal of converts, to quell slavery and the slave trade all over the continent. That such barbaric phenomena continued overseas after Britain had forsworn them was reason enough to mix the stern business of extracting wealth with the pleasure of stamping out this abominable practice, and of bringing religious conversion to those who, in their folly, still worshipped rivers, forests and hills. Humanitarians were supported by the generosity of sympathizers at home, the missionary societies and the hosts of Mrs Jellybys as portrayed by Charles Dickens in Bleak House with their tenderness for the natives of Borrioboola-Gha.

The mission to rescue Africa in our time rouses eerie echoes of that earlier age; although different actors have assumed the familiar roles, and the three Cs have become the three Ds development, democracy and deregulation.

No doubt the likes of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are animated by the same high-minded desire that drove Leopold II; although they have an even more difficult task. For they must ensure that the wealth of the world (including that of Africa) continues to sustain their own people at the levels to which they have become accustomed, while simultaneously lifting up the poor of Africa. Bob Geldof, Bono and pressure-groups urging the G-8 to increase aid, step up debt relief and make trade more fair, are governed by the same commitment which roused the charitable societies and benevolent institutions of Victorian Britain. They do not, of course, urge their supporters to renounce their own advantages: the exaltations of singing and raising awareness will, it seems, suffice to make people less poor; although whenever humanitarianism has struck against economic reason, it is rarely philanthropy that prevails.

When the European powers were compelled by liberation and independence movements to abandon control over their overseas possessions, they declared imperialism at an end; and resumed subcontracting their foreign adventures to private enterprise once more.

There is, today, as in the 19th century, a division of moral, as well as material, labour among the privileged people of the Western world: those who clamour for the relief of poverty and injustice are not the same people who are busy extracting the riches of the continent. In 2005 it was revealed that in Angola, Liberia and Equatorial Guinea, British banks and transnational companies had been engaged in clandestine deals to gain control of the trade in diamonds, oil and natural gas production.

Equatorial Guinea represents, perhaps, the most exuberant replay of history, as tragic now as it was first time around. Since oil and natural gas were discovered in the early 1990s, the country of half a million people has become the third largest exporter of oil in sub-Saharan Africa, with economic growth faster than anywhere in the world: in 1997 it reached 70 per cent. Exxon now exports more than 300,000 barrels of oil a day to the US, and per-capita income is about $6,000. While the family of President Teodoro Obango Nguema is fabulously rich, the majority remains in extreme want. The country has regressed in the UN Development Index since oil was discovered, even though between 1995 and 2000 US oil firms invested $5 billion. A US Senate report into Washington-based Riggs Bank in 2004 found it had helped government officials of Equatorial Guinea steal hundreds of millions of dollars in oil revenues. Equatorial Guinea, it will be remembered, was the object of a failed coup, with the participation, among others, of Sir Mark Thatcher. It seems scarcely conceivable that this seedy bunch of fantasists was acting in the interests of good governance, social justice or human rights.

Who, it might be asked, is doing the real work of the West in Africa? Is it the unconvicted conviction politicians? Is it the emotional hyper-ventilation of conscience-stricken celebrities? Or is it the solid, unremitting dedication to the retention of privilege by transnational entities and their agents and emissaries in Africa? Who are the real beneficiaries of this noble enterprise, and what are the consequences of our complicity?

Imperialism is not static. It dances through time, mobile, adaptable, protean. In one epoch, nation states outsource the imperial task to private entities; in another they assume governance of the territories. After conceding independence at the end of World War Two, the rich countries once more contracted out colonialism to transnational entities which operate worldwide, above and beyond mere geography. The shape of imperialism varies; only the outcomes remain the same. The Leopolds vanish; the likes of Brown and Blair appear; Mrs Jellyby yields to the hectorings of the pop star.

The most significant actors remain, however, the adventurers and explorers of the Niger Company or the East African Association in the 19th century and of Exxon in Equatorial Guinea or Elf in Congo-Brazzaville in the 21st. To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe. Conrads heart of darkness remains, secure as ever within its decorative humanitarian shell.