----- Original Message ----- From: "Henry C.K. Liu"
Its curious why Bond's self righteous complaints are always focused
on countries that displease the US. Other anedotal incidents in many
other countries did not seem to upset Bond. He seems to have a nose
for singling geopolitical targets. For example, he is very silent
about the racist policies in the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans,
despite having been raise in the South.
It's curious that Henry bothers reading my posts. Please man, can you
not put me on your blocked sender list? Alternatively, can you not do
a little research on google before making ridiculous accusations about
what I 'always' complain about? I have quite diverse complaints. The
first sentences of a book Zed will publish in July are below, to
satisfy you. But please, do consider putting me on your hitlist to
avoid this apoplexy problem I seem to cause.
Cheers,
Patrick
***
Looting Africa
The economics of exploitation
Preface
What is ordinarily conveyed by the word ‘looting’? On August 30, 2005,
we received a vivid answer at yahoo.com, in the form of a metaphor for
the common-sense inversion of Africa’s relationship to the West. Two
photographs were momentarily on display at yahoo.com’s news site, in
the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In one, Agence France
Press had snapped two New Orleans residents triumphantly wading
‘through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local
grocery store’, as the caption explained. In the other, the Associated
Press circulated a picture of a man walking ‘through chest deep flood
water after looting a grocery store’.
The couple ‘finding’ were white, the man ‘looting’ was black.[1]
Social critic Slavoj Žižek considered stereotypes of this sort
in discussing what he termed ‘the subject supposed to loot and rape’
in New Orleans:
We all remember the reports on the disintegration of public order, the
explosion of black violence, rape and looting. However, later
inquiries demonstrated that, in the large majority of cases, these
alleged orgies of violence did not occur: Non-verified rumors were
simply reported as facts by the media. For example, on September 3,
the Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department told the New
York Times about conditions at the Convention Center: ‘The tourists
are walking around there, and as soon as these individuals see them,
they’re being preyed upon. They are beating, they are raping them in
the streets.’ In an interview just weeks later, he conceded that some
of his most shocking statements turned out to be untrue: ‘We have no
official reports to document any murder. Not one official report of
rape or sexual assault.’[2]
When white tourists formerly lodged at New Orleans hotels sought to
escape the city, they were hustled to the front of emergency bus
queues, ahead of the mainly African-American, low-income ghetto
residents stuck at the wretched Convention Centre. Some such residents
had indeed raided shops for water, milk and perishables primarily as a
survival mechanism, to the opprobrium of Fox News anchors and
like-minded neoconservative commentators.
So who, in reality, benefited from the catastrophe? Another
critical analyst, Mike Davis, observed how the Bush regime rapidly
swung open the doors of New Orleans to corporate looters such as
Halliburton, the Shaw Group and Blackwater Security, already fat from
the spoils of the Tigris, [which] contrasted obscenely with the
Federal Emergency Management Agency’s deadly procrastination over
sending water, food and buses to the multitudes trapped in the
stinking hell of the Louisiana Superdome.[3]
Hence when it comes to explaining the world’s growing social divides,
revelations from the main port city of the world’s richest country are
telling. They boil down to the idea of ‘looting’: not as the logical
lifestyle of imperialism’s black victims, but instead as the basis for
capital accumulation under conditions of extreme inequality.
The great African political economist, Samir Amin, speaks of a
US strategy for Third World societies that ‘aims only at looting their
resources.’[4] Confirms Princeton economist Paul Krugman in a New York
Times column, ‘A while back, George Akerlof, the Nobel laureate in
economics, described what’s happening to public policy as “a form of
looting”… The Bush administration and the Republican leadership in
Congress are leading the looting party.’[5]
That party – and subsequent interimperial rivalries - began
many years earlier. According to Karl Marx,
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation,
enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the
turning of Africa into a commercial warren for the hunting of black
skins signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.
These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive
accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European
nations, with the globe for a theatre.[6]
By 1913, Rosa Luxemburg had developed a full-fledged theory of
imperialism from these insights:
Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed without any
attempt at concealment, and it requires an effort to discover within
this tangle of political violence and contests of power the stern laws
of the economic process. Bourgeois liberal theory takes into account
only the former aspect: ‘the realm of peaceful competition’, the
marvels of technology and pure commodity exchange; it separates it
strictly from the other aspect: the realm of capital’s blustering
violence which is regarded as more or less incidental to foreign
policy and quite independent of the economic sphere of capital.
In reality, political power is nothing but a vehicle for the
economic process. The conditions for the reproduction of capital
provide the organic link between these two aspects of the accumulation
of capital. The historical career of capitalism can only be
appreciated by taking them together. ‘Sweating blood and filth with
every pore from head to toe’ characterizes not only the birth of
capital but also its progress in the world at every step, arid thus
capitalism prepares its own downfall under ever more violent
contortions and convulsions…
Militarism fulfils a quite definite function in the history of
capital, accompanying as it does every historical phase of
accumulation. It plays a decisive part in the first stages of European
capitalism, in the period of the so-called ‘primitive accumulation’,
as a means of conquering the New World and the spice-producing
countries of India. Later, it is employed to subject the modern
colonies, to destroy the social organizations of primitive societies
so that their means of production may be appropriated, forcibly to
introduce commodity trade in countries where the social structure had
been unfavourable to it, and to turn the natives into a proletariat by
compelling them to work for wages in the colonies. It is responsible
for the creation and expansion of spheres of interest for European
capital in non-European regions, for extorting railway concessions in
backward countries, and for enforcing the claims of European capital
as international lender. Finally, militarism is a weapon in the
competitive struggle between capitalist countries for areas of
non-capitalist civilization.[7]
The wealth of capitalism - based in no small measure upon looting
Africa – is regularly revealed by critical scholars, of whom Walter
Rodney looms large for his 1972 book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,
followed by Paul Zeleza’s formidable 1993 Codesria manuscript covering
the 19th century, A Modern Economic History of Africa. Notwithstanding
such efforts, however, thanks to politicians and bureaucrats in
Washington and London, IMF and World Bank mandarins, Geneva trade
hucksters, pliant NGOs, banal celebrities and the mass media, the
legacy and ongoing exploitation of Africa have been tangled up in
ideological confusion.
To illustrate, consider all the attention Africa received
during 2005, through efforts to ‘make poverty history’, to provide
relief from crushing debt loads, to double aid and to establish a
‘development round’ of trade. At best, partial critiques of imperial
power emerged amidst the cacophony of all-white rock concerts and
political grandstanding. At worst, polite public discourse tactfully
avoided capital’s blustering violence, from Nigeria’s oil-soaked Delta
to northeastern Congo’s gold mines to Botswana’s diamond finds to
Sudan’s killing fields. Most of the London charity NGO strategies
ensured that core issue areas – debt, aid, trade and investment –
would be addressed in only the most superficial ways.
Perhaps this was not surprising. Mass media’s images of
Africans themselves were nearly uniformly negative during the recent
period, which plays nicely into the hands of elites. Reminiscent of
New Orleans ghettoes, Giles Mohan and Tunde Zack-Williams observed,
‘Africa’s underdevelopment has for long been blamed on local culture
and the lack of “proper” values. Such discourses designed to let
imperialism off the hook have reared their ugly head again in various
guises.’[8] It was from West Africa that the neoconservative US writer
Robert Kaplan described a future defined in terms of ‘disease,
overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee
migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international
borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and
international drug cartels’.[9] From such a frightened worldview, it
is not a distant leap for Tony Blair’s advisor Robert Cooper to
declare that ‘when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states… we
need to revert to rougher methods of an earlier age: force,
pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with
those who still live in the 19th century world of “every state for
itself”‘, hence generating ‘a new kind of imperialism… to bring order
and organization’.[10] Tim Jacoby concludes of such sentiments, ‘In
order to obscure western complicity in, or in some cases
responsibility for, the defects of states in the South, policy makers
have been influenced by, and contributed to, a rise to prominence of
cultural explanations for social phenomena.’[11]
As the ‘dark continent’, Africa has typically been painted
with broad-brush strokes, as a place of heathen and uncivilized
people, as savage and superstitious, as tribalistic and nepostic. As
David Wiley has shown, western media coverage is crisis driven, based
upon parachute journalism, amplified by an entertainment media which
‘perpetuates negative images of helpless primitives, happy-go-lucky
buffoons, evil pagans. The media glorify colonialism/European
intervention. Currently, Africa is represented as a place of endemic
violence and brutal but ignorant dictators.’ Add to this the
‘animalization of Africa via legion of nature shows on Africa that
present Africa as being devoid of humans’, enhanced by an ‘advertising
industry that has built and exploited (and thereby perpetuated)
simplistic stereotypes of Africa’. [12] Thus it was disgusting but
logical, perhaps, that African people were settled into a theme
village at an Austrian zoo in June 2005, their huts placed next to
monkey cages in scenes reminiscent of 19th century exhibitions. In an
explanatory letter, zoo director Barbara Jantschke denied that this
was ‘a mistake’ because ‘I think the Augsburg zoo is exactly the right
place to communicate an atmosphere of the exotic.’[13]
In this context, the difficulty of advancing structural
critique to link political and economic problems, and race, class and
gender, became clearer to me when in the immediate wake of the
Gleneagles G8 hoopla in July 2005, a friend emailed me a column from
that day’s International Herald Tribune authored by Daniel Altman, the
paper’s ‘global economics correspondent’. Without identifying himself,
Altman was positioned next to me on a JFK-Heathrow redeye and cribbed
some notes. His column began as follows:
Not long ago, Patrick Bond, an author and professor at the University
of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, was sitting on an airplane, working
on a presentation he was soon to make at Oxford. For one particular
slide, he spent several minutes rearranging pictures of American
troops’ flag-draped caskets aboard a cargo plane and of the World Bank
president, Paul Wolfowitz, dressed as an astronaut. Never mind that
this was a presentation about water commodification in South Africa -
to opponents of ‘neoliberalism’ like Bond, the supposed evils of free
markets and expansionist foreign policy are one and the same.[14]
I confess: what I’d groggily asked at the next day’s seminar was
whether the World Bank’s drive to commodify everything under the sun,
including water and even the air,[15] would be modified or
strengthened by Wolfowitz’s unilateralist, petro-militarist record and
orientation. The first slide of those three posed a couple of queries:
‘Will the Wolfowitz World Bank revert to neoliberalism? What is his
long-term agenda?’
Without dissent, my answer was that although the looting of
Iraq explicitly combined neoliberalism (Paul Bremer’s total
privatization agenda) with military occupation, this merger would have
problems in applications elsewhere. First, growing economic
contradictions associated with liberalized trade, investment and
especially financial markets appear insurmountable. Second, the
coffins demonstrated that US militarism applied to Iraq – and maybe
Syria, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, for example - may also be
untenable. Yet Wolfowitz would, I predicted, continue attempting to
fuse the economic and territorial imperatives of imperialism. An
uncomprehending Altman complained: ‘To its enemies, neoliberalism
apparently refers to an American-born urge to create unrestrained
markets for everything, everywhere, even if it means overthrowing a
government.’ Precisely.
Sometimes the elites cannot – or will not - see beyond their
noses. In contrast, a venerable and extremely popular US radio
commentator, Paul Harvey, had just a few days earlier expressed his
country’s basic urges more openly, in an appeal for Bush to
aggressively deploy weapons of mass destruction:
We sent men with rifles into Afghanistan and Iraq, and we kept our
best weapons in our silos. Even now we’re standing there dying, daring
to do nothing decisive, because we’ve declared ourselves to be better
than our terrorist enemies - more moral, more civilized. Our image is
at stake, we insist.
But we didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy.
Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and into this continent by
giving small pox infected blankets to native Americans. Yes, that was
biological warfare! And we used every other weapon we could get our
hands on to grab this land from whomever. And we grew prosperous. And,
yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves.
And so it goes with most nation states, which, feeling guilty
about their savage pasts, eventually civilize themselves out of
business and wind up invaded, and ultimately dominated by the lean,
hungry and up and coming who are not made of sugar candy.[16]
When the grabbing of land or markets must be defended, there are too
many proud Americans – and not just talk-show schlock-jocks like Paul
Harvey or Rush Limbaugh - who shamelessly stand in favour of looting.
As the suave New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman famously
remarked, ‘The hidden hand of the market will never work without the
hidden fist – McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas,
the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world
safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States
Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.’[17]
In short, contemporary ‘looting’ is not comprehensible
through populist, surface-level imagery like that the Associated Press
caption alleged. Looting is a system driven from capitalist
institutions in Washington, London and other Northern centres, and
accommodated by junior partners across the Third World, including
African capitals, especially Pretoria. This, anyway, is the argument I
will defend in the pages that follow.
Notes
[1]. http://www.flickr.com/photos/firewall/38725768/
[2]. Zizek, S. (2005), ‘The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape: Reality
and Fantasy in New Orleans’, In These Times, 20 October.
[3]. Davis, M. (2005), ‘Catastrophic Economics: The Predators of New
Orleans’, Le Monde Diplomatique, 2 October.
[4]. Amin, S. (2003), ‘Confronting the Empire,’ presented to the
conference on The Work of Karl Marx and the Challenges of the 21st
Century, Institute of Philosophy of the Ministry of Science,
Technology and the Environment, the National Association of Economists
of Cuba, the Cuban Trade Union Federation and the Centre for the Study
of Economy and Planning, Havana, 5-8 May.
[5]. Krugman, P. (2003), ‘Looting the Future,’ New York Times, 5
December.
[6]. Marx, K. (1867)[2005], Das Kapital, available at
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm.
[7]. Luxemburg, R. (1968)[1923], The Accumulation of Capital, New
York, Monthly Review Press. See www.marxists.org/archive/
luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/, from which these citations are
drawn.
[8]. Mohan, G. and T. Zack-Williams (2005), ‘Oiling the Wheels of
Imperialism’, Review of African Political Economy, 104/105, p.214.
[9]. Kaplan, R. (1994), ‘The Coming Anarchy’, Atlantic Monthly, 273,
p.46.
[10]. Cooper, R. (2002), ‘The Post-Modern State’, in M.Leonard (Ed),
Re-Ordering the World: The Long-Term Implications of September 11,
London, The Foreign Policy Centre, pp.16-17.
[11]. Jacoby, T. (2005), ‘Cultural Determinism, Western Hegemony and
the Efficacy of Defective States’, Review of African Political
Economy, 104/105, p.228.
[12].
http://exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu/curriculum/lm1/1/lm1_teachers.html.
[13]. Hawley, C. (2005), ‘African Village Accused of Putting Humans on
Display’, Spiegel Online, 9 June,
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,359799,00.html.
[14]. Altman, D. (2005), ‘Neoliberalism? It Doesn’t Exist’,
International Herald Tribune, 16 July.
[15]. Bond, P. and R.Dada (Eds)(2005), Trouble in the Air: Global
Warming and the Privatised Atmosphere, Durban, University of
KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society.
[16]. Cited in Zorn, E. (2005), ‘Paul Harvey: Ah, Genocide and
Slavery, now That’s a Good Day!’, Chicago Tribune, 24 June.
[17]. Friedman, T. (1999), ‘A Manifesto for the Fast World’, New York
Times Magazine, March.
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