It’s Getting Hot In Here

Suicide (n) – The most preventable type of death.

This is the ongoing story of a species whose leaders have a death wish, and whose members at large mostly don’t. Also, sometimes they got to wondering what should be done about a large geopolitical concentration of fellow beings operating under the brand name “China”.

(9) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (10) Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. (11) There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. – Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (NIV)

Glenn Hurowitz recently wondered who’s going to help Tibet bring down China, like the Russians were brought down in Afghanistan and the British in India.

International pressure and protest seems to carry no weight among the Chinese. Their government is still arresting monks for “unauthorized gatherings”, they’re still shooting and killing Tibetans. They’ve also been shipping weapons to Zimbabwe’s dictator, who’s currently ignoring the results of an election that voted him and his party out of power. They buy 90 percent of Sudan’s exported oil, and sells them small arms destined for Darfur. Darfur, where the Sudanese government is carrying out air attacks against helpless civilian targets. Oh yes, and they’re now the world’s top carbon polluter, though the US still remains the top carbon polluter per capita.

Yeah, that Chinese government, complete jerks, tyrants, to put it charitably. People are surprised that the Olympic torch protests seem only to have stirred Chinese nationalism, surprised that the Chinese don’t understand why people are angry. Still, I think Glenn asks the wrong question. Because who is it that raised China up? The lack of self-awareness in this situation isn’t exclusive to the Chinese, people everywhere have an amazing capacity to accept almost anything as normal.

Indeed, let’s cut right to the heart of the matter: whom else will we buy our shoes from?

I looked this up once when I was working at my community college paper in 2005. There was an editorial insistence on doing a fashion insert, so I contributed something about sweatshops and the offshoring of clothing manufacture. (I know, total killjoy.) I found a copy of that article in my old files, and according to the research that I’d done at the time, the US had lost over 860,000 textile and apparel jobs since 1993, and China was making 80% of the world’s shoes.

Sure, if you have (usually) more money to spend, you can find shoes made somewhere else. But not everyone has that kind of time or latitude. Funny thing, though, now shoe manufacturers are closing down in China. Now that “many factories have to meet social obligations” and workers have been agitating for better pay, manufacturing jobs are slowly starting to leave China as they once left the US.

Nobody in power ever really likes labor agitators. Not most ostensibly liberal employers, not even theoretically communist governments.

It all starts to sound so familiar. Like a story we’ve heard before. Which it is, of course.

We are rightly angry about Tibet, about Darfur. But we should be as angry about the engine of consumption, consolidation and extraction that created Tibet and Darfur. That created Iraq, Guatemala, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, vietnam, and so many other shattered nations at various stages of piecing a society back together or splintering further apart.

Maybe you don’t know all the stories of those other places. Or, like me, perhaps you know more or less enough to cringe over their names. Perhaps you know enough to make you really angry. There have been (and let’s try and stick with being charitable) terrible abuses.

Though as is so often true, abuse begins at home. And by home, in this case, I mean the home of the social system in which the Chinese government operates.

They Had No Title To Their Land, They Were Sold As Slaves

First, there was a plague and wars. Then the Western elites saw that the people who lived on the land, the subsistence farmers, had no titles of ownership to the land they farmed crops and grazed animals on in commons. The elites put up fences, they secured official deeds, they evicted the farmers and herders. They had the force of arms and the backing of the law. Whole families were cut off from their livelihoods, leaving many to flee to the growing slums of the cities to try and eke out a living at the whim of the manufacturing economy.

South America? The Native North Americans? No. The European peasantry, starting mainly in the 1400-1500s. Though it was a gradual process that took place at different rates in countries like England and Italy.

It isn’t that manufacturing is bad, necessarily. But you had a whole class of people, who once might have been able to choose to work at it or not, separated from the basic means of subsistence that allowed them to try and maintain their families when there was no work. The lands they were turned out from stopped being used for the trifling purpose of supporting the people who lived nearby. They became productive lands that supported the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, they created great fortunes.

In 1776, in the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote about the situation that had become the lot of ever greater numbers of people in his day. A peasant underclass that was not merely poor, but entirely without means:

We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long-run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him, but the necessity is not so immediate.

That went and happened again. Many times, all over the world. The last few decades have seen an acceleration in mass displacement of subsistence farm families in developing nations. Now their lands are productive though, supporting the accumulation of great wealth. Too bad those people have had to flee to cities where their isn’t enough work for illiterate former farmers, too bad they can’t afford to buy what they used to grow.

When the American colonies began to be settled with commodity farming in mind, people were taken from their homes, from prisons, press-ganged to the New World to work as slave labor on farms. They owed fealty, as if to a king or aristocrat, to the leaders of the London Company, the Ohio Company, the Dutch West India Company, among others. [1]

Black Africans? Not in this case. Again, the European peasantry. That’s how many of the first Whites to come to North America first came; as slaves press ganged against their will, indentured servants, and mercenaries bound by oath. Will Allen, The War On Bugs, 2008 [1]:

Historian James O’Neal described the climate of freedom in eastern North America immediately before and after the Revolutionary War: “From 1682 to 1804 the proportion of white slaves to the whole number of immigrants to Pennsylvania steadily increased, till they constituted two-thirds during the last 19 years.” Pennsylvania was politically the most liberal state and did not even require property ownership for voting privilege. But even in this most liberal state, only one-third of the immigrants in the period immediately after the Revolution obtained their freedom when they arrived in America.

Everybody did it, you know, lived in a society that kept slaves. It’s still done, even though it’s illegal.

Back when it was legal here in the United States, there were also free White people who sold their own children as slaves, if you can believe it.

It should hardly surprise anyone that a society like that would go on to do the same things to people from other societies. That their elites would steal land from Native Americans. That they would also buy and sell human beings who didn’t look related to them. It doesn’t excuse anything done to Blacks, neither to the Native Americans who were also kept as slaves and worse, nor could it excuse the racial apartheid that followed the formal end of slavery.

It just goes to show that the ancestors who founded this country were very sick, in more ways than we always remember.

It’s to their credit that, being products of such a brutal upbringing, they were able to lay the foundations for a more expansive democracy. That even though many of them strove for a pseudo-aristocratic stranglehold on the wealth of the new nation they were building, they set in motion an engine of greater liberty than they were themselves capable of envisioning.

To love or respect any person, or human enterprise, without acknowledging their flaws, is ultimately not to love. Not to respect. It is to dream about people that never were.

If you want only to dream, go to sleep.

Inhumanity

How nice it would be if we were past all that. Institutionalized, legal slavery is gone in the US. But there were many poisonous aspects to it that remain, demons that have yet to be exorcised. Mostly, the way there’s always some group of people that other parties to events can’t see as human.

People whose hurt and sufferings and shattered lives we can’t feel. If it were my sister treated as the women are by the Janjaweed militias in Darfur, it would injure me, too. If it were my cousin, reduced to howling grief on the street because all his precious children lay in tatters in a bombed out house as happens in Iraq, I would howl with him. It would break me to know and love those people and hurt for them; I would have to act, to try to help.

We were all asked to do this, to care for each other a long time ago by a very original social radical, but hardly anyone listened. Maybe there’s still time for that, but it has yet to work.

How nice it would be if it had worked to just tell people to be good to each other, as if the motive had been to treat people badly in the first place. That’s just the byproduct. Just.

After all, the modernized nations were perfectly willing to give up most of the mistreatment of their own people as soon as they had people in other nations to exploit or steal from. It wasn’t personal.

We often forget, now, that it’s how those who came before us jumpstarted our own prosperity. Though the peoples we hurt along the way haven’t forgotten. The Chinese, who long for prosperity of their own, they remember. They aren’t evil, they just want to thrive. As the people whose cultures originated in Europe had previously explained it to them: if you want to thrive, this is how it’s done these days.

It would be better if only the victims lived someplace else. Not on top of the Chinese’ land. Not on top of the US’ oil. Not on that really nice farmland they weren’t using properly. It would be better if they’d buy our stuff and would just sell us what we want them to. Then there wouldn’t be any problems, it’s only that the engine must be fed. Must. It’s too bad people won’t go along quietly. Too bad they don’t understand.

Now look what they made us do.

[1] “The War On Bugs” by Will Allen, 2008, Chelsea Green. A history of pesticides and modern agriculture.

[2] “Global Warning: The Last Chance for Change” by Paul Brown, 2007, Reader’s Digest. Or, as they say at the Fafblog, “Global Warming: How F*cked Are We? The answer may surprise you! But only if you thought the answer was “not f*cked,” ’cause it turns out we’re pretty f*cked.”

[3] “China: Inside the Dragon” a special issue of National Geographic, May, 2008.

Other GSP installments:

Transnational Maoism – All hail our corporate mercantilist overlords.
Darfur Engine, Pt 2 – The long burn.
Darfur Engine, Pt 1 – You didn’t think the Chinese had no precedent, did you?
Amish Takeover – Apocalyptic dystopia? No thanks, I’d rather have a civilization.
The Efficiency Trap – Energy flow in living systems and their origins.
The End of Cheap – Political reality, meet physical reality.

X-posted from OpenLeft