Saturday, January 16, 2010

the uses of Haiti/2

As you can probably notice, this is a long one. Not really "writing for the web".

Via Leonardo (one of the best - Italian only), a link to an article on "il Giornale" (one of Berlusconi's newspapers), stating that the possibly 150,000 victims and 3,000,000 homeless in Haiti are due to the fact that the country has chosen a non-capitalistic development path. As a consequence, it has failed in overcoming poverty, whereas we capitalistic developed countries succeeded.

That a country which has been first a slave-labor-based plantation, then a militarily occupied territory, lastly the personal domain of a handful dictators, may have been able to autonomously determine its economic policy, already sounds like an overstatement. Whenever the Haitians have tried to pursue an idea of self-determined government there has always been a foreign power ready to restore things the way they used to be. To me, whatever system they live in today, it looks rather imposed than freely chosen.

That Haiti is an example of anti-capitalistic economy is plain wrong. The country has been re-populated with Africans to be used as a plantation to meet the western countries' needs. It is actually a manifestation of what globalization already looked like in pre-industrial period. And, with a little help of the US, it's stably been a free market economy in the last century. Just an extremely poor one, where development has never happened.

That capitalism should be the reason our lives are so good, I find even more debatable. The argument there is quite a common one. Our system is right because our life expectancy, per capita GDP and material consumption are higher, and this has been made possible by capitalism, free market, and industrial revolution.

In fact, the better lifestyle of citizens of advanced economies depends only in part on the widespread availability of cheap commodities and services (food, water, clothes, sanitation, transportation, heating systems) which have indeed been made available by mechanization of productive activities and fast and free circulation of wares. It is also founded on a whole set of measures that redistribute profit to ensure social security and welfare.

Every State defines boundaries outside of which a measure that could be desirable, since it makes an activity more profitable, becomes illegal, because it creates a series of negative side-effects, of externalities, that a society can't afford. We take for granted that children shouldn't be allowed to work, that nature should be safeguarded, that men and women should be equally paid, that any working environment should be safe and that workers should be protected in case of accidents or sickness. And most of the developed States, through progressive taxation, generally ensure that good education and work opportunities are not restricted to those who can pay for them, that health care is available to all, that people have a fulfilling life when they're retired or unemployed.

These measures are essentially anti-capitalistic. They modify the market and limit the accumulation of wealth to guarantee every citizen the access to a set of fundamental, non negotiable rights. They have been progressively conquered by the civil society with a struggle against the capital, and finally imposed though democratic legislation. Without the definition and the respect of this set of rights, the lumpenproletariat that populated European cities a couple of centuries ago wouldn't probably be any better off.

We have been quite good in producing and enforcing these rules in our countries (although not uniformly), but the same hasn't happened on a worldwide scale. Actually, we are more and more experiencing the opposite.

In the absence of internationally recognized standards and rights, low fossil-fuel-based-energy prices have contributed in creating a kind of "international reserve army of labour", composed of developing countries that have all the interest in keeping regulations as loose as possible, to lower the production costs and be more competitive. In order to maximize profits, many productive activities (especially industrial, labour intensive, polluting ones, that require less qualified manpower) have moved to countries where the labour is cheap and workers are not guaranteed, where the environmental legislation is non existent, where safety regulations are not respected, building codes not enforced, urban growth not managed. And where any form of development would make production more expensive, leading to the loss of the competitive advantage, of the only reason why a certain activity is carried out right there.

This process has become absolutely fundamental in ensuring material well-being of consumers in developed countries. Our access to cheap food, clothes, cars, fuel, and so on, is totally based on it. Its consequence is that socio-economical and environmental externalities have been moved out of our sight, giving us the illusion of living in the best of possible worlds, but, in reality, drastically worsening the life conditions of billions living somewhere else. Prosperity chez nous is actually based on environmental destruction and social injustice chez eux. Simply, we don't care.

Haiti's current situation is not just a failure of the prevailing international economic system. It is absolutely organic to it. Unregulated globalized capitalism needs "black holes" to accumulate its externalities. It needs a Lake Victoria for its perch fillets, it needs an Amazon forest for the soya to feed its cows, it needs a Bhopal to establish its dangerous activities. And it also needs places like Naples to dump its toxic waste, or Rosarno (or the old part of New Orleans) to pile up cheap manpower.

It always directs its undesirable side-effects to places where laws and regulations are non existent, or non enforced. There always are places like that. They can be managed, conserved, and even be created, through military interventions, financial crisis, coups, civil wars, embargoes, and conflicts.

It's really not about the poor countries being too under-developed. Not only following us on our "development" path is not going to solve their problems; it is actually what's causing them. Without boundaries and constraints, the capitalist production system tends to create "islands of wealth in oceans of poverty". And it will keep preventing a large share of the world population from having its basic needs met, its fundamental human rights respected.

This system we live in can only look good if we decide that liberté, égalité, and fraternité only apply to those that already are free, equal, and similar to us. We found them such good ideas for ourselves, why should it be any different with a few other billion people?

2 comments:

  1. Adesso questo post è salvato sul mio computer, pronto per essere riletto all'occorrenza e per riflettere quando qualche sciacallo dirà ancora qualche cafonata sui benefici incontestabili del capitalismo.
    thank you
    Alessandra

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  2. I totally agree... :-)

    ReplyDelete