It’s back to the eighties again, considering the complete and utter collapse of the Anglo-American financial world and the sombre news from the budget in Den Haag: can mass unemployment be far behind? If so, this old classic by the Janse Bagge Bend is shockingly relevant again.
Life under Capitalism
Let them eat mud cake
I’m sure I’ve read about this recently in another context, but in Haiti mud cakes have become a staple diet of the poor:
At first sight the business resembles a thriving pottery. In a dusty courtyard women mould clay and water into hundreds of little platters and lay them out to harden under the Caribbean sun.
The craftsmanship is rough and the finished products are uneven. But customers do not object. This is Cité Soleil, Haiti’s most notorious slum, and these platters are not to hold food. They are food.
Brittle and gritty – and as revolting as they sound – these are “mud cakes”. For years they have been consumed by impoverished pregnant women seeking calcium, a risky and medically unproven supplement, but now the cakes have become a staple for entire families.
It is not for the taste and nutrition – smidgins of salt and margarine do not disguise what is essentially dirt, and the Guardian can testify that the aftertaste lingers – but because they are the cheapest and increasingly only way to fill bellies.
“It stops the hunger,” said Marie-Carmelle Baptiste, 35, a producer, eyeing up her stock laid out in rows. She did not embroider their appeal. “You eat them when you have to.”
These days many people have to. The global food and fuel crisis has hit Haiti harder than perhaps any other country, pushing a population mired in extreme poverty towards starvation and revolt. Hunger burns are called “swallowing Clorox”, a brand of bleach.
I’ve been reading a fair few history books this year and I remember reading about this exact same practise, perhaps in Braudel’s The Structures of Everyday Life, but this was in the context of a pre-industrial, agricultural society still tightly bound to the vagracies of nature. It’s impressive how modern capitalism has enabled us to repeat the experiences of the most primitive of societies. Because while The Guardian article might give you the impression that all this is just the unfortunate result of the rise in food and fuel prices worldwide, much of the Haitian crisis is actually due to years and decades of capitalist profitering by the richest 1 percent of Haiti’s population, as they systematically dismantled most of Haiti’s domestic food production in order to have a monopoly on food imports, as explained back in May on Prog Gold.
And of course it has not been just domestic profiteers who’ve caused the crisis. Haiti started its existence as one of France’s most profitable slave colonies, succesfully rebelled against them in 1803 after a long and brutal war, but had to pay its former masters 150 million francs as compensation. Since then it has been a semi-colony of the United States, with American companies working hand in glove with the succession of dictators and their cronies to exploit its natural wealth and people. In recent decades IMF restructuring programmes have worsened the situation even further, by privatising and hence destroying the state sector, opening up the country to the free market and tying its government to strict spending controls. But the democratically elected Aristide government refused to privatise public utilities and actually increased the tacx burden on the wealthiest, which meant that sooner or later it would have to go. Under Clinton Haiti was put under pressure to chose the right government by slashing development aid to the country, under Bush the solution was more simple: a UN sponsored invasion and occupation. See Peter Hallward’s excellent article in The New Left Review for more information.
Haiti is the best example, because it’s the most blatant example, of how capitalism causes starvation and mass deprivation around the globe, usually hidden from view because it’s built into the system, with no clear bad guy to put the blame on. Blood and Treasure, comparing Haiti to China during the Great Leap Forward, put it best:
Slash and burn in the GLF was down to the rural industrialization programme. Hillsides were denuded by people creating charcoal for backyard furnaces, when they should have been, say, growing food. That policy could be traced neatly and accurately back to Mao. Distributed authorship of mass starvation has always been a structural political advantage of capitalism. Who, specifically, was responsible for the Irish or Bengal famines? And how about the IMF? Did it really just “applaud” or did it have a bit less of a spectator’s role in helping destroy Haitian farming?
Leave the kids alone? Ain’t gonna happen
Last night while I was dropping off to sleep, for some reason I started thinking of how I used to walk to school when I was little. I must’ve been four when I started walking on my own to school, which was only five minutes away and how nobody thought this was weird, because everybody did this. In a neighbourhood with lots of young families and small children and little car traffic, this was perfectly safe to do. Had we lived in Amsterdam it would’ve been different, but no doubt I and my brothers and sister would’ve been using the public transport before we hit our teens. All of this is of course several decades ago and no doubt parents have become more uptight here as well, but I sincerily doubt we ever see shock horror articles likes this: Mom lets 9-year-old take subway home alone (found via Unfogged):
Once upon a time in New York City, it wasn’t a big deal if pre-teen kids rode the subways and buses alone. Today, as Lenore Skenazy has discovered, a kid who goes out without a nanny, a helmet and a security detail is a national news story, and his mother is a candidate for child-abuse charges.
A columnist for The New York Sun, Skenazy recently left her 9-year-old son, Izzy, at Bloomingdale’s in midtown Manhattan with a Metrocard for the subway, a subway map, $20, and told him she’d see him when he got back home. She wrote a column about it and has been amazed at the chord she struck among New Yorkers who remember being kids in those more innocent times.
[…]
Dr. Ruth Peters, a parenting expert and TODAY Show contributor, agreed that children should be allowed independent experiences, but felt there are better – and safer – ways to have them than the one Skenazy chose.
“I’m not so much concerned that he’s going to be abducted, but there’s a lot of people who would rough him up,” she said. “There’s some bullies and things like that. He could have gotten the same experience in a safer manner.”
In the accompanying poll, 51 percent of the people who responsed said they wouldn’t allow their children on the subway at that age. It all seems a bit hysterical. Even in Amsterdam, vice capital of the Netherlands, I see pre-teen kids ride bikes to school and why shouldn’t they? Part of growing up is learning to do things without your parents and if you keep your kids in an overprotective bubble they will never learn to be independent. Yet judging from the article, keeping their children in such a bubble is exactly what many if not most parents want to do.
A related development is the amount of work and pseudowork children, even young children, seem to be saddled with these days. Children of my generation didn’t get homework until the final year of primary school, if at all and while we did have afterschool activities like learning to play guitar or were involved in sports, few of us had more than one or two of those at the same time. these days it seems schools and parents both are deeply involving even young children with what one Unfogged commenter called “the cultivation of personal individuality and resumé-like individual capacities” all in highly structured, cocooned settings but without giving children much freedom to do things on their own, outside a parent or parent-substitute’s supervision.
So you get a generation of children who are expected to have an agenda filled with “career building”highly structured activities alongside their school work, while everything outside these activities is frowned upon, actively discouraged or even criminalised –asbos for youths hanging around shopping centres, zero tolerance anti drugs policies for toddlers, metal detectors at schools and police officers at the door. Does that combination strike you as raising a generation of people able to dissent from what their leaders and betters have planned for them?
BNP or BBC?
Imagine the following trailer: the face of a white, bald man somewhere in his forties is shown in close up while Billy Bragg’s interpretation of Jerusalem plays. A hand moves in view and starts writing on the man’s skin in black paint, in a clearly non-western looking script. A second hand follows and writes in another script. More hands follows, until the man’s whole face is covered in black paint. He then closes his eyes and the text appears below: “is Britain’s white working class becoming invisible?” All hands shown look Black or Asian.
sounds like a BNP ad? You would think so, but if you’ve been watching the BBC this weekend you must’ve seen it come past, as a trailer for their coming season of programmes devoted to “the white working class”. According to the press release the BBC have put out about this, these programmes are meant to examine “why some sections of this community feel increasingly marginalised yoday” and why it is that “some white working class people to say they feel under siege and as if their very sense of self is being brought into question“.
Because until now the working class has largely featured on BBC2 as gormless chavs who need to be taught how to feed their children properly, it’s not hard to feel skeptical about the intentions behind this. The BBC has rarely cared about the working classes, white or otherwise, staunch bastion of middle class priviledge that it is. Why suddenly discover them now and sell this with images and a narrative that play straight into BNP scaremongering? A white man’s face that disappears under a layer of black paint; how obvious can you get?
This season could’ve been worthwhile if the BBC had made it working class season rather than white season because the issues it presents are issues that concern the whole working class, not just the white part of it. Britain in the last thirty years has been forcibly shifted from a manufacturing to a services orientated economy and that’s the reason the “white working class” feels “increasingly marginalised today”, because the jobs their fathers and grandfathers had for life have disappeared. It’s the economy, stupid.
Of course the programmes themselves may very well be much better than the trailer makes them out to be; the BBC has a long tradition of making shit trailers for good shows. These programmes might just examine the economic background to the plight of the English working class, -white, black, Asian and other–. For the moment however whatever the BBC thinks it’s doing, it’s mostly providing ammunition to the BNP and other bigots, as a Google search on “BBC white working class” makes clear. The first hit is to the St*rmfr*nt hate site.
The last word is for Theloonyfromcatford commenting on a similar article in the Guardian lamenting the loss of “white working class identity”:
I’m a white,working class man.
The idea that I’ve become invisible, maligned and need a hug/season of programmes from ex public schoolboys in order to feel better about myself is absurd.
Yes, the man who owns the local shop has brown skin. Yes,my work colleagues include Polish girls and black blokes.
So what?
Bridgend
What can you say about the Bridgend suicides? It’s a tragedy for the victims and the bereaved both, made worse by a torrent of media hype flooding over the town and the accompanying headlines. Worse is the talk about suicide pacts, copycat suicides and Werther effect, all of which sounds vaguely patronising at best, reducing the suicides and the pain and suffering they caused families and friends to some insidious trend or fashion. Of course the media, in love with itself as always, has also asked itself the hard (but exciting!) question whether they might not be to blame, their mighty influence causing the “epidemic”.
What rot.
Copycat suicides do happen, but they are not undertaken by people who are otherwise fine and just pushed into suicide by the media, or friends, or whatever. They’re a proximate cause, not the ultimate cause of suicides, as the Wikipedia article and the sources it cite also make clear. There’s more going on than just impressionable youths imitating each other. What exactly drove each of these victims to their deaths I don’t known and nobody knows, but I do know what created the pressures that drove them to their deaths.
The truth is, in Britain it’s now increasingly a crime to be a teenager. Day after day if you’re a teen, you are bombarded with the message that you’re scum: knife crime, binge drinking, anti-social behaviour, chavs: a constant litany of ills supposedly caused by teens. Meanwhile more and more repression against teenagers is tolerated by society, from using asbos to combat legal but “problematic” behaviour, to those mosquito anti-teen devices that chase them out of shops to the ever increasing presence of CCTV to keep them under surveillance. Politicians worry constantly about teenagers, the media reports on them, not for their sakes, but for the threat they supposedly are against others. Is it any wonder that many teenagers, derided as chavs from birth feel worthless? All our media stereotypes about teenagers are bad, from Little Britain to Catherine Tate. As if adolescence is such a happy time anyway.
But even if you’re not typecast as a chav or a hoodlum you have problems. Few teens, even those with nice middle class parents get to be Max Gogarty. All their lives they’ve been bombarded with commercials and aspirational messages telling them they should expect a good job, a nice house and car, holidays twice a year, all the trappings of the middle class lifestyles their parents have, only to discover once they finish school or graduate from university that it’s all a crock. Either, like in Bridgend, the jobs aren’t there or, like in London, there are no houses to be had for love nor money or even, as in Plymouth, both jobs are missing and houses are priced out of reach.
It’s this twopronged development that’s driving these suicides, the constant reinforcement that you’re scum, combined with the resentment and despair at seeing others have the good life that is forever out of your reach.