| Reflections
on the ‘Dispossessed’
By Nicolas J S
Davies
November 27,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- After centuries of hard-fought but limited progress,
human society seems to be reverting to the law of the
jungle. For many of our international neighbors, this
means leading lives defined by
aerial bombardment, guerrilla warfare,
militia rule and displacement as
refugees.
For half my
neighbors in the U.S., it means living paycheck to
paycheck under a corrupt
“inverted totalitarian” political and economic
system designed to funnel ever greater concentrations of
wealth and power into the hands of a greedy and
unsympathetic ruling class, exemplified at the moment by
Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, the Koch brothers and
Wall Street.
For people
everywhere, the fragile collective systems of law, civil
and human rights, social welfare, progressive taxation
and public services that painstakingly evolved to
provide human beings with basic rights and longer,
healthier, happier lives are disintegrating into
something closer to Thomas Hobbes’ Seventeenth Century
nightmare of a violent and chaotic world in which most
people’s lives will be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish
and short.”
If we
understood more of our own history, we might grasp a
little better the fragility of the improving quality of
life we or our parents once took for granted, the
competing forces of progress and greed that have shaped
the world we live in, and the mechanisms by which greed
keeps rearing its head to undermine progress in spite of
all our efforts.
Until I read
Eric Hobsbawm’s quartet of books that begins with
The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 and ends with
The Age of Extremes: 1914-1991, I did not know that
my own great-great-grandparents in newly industrialized
Dudley in England’s Black Country were born with an
average life expectancy of only 18 years.
I also learned
from Hobsbawm that, when I was born in a British
dockyard hospital in Sri Lanka in 1954, at least half of
my fellow human beings still lived as subsistence
farmers in societies that had evolved for centuries with
less radical change than they have now experienced in my
own short lifetime.
Loss of
Communal Rights
In the bat of
an eyelid in the sweep of human history, traditional
ways of life based on communal rights to land and
centuries of accumulated wisdom about how to live on it
have been shattered and discarded.
On Friday,
Consortiumnews reported on
the crisis of landlessness and poverty that has led
to decades of resistance and repression in
the Philippines. Throughout the “developing” world,
a billion poor, landless people have been herded into
new megacities ringed by endless slums and shanty-towns,
to lead lives defined by low-wage labor, street life,
extreme poverty and insecurity, and unsanitary and toxic
environments – not unlike Dudley in the 1830s.
The predicament
facing our fellow creatures is even worse than our own.
The World Wildlife Fund reported recently that the
Earth’s total population of wild animals, birds, fish,
amphibians and reptiles
has declined by 60 percent since 1970, and that the
decline has accelerated in the past five years despite
current conservation efforts.
The shattering
of relationships between people, communities and the
land they live on is in large part the culmination of a
process that began in England 500 years ago. In medieval
times, English peasants were forced to work their feudal
masters’ land, but they also had access to
common land where they could build homes, grow crops
and graze animals.
Then landowners
began to
“enclose” formerly common land in what we would now
call a privatization of land, the most vital resource in
an agricultural society. Feudal lords gradually became
“modern” landlords and employers, scattering their
former vassals to the wind with no right to land on
which to build cottages, grow crops or graze animals.
As Thomas More wrote
in Utopia in 1516, greedy landowners discovered
that grazing sheep could be more profitable than
sharing land with other human beings: “…the nobility and
gentry, and even those holy men, the abbots, not
contented with the old rents which their farms yielded,
nor thinking it enough that they, living at their ease,
do no good to the public, resolve to do it hurt instead
of good. They stop the course of agriculture, destroying
houses and towns, reserving only the churches, and
enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep in them…
“[Ordinary
people] are put in prison as idle vagabonds; while they
would willingly work, but can find none that will hire
them; for there is no more occasion for country labor,
to which they have been bred, when there is no arable
ground left. One shepherd can look after a flock which
will stock an extent of ground that would require many
hands if it were to be ploughed and reaped. This
likewise in many places raises the price of corn.”
Orwell’s Dim View
George Orwell
echoed More’s dim view of property owners and the
enclosure of common lands in a column
in Tribune on Aug. 18, 1944:
“…the so-called
owners of the land … simply seized it by force,
afterwards hiring lawyers to provide them with
title-deeds. In the case of the enclosure of the common
lands…, the land-grabbers did not even have the excuse
of being foreign conquerors; they were quite frankly
taking the heritage of their own countrymen, upon no
sort of pretext except that they had the power to do
so. Except for the few surviving commons, the high
roads, the lands of the National Trust, a certain number
of parks, and the sea shore below high-tide mark, every
square inch of England is ‘owned’ by a few thousand
families. These people are just about as useful as so
many tapeworms.”
The proportion
of common land in England shrank
from a third in 1500 to 27 percent by 1600, and has
kept shrinking ever since. A series of parliamentary
“Inclosure Acts” codified and regulated this process in
the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, and the newly
dispossessed provided a captive labor pool for new
factories in places like Dudley, where women and
children worked in conditions previously imposed only on
convicts.
Before the
Second World War, hundreds of “commoner” families still
grew crops and grazed animals in
Ashdown Forest, the largest remaining area of common
land in southeast England (and the setting for A.A.
Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories). The commoners
won a famous court case to uphold their rights in 1881,
but half the remaining commoners lost their rights by
failing to re-register under a new law in 1965. There
are still 730 registered commoner families living in the
forest, but reportedly only one family still makes its
living grazing cattle on the common land. The others
lead “modern” lives like the rest of us.
After the
Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, Scottish clan
chieftains followed the example of the English lords,
turned their lands to sheep farming and
ethnically cleansed their clan members – their own
extended families – from the highlands.
The haunting
emptiness of that landscape today is the result of a
crime against humanity, well documented in John Preble’s
classic, The Highland Clearances. Memories of
burned-out crofts live on across the sea in place names
like Ben Lomond in California, named for the last
Scottish mountain the dispossessed highlanders could see
from the decks of migrant ships sailing down the Clyde.
Destroying the Mayans
In the
highlands of Guatemala, where indigenous Mayan peoples
have fought fiercely to save their land and their
culture for 500 years, girls at American mission schools
are forced to exchange the beautiful traje
(traditional clothes) hand-woven by their mothers and
grandmothers for Scots tartan uniforms,
cheap factory-made imitations of the traje of
another highland culture who were banned from wearing it
themselves after the Jacobite rebellions. The irony
seems to be lost on their American benefactors.
As Europe’s
rulers and landowners emptied their throwaway people
into the Americas and other settler colonies, they
spread the privatization of land and the destruction of
traditional societies to new regions, leading to
genocides of indigenous people and their cultures across
the Americas and the world.
Colonial and
post-colonial rulers alike have pitted the dispossessed
of Europe against indigenous people in elemental
struggles for survival in which the ultimate winners are
always the wealthy few who can take advantage of the
commodification of the Earth to claim ownership of more
and more of it.
Across the
world, legal concepts that evolved out
of medieval English property law now serve as mechanisms
to dispossess hundreds of millions of people: either
because they have no paper title to land their families
may have lived on for centuries; or because the extra
land they would need to support a growing extended
family has already been expropriated by wealthy
landlords or agri-business companies; or because
neoliberal government policies force small producers to
compete with transnational companies in
global markets, where prices of food and basic
commodities fluctuate dramatically without regard for
their impact on real people’s lives; or because, as many
Americans have experienced, they are swindled into debt
and foreclosure by greedy bankers, wealthy investors,
corrupt governments and courts.
The foreclosure
crisis in the U.S. then dumped millions of its victims
into newly inflated rental markets to be exploited all
over again by other investors who are now their
landlords.
Privatization on Steroids
Now these
concepts of private ownership and property rights are
expanding into new areas
of life under novel legal constructs like intellectual
property law, “free” trade and investment agreements,
corporate personhood, binding arbitration,
investor-state dispute settlement and global patent
law.
These create
new opportunities for privatization and profit, leaving
ordinary human beings farther adrift in captive markets
where more and more of the basics of life, from food to
medical care to housing to education, must be bought at
a premium from increasingly monopolistic corporations.
The cradle-to-grave welfare state promised to the men
who marched home from World War Two has metamorphosed
into cradle-to-grave debt for their grandchildren.
As traditional
communal land ownership was replaced by new systems of
private property across the world, the rise of socialism
and communism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries
was an attempt to restore social justice, community and
communal ownership through new forms of political and
economic organization. It should therefore be no
surprise that the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and the
resulting expansion of the neoliberal world led to an
unbridled global acceleration of privatization and the
accumulation of all forms of wealth in fewer and fewer
hands.
In the Western
world, the prior gains of movements for labor,
environmental, civil and human rights have fallen victim
to a rampage of neoliberal political and economic
policies, backed by triumphalist claims for the “magic
of the market” that have more in common with religious
dogma than social science. But the laws of economics
have not really changed since the 1930s, when an
apocryphal saying attributed to J.M. Keynes defined this
kind of laissez-faire capitalism as “the absurd idea
that the worst people, for the worst reasons, will do
what is best for all of us.”
The parasites
who Orwell called the “so-called owners” of the world
think they have built an impregnable legal fortress on
the equally absurd idea that they own everything and
that the rest of us therefore come into the world with
nothing and must pay them for the privilege of living
here. This is not the way that human beings have lived
throughout our history on Earth, and it is not an
improvement.
These so-called
owners now threaten our very existence with their
insatiable greed and genocidal behavior. So let us make
sure that this disastrous experiment is short-lived, and
that it ends, not in a nuclear holocaust, nor with a
society destroyed by climate change, but with a
peaceful, sustainable world that we will all love,
share, and safeguard for future generations.
Castro’s Death
With the death
of Fidel Castro, the world has lost the most prominent
world leader of his generation to clearly and
consistently challenge the immorality and absurdity of
allowing the world to be ruled by such a parasitic and
dangerous ownership class. China’s Xinhua news agency
rightly called him, “a pioneer in battling the
current international economic order, particularly
against the capitalist system, neoliberal globalisation,
foreign debt and exploitation of natural resources.”
With his
passing, to quote another leader of his era, “The torch
has been passed to a new generation.”
The Republican
sweep in the 2016 election presents this generation of
Americans with challenges that should be familiar by
now after several decades of neoliberalism,
notwithstanding the surprise rebranding of Donald Trump,
a bigoted
billionaire and
TV game show host, as our new president.
In the
conclusion of his masterwork, Century of War,
historian Gabriel
Kolko proposed a formula for a pragmatic way
forward that is just as pertinent today as when he wrote
it in 1994.
“In the last
analysis,” Kolko wrote, “how means and ends are defined
(is) constrained only by a quite simple dedication to
being on the side of the oppressed, the disadvantaged,
and the people who really work to earn what they spend,
whenever the basic criterion of who should gain or lose
in a society is applied. In the most basic sense, when
the question of ‘whose side are you on’ is asked, this
is ultimately the only response to it that makes the
entire historic tradition of reform, the improvement of
society, and socialism both meaningful and consistent…
And it complements an equally necessary devotion to the
prevention of war.”
Kolko’s
prescription remains a rational political response to
the global crisis in which we are living. Its relevance
has not been diminished by anything that has happened
under the Clinton, Bush or Obama presidencies, and it
will remain a solid basis for principled opposition and
united resistance to whatever further madness the Trump
administration unleashes on the world.
As Kolko
prophetically concluded,“…there are no easy solutions to
the problems of irresponsible, deluded leaders and the
classes they represent, or the hesitation of people to
reverse the world’s folly before they are themselves
subjected to its grievous consequences.
“So much
remains to be done – and it is late… While the prospects
for essential and sufficient changes are very uncertain
at the present moment, allowing the world’s drift since
1914 to reach its inevitable destructive culmination is
a course that our natural desire for human survival
instinctively rejects…
“Dispelling the
myths of history, dismantling the pretensions of
conventional wisdom and of leaders who claim
omniscience, and discarding the shibboleths of
ideologies that have betrayed their followers are all
preconditions for escaping from the fatal illusions and
errors that [the Twentieth] century has bequeathed to
us.”
Nicolas J S Davies is the author of
Blood On Our Hands: the American
Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He also wrote
the chapters on “Obama at War” in Grading the 44th
President: a Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as
a Progressive Leader. |
