Towards An Editorial

In 1986 The Economist pronounced that Africa's land "must be enclosed, and 
traditional rights of use, access and grazing extinguished". 
"Anti-Imperialist" nations have been just as quick as "client" states to toe 
the line. Under the cover of nationalisation, the commons are appropriated. 
(1) 

In the meantime, famine occurs again in Africa, stretching from Somalia to 
South Africa. Bemused aid workers in Somalia, stunned by the carnage of 
factions seeking state power, suggest that a return to the authority of the 
village elders (as opposed to the warlords) might be the only way to solve 
the aid debacle. No doubt others will damn such a suggestion as paternalist 
and regressive. 

The possibility that these famines result from trying to squeeze 300-400 
years of capitalist progress into a couple of decades should not be 
dismissed. Stalin too tried to pass off the famines of Ukraine in the 1930s 
as a "natural disaster" when in fact they were the direct result of his 
policy of creating an industrial proletariat in the Soviet Union. The 
centuries it took to establish such a workforce in the British Isles were 
marked by civil war, mass emigration, vagabondage and famine.What is seen in 
Africa today is an accelerated version of what capitalism did to those 
countries now lumped together as "the West". Only those seeking a 
re-arrangement of essentially the same power relations identify such a 
process  as an ethnically based "imperialism". What is happening in Africa 
today is what capitalism does.

Many in the industrialised nations dig deep into their pockets for the 
starving of Africa. Such gifts and their fate reveal a lot about how states 
conduct foreign policy today. It can have escaped nobody's notice how 
mobilisation for aid and mobilisation for war have become increasingly hard 
to distinguish. The Gulf War appealed to much of the sentiment summoned up by 
Live Aid. Although these mobilisations are nothing like the "total" 
mobilisations during WW1 and WW2, such movement as there was was inspired 
more by concern than by militarism. This was one reason for the failure of 
the anti-war movement during the Gulf action and for its total disarray when 
faced with the Balkans conflict. Attempting to explain war in terms of moral 
or psychological unpleasantness has always been suspect. Today, with what 
seems to be half the Left lined up behind "brave little Bosnia", such 
simplifications have proved to be disastrous. By shielding themselves from 
the realities of war (i.e. that it is motivated as much by the highest as the 
lowest of human attributes), they have allowed their good intentions to lead 
them into the camp of the enemy. Those who don't realise that concern, 
humanitarianism, and even internationalism, can point the way to the triumph 
of militarism are doomed to being the perpetual reformists of that which they 
would like to see abolished.

The same illusions in good intentions underlie the aid phenomenon. There is 
little doubt that all people involved in the aid process (except politicians 
and media stars) are motivated by a genuine desire to help their fellow human 
beings. Even journalists who pride themselves on having a thick skin can 
perhaps be included among the well-intentioned However, none of this virtue 
seems enough to prevent aid becoming part of the penetration and destruction 
of convivial, traditional ways of living. 

This is not to say, as the New Right claim, that aid is the direct cause of 
famine (by setting up a dependency culture and undercutting the prices of 
locally-grown food) In fact, the causes are more to be found in the 
debt-induced rural depopulation and the disruption of subsistence agriculture 
by either collectivisation or privitisation. But once these scourges have 
been unleashed on a population, aid exascerbates the disintegration of the 
local community by creating needs which can only be (un)satisfied by plugging 
into the global economy and by introducing values and ways of seeing the 
world which are incompatible with continued traditional existence. And yet 
the gift remains a muted expression ofthe sort of sociability which is 
antagonistic to the universal uniformity of commodity exchange. So there is a 
savage irony when that which could neutralise the forces of production 
threatening ways of being, ends up sustaining them.

Such observations are not meant as an apology for despair. Nor by revealing 
the fate of superficial moral critiques of the system is a return to the 
determinism of the ultra-Marxists intended. The problems of the world are 
solved neither by the tinkle of money into a charity tin, nor by the 
well-trained smile of an intervening UN soldier. But this recognition does 
not provide an excuse to embrace non-existent extra-human forces of 
salvation. Gifts should be redirected outside the official agencies of care. 
They should be accomplished in ways which unplug people from the commodity 
economy. Statecraft should be rejected as a legitimate form of political 
practice. The imperative to think, plan and imagine as if one was a state or 
in "state power" is corrosive to free-thinking and stifles the possibility of 
solutions. With the likes of Hurd and Cyrus Vance hand-wringing in the face 
of the Balkans bloodshed, there is a hint that capitalism's much-hyped moment 
of victory contains the seeds of defeat. Could it be that the State should be 
opposed not only because of its restrictions, regulations and reformations, 
but because the world is now dominated by problems which, by their very 
nature, cannot be solved by the actions of States, however disguised?

	John Barrett

(1) See Sylvia Federici's excellent article "The Debt Crisis, Africa and the 
New Enclosures" in Midnight Notes no.10.
 
From Here & Now 13 1992 - No Copyright
