WAR OF THE WAVES

God as a material construct

2011-09-05T04:01:00.011+10:00

God exists.

Okay, not that God; not an actual invisible being/cosmic overlord/forgiver of sin that many people believe exists. But in a very real sense, there is a God. That God is the totality of the collective neural states of millions of believers, the literature and poetry paying homage to him, the infrastructure of the many denominational churches, the customs and taboos that play out every day all over the world, and the financial resources and political power of the clergy. Clearly, God is a material force in the world, even if the entity depicted in the concept of God isn’t any more real than Harry Potter or Zeus.

But this leads onto the question: why is there such a thing as the God concept, and how is it that it holds so much sway? How is belief in a blatantly transparent and corrupt falsehood maintained? There are several hypotheses to explain this, none of them mutually exclusive. All of them probably capture an important element of the truth about why God – the aforementioned collective of brain-states, infrastructure, customs, and regimentations - is a power to be reckoned with. They all take place within a historical material context, feeding off of it, reinforcing it, and being shaped by it (and shaping the broader social conditions in turn). God cannot be separated from the social organism he clings to, and to understand one is to understand something about the other.

God as the personification of human anxiety

Humans fear death. Not just in the sense that an animal might, but in an ''existential'' sense: we can conceive of the fact that we will no longer be. We try to picture this abyss of nothingness where the human mind and all consciousness is annihilated. This self-negation is taken as the termination of our narrative in this world; our pursuits, our problems and our happiness are snuffed out by death. The point of existence ceases to be; we no longer matter, because there is nothing left to do the mattering. When the human mind dwells on this nothingness, it panics and recoils at the implication that our existence is not the raison d’etre of its context. Thus the mind recreates the universe in its own image, conferring to God the attributes that give human life its sustenance and purpose-driven story. The universe (but more obviously the world inhabited by people) is moulded into a gigantic theatre playing to the tune of a supreme Purpose, to be deciphered upon death, which is now converted from oblivion to salvation.

The evolution of human intelligence almost certainly had a lot to do with the demands of group living. But among the motivating drivers for God, existential anxiety must definitely rank high among them. As Erich Fromm said: ''Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts. He has to have a frame of orientation which permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another danger which is specifically human: that of becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind.'' Humanity thus had a powerful motivation to craft fictions about its place in the cosmos. The metaphysical scheme derived to resolve this anxiety was religion. But while man created God in his own image, he has now become alienated even from that creation. Again with Fromm, humanity bestows upon God all of its finest attributes, and then begs God to give them back to it. God is humankind’s premier schizophrenic child. Contact with the child itself turns one into a schizophrenic, and a child.

Not only is humanity alienated from God, but God is also an alienating mechanism: he helps to maintain the political and economic hegemony of the ruling class, legitimates the down-grading of women, stifles inquiry, and sets in motion habits of subordination that alienate the masses of one nation state from those in another. God both helps and is helped along by the class structure of society, which leads onto the next point:

God as a misdiagnosis of man’s material condition

Humans live in class societies. Classes are defined by their relation to the means of production; that is, the technologies and procedures by which human life can be reproduced. Classes are antagonistic because their interests do not fully converge but are often irreconcilable, with one class trying to co-opt the labour of the other, and the latter trying to extract ever more concessions and freedoms from the former. Religion represents false consciousness: it posits that the human condition is determined by ''cosmic'' forces that contain within themselves the very embodiments of ''good'' and ''evil'' (concepts that are themselves only meaningful in relation to the material conditions of human beings in any given epoch, yet which are taken as ''eternal'' truths by believers in that epoch. These concepts actually evolve as the material basis for production and class antagonism changes). While humanity is set as a crucial part of this cosmic narrative, these forces are taken as being ''beyond'' humanity; that is, humanity is not taken to be their author. It is no accident that religions have almost always been on the side of the oppressing classes. They are used to legitimate the hegemony of the ruling class by invoking some version of the ''divine right of kings''. In feudal society, the gentry and the royal family (which was basically the most powerful and well-connected gentry that was able to consolidate its control over the other gentry to establish the first nation-states) sold, through the clergy, the idea that their lot in life and that of the peasantry represented the natural order of things. Hence it was blasphemy to suggest that these conditions should be changed, because to do so was to question the very word of God.

One still sees religion being invoked by the leaders of nation-states, especially when their policies are so obviously contra to the interests of the majority of people that these leaders must appeal to their crudest prejudices, namely blind faith. This faith, aside from helping to maintain the power and privilege of the rulers through its message of ''God and country'', also has less direct and more subtle consequences: it helps to maintain habits of subordination that states and other power structures find eminently useful. When people are prevented from thinking in a clear, scientific way that would allow them to make concrete connections between various phenomena and processes (and therefore leaving them unable to grasp and formalise the political-economic content of the forces that shape their lives), they are also much more likely to go along with platitudes, slogans and propaganda spouted by the various cultural managers in the state, the corporation and the media. They are more likely to identify with a group that sees itself as inherently superior to other groups, and to support its policies no matter how destructive they are. One variation of this is called nationalism. It is the belief that to be American or French or Egyptian is somehow ''an honour''. Nationalism is really just another term for nation-state cohesion and backing for the prerogative of a local ruling class, masking itself in a mythical canon. Nationalism undermines not only broader humanity, but also perpetuates the ridiculous notion of a homogenous society in which ''the people'' of said nation have the same basic interests. In this scheme, class distinctions do not feature; there is no structural imperative for one group to control and subdue another. There is no inherent conflict between antagonistic classes, because the nation has become the focal reference point, whether you are a street sweeper or the chairman of Goldman-Sachs. Nationalism is a quasi-religious doctrine that shares features with theism proper: it is largely faith based, it is divisive, it stultifies and regiments, and it can turn people into blood-thirsty animals.

God as salvation in a horrible world

The world is, largely, a horrible place. Alongside the beauty and joy, there is an ocean of squalor, drudgery, boredom, alienation, fear, guilt, betrayal, desperation and slavish obedience to stupidity. This is not a law of nature; it is simply part of the historical context in which we live. There is a constant undercurrent of injustice that most human beings conceive of but feel powerless to stop. This injustice can overwhelm someone if it's focused upon for too long and may even threaten to throw them into the jaws of insanity. With injustice, there is a desire to end it. The human being who conceives of injustice is the one who, at some level, realizes that there is a fundamental mismatch between human potential and human practice. The world is filled with ideologies and doctrines that distort, pollute, misguide and undermine the creative and nurturing impulses of humanity. However, in conjunction with the alienation inherent in class society, people are not able to scientifically and rationally identify those forces that are really behind it and the injustice that arises organically from it, because their own thinking has been to a very substantial degree shaped by those same relations of society. Thus the locus of injustice will be misplaced, imagined to reside in some ''outside'' domain. The emotional need to see justice served remains while the inability to target its ever shifting form produces an internal crisis that culminates in conceiving of a divine justice dispenser (God). The alternative - that cruelty, despotism and injustice may win, or that its practitioners may never be brought to heel - is too horrible and frustrating to contemplate. It is, in a sense, to admit one's one futility.

God as an explanation

For tens of thousands of years, humanity did not engage in a systematic inquiry into its own origins. It instead invented tales, sometimes featuring itself at the centre of concerns and sometimes not, to explain this existence. Humans think in terms of mind/body dualism: for good evolutionary reasons, we find it convenient to think of minds as qualitatively separate from bodies. Humans are also avid pattern seekers, again for good evolutionary reasons. These two characteristics – the folk psychology that we deploy with relation to one another, and the discernment of patterns – perhaps predisposes us to inventing fictions in which the world was designed by a Mind who organized the forests and animals and oceans. Many people continue to believe that God provides an explanation for nature and its workings. This is most graphically illustrated in literalist dogmatism. God might be extinguished in some ways in modern societies, but the slack is often taken up by New Age spiritualism and the like, which regurgitates much the same comforting delusions: that the universe is fundamentally embodied with purpose and that we can ''connect'' with the universe. These new religions, which often lack an explicit God, are also outgrowths of alienation in class society. They are expressions of a need for purpose, while dispensing with the more obtuse logic of a divine patriarch. It might even be supposed that this New Age mysticism is tailored more to women, who have largely been liberated from the feudal obligations of traditional marriage, but who still must contend with and navigate the alienation of capitalist society.

To sum up: the existence of the God concept, its continued appeal, and its usefulness to those in power involves several conditions which embody internal oppositions, and which interact among each other. So how will religion be ended? We often hear, even among hardcore atheists, that ''there will always be religion''. And this may be so. But the assumption inherent in this prediction is that religion is an expression of some aspect of human nature that will remain fixed. I see it differently: the proclivity to religion manifests itself as actual religious belief when the socio-economic context is conducive to it. The standard formulation ignores the historical materialist basis of religion. Religion may persist for a long time, but it will only be vanquished when the material forces of production are aligned with the full creative output of humanity, that is, when work has been emancipated and is no longer alienated work. This will require that people consciously understand both the technical and the social components of their work: how their work relates to the society, how it benefits it and how it enriches it. And, incidentally, when classes have been abolished.

Why can religion not be abolished in class society? In a word: contradiction. For people to have a rational, authentically scientific appraisal of the political-economic forces shaping their lives, they would seek ''answers'' in religion only by willfully ignoring the analysis they had achieved in the first place; to have come to such a level of consciousness, one would already have graduated beyond the false consciousness of religion, which appeals to tales conceived in ignorance. To make connections between material forces is to deny the waffle and obscurantism offered by religion. Bourgeois society is itself a bubble that prevents many from seeing this, because it constantly feeds and reinforces fictions that even its most clever and conscientious adherents are oblivious to. These fictions must produce reactions, as people try to fit irreconcilable conditions of life with one another. This we call, among other things, religion.

Wasps, behaviour, and levels of abstraction

2011-07-10T04:29:00.006+10:00

The following is a question (rephrased somewhat) by a friend and reflects a bias many people have when thinking about organismal behaviour.

''How can behaviour be hard-wired into an organism? For example, how can a parasitiod wasp exhibit the sophisticated behaviours that it does when finding the ant nest that harbours a blue butterfly caterpillar? A human baby needs constant care by its parents, but a wasp already knows what to do when it emerges from a caterpillar. How is it able to do this?''

The basic answer is that all organisms have behavioural sub-routines that are appropriate to the demands of their environments (that is, the criteria that determine whether individual organisms will prosper or die), because these environments have selected for these sub-routines (alternative sub-routines were "purged" from the population, because they didn't have what it took, given the aforementioned criteria, to get into the next generation). Humans are utterly dependent at birth on their parents/guardians, but they can afford to be; these wasps, on the other hand, can hit the ground running, and this has to do with the particular life style they have evolved to excel at. The question, "How do they know where to go and what to do?" can be answered in different ways, depending upon what aspect of the behaviour you're interested in - or, more precisely, what level of abstraction you're interested in. If you're interested in the actual physical biochemical processes going on in the brain of the wasp, then you need to ask a question about what enzymes and neural patterns are being used, and so forth. This "low level" approach, while interesting, is often not what evolutionary biologists are centrally concerned about. The question they ask (or at least, what behavioural biologists ask) is: "why" do these wasps behave in this way? "Why" is this behavioural routine, as opposed to some other, the one being maintained in the population? This is a more high-level, abstract question that separates the actual nuts-and-bolts happenings from what can be classified as a "functional" perspective (what is this behaviour "for"?). However, the two questions are of course not entirely separate, but in order to link them, it's important to understand something from the outset: natural selection, in its most general formulation, is simply this: certain configurations of matter are more effective at perpetuating themselves than other configurations, by virtue of the consequences they have in particular environments. Once you've understood this, the conceptual hurdle of thinking about how wasps "know what to do" becomes much less formidable.

As a thought experiment, imagine the following: a mutation arises, which happens to change the amount of some enzyme that was being manufactured in the wasp's cells, which has an effect on the expression of some compound that is used in the synapse connections in the brain, which...and so on, which has the consequence that the search pattern of the wasp is changed in some way. It's not important to know exactly what the particular pathway is if we're focusing our attention at the high-level functional mode of analysis, only that there are such pathways. By virtue of the eventual behavioural consequence of the mutation, the latter will automatically become more prevalent in the population (because it does better than "rival" - alternative - mutations at helping the wasp carry out some task). All we need to assume is that there are genetic changes that result in the brain being altered in some way, and that these changes have consequences for survival and reproduction. This is how natural selection "programs" the behaviour of organisms: by indirectly selecting among genetic changes via the proxy of some high-level effect (in this case, organismal behaviour) that is "visible" to it. Thus in this sense does the genome "code for" these behaviours. The genes themselves of course have no idea about anything; they're just strings of nucleotides. But due to the effects they have on the physical patterns of the brain during the development of the wasp, we can treat them as though they knew what they were doing. And so, by extension, the wasp "knows what it's doing" - because it has neural structures that result from this coded program, and these structures process information (or rather, environmental stimuli that are represented to the wasp in an appropriate pattern) in a very particular, highly effective way.

That's really all there is to it. Again, we must always be able to translate back and forth between our low level, nuts-and-bolts explanation ("protein A induces protein B to...etc") with our high-level, functional, more abstract explanation ("Wasps do this because, in this environment, this behavour allows the wasp to find food more easily...etc"). In practise, biologists always implicitly know what they mean when they talk about a behaviour (or a gene) "for" something. This more abstract way of talking is simply less cumbersome than having to always revert back to "gene language".

The mistake people often make is to be mystified by behaviour, because they think that the animal has to "know" what it's doing. And, of course, at some level this is true. The animal has to be able to process information and act on that information in a highly sophisticated way (sometimes, anyway). But it's not necessary to imagine that the animal consciously has any conception of what it's doing, any more than the genes that code "for" that behaviour know. The animal might, as a matter of fact, know what it's doing, or it might not, but this isn't a prerequisite for it actually doing something. A similar question could be asked of cells: how do they "know" how to manufacture proteins (and the myriad other things they do)? And again, the answer is that selection has favoured certain configurations of matter that have the effect that the entity in question behaves in some way appropriate to the demands of the environment, and that some of these ways are more appropriate to the needs of coping with the overall environment than others. It's simply following a set of instructions and rules-of-thumb which have been programmed by natural selection over many generations, given the average set of constraints and challenges encountered in that environment by an individual's predecessors. In the case of cells, we're interested in how proteins are made and delivered to other parts of the cell. In the case of behavour, we're interested in how complex, multicellular systems (that is, organisms - and people!) interact with their environments. Of course, there are more "steps" along the way when considering complex organisms than there are when considering single cells - but this just means that the causal chain is more tortuous. There is still an effect that reaches out from the original, biochemical goings-on in the cell to the outward manifestations that are expressed by the organism as a whole. If we take the abstract, high-level view, we can "cut out" the biochemical middlemen and focus on the functional significance of some behaviour over another (that is, its relevance to the organism's prospects of survival and reproduction), and simply ask "Why does a wasp do this?".

This template can be used for thinking about any complex biological feature, whether morphological or behavioral. A favourite of mine is the examples of mimicry that many insects exhibit. Some insects look just like dried leaves, right down to the veins and ragged edges. Others look like other insects, as a means of infiltrating their dwellings. As a kid, I marvelled at such things. I always had a sense that some historical process had built these structures, but I was mystified as to how the insect could ''know'' to build such a structure, just as I was mystified as to how Triceratops could ''know'' to have horns to defend from Tyrannosaurs. I knew that the animals in question didn't actually need to know in the conscious sense, that they weren't actually thinking about their needs in that particular environment, but nevertheless there had to be some design process, as it were, present (and no, I didn't gravitate towards God. I don't know why that was; perhaps the atheism of my parents unduly influenced me. Religion always seemed to me too dopey to take seriously, perhaps because of the pious injunction to believe or face the torment of Hell, which perhaps led my young mind to suspect that control, rather than explanation, was at the core of religious doctrine). The scientific and fully satisfying answer is that the design work has been distributed over many generations, with modest increments that aided survival and reproduction being preserved here and there, accumulating through time and resulting in something that looks uncannily like the result of a conscious design process. This is how the universe manufactured us.

Once you've made this conceptual inversion of the world - that historical, impersonal material forces can produce things that exhibit, in some important sense, function - then you've come to a profound philosophical insight: conscious purpose need not precede form.

Evolution is the process that changes systems that are themselves endowed with a series of internal processes to navigate an environment space. As the systems change, so does the broader configuration that it is a part of. These systems filter information about the environment, come to a determination of what to do, and then, based upon the fit of the response with the severity of the environmental demand, differentially propagate themselves - and change the environment while doing so, partly because they are themselves simply part of the environment, and partly because they craft the chemistry that permeates the biosphere. In this context can systems enter into cooperative relationships with other systems, merge with them, purge them, and parasitise them. No organism can be understood in isolation, and the biosphere, the totality of all the organisms and their interrelations, must be understood as a gigantic web that is itself changing through time.

Tupac songs

2011-06-10T01:20:00.005+10:00

Gorgeous things happening in the Middle East

2011-01-28T04:27:00.006+11:00

The Tunisian dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, has been sent packing with his tail between his legs, thrown out of the country by an upsurge of mass anger at years of corruption, police state brutality, and a lack of prospects for the youth. The uprising, sparked by the self-immolation of a young man, Mohamed Bou'azizi, has now inspired similar actions in other states in the region, namely Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Jordan and Egypt. What we are seeing is quite possibly the beginning of a pan-Arab uprising against dictatorship, imperialism, poverty and brutal class exploitation. While the flame of revolution might well be stamped out before it spreads, and the contagion inoculated and confined to Tunisia, the mere prospect of the long-oppressed masses taking matters into their own hands is, for the dictators and ruling classes in the region, a terrifying prospect. It is also a grave matter for concern to the United States, the imperial hegemon and one of the main beneficiaries of the status quo (and which sees these regimes as strategic assets to be backed with billions of dollars in military aid, under the guise of the ''War on Terror''), and to Israel, America's mercenary state and an important collaborator. The basic interests of the Arab masses are fundamentally counterposed to those of imperialism and its lackeys. The Tunisian upsurge is a manifestation of this contradiction.

To have the greatest chance of success in not only overthrowing the gangster regimes but also to flush out the systems of subjugation that have stifled the region for decades, workers, youth and intellectuals must lead a mass-based movement that seek to do away with class-based antagonisms at their root, with special focus upon helping the most oppressed, marginalised sections of society. In other words, an authentic, mass-based, democratic socialist movement. The class-based nature of the revolt must be made clear and brought to the fore. Nationalism and fundamentalist religion, by contrast, are deadly poisons to the working class. The revolt must spread and inspire further acts of disobedience throughout the region, until both imperialism and capitalism have been thoroughly overthrown.

To the Tunisian people, I just want to say Thank You. You have inspired new hope and vitality in the struggle for dignity and decency. May your example serve to ignite the world and crush all oppressors.

From Socialist Alternative Australia:

The Arab world is being turned upside down

Corey Oakley 28 January 2011

A stunning revolt by workers and the poor is shaking the Arab world. The revolution in Tunisia has inspired or accelerated protest movements in Algeria, Yemen, Jordan and beyond. And now Egypt – the most strategically important of all the Arab countries – is in the midst of a mass rebellion the likes of which has not been seen in a generation, and which threatens to topple the hated pro-US dictator, Hosni Mubarak.

In amazing scenes not witnessed in Egypt since the bread riots of 1977, thousands of people marched through the streets of Cairo, battling riot police, storming government buildings, and occupying the symbolic Tahrir Square. The protests started in the early afternoon, but many hours later – at 2am the next morning – thousands of people were still demonstrating outside the parliament building.

The protesters showed incredible courage and defiance in the face of police repression. Riot police – who usually suppress protests in the capital with ease – lost their ability to instil fear.

One account from Tahrir Square, early in the day, tells how:

On the south end of the square, a military tank rolled into the crowd. At the top of the tank an officer manned a fire hose that hammered down onto the protesters. But no one moved.

The fire tank had not advanced more than 30 yards before a young Egyptian sprinted up the front of the vehicle and scaled up the side. He proceeded to climb up to the top of the tank, inciting ovations from the crowd. When he reached the top of the tank, the officer manning the hose dropped the nozzle and jumped on the back of the protester. The two men toppled off the vehicle and onto the ground, where the man was taken away by other officers.

The moment they fell to the ground, the front 200 protesters dropped to their knees in unison and began to pray while the rest of the crowd looked into the faces of Egyptians staring at the scene from high above in their apartment windows. “Who will be the next hero?” they chanted as they looked up. Then they burst into a new chant: "Come join us, come join us!"

In many places the police found themselves on the losing end of battles with protesters, who broke their lines and chased them off the streets.

While the protests in Cairo – where the ability of the state to repress dissent is strongest – were immensely significant, so to were the protests outside of the capital. As Egyptian-American activist Mostafa Omar told socialistworker.org

The size and scale of the protests outside Cairo is the government's biggest problem. In Suez, people refused to be dispersed and fought a kind of guerrilla battle with police. In Alexandria, there was a mass demonstration of tens of thousands, followed by meetings at central squares. There were fascinating scenes – people brought huge posters with Mubarak's face, and were burning them in the street. Elsewhere, in a number of cities in the Nile Delta – a very industrialized era – the demonstrations were most militant as well. It was almost like a national uprising.

In Mahalla, the heart of working-class militancy in recent years, as many as 45,000 demonstrated, and engaged in fierce battles with police.

But it was not just the militancy of demonstrators – the protests were infused with an insurgent, revolutionary mood. Outside the offices of the ruling National Democratic Party in Cairo, a crowd of a thousand chanted: “Mubarak, your plane is waiting for you” (Zine Ben-Ali fled by plane from Tunis to Saudi Arabia). “This is the first day of our revolution” said a group of young men talking to Al Jazeera.

Hatred of dictatorial rule, corruption, police violence, and craven subservience to the US and Israel, are all important factors motivating the protests. But at the centre of the revolt – in Egypt and across the region – are class issues: endemic poverty, debilitating price rises, and the vicious neo-liberal policies imposed on Egyptians by the ruling elite. So while there is support for the protests across social classes, it is being driven by the anger of workers, youth and the poor.

The grievances that led to this week’s explosion have been building for many years. And the latest revolt follows on from what has been a growing rebellion by workers over the past three years.

But it is the events in Tunisia that have turned hatred and anger into open rebellion. Marx once said that ideas become a material force when they grip the minds of the masses. The idea that is gripping the imagination of the Arab world today is that it is possible to resist, that dictators can be overthrown, that people can rise up and make their own history.

The histories of all of the mass revolutionary movements of the past are filled with accounts of how ordinary people, usually too ground down by the drudgery of everyday life to be involved in politics, can be transformed by the fact that suddenly it is they who have the power to determine their own destiny and that of their country, rather than the usual politicians, bureaucrats and “experts”.

Watching the footage of Egyptians, young and old, defiantly speaking their minds to the cameras; organising each other to defend the protests from the police; making heroic, unforgettable gestures of defiance and dignity – the reclamations of humanity that define mass rebellion – you could not help but think that something has fundamentally changed. And the regime, for all its power, will find it very difficult to change things back.

It was the sense of the power of mass defiance that turned the hesitations and nervousness with which the protests began into a revolt that lasted long into the night. Guardian journalist Jack Shenker sent this report late Tuesday evening:

As midnight approaches in Cairo thousands of protesters are still occupying the Tahrir Square, vowing to remain in place until the government falls…

"We will stay here all night, all week if necessary," said Youssef Hisham, a 25 year old filmmaker. "There are too many people on the streets for the police to charge – if they did, it would be a massacre. I came here today not as the representative of any political party, but simply in the name of Egypt. We have liberated the heart of the country, and Mubarak now knows that his people want him gone."

As fresh waves of protesters broke through police cordons to join the throng in Tahrir, a festival atmosphere took hold – groups were cheered as they arrived carrying blankets and food, and demonstrators pooled money together to buy water and other supplies. "The atmosphere is simply amazing – everyone is so friendly, there's no anger, no harassment, just solidarity and remarkable energy," added Hisham.

Just before 3am, after prolonged fighting, the police finally cleared the square. The next morning, Thursday, the government announced that all further protests were banned, and anyone who attempted to demonstrate would be arrested and charged. Literally tens of thousands of police manned street corners, arresting anyone who walked near. According to Egyptian officials, over 860 people have been arrested, the overwhelming majority in Cairo.

The Guardian reported on Thursday night (Egyptian time) that

Riot police and plainclothes officers armed with staves and bars broke up a demonstration outside one of the capital's biggest tourist hotels, the Ramses Hilton, on the banks of the river Nile. Tonight demonstrators and police are still playing a violent game of cat and mouse through the city centre with protesters quickly regrouping after being broken up. The sound of police sirens and detonating teargas canisters could be heard across the city.

But for all the repression, the security forces failed in their attempt to squash the movement through means of state terror. Thousands still managed to demonstrate in Cairo and across the country. In Suez the main police station was set on fire. Further mass demonstrations – hopefully the biggest yet – are planned after Friday prayers this week.

The US and the Egyptian ruling class

It is often said on the left – with some truth – that the Israeli state is the key means by which the US ensures its domination of the Middle East and its resources. But just as important is the network of Arab dictatorships that maintain an iron grip on their populations, collaborate closely with Israel in its oppression of the Palestinians, and allow the vast resources of the region to be expropriated by the various imperial powers while the mass of the Arab population lives in abject poverty. In exchange for this base treachery they are allowed to amass their own obscene fortunes, which to their minds is more than fair payment for their souls.

Because of this, the latest rebellion puts the US government in a bind.

On the one hand, it feels obliged – for purely public relations reasons – to not seem hostile to what is self-evidently a heroic movement for democratic rights.

On the other hand, the upsurge of democratic revolt is fundamentally at odds with US imperialistic domination of the Middle East. Any genuinely democratic regime that represented the views of the people in the Arab world would be fiercely opposed to US/Israeli domination of the region, and also to the brutal class system that sees a tiny minority live in luxury while most people struggle to survive.

So the US is attempting to hedge its bets. Obama claims to support the democratic aspirations of the Tunisian people – though he did not feel moved to do so until Zine Ben-Ali was safely in a plane circling Europe looking for a country to land (thank god for the US’s favourite client, Saudi Arabia!). No mention, of course, of the billions of dollars the US gave Ben Ali for services rendered, particularly since the beginning of the War on Terror.

But it was one thing to abandon the Tunisian dictator, it is entirely another to abandon Mubarak’s regime in Egypt, which has played a key role in enforcing US interests in the region and the murderous Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Obama pointedly refused to mention the Egyptian protests in his state of the union address. White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs said when questioned about the upheavals that "We have a close and important ally in Egypt and they will continue to be". Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also said the United States believed the government of Egyptian President Mubarak was “stable and was looking for ways to meet the Egyptian people's needs.”

There are figures in the US ruling class who think the US needs to distance itself from Mubarak. A Washington Post editorial warned that “Tuesday's events suggested that the Cairo government is not at all stable” and argued that “blind U.S. backing for Mr. Mubarak makes a political disaster in Egypt more rather than less likely.”

But these are mere strategic differences. The US ruling class is united in its determination to see a pro-US regime in Egypt. And on a fundamental level, that means an anti-democratic government, for the reason that the interests of the US and Israel are totally counterposed to those of the mass of Egyptian citizens. There should be no doubt that the US will stop at nothing to try and prevent any genuinely democratic government coming to power in Egypt.

The strategic importance of Egypt to the US is one of the reasons that the Egyptian uprising will face much more serious obstacles to success than did the revolution in Tunisia. On top of that, the Egyptian ruling class is much more stable and broadly based than was Ben Ali’s nepotistic dictatorship. The army will not abandon Mubarak with the same speed as its Tunisian counterpart.

A fight for socialism is the only solution

The revolt in Egypt poses point blank the need for a struggle for socialism.

The demands that are driving the revolt – for an end to imperialist domination of the region, for democracy, for a decent life for the millions of Arab workers who cannot afford the basics of life in spite of living in a part of the world that has created more riches than almost any other in history - cannot be met without a fundamental reorganisation of power in the Middle East.

US imperialism has to be driven out. So too do the ruling class elites who are both craven servants of the US, and exploitative ruling classes in their own right. The only way to do this is to turn the current uprisings into a genuinely social revolution, one that expropriates the riches of the powerful and creates new organs of power based on the democratic organisation of workers, students and the poor.

In Tunisia we are starting to see the beginnings of such organisation, as people organise in their workplaces and communities to try and defend the radical spirit of the revolution against attempts to impose a government that is simply the Ben Ali regime without Ben Ali.

In Egypt the immediate task is still the overthrow of the dictatorship. Because of the strength of the regime, and the intransigent backing that the Egyptian ruling class receives from the US state, working class organisation and struggle is crucial not just to determining the nature of a future regime, but to getting rid of the current one.

This means that in the coming days and weeks in Egypt, the extent to which the working class imposes itself on the movement and gives it direction and organisation will be crucial to determining whether the regime can be overthrown.

The huge strike movement of the last few years opens up the possibility that the working class movement can play a decisive role. But until now the political opposition to Mubarak has been occupied by forces – like the Muslim Brotherhood – who have no fundamental opposition to the prevailing social order in Egypt.

The difficulties that those rebelling in Egypt face are not minor concerns. For decades oppositional politics have been dominated by, variously, bourgeois Arab nationalism, Stalinism, and Islamism. It will not be easy for a genuinely revolutionary working class socialist current to build now, even given the extraordinary events taking place. But insofar as mass upheavals inspire hope on an undreamt of scale, they also open up possibilities that yesterday seemed mere fantasy.

What WikiLeaks revealed to the world in 2010

2010-12-28T06:07:00.005+11:00

by Glenn Greenwald, Salon Magazine

Friday December 24, 2010

Throughout this year I've devoted substantial attention to WikiLeaks, particularly in the last four weeks as calls for its destruction intensified. To understand why I've done so, and to see what motivates the increasing devotion of the U.S. Government and those influenced by it to destroying that organization, it's well worth reviewing exactly what WikiLeaks exposed to the world just in the last year: the breadth of the corruption, deceit, brutality and criminality on the part of the world's most powerful factions.

As revealing as the disclosures themselves are, the reactions to them have been equally revealing. The vast bulk of the outrage has been devoted not to the crimes that have been exposed but rather to those who exposed them: WikiLeaks and (allegedly) Bradley Manning. A consensus quickly emerged in the political and media class that they are Evil Villains who must be severely punished, while those responsible for the acts they revealed are guilty of nothing. That reaction has not been weakened at all even by the Pentagon's own admission that, in stark contrast to its own actions, there is no evidence -- zero -- that any of WikiLeaks' actions has caused even a single death. Meanwhile, the American establishment media -- even in the face of all these revelations -- continues to insist on the contradictory, Orwellian platitudes that (a) there is Nothing New™ in anything disclosed by WikiLeaks and (b) WikiLeaks has done Grave Harm to American National Security™ through its disclosures.

It's unsurprising that political leaders would want to convince people that the true criminals are those who expose acts of high-level political corruption and criminality, rather than those who perpetrate them. Every political leader would love for that self-serving piety to take hold. But what's startling is how many citizens and, especially, "journalists" now vehemently believe that as well.

Continue reading here.

==============================================

Lately, there has been a rash of vitriolic and furious denunciation of WikiLeaks by a host of pundits, from (so-called) journalists to politicians. Some have even called for Julian Assange, the man at the centre of the saga, to be assassinated or disappeared by the CIA on the grounds that WikiLeaks is a terrorist organisation (no, I'm not joking). Another man, a young Army Private called Bradley Manning, who is alleged to be one of Assange's sources, is being held in solitary confinement under conditions tantamount to torture. Meanwhile, governments around the world are scrambling to minimise the damage inflicted on whatever was left of their reputations. Check back on Glenn's webpage for more information about WikiLeaks and related stories as it comes in.

A tale of two elections

2010-11-28T17:17:00.002+11:00

by Dan Beaton

November 24 2010

On November 7, Burma’s military regime held the country’s first elections in 20 years. While several parties participated, the electoral process, and the results that saw the regime’s Union Solidarity and Development Party win, have rightly been condemned as a sham by the Obama Administration and other nations.

The reasons are straightforward: The authorities in charge in Burma barred parties from the ballot, including the most popular, the National League for Democracy (NLD), for refusing to expel party leader Aung San Suu Kyi and hundreds of other party members. The NLD won the last elections in 1990 but were never allowed to take office. Under house arrest, Suu Kyi was prevented from appearing in public. The military dictatorship’s handpicked commission oversaw the electoral process.

President Obama slammed the bogus elections, saying, “The elections were based on a fundamentally flawed process and demonstrated the [Burmese] regime’s continued preference for repression and restriction over inclusion and transparency.” He went on to say, “The unfair electoral laws and overtly partisan Election Commission ensured that Burma’s leading pro-democracy party, the National League for Democracy, was silenced and sidelined.”

But much closer to home, the process is about to be repeated, and this time, the Obama Administration seems all too happy to go along with the charade. Haiti’s elections are scheduled for Nov. 28, and at this point, nothing – not the cholera outbreak that has claimed over 1,200 lives, nor the fact that over a million quake survivors remain homeless – seems likely to convince the Haitian government, nor its international backers, that the vote should be postponed.

In Haiti, as in Burma, the process is rigged: Several parties, including the most popular, Fanmi Lavalas, are being kept off the ballot in an overtly anti-democratic move. Fanmi Lavalas has won every election it has contested, and the Haitian authorities, it seems, are determined to prevent that from happening again. As in Burma, Haiti’s electoral process is being run by an electoral council hand-picked by the current government. And as in Burma, the party’s leader is kept from rallying supporters; while Suu Kyi was kept under house arrest, Aristide is prevented from returning to Haiti from exile in South Africa, as the Haitian government refuses to grant him a new passport. And even as pro-democracy demonstrations in Burma have been violently repressed, so too have they in recent years in Haiti by police firing live ammunition at crowds. Shamefully, in Haiti, UN troops have provided support for this police repression, when not attacking crowds and journalists directly themselves. Although the ongoing repression is not on the scale of Burma, thousands of Lavalas supporters were murdered after the 2004 overthrow of the elected president, Aristide. This coup was strongly supported by the U.S. government.

Whereas Obama Administration officials cited the exclusion of key political parties as a major concern in regards to Burma, the Administration is providing over $10 million in support for the Haitian elections. Even public condemnation of the flawed process from 45 members of Congress, Senator Richard Lugar (the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee), and the NGO community has not budged the Administration from its expressed support. “These are decisions for the Government of Haiti to make. We’re not going to second guess any one decision,” State Department spokesperson Philip J. Crowley said when questioned about the controversy.

The dangers of U.S. support for an anti-democratic process in Haiti, and what assuredly signals support for the illegitimate government that will result, are serious. Frustrations among a majority of Haitians are already high, due to understandable factors, including the deplorable lack of progress that has been made to relocate displaced persons to suitable shelter, provide adequate sanitation, or even to remove rubble from the streets. Billions of dollars in aid money that the international community pledged months ago has yet to trickle in, even as the cholera epidemic sweeps across the country. The fact that the cholera outbreak is likely to have originated at a UN base in Haiti, and the UN mission’s undying support for the flawed electoral process – combined with the mission’s violent and sometimes criminal history over the past six years – has spurred protests against the UN in the past week.

International observers have warned of the possibility of mass protests and unrest for months as the post-quake situation worsened. Taking away the possibility of electing their own government, as the Haitian authorities are doing -- with the Obama Administration’s support -- will kill hope for many people for whom hope is already in desperately short supply.

If the Obama Administration wants to stand on the side of democracy and human rights in Haiti, as it did in Burma, it should support the call of Haitian parties and groups that want the elections postponed until all political parties are allowed to run, and all eligible voters are guaranteed the opportunity to vote. Since the current cholera outbreak could inhibit the latter, that should be an important consideration as well. Continued support for sham elections, however, would add to a long list of U.S. injustices against one of our closest neighbor states.

Queen Latifah

2010-11-22T14:34:00.001+11:00

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Posted by djcrisodscompany on YouTube.

The dark side of Dubai

2010-11-11T21:13:00.008+11:00

The Independent

Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging. Johann Hari reports

Tuesday, 7 April 2009

The wide, smiling face of Sheikh Mohammed – the absolute ruler of Dubai – beams down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, a Shangri-La in the Middle East insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the region. He dominates the Manhattan-manqué skyline, beaming out from row after row of glass pyramids and hotels smelted into the shape of piles of golden coins. And there he stands on the tallest building in the world – a skinny spike, jabbing farther into the sky than any other human construction in history.

But something has flickered in Sheikh Mohammed's smile. The ubiquitous cranes have paused on the skyline, as if stuck in time. There are countless buildings half-finished, seemingly abandoned. In the swankiest new constructions – like the vast Atlantis hotel, a giant pink castle built in 1,000 days for $1.5bn on its own artificial island – where rainwater is leaking from the ceilings and the tiles are falling off the roof. This Neverland was built on the Never-Never – and now the cracks are beginning to show. Suddenly it looks less like Manhattan in the sun than Iceland in the desert.

Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

I. An Adult Disneyland

Karen Andrews can't speak. Every time she starts to tell her story, she puts her head down and crumples. She is slim and angular and has the faded radiance of the once-rich, even though her clothes are as creased as her forehead. I find her in the car park of one of Dubai's finest international hotels, where she is living, in her Range Rover. She has been sleeping here for months, thanks to the kindness of the Bangladeshi car park attendants who don't have the heart to move her on. This is not where she thought her Dubai dream would end.

Her story comes out in stutters, over four hours. At times, her old voice – witty and warm – breaks through. Karen came here from Canada when her husband was offered a job in the senior division of a famous multinational. "When he said Dubai, I said – if you want me to wear black and quit booze, baby, you've got the wrong girl. But he asked me to give it a chance. And I loved him."

All her worries melted when she touched down in Dubai in 2005. "It was an adult Disneyland, where Sheikh Mohammed is the mouse," she says. "Life was fantastic. You had these amazing big apartments, you had a whole army of your own staff, you pay no taxes at all. It seemed like everyone was a CEO. We were partying the whole time."

Her husband, Daniel, bought two properties. "We were drunk on Dubai," she says. But for the first time in his life, he was beginning to mismanage their finances. "We're not talking huge sums, but he was getting confused. It was so unlike Daniel, I was surprised. We got into a little bit of debt." After a year, she found out why: Daniel was diagnosed with a brain tumour.

One doctor told him he had a year to live; another said it was benign and he'd be okay. But the debts were growing. "Before I came here, I didn't know anything about Dubai law. I assumed if all these big companies come here, it must be pretty like Canada's or any other liberal democracy's," she says. Nobody told her there is no concept of bankruptcy. If you get into debt and you can't pay, you go to prison.

"When we realised that, I sat Daniel down and told him: listen, we need to get out of here. He knew he was guaranteed a pay-off when he resigned, so we said – right, let's take the pay-off, clear the debt, and go." So Daniel resigned – but he was given a lower pay-off than his contract suggested. The debt remained. As soon as you quit your job in Dubai, your employer has to inform your bank. If you have any outstanding debts that aren't covered by your savings, then all your accounts are frozen, and you are forbidden to leave the country.

"Suddenly our cards stopped working. We had nothing. We were thrown out of our apartment." Karen can't speak about what happened next for a long time; she is shaking.

Daniel was arrested and taken away on the day of their eviction. It was six days before she could talk to him. "He told me he was put in a cell with another debtor, a Sri Lankan guy who was only 27, who said he couldn't face the shame to his family. Daniel woke up and the boy had swallowed razor-blades. He banged for help, but nobody came, and the boy died in front of him."

Karen managed to beg from her friends for a few weeks, "but it was so humiliating. I've never lived like this. I worked in the fashion industry. I had my own shops. I've never..." She peters out.

Daniel was sentenced to six months' imprisonment at a trial he couldn't understand. It was in Arabic, and there was no translation. "Now I'm here illegally, too," Karen says I've got no money, nothing. I have to last nine months until he's out, somehow." Looking away, almost paralysed with embarrassment, she asks if I could buy her a meal.

She is not alone. All over the city, there are maxed-out expats sleeping secretly in the sand-dunes or the airport or in their cars.

"The thing you have to understand about Dubai is – nothing is what it seems," Karen says at last. "Nothing. This isn't a city, it's a con-job. They lure you in telling you it's one thing – a modern kind of place – but beneath the surface it's a medieval dictatorship."

II. Tumbleweed

Thirty years ago, almost all of contemporary Dubai was desert, inhabited only by cactuses and tumbleweed and scorpions. But downtown there are traces of the town that once was, buried amidst the metal and glass. In the dusty fort of the Dubai Museum, a sanitised version of this story is told.

In the mid-18th century, a small village was built here, in the lower Persian Gulf, where people would dive for pearls off the coast. It soon began to accumulate a cosmopolitan population washing up from Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and other Arab countries, all hoping to make their fortune. They named it after a local locust, the daba, who consumed everything before it. The town was soon seized by the gunships of the British Empire, who held it by the throat as late as 1971. As they scuttled away, Dubai decided to ally with the six surrounding states and make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The British quit, exhausted, just as oil was being discovered, and the sheikhs who suddenly found themselves in charge faced a remarkable dilemma. They were largely illiterate nomads who spent their lives driving camels through the desert – yet now they had a vast pot of gold. What should they do with it?

Dubai only had a dribble of oil compared to neighbouring Abu Dhabi – so Sheikh Maktoum decided to use the revenues to build something that would last. Israel used to boast it made the desert bloom; Sheikh Maktoum resolved to make the desert boom. He would build a city to be a centre of tourism and financial services, sucking up cash and talent from across the globe. He invited the world to come tax-free – and they came in their millions, swamping the local population, who now make up just 5 per cent of Dubai. A city seemed to fall from the sky in just three decades, whole and complete and swelling. They fast-forwarded from the 18th century to the 21st in a single generation.

If you take the Big Bus Tour of Dubai – the passport to a pre-processed experience of every major city on earth – you are fed the propaganda-vision of how this happened. "Dubai's motto is 'Open doors, open minds'," the tour guide tells you in clipped tones, before depositing you at the souks to buy camel tea-cosies. "Here you are free. To purchase fabrics," he adds. As you pass each new monumental building, he tells you: "The World Trade Centre was built by His Highness..."

But this is a lie. The sheikh did not build this city. It was built by slaves. They are building it now.

III. Hidden in plain view

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out.

Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means "City of Gold". In the first camp I stop at – riven with the smell of sewage and sweat – the men huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them.

Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise.

As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.

Sahinal was in a panic. His family back home – his son, daughter, wife and parents – were waiting for money, excited that their boy had finally made it. But he was going to have to work for more than two years just to pay for the cost of getting here – and all to earn less than he did in Bangladesh.

He shows me his room. It is a tiny, poky, concrete cell with triple-decker bunk-beds, where he lives with 11 other men. All his belongings are piled onto his bunk: three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, and a cellphone. The room stinks, because the lavatories in the corner of the camp – holes in the ground – are backed up with excrement and clouds of black flies. There is no air conditioning or fans, so the heat is "unbearable. You cannot sleep. All you do is sweat and scratch all night." At the height of summer, people sleep on the floor, on the roof, anywhere where they can pray for a moment of breeze.

The water delivered to the camp in huge white containers isn't properly desalinated: it tastes of salt. "It makes us sick, but we have nothing else to drink," he says.

The work is "the worst in the world," he says. "You have to carry 50kg bricks and blocks of cement in the worst heat imaginable ... This heat – it is like nothing else. You sweat so much you can't pee, not for days or weeks. It's like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. You become dizzy and sick but you aren't allowed to stop, except for an hour in the afternoon. You know if you drop anything or slip, you could die. If you take time off sick, your wages are docked, and you are trapped here even longer."

He is currently working on the 67th floor of a shiny new tower, where he builds upwards, into the sky, into the heat. He doesn't know its name. In his four years here, he has never seen the Dubai of tourist-fame, except as he constructs it floor-by-floor.

Is he angry? He is quiet for a long time. "Here, nobody shows their anger. You can't. You get put in jail for a long time, then deported." Last year, some workers went on strike after they were not given their wages for four months. The Dubai police surrounded their camps with razor-wire and water-cannons and blasted them out and back to work.

The "ringleaders" were imprisoned. I try a different question: does Sohinal regret coming? All the men look down, awkwardly. "How can we think about that? We are trapped. If we start to think about regrets..." He lets the sentence trail off. Eventually, another worker breaks the silence by adding: "I miss my country, my family and my land. We can grow food in Bangladesh. Here, nothing grows. Just oil and buildings."

Since the recession hit, they say, the electricity has been cut off in dozens of the camps, and the men have not been paid for months. Their companies have disappeared with their passports and their pay. "We have been robbed of everything. Even if somehow we get back to Bangladesh, the loan sharks will demand we repay our loans immediately, and when we can't, we'll be sent to prison."

This is all supposed to be illegal. Employers are meant to pay on time, never take your passport, give you breaks in the heat – but I met nobody who said it happens. Not one. These men are conned into coming and trapped into staying, with the complicity of the Dubai authorities.

Sahinal could well die out here. A British man who used to work on construction projects told me: "There's a huge number of suicides in the camps and on the construction sites, but they're not reported. They're described as 'accidents'." Even then, their families aren't free: they simply inherit the debts. A Human Rights Watch study found there is a "cover-up of the true extent" of deaths from heat exhaustion, overwork and suicide, but the Indian consulate registered 971 deaths of their nationals in 2005 alone. After this figure was leaked, the consulates were told to stop counting.

At night, in the dusk, I sit in the camp with Sohinal and his friends as they scrape together what they have left to buy a cheap bottle of spirits. They down it in one ferocious gulp. "It helps you to feel numb", Sohinal says through a stinging throat. In the distance, the glistening Dubai skyline he built stands, oblivious.

IV. Mauled by the mall

I find myself stumbling in a daze from the camps into the sprawling marble malls that seem to stand on every street in Dubai. It is so hot there is no point building pavements; people gather in these cathedrals of consumerism to bask in the air conditioning. So within a ten minute taxi-ride, I have left Sohinal and I am standing in the middle of Harvey Nichols, being shown a £20,000 taffeta dress by a bored salesgirl. "As you can see, it is cut on the bias..." she says, and I stop writing.

Time doesn't seem to pass in the malls. Days blur with the same electric light, the same shined floors, the same brands I know from home. Here, Dubai is reduced to its component sounds: do-buy. In the most expensive malls I am almost alone, the shops empty and echoing. On the record, everybody tells me business is going fine. Off the record, they look panicky. There is a hat exhibition ahead of the Dubai races, selling elaborate headgear for £1,000 a pop. "Last year, we were packed. Now look," a hat designer tells me. She swoops her arm over a vacant space.

I approach a blonde 17-year-old Dutch girl wandering around in hotpants, oblivious to the swarms of men gaping at her. "I love it here!" she says. "The heat, the malls, the beach!" Does it ever bother you that it's a slave society? She puts her head down, just as Sohinal did. "I try not to see," she says. Even at 17, she has learned not to look, and not to ask; that, she senses, is a transgression too far.

Between the malls, there is nothing but the connecting tissue of asphalt. Every road has at least four lanes; Dubai feels like a motorway punctuated by shopping centres. You only walk anywhere if you are suicidal. The residents of Dubai flit from mall to mall by car or taxis.

How does it feel if this is your country, filled with foreigners? Unlike the expats and the slave class, I can't just approach the native Emiratis to ask questions when I see them wandering around – the men in cool white robes, the women in sweltering black. If you try, the women blank you, and the men look affronted, and tell you brusquely that Dubai is "fine". So I browse through the Emirati blog-scene and found some typical-sounding young Emiratis. We meet – where else? – in the mall.

Ahmed al-Atar is a handsome 23-year-old with a neat, trimmed beard, tailored white robes, and rectangular wire-glasses. He speaks perfect American-English, and quickly shows that he knows London, Los Angeles and Paris better than most westerners. Sitting back in his chair in an identikit Starbucks, he announces: "This is the best place in the world to be young! The government pays for your education up to PhD level. You get given a free house when you get married. You get free healthcare, and if it's not good enough here, they pay for you to go abroad. You don't even have to pay for your phone calls. Almost everyone has a maid, a nanny, and a driver. And we never pay any taxes. Don't you wish you were Emirati?"

I try to raise potential objections to this Panglossian summary, but he leans forward and says: "Look – my grandfather woke up every day and he would have to fight to get to the well first to get water. When the wells ran dry, they had to have water delivered by camel. They were always hungry and thirsty and desperate for jobs. He limped all his life, because he there was no medical treatment available when he broke his leg. Now look at us!"

For Emiratis, this is a Santa Claus state, handing out goodies while it makes its money elsewhere: through renting out land to foreigners, soft taxes on them like business and airport charges, and the remaining dribble of oil. Most Emiratis, like Ahmed, work for the government, so they're cushioned from the credit crunch. "I haven't felt any effect at all, and nor have my friends," he says. "Your employment is secure. You will only be fired if you do something incredibly bad." The laws are currently being tightened, to make it even more impossible to sack an Emirati.

Sure, the flooding-in of expats can sometimes be "an eyesore", Ahmed says. "But we see the expats as the price we had to pay for this development. How else could we do it? Nobody wants to go back to the days of the desert, the days before everyone came. We went from being like an African country to having an average income per head of $120,000 a year. And we're supposed to complain?"

He says the lack of political freedom is fine by him. "You'll find it very hard to find an Emirati who doesn't support Sheikh Mohammed." Because they're scared? "No, because we really all support him. He's a great leader. Just look!" He smiles and says: "I'm sure my life is very much like yours. We hang out, have a coffee, go to the movies. You'll be in a Pizza Hut or Nando's in London, and at the same time I'll be in one in Dubai," he says, ordering another latte.

But do all young Emiratis see it this way? Can it really be so sunny in the political sands? In the sleek Emirates Tower Hotel, I meet Sultan al-Qassemi. He's a 31-year-old Emirati columnist for the Dubai press and private art collector, with a reputation for being a contrarian liberal, advocating gradual reform. He is wearing Western clothes – blue jeans and a Ralph Lauren shirt – and speaks incredibly fast, turning himself into a manic whirr of arguments.

"People here are turning into lazy, overweight babies!" he exclaims. "The nanny state has gone too far. We don't do anything for ourselves! Why don't any of us work for the private sector? Why can't a mother and father look after their own child?" And yet, when I try to bring up the system of slavery that built Dubai, he looks angry. "People should give us credit," he insists. "We are the most tolerant people in the world. Dubai is the only truly international city in the world. Everyone who comes here is treated with respect."

I pause, and think of the vast camps in Sonapur, just a few miles away. Does he even know they exist? He looks irritated. "You know, if there are 30 or 40 cases [of worker abuse] a year, that sounds like a lot but when you think about how many people are here..." Thirty or 40? This abuse is endemic to the system, I say. We're talking about hundreds of thousands.

Sultan is furious. He splutters: "You don't think Mexicans are treated badly in New York City? And how long did it take Britain to treat people well? I could come to London and write about the homeless people on Oxford Street and make your city sound like a terrible place, too! The workers here can leave any time they want! Any Indian can leave, any Asian can leave!"

But they can't, I point out. Their passports are taken away, and their wages are withheld. "Well, I feel bad if that happens, and anybody who does that should be punished. But their embassies should help them." They try. But why do you forbid the workers – with force – from going on strike against lousy employers? "Thank God we don't allow that!" he exclaims. "Strikes are in-convenient! They go on the street – we're not having that. We won't be like France. Imagine a country where they the workers can just stop whenever they want!" So what should the workers do when they are cheated and lied to? "Quit. Leave the country."

I sigh. Sultan is seething now. "People in the West are always complaining about us," he says. Suddenly, he adopts a mock-whiny voice and says, in imitation of these disgusting critics: "Why don't you treat animals better? Why don't you have better shampoo advertising? Why don't you treat labourers better?" It's a revealing order: animals, shampoo, then workers. He becomes more heated, shifting in his seat, jabbing his finger at me. "I gave workers who worked for me safety goggles and special boots, and they didn't want to wear them! It slows them down!"

And then he smiles, coming up with what he sees as his killer argument. "When I see Western journalists criticise us – don't you realise you're shooting yourself in the foot? The Middle East will be far more dangerous if Dubai fails. Our export isn't oil, it's hope. Poor Egyptians or Libyans or Iranians grow up saying – I want to go to Dubai. We're very important to the region. We are showing how to be a modern Muslim country. We don't have any fundamentalists here. Europeans shouldn't gloat at our demise. You should be very worried.... Do you know what will happen if this model fails? Dubai will go down the Iranian path, the Islamist path."

Sultan sits back. My arguments have clearly disturbed him; he says in a softer, conciliatory tone, almost pleading: "Listen. My mother used to go to the well and get a bucket of water every morning. On her wedding day, she was given an orange as a gift because she had never eaten one. Two of my brothers died when they were babies because the healthcare system hadn't developed yet. Don't judge us." He says it again, his eyes filled with intensity: "Don't judge us."

V. The Dunkin' Donuts Dissidents

But there is another face to the Emirati minority – a small huddle of dissidents, trying to shake the Sheikhs out of abusive laws. Next to a Virgin Megastore and a Dunkin' Donuts, with James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" blaring behind me, I meet the Dubai dictatorship's Public Enemy Number One. By way of introduction, Mohammed al-Mansoori says from within his white robes and sinewy face: "Westerners come her and see the malls and the tall buildings and they think that means we are free. But these businesses, these buildings – who are they for? This is a dictatorship. The royal family think they own the country, and the people are their servants. There is no freedom here."

We snuffle out the only Arabic restaurant in this mall, and he says everything you are banned – under threat of prison – from saying in Dubai. Mohammed tells me he was born in Dubai to a fisherman father who taught him one enduring lesson: Never follow the herd. Think for yourself. In the sudden surge of development, Mohammed trained as a lawyer. By the Noughties, he had climbed to the head of the Jurists' Association, an organisation set up to press for Dubai's laws to be consistent with international human rights legislation.

And then – suddenly – Mohammed thwacked into the limits of Sheikh Mohammed's tolerance. Horrified by the "system of slavery" his country was being built on, he spoke out to Human Rights Watch and the BBC. "So I was hauled in by the secret police and told: shut up, or you will lose you job, and your children will be unemployable," he says. "But how could I be silent?"

He was stripped of his lawyer's licence and his passport – becoming yet another person imprisoned in this country. "I have been blacklisted and so have my children. The newspapers are not allowed to write about me."

Why is the state so keen to defend this system of slavery? He offers a prosaic explanation. "Most companies are owned by the government, so they oppose human rights laws because it will reduce their profit margins. It's in their interests that the workers are slaves."

Last time there was a depression, there was a starbust of democracy in Dubai, seized by force from the sheikhs. In the 1930s, the city's merchants banded together against Sheikh Said bin Maktum al-Maktum – the absolute ruler of his day – and insisted they be given control over the state finances. It lasted only a few years, before the Sheikh – with the enthusiastic support of the British – snuffed them out.

And today? Sheikh Mohammed turned Dubai into Creditopolis, a city built entirely on debt. Dubai owes 107 percent of its entire GDP. It would be bust already, if the neighbouring oil-soaked state of Abu Dhabi hadn't pulled out its chequebook. Mohammed says this will constrict freedom even further. "Now Abu Dhabi calls the tunes – and they are much more conservative and restrictive than even Dubai. Freedom here will diminish every day." Already, new media laws have been drafted forbidding the press to report on anything that could "damage" Dubai or "its economy". Is this why the newspapers are giving away glossy supplements talking about "encouraging economic indicators"?

Everybody here waves Islamism as the threat somewhere over the horizon, sure to swell if their advice is not followed. Today, every imam is appointed by the government, and every sermon is tightly controlled to keep it moderate. But Mohammed says anxiously: "We don't have Islamism here now, but I think that if you control people and give them no way to express anger, it could rise. People who are told to shut up all the time can just explode."

Later that day, against another identikit-corporate backdrop, I meet another dissident – Abdulkhaleq Abdullah, Professor of Political Science at Emirates University. His anger focuses not on political reform, but the erosion of Emirati identity. He is famous among the locals, a rare outspoken conductor for their anger. He says somberly: "There has been a rupture here. This is a totally different city to the one I was born in 50 years ago."

He looks around at the shiny floors and Western tourists and says: "What we see now didn't occur in our wildest dreams. We never thought we could be such a success, a trendsetter, a model for other Arab countries. The people of Dubai are mighty proud of their city, and rightly so. And yet..." He shakes his head. "In our hearts, we fear we have built a modern city but we are losing it to all these expats."

Adbulkhaleq says every Emirati of his generation lives with a "psychological trauma." Their hearts are divided – "between pride on one side, and fear on the other." Just after he says this, a smiling waitress approaches, and asks us what we would like to drink. He orders a Coke.

VI. Dubai Pride

There is one group in Dubai for whom the rhetoric of sudden freedom and liberation rings true – but it is the very group the government wanted to liberate least: gays.

Beneath a famous international hotel, I clamber down into possibly the only gay club on the Saudi Arabian peninsula. I find a United Nations of tank-tops and bulging biceps, dancing to Kylie, dropping ecstasy, and partying like it's Soho. "Dubai is the best place in the Muslim world for gays!" a 25-year old Emirati with spiked hair says, his arms wrapped around his 31-year old "husband". "We are alive. We can meet. That is more than most Arab gays."

It is illegal to be gay in Dubai, and punishable by 10 years in prison. But the locations of the latest unofficial gay clubs circulate online, and men flock there, seemingly unafraid of the police. "They might bust the club, but they will just disperse us," one of them says. "The police have other things to do."

In every large city, gay people find a way to find each other – but Dubai has become the clearing-house for the region's homosexuals, a place where they can live in relative safety. Saleh, a lean private in the Saudi Arabian army, has come here for the Coldplay concert, and tells me Dubai is "great" for gays: "In Saudi, it's hard to be straight when you're young. The women are shut away so everyone has gay sex. But they only want to have sex with boys – 15- to 21-year-olds. I'm 27, so I'm too old now. I need to find real gays, so this is the best place. All Arab gays want to live in Dubai."

With that, Saleh dances off across the dancefloor, towards a Dutch guy with big biceps and a big smile.

VII. The Lifestyle

All the guidebooks call Dubai a "melting pot", but as I trawl across the city, I find that every group here huddles together in its own little ethnic enclave – and becomes a caricature of itself. One night – in the heart of this homesick city, tired of the malls and the camps – I go to Double Decker, a hang-out for British expats. At the entrance there is a red telephone box, and London bus-stop signs. Its wooden interior looks like a cross between a colonial clubhouse in the Raj and an Eighties school disco, with blinking coloured lights and cheese blaring out. As I enter, a girl in a short skirt collapses out of the door onto her back. A guy wearing a pirate hat helps her to her feet, dropping his beer bottle with a paralytic laugh.

I start to talk to two sun-dried women in their sixties who have been getting gently sozzled since midday. "You stay here for The Lifestyle," they say, telling me to take a seat and order some more drinks. All the expats talk about The Lifestyle, but when you ask what it is, they become vague. Ann Wark tries to summarise it: "Here, you go out every night. You'd never do that back home. You see people all the time. It's great. You have lots of free time. You have maids and staff so you don't have to do all that stuff. You party!"

They have been in Dubai for 20 years, and they are happy to explain how the city works. "You've got a hierarchy, haven't you?" Ann says. "It's the Emiratis at the top, then I'd say the British and other Westerners. Then I suppose it's the Filipinos, because they've got a bit more brains than the Indians. Then at the bottom you've got the Indians and all them lot."

They admit, however, they have "never" spoken to an Emirati. Never? "No. They keep themselves to themselves." Yet Dubai has disappointed them. Jules Taylor tells me: "If you have an accident here it's a nightmare. There was a British woman we knew who ran over an Indian guy, and she was locked up for four days! If you have a tiny bit of alcohol on your breath they're all over you. These Indians throw themselves in front of cars, because then their family has to be given blood money – you know, compensation. But the police just blame us. That poor woman."

A 24-year-old British woman called Hannah Gamble takes a break from the dancefloor to talk to me. "I love the sun and the beach! It's great out here!" she says. Is there anything bad? "Oh yes!" she says. Ah: one of them has noticed, I think with relief. "The banks! When you want to make a transfer you have to fax them. You can't do it online." Anything else? She thinks hard. "The traffic's not very good."

When I ask the British expats how they feel to not be in a democracy, their reaction is always the same. First, they look bemused. Then they look affronted. "It's the Arab way!" an Essex boy shouts at me in response, as he tries to put a pair of comedy antlers on his head while pouring some beer into the mouth of his friend, who is lying on his back on the floor, gurning.

Later, in a hotel bar, I start chatting to a dyspeptic expat American who works in the cosmetics industry and is desperate to get away from these people. She says: "All the people who couldn't succeed in their own countries end up here, and suddenly they're rich and promoted way above their abilities and bragging about how great they are. I've never met so many incompetent people in such senior positions anywhere in the world." She adds: "It's absolutely racist. I had Filipino girls working for me doing the same job as a European girl, and she's paid a quarter of the wages. The people who do the real work are paid next to nothing, while these incompetent managers pay themselves £40,000 a month."

With the exception of her, one theme unites every expat I speak to: their joy at having staff to do the work that would clog their lives up Back Home. Everyone, it seems, has a maid. The maids used to be predominantly Filipino, but with the recession, Filipinos have been judged to be too expensive, so a nice Ethiopian servant girl is the latest fashionable accessory.

It is an open secret that once you hire a maid, you have absolute power over her. You take her passport – everyone does; you decide when to pay her, and when – if ever – she can take a break; and you decide who she talks to. She speaks no Arabic. She cannot escape.

In a Burger King, a Filipino girl tells me it is "terrifying" for her to wander the malls in Dubai because Filipino maids or nannies always sneak away from the family they are with and beg her for help. "They say – 'Please, I am being held prisoner, they don't let me call home, they make me work every waking hour seven days a week.' At first I would say – my God, I will tell the consulate, where are you staying? But they never know their address, and the consulate isn't interested. I avoid them now. I keep thinking about a woman who told me she hadn't eaten any fruit in four years. They think I have power because I can walk around on my own, but I'm powerless."

The only hostel for women in Dubai – a filthy private villa on the brink of being repossessed – is filled with escaped maids. Mela Matari, a 25-year-old Ethiopian woman with a drooping smile, tells me what happened to her – and thousands like her. She was promised a paradise in the sands by an agency, so she left her four year-old daughter at home and headed here to earn money for a better future. "But they paid me half what they promised. I was put with an Australian family – four children – and Madam made me work from 6am to 1am every day, with no day off. I was exhausted and pleaded for a break, but they just shouted: 'You came here to work, not sleep!' Then one day I just couldn't go on, and Madam beat me. She beat me with her fists and kicked me. My ear still hurts. They wouldn't give me my wages: they said they'd pay me at the end of the two years. What could I do? I didn't know anybody here. I was terrified."

One day, after yet another beating, Mela ran out onto the streets, and asked – in broken English – how to find the Ethiopian consulate. After walking for two days, she found it, but they told her she had to get her passport back from Madam. "Well, how could I?" she asks. She has been in this hostel for six months. She has spoken to her daughter twice. "I lost my country, I lost my daughter, I lost everything," she says.

As she says this, I remember a stray sentence I heard back at Double Decker. I asked a British woman called Hermione Frayling what the best thing about Dubai was. "Oh, the servant class!" she trilled. "You do nothing. They'll do anything!"

VIII. The End of The World

The World is empty. It has been abandoned, its continents unfinished. Through binoculars, I think I can glimpse Britain; this sceptred isle barren in the salt-breeze.

Here, off the coast of Dubai, developers have been rebuilding the world. They have constructed artificial islands in the shape of all planet Earth's land masses, and they plan to sell each continent off to be built on. There were rumours that the Beckhams would bid for Britain. But the people who work at the nearby coast say they haven't seen anybody there for months now. "The World is over," a South African suggests.

All over Dubai, crazy projects that were Under Construction are now Under Collapse. They were building an air-conditioned beach here, with cooling pipes running below the sand, so the super-rich didn't singe their toes on their way from towel to sea.

The projects completed just before the global economy crashed look empty and tattered. The Atlantis Hotel was launched last winter in a $20m fin-de-siecle party attended by Robert De Niro, Lindsay Lohan and Lily Allen. Sitting on its own fake island – shaped, of course, like a palm tree – it looks like an immense upturned tooth in a faintly decaying mouth. It is pink and turreted – the architecture of the pharaohs, as reimagined by Zsa-Zsa Gabor. Its Grand Lobby is a monumental dome covered in glitterballs, held up by eight monumental concrete palm trees. Standing in the middle, there is a giant shining glass structure that looks like the intestines of every guest who has ever stayed at the Atlantis. It is unexpectedly raining; water is leaking from the roof, and tiles are falling off.

A South African PR girl shows me around its most coveted rooms, explaining that this is "the greatest luxury offered in the world". We stroll past shops selling £24m diamond rings around a hotel themed on the lost and sunken continent of, yes, Atlantis. There are huge water tanks filled with sharks, which poke around mock-abandoned castles and dumped submarines. There are more than 1,500 rooms here, each with a sea view. The Neptune suite has three floors, and – I gasp as I see it – it looks out directly on to the vast shark tank. You lie on the bed, and the sharks stare in at you. In Dubai, you can sleep with the fishes, and survive.

But even the luxury – reminiscent of a Bond villain's lair – is also being abandoned. I check myself in for a few nights to the classiest hotel in town, the Park Hyatt. It is the fashionistas' favourite hotel, where Elle Macpherson and Tommy Hilfiger stay, a gorgeous, understated palace. It feels empty. Whenever I eat, I am one of the only people in the restaurant. A staff member tells me in a whisper: "It used to be full here. Now there's hardly anyone." Rattling around, I feel like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, the last man in an abandoned, haunted home.

The most famous hotel in Dubai – the proud icon of the city – is the Burj al Arab hotel, sitting on the shore, shaped like a giant glass sailing boat. In the lobby, I start chatting to a couple from London who work in the City. They have been coming to Dubai for 10 years now, and they say they love it. "You never know what you'll find here," he says. "On our last trip, at the beginning of the holiday, our window looked out on the sea. By the end, they'd built an entire island there."

My patience frayed by all this excess, I find myself snapping: doesn't the omnipresent slave class bother you? I hope they misunderstood me, because the woman replied: "That's what we come for! It's great, you can't do anything for yourself!" Her husband chimes in: "When you go to the toilet, they open the door, they turn on the tap – the only thing they don't do is take it out for you when you have a piss!" And they both fall about laughing.

IX. Taking on the Desert

Dubai is not just a city living beyond its financial means; it is living beyond its ecological means. You stand on a manicured Dubai lawn and watch the sprinklers spray water all around you. You see tourists flocking to swim with dolphins. You wander into a mountain-sized freezer where they have built a ski slope with real snow. And a voice at the back of your head squeaks: this is the desert. This is the most water-stressed place on the planet. How can this be happening? How is it possible?

The very earth is trying to repel Dubai, to dry it up and blow it away. The new Tiger Woods Gold Course needs four million gallons of water to be pumped on to its grounds every day, or it would simply shrivel and disappear on the winds. The city is regularly washed over with dust-storms that fog up the skies and turn the skyline into a blur. When the dust parts, heat burns through. It cooks anything that is not kept constantly, artificially wet.

Dr Mohammed Raouf, the environmental director of the Gulf Research Centre, sounds sombre as he sits in his Dubai office and warns: "This is a desert area, and we are trying to defy its environment. It is very unwise. If you take on the desert, you will lose."

Sheikh Maktoum built his showcase city in a place with no useable water. None. There is no surface water, very little acquifer, and among the lowest rainfall in the world. So Dubai drinks the sea. The Emirates' water is stripped of salt in vast desalination plants around the Gulf – making it the most expensive water on earth. It costs more than petrol to produce, and belches vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as it goes. It's the main reason why a resident of Dubai has the biggest average carbon footprint of any human being – more than double that of an American.

If a recession turns into depression, Dr Raouf believes Dubai could run out of water. "At the moment, we have financial reserves that cover bringing so much water to the middle of the desert. But if we had lower revenues – if, say, the world shifts to a source of energy other than oil..." he shakes his head. "We will have a very big problem. Water is the main source of life. It would be a catastrophe. Dubai only has enough water to last us a week. There's almost no storage. We don't know what will happen if our supplies falter. It would be hard to survive."

Global warming, he adds, makes the problem even worse. "We are building all these artificial islands, but if the sea level rises, they will be gone, and we will lose a lot. Developers keep saying it's all fine, they've taken it into consideration, but I'm not so sure."

Is the Dubai government concerned about any of this? "There isn't much interest in these problems," he says sadly. But just to stand still, the average resident of Dubai needs three times more water than the average human. In the looming century of water stresses and a transition away from fossil fuels, Dubai is uniquely vulnerable.

I wanted to understand how the government of Dubai will react, so I decided to look at how it has dealt with an environmental problem that already exists – the pollution of its beaches. One woman – an American, working at one of the big hotels – had written in a lot of online forums arguing that it was bad and getting worse, so I called her to arrange a meeting. "I can't talk to you," she said sternly. Not even if it's off the record? "I can't talk to you." But I don't have to disclose your name... "You're not listening. This phone is bugged. I can't talk to you," she snapped, and hung up.

The next day I turned up at her office. "If you reveal my identity, I'll be sent on the first plane out of this city," she said, before beginning to nervously pace the shore with me. "It started like this. We began to get complaints from people using the beach. The water looked and smelled odd, and they were starting to get sick after going into it. So I wrote to the ministers of health and tourism and expected to hear back immediately – but there was nothing. Silence. I hand-delivered the letters. Still nothing."

The water quality got worse and worse. The guests started to spot raw sewage, condoms, and used sanitary towels floating in the sea. So the hotel ordered its own water analyses from a professional company. "They told us it was full of fecal matter and bacteria 'too numerous to count'. I had to start telling guests not to go in the water, and since they'd come on a beach holiday, as you can imagine, they were pretty pissed off." She began to make angry posts on the expat discussion forums – and people began to figure out what was happening. Dubai had expanded so fast its sewage treatment facilities couldn't keep up. The sewage disposal trucks had to queue for three or four days at the treatment plants – so instead, they were simply drilling open the manholes and dumping the untreated sewage down them, so it flowed straight to the sea.

Suddenly, it was an open secret – and the municipal authorities finally acknowledged the problem. They said they would fine the truckers. But the water quality didn't improve: it became black and stank. "It's got chemicals in it. I don't know what they are. But this stuff is toxic."

She continued to complain – and started to receive anonymous phone calls. "Stop embarassing Dubai, or your visa will be cancelled and you're out," they said. She says: "The expats are terrified to talk about anything. One critical comment in the newspapers and they deport you. So what am I supposed to do? Now the water is worse than ever. People are getting really sick. Eye infections, ear infections, stomach infections, rashes. Look at it!" There is faeces floating on the beach, in the shadow of one of Dubai's most famous hotels.

"What I learnt about Dubai is that the authorities don't give a toss about the environment," she says, standing in the stench. "They're pumping toxins into the sea, their main tourist attraction, for God's sake. If there are environmental problems in the future, I can tell you now how they will deal with them – deny it's happening, cover it up, and carry on until it's a total disaster." As she speaks, a dust-storm blows around us, as the desert tries, slowly, insistently, to take back its land.

X. Fake Plastic Trees

On my final night in the Dubai Disneyland, I stop off on my way to the airport, at a Pizza Hut that sits at the side of one of the city's endless, wide, gaping roads. It is identical to the one near my apartment in London in every respect, even the vomit-coloured decor. My mind is whirring and distracted. Perhaps Dubai disturbed me so much, I am thinking, because here, the entire global supply chain is condensed. Many of my goods are made by semi-enslaved populations desperate for a chance 2,000 miles away; is the only difference that here, they are merely two miles away, and you sometimes get to glimpse their faces? Dubai is Market Fundamentalist Globalisation in One City.

I ask the Filipino girl behind the counter if she likes it here. "It's OK," she says cautiously. Really? I say. I can't stand it. She sighs with relief and says: "This is the most terrible place! I hate it! I was here for months before I realised – everything in Dubai is fake. Everything you see. The trees are fake, the workers' contracts are fake, the islands are fake, the smiles are fake – even the water is fake!" But she is trapped, she says. She got into debt to come here, and she is stuck for three years: an old story now. "I think Dubai is like an oasis. It is an illusion, not real. You think you have seen water in the distance, but you get close and you only get a mouthful of sand."

As she says this, another customer enters. She forces her face into the broad, empty Dubai smile and says: "And how may I help you tonight, sir?"

Some names in this article have been changed.

=================================

I just want to add one thing to Hari's article: FUCK Dubai. I hope with all my heart that the underclass there rise up and literally -- not figuratively -- lynch their exploiters. The place is fucking immoral right down to its very core, and should be burnt down as quickly as possible.

Australians 'donating $70b in unpaid overtime'

2010-11-10T16:57:00.001+11:00

ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Ashley Hall

The amount of unpaid overtime Australians work is again in the spotlight, with a new survey revealing four in five overtime workers want to work fewer hours.

The research, commissioned by the Australia Institute, found half of all workers surveyed would like a shorter working week.

In fact, they said they would like to cut, on average, two-and-a-half hours from their weekly grind.

The executive director of the Australia Institute, Richard Dennis, argues cutting back on overtime could create about 400,000 extra jobs in Australia and improve the health of workers.

"If you could convert all of the unpaid overtime into new jobs you could create more than 1 million new jobs," he said.

"But we've estimated that if the number of hours reduced were apportioned in the same way that occurred when France reduced their hours you could create 390,000 new jobs."

Dr Dennis says people working 50 hours or more each week would happily slash 13-and-a-half hours from their workload.

"Australian workers are donating more than $70 billion a year to their employers in terms of unpaid overtime and that's a very generous gift, and our employers have taken, got into the habit of accepting it," Dr Dennis said.

"But the reality is, if you don't know how many hours you work, you can't really figure out what your hourly rate of pay is.

"Full-time workers want to work a lot less and part-time and casual workers want to work a lot more, so the labour market really isn't matching the preferences of employers and the preferences of employees," he said.

Dr Dennis says Australia's overwork culture is counter-productive.

"We're saying to people we want them to tackle lifestyle illness like diet through fixing their diet, fixing their exercise and seeing their doctor before they get sick," he said.

"But what our survey respondents are telling us is that they're too busy to cook home-cooked meals, they don't have time to exercise and, in fact, when they're sick they're more likely to soldier on and go to work than they are to go to the doctor and find out what's wrong."

Dr Dennis says tackling the problem will require action on a number of fronts.

He wants governments to introduce caps on working hours, employers to cut their reliance on unpaid overtime and workers to pay more attention to how much of their time they are giving away.

Global 'agreement' on protecting biodiversity is another con

2010-11-07T00:41:00.002+11:00

Sydney Morning Herald

George Monbiot

November 3, 2010

UN talks in Japan do nothing to prevent the trashing of the planet.

''Countries join forces to save life on Earth'', ''a landmark'', ''historic'', a ''much-needed morale booster'', the international media chorused following last week's agreement in Japan to protect the world's wild species and places.

The evidence suggests that we've been conned. The final version of the declaration isn't available but the draft agreement, published a month ago, contained no binding obligations. Nothing I've heard from Japan suggests that this has changed.

The draft saw the targets for 2020 that governments were asked to adopt as nothing more than ''aspirations for achievement at the global level'' and a ''flexible framework'' within which countries can do as they wish. No government, if the draft has been approved, is obliged to change its policies.

In 2002, the signatories to the convention agreed to something similar, a splendid-sounding declaration that imposed no legal commitments. They announced they would ''achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss''. Mission accomplished, the press proclaimed, and everyone went home to congratulate themselves. Earlier this year, the UN admitted the 2002 agreement was fruitless: ''The pressures on biodiversity remain constant or increase in intensity.''

It strikes me that governments are determined to protect not the marvels of our world but the world-eating system to which they are being sacrificed. They fight viciously and at the highest level for the right to turn rainforests into pulp, or marine ecosystems into fishmeal. Then they send a middle-ranking civil servant to approve a meaningless promise to protect the natural world.

Japan was praised for its slick management of the meeting, but still insists on completing its mission to turn the last bluefin tuna into fancy fast food.

Russia signed a new agreement in September to protect its tigers (the world's largest remaining population), but an unrepealed law in effect renders poachers immune from prosecution, even when they're caught with a gun and a dead tiger.

The US, despite proclaiming a new commitment to multilateralism, refuses to ratify the convention on biological diversity.

It suits governments to let us trash the planet. It's not just that big business gains more than it loses from converting natural wealth into money. A continued expansion into the biosphere permits states to avoid addressing issues of distribution and social justice: the promise of perpetual growth dulls our anger about widening inequality. By trampling over nature, we avoid treading on the toes of the powerful.

A massive accounting exercise, whose results were presented at the meeting in Japan, has sought to change this calculation.

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity attempts to price the ecosystems we are destroying. It shows that the economic benefit of protecting habitats and species often greatly outweighs the money to be made by trashing them. The catchment protected by one nature reserve in New Zealand, for instance, saves locals $NZ136 million ($A104 million) a year in water bills. Three-quarters of the US haddock catch now comes from within five kilometres of a reserve off the New England coast: by protecting the ecosystem, the reserve has boosted the fishery.

I understand why this approach is felt to be necessary. I understand that if something can't be measured, governments and businesses don't value it. I accept the reasoning that the rural poor, many of whom survive exclusively on what the ecosystem has to offer, are treated harshly by an economic system that doesn't recognise its value. Even so, this exercise disturbs me.

As soon as something is measurable it becomes negotiable. Subject the natural world to cost-benefit analysis and accountants and statisticians will decide which parts of it we can do without. All that now needs to be done to demonstrate that an ecosystem can be junked is to show that the money to be made from trashing it exceeds the money to be made from preserving it.

That, in the weird world of environmental economics, isn't hard: ask the right statistician and he'll give you any number you want.

The approach reduces the biosphere to a subsidiary of the economy. In reality, it's the other way around. The economy, like all other human affairs, hangs from the world's living systems. Nature is turned into a business plan, and we are its customers. The market now owns the world.

But I also recognise this: that if governments had met in Japan to try to save the banks, they would have sent more senior representatives, their task would have seemed more urgent, and every dot and comma of their agreement would have been checked by hungry journalists.

When they meet to consider the gradual collapse of the natural world, they send their office cleaners and defer the hard choices for another decade, while the media don't even notice that they have failed to produce a written agreement.

George Monbiot is a columnist for The Guardian.

The Realities of China Today

2010-11-05T22:29:00.000+11:00

- Martin Hart-Landsberg

INTEREST IN THE post-1978 Chinese market reform experience remains high and for an obvious reason: China is widely considered to be one of the most successful developing countries in modern times. The Chinese economy has recorded record rates of growth over an extended time period, in concert with a massive industrial transformation. Adding to the interest is the Chinese government's claim that this success demonstrates both the workability and superiority of "market socialism."

There are those on the left who share this celebratory view of the Chinese experience, believing that it stands as an effective rebuttal to the neoliberal mantra that still dominates economic thinking. Therefore, they encourage other countries to learn from China's gradual, state controlled process of marketization, privatization, and deregulation of economic activity. A small but significant number share the Chinese government's view that China has indeed pioneered a new type of socialism.

Many on the left also believe that China may soon be capable of anchoring an alternative international economic system, thereby offering other countries the opportunity to reduce their dependence on the current U.S. dominated system and pursue their own independent development strategies.*

Unfortunately, as argued below, there is no justification for this positive perspective on the Chinese experience. First, regardless of what Chinese leaders say, China is not pioneering a new form of market socialism - rather the reforms have led to the restoration of capitalism. As a result, Chinese internal dynamics are clearly hostile to the creation of any anti-capitalist alternative. Second, the reforms have produced an increasingly exploitative growth process, one that is generating considerable wealth for a small minority at unacceptably high cost for the great majority of Chinese working people.

Finally, China's growth process is now structurally enmeshed in, and dependent upon, the operation of a broader process of regional and international restructuring, one controlled by transnational capital. As a result, China is not only incapable of serving as an anchor for an alternative global economy, its accumulation dynamics actually contribute to the strengthening of existing international structures of power and the global imbalances and tensions they generate.

The stakes are high in this engagement over the nature and significance of the Chinese experience. For example, left support for the Chinese reform experience encourages, consciously or unconsciously, the mistaken belief that socialism can be built through the use of markets and a closer integration with global capitalist accumulation dynamics. At a minimum, this leads to confusion about the nature of socialism, and of capitalism as well.

This is more than a theoretical concern: one finds in many countries - including Cuba, Venezuela, South Africa and Brazil -- advocates for socialism who argue that their respective governments should implement Chinese style market reform policies.

Chinese workers, in growing number, are beginning to challenge Chinese state policies, not just in response to the exploitation they experience but also because of their renewed interest in socialism itself. It is therefore vital that we develop an accurate understanding of the Chinese experience, both to provide support for those seeking socialist renewal in China and to ensure that efforts at social transformation in other countries are not compromised by false understandings of the dangers of markets and capitalist imperatives.

China's Structural Transformation

In 1978, two years after the death of Mao Zedong, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, led by Deng Xiaoping, decided to radically increase the economy's reliance on market forces. The leadership claimed that such a step was necessary to overcome the country's growing economic problems which were alleged to be caused by Mao's overly centralized system of state planning and production.

Political and economic changes were definitely desired by the majority of Chinese. Deng and his followers, however, greatly overstated the severity of existing problems and, more importantly, ignored popular calls for an exploration of other, non-market reform responses.

Once begun, the market reform process quickly became uncontrollable.(1) Each stage generated new tensions and contradictions that could only be resolved (given the leadership's opposition to worker-community centered alternatives) through a further expansion of market power. The "slippery slope" of market reforms thus led to an eventual privileging of market dynamics over planning, private ownership over public ownership, and foreign enterprises and markets over domestic ones.

Economic transactions are now overwhelmingly shaped by market prices. The share of retail sales made according to market determined prices rose from 3% in 1978 to 96.1% in 2003. For producer goods, the share rose from zero to 87.3% over the same period.(2)

The growing industrial dominance of the private sector is also clear. In 1978, state owned enterprises accounted for all value added in China's industrial sector (defined as mining, utilities, and manufacturing). By 2003, the private sector share was larger than the state sector share: 52.3% to 41.9%.(3) But even this diminished state share overstates the actual "economic weight" of state production.

Recognizing that many state enterprises are now jointly owned by private interests - either through joint venture or stock ownership - the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) classifies state firms as either directly or indirectly controlled, depending on whether the state share of paid-in capital is greater than 50% of the total. In 2003, directly controlled state enterprises accounted for only 22.9% of industrial value added - less than a quarter of the total.

The declining strategic importance of the state sector becomes even clearer if we narrow our focus to manufacturing. The OECD has divided China's manufacturing sector into two groups. The first includes the five industries that continue to be dominated by state production: petroleum processing and coking, smelting and pressing of ferrous metals, smelting and pressing of non-ferrous metals, tobacco processing, and transport equipment.

The second and larger group (which accounts for over 75% of manufacturing value added) is dominated by private enterprise. This group is made up of 23 different manufacturing industries, including food processing, textiles, garments, chemicals, medical and pharmaceuticals, plastics, ordinary machinery, special purpose machinery, electrical equipment, and electronic and telecom equipment. As the OECD explains:

In 1998 the private sector produced the higher share of value added in only 5 out of these 23 . . . manufacturing industries. By 2003, this was true for all 23 of these industries. Moreover, in half of them, private firms produced more than three-quarters of output. Overall in these 23 industries, the private sector employs two-thirds of the labor force, produces two-thirds of these industries' value added and accounts for over 90 percent of their exports.(4)

State-owned enterprises do remain important and the Chinese state still exercises control over critical sectors of the economy, but these areas of strength are now largely limited to finance and activities supported by state ownership of natural resources. Thus, in 2006, three state oil companies accounted for half of the earnings of the 160 largest "state owned monopolies and oligopolies." In fact, "Up to 80 percent of the year-on-year increase in profits realized in 2006 by all Chinese enterprises were attributable to . . . monopoly financial groups or monopoly firms in the areas of oil and petrochemicals, electricity, coal and metals."(5)

Foreign capital also enjoys a greatly strengthened role in the Chinese economy. The share of foreign manufacturers in China's total manufacturing sales grew from 2.3% in 1990 to 31.3% in 2000.(6) Perhaps more revealing, a 2006 government report concluded that foreign capital holds a majority of assets in 21 out of 28 of the country's leading industrial sectors.(7)

One consequence of this development is that China's economic growth has become increasingly dependent on foreign produced exports. Foreign firms dominate China's export activity: their share of China's total exports grew from two percent in 1985 to 58% in 2005 (and stands at 88% for high tech exports.(8)

Moreover, these exports are increasingly being produced by 100% foreign owned firms. A case in point: the share of computer related exports produced by 100% foreign-owned firms increased from 51 to 75% over the period 1993-2003.(9) As a result of these trends, the ratio of exports to GDP has climbed from 16% in 1990 to over 40% in 2006.

In sum, while state planners and enterprises continue to play an important role in China's economy, state power has been used to shape an accumulation process that is now dominated by private (profit-seeking) firms, led by foreign transnational corporations, whose production is largely aimed at markets in other (mostly advanced capitalist) countries.

Regardless of how one might evaluate the performance of the Chinese economy, it is hard to imagine how this development can be viewed as laying the foundation for an alternative to capitalism, at either national or international levels. Rather it points to the conclusion that capitalism itself has been restored in China.

Social Consequences of Market Reform

Many on the left are no longer interested in the debate over whether China is socialist. Rather, they are concerned with whether China's growth and transformation has led to "successful" economic development. For a majority, the answer is an unequivocal "yes." This answer appears largely based on a consideration of a limited but important set of indicators: rates of growth of foreign investment, exports, and GDP.

If we broaden our notion of development, however, to include measures of working-class well-being, the answer tragically changes. The reality is that China's market refor m polices have created a growth process underpinned by increasingly harsh working and living conditions for the great majority of Chinese.

Perhaps most surprising is the fact that the country's rapid growth has failed to generate adequate employment opportunities. According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), total urban (regular) manufacturing employment actually declined over the period 1990-2002, from 53.9 million to 37.3 million.(10) And while there was a small increase in total urban employment, almost all the growth was in irregular employment, meaning casual-wage or self-employment - typically in construction, cleaning and maintenance of premises, retail trade, street vending, repair services or domestic services.

More specifically, while total urban employment over this 13-year period grew by 81.7 million, 80 million of that growth was in irregular employment. As a result, irregular workers now comprise the largest single urban employment category - much as in Africa and Latin America where such an outcome is blamed on stagnant capital accumulation. In addition, the ILO reports declining labor force participation rates and double digit unemployment rates for urban residents.

The reform process has taken an especially heavy toll on state workers. According to Chinese government figures, state-owned enterprises laid off 30 million workers over the period 1998-2004. As of June 2005, 21.8 million of them were struggling to survive on the government's "minimum living allowance" - the basic welfare grant given to all poor urban residents. In June 2005, this allowance was approximately $19 a month.(11)

Of course there has been job growth in the private sector, especially at firms producing for export. But most of the new jobs are low paid with poor working conditions. "Even after doubling between 2002-2005, the average manufacturing wage in China was only 60 US cents an hour, compared with $2.46 an hour in Mexico."(12)

A recent report on labor practices in China by Verite Inc., a U.S. company that advises transnational corporations on responsible business practices, found that "systemic problems in payment practices in Chinese export factories consistently rob workers of at least 15% of their pay."(13) Workplace safety is an even greater problem. According to official Chinese government sources, about 200 million workers labor under "hazardous" conditions. "Every year there are more than 700,000 serious work-related injuries nation-wide, claiming 130,000 lives."(14)

One critical but often overlooked explanation for China's manufacturing competitiveness is that approximately 70% of manufacturing work is done by migrants. Over the last 25 years, some 150-200 million Chinese have moved from the countryside to urban areas in search of employment.

Although the great majority of these migrant workers have moved legally, they suffer enormous discrimination. For example, because they remain classified as rural residents under the Chinese registration system, not only must they pay steep fees to register as temporary urban residents, they also have no rights to the public services available to urban born residents (including free or subsidized education, health care, housing and pensions). The same is true for their children, even if they are born in an urban area.

As a consequence migrant workers are easily exploitable. They typically work 11 hours a day, 26 days a month. Most receive no special overtime pay and commonly earn one-quarter to one-half of what urban residents receive.(15)

The overall effectiveness of Chinese labor policies (which are primarily designed to boost export competitiveness) is well illustrated by recent trends in wages and consumption. Chinese wages as a share of GDP have fallen from approximately 53% of Gross Domestic Product in 1992 to less than 40% in 2006. Private consumption as a percent of GDP has also declined, falling from approximately 47% to 36% over the same period. By comparison, private consumption as a share of GDP is over 50% in Britain, Australia, Italy, Germany, India, Japan, France, and South Korea; it is over 70% in the United States.(16)

As the Economist states, "the decline in the ratio of consumption to GDP . . . is largely explained by a sharp drop in the share of national income going to households (in the form of wages, government transfers and investment income), while the shares of profits and government revenues have risen." In fact, according to the Economist, "Many countries have seen a fall in the share of labor income in recent years, but nowhere has the drop been as huge as in China."(17)

A vicious cycle is at work here: the lower the share of income going to workers, the more economic forces reinforce the export orientation of the Chinese economy, which encourages the implementation of new policies to suppress worker standards of living.

To be sure, China's growth and industrial transformation has also generated great wealth - leading to an explosion of inequality and the formation (or solidification) of new class relations. An Asian Development Bank study of 22 East Asian developing countries concluded that China had become the region's second most unequal country, trailing only Nepal. This is not surprising considering that over a roughly ten-year period (from the early 1990s to the early 2000s) China recorded the region's second highest increase in inequality, again trailing only Nepal.(18)

While the results of the Asian Development Bank study are significant, they do not adequately convey the real concentration of wealth that has accompanied and motivated China's market reform program. According to the Boston Consulting Group, China had 250,000 U.S. dollar millionaire households (excluding the value of primary residence) in 2005, the sixth greatest national total in the world. Although this group made up only 0.4% of China's total households, it held 70% of the country's wealth.(19)

According to a yearly listing of China's richest people, the number of U.S. dollar billionaires has grown from one in 1999 to 106 in 2007 (more than any other country except the United States).(20) China's nouveau riche have not been shy about spending their money: "LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the world's largest luxury goods maker, plans to open two to three stores a year in China, where sales are rising 50% annually. Financièr Richemont, the world's second-biggest, expects to quadruple sales in China within five years by selling more Cartier jewelry and Piaget watches."(21)

There are clear signs that the Communist Party is becoming concerned that widening income (and consumption) inequalities are adding fuel to growing popular anger over deteriorating employment, health, housing, environmental and retirement conditions. And with good reason: the number of large scale "public order disturbances" has grown from 58,000 in 2003, to 74,000 in 2004, 87,000 in 2005, and an estimated 94,000 in 2006.(22) Particularly worrisome to the leadership is the increasingly effective and militant strike activity at foreign-owned export factories (despite the fact that strikes remain illegal in China).

As repression has failed to stem the rising tide of protest, the Party has also begun to initiate a number of reform efforts. These are designed to ameliorate the worst excesses generated by China's growth strategy without radically changing its orientation. For example, the central government approved a new Labor Contract Law which came into force on January 1, 2008.(23) Both the European and U.S. Chambers of Commerce bitterly opposed this effort and intervened heavily during the drafting stage in a successful effort to reduce its scope.

The approved law requires, among other things, that all employers provide their workers with a written contract (something that a majority of workers either do not have or have never seen) that specifies the terms of employment and includes pension and insurance benefits. The new law also requires that companies pay a premium for overtime and weekend work.

While the new law has generated a sharp increase in arbitration cases (most of which involve non-payment of wages and overtime premiums), its impact on employment conditions appears limited (even in the areas it was intended to address).(24) Many companies are circumventing the law by reducing their employment of "regular" workers (some did so before the law went into effect), relying instead on workers provided by labor dispatch companies or increasing their use of subcontracting relationships.

Some companies now pay workers their contracted salaries and respect vacation and overtime standards, but then undermine worker gains by increasing what the same workers must pay for company-provided dormitories and canteen meals. Some foreign-owned companies are threatening to shift production to a different location within or even outside of China if workers press their demands too aggressively.

In addition, the many-layered official dispute resolution process remains slow and costly, making it difficult for workers to force unwilling companies to comply with the higher standards contained in the new law. Finally, and most importantly, the new law still allows local governments, and thus employers, to differentiate between urban born and migrant workers; the latter continue to be denied unemployment and other employment-based social security benefits.

A major reason that many in the leadership of the Communist Party remain unwilling to support fundamental changes in China's current growth strategy, despite its devastating effects on working people, is that they have been among its biggest beneficiaries. Their ability to shape the reform process has enabled them to use state assets for personal gain, place family and friends in lucrative positions of authority in both the state and private sector, and ensure that the rapidly growing capitalist class remains dependent on the Party's good will.

This, in turn, has led to a fusion of party-state-capitalist elites around a shared commitment to continue the advance of a capitalist political economy with "Chinese characteristics."

The results of this development are easy to see. Many of the children of leading party officials (known as the "princelings") were appointed to key positions in "China's most strategic and profitable industries: banking, transportation, power generation, natural resources, media, and weapons. Once in management positions, they get loans from government-controlled banks, acquire foreign partners, and list their companies on Hong Kong or New York stock exchanges to raise more capital. Each step of the way the princelings enrich themselves - not only as major shareholders of the companies, but also from the kickbacks they get by awarding contracts to foreign firms." Not surprisingly, more than 90% of China's richest 20,000 people are reported to be "related to senior government or Communist Party officials."(25)

China's elite has been willing to share the fruits of the country's production with international capital - although struggles over distributional issues are growing sharper as international capital strengthens its position within China - because international capital's participation has been critical to the establishment and continued growth of China's new political economy. China's elite, however, appears determined to ensure that they will be the primary national claimant.

Thus, at the same time that the "Chinese Communist Party has opened up an unprecedented number of sectors for foreign-equity participation . . . the authorities have . . . tightened control over other aspects of the economy. This has resulted in the truncation, if not atrophy, of thousands of [small and medium sized] private firms. These are in danger of being edged out by powerful monopolies and oligopolies that are controlled either by the party-and-state apparatus or by senior cadres and their offspring."(26)

In sum, it appears that those driving China's economic strategy have been remarkably successful in using the reforms to shape an accumulation process responsive to their interests. And consistent with the underlying capitalist nature of this process, their gains have come at ever greater cost to the majority of Chinese working people.

As a result, Chinese leaders must now contend with an explosion of strikes and demonstrations. It remains to be seen whether such actions will threaten future foreign investment and export production, two of the most important pillars upholding China's growth strategy. Regardless of what happens, it is difficult to see on what basis progressives would want to celebrate and promote China's reform experience.

Market Reforms and Transnational Accumulation

Many on the left believe that the combination of China's size and pattern of growth along with the (self-proclaimed) socialist (or at least anti-imperialist) orientation of the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party mean that China will soon be capable of anchoring a new, more progressive international economic order.

This belief tends to be buttressed by the following reasoning: China has maintained (and can be expected to sustain) high rates of growth for decades. Because this growth is highly import dependent, it supports the export production and thus economic growth of China's trading partners (especially in East Asia but also in Latin America and Africa).

Moreover, China's export success has enabled the country to build up its own huge foreign exchange holdings, which the government is increasingly using to help its Latin American and African trading partners finance needed (infrastructure) modernization.

This vision of China as a powerful and positive agent for international change is attractive but flawed. In most cases, it is the result of using a nation-state lens to understand Chinese accumulation dynamics. The reality is that China's economic transformation is not occurring in a vacuum or solely in response to Chinese initiatives.

Rather, East Asia's economies, including that of China, are being linked and collectively reshaped by broader transnational capitalist dynamics, in particular by the establishment and intensification of cross-border production networks organized by transnational corporations. As a result, China's own accumulation dynamics are increasingly being tied to dominant patterns of investment and trade, thereby reinforcing rather than offering an alternative to them.

Most immediately, the expansion of cross-border production networks has led to a significant increase in the trade dependency of all East Asian economies. One indicator of this trend: the region's export/GDP ratio grew from 24% in 1980 to 55% in 2005. By comparison, the world average in 2005 was only 28.5%.(27) Further, a growing share of this activity is now under the control of transnational corporations; for example, they account for 73% of Malaysia's and 86% of Singapore's exports of manufactures.(28)

More significantly, as a consequence of the operation of these networks, a rising share of East Asia's trade in manufactures is now in parts and components. This is illustrated by the changing trade composition of leading Southeast Asian countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam).

The share of parts and components in the group's total exports of manufactures grew from 27.5% in 1992-3 to 40.3% in 2004-5.(29) The import share of parts and components also grew substantially over the same period, from 32.6% to 48.5%. Trends are similar for Taiwan and Korea. For example, the export share of parts and components for Taiwan grew from 21.2% to 43.5%.

In addition, almost all the parts and components being traded by East Asian countries come from the same three industrial categories (with identical national rankings of importance): electronics machinery, office machines and automatic data processing, and telecommunications and sound recording. Moreover, these parts and components are increasingly being traded from one developing East Asian country to another; the intra-regional share of parts and components trade rose from 37.8% in 1992-3 to 55.6% in 2004-5.

In short, East Asian export production (itself a growing share of total national production) is increasingly narrowing not only to parts and components, but also to a select few operations in a select few industries in response to the needs of transnational corporate-controlled production networks.

China was not only pulled into this process of regional restructuring, it has become central to its functioning. In the words of the Asian Development Bank, "the increasing importance of intra-regional trade is attributed mainly to the parts and components trade, with the PRC functioning as an assembly hub for final products in Asian production networks."(30)

China's unique position as the final production platform in this transnational structured regional production system is highlighted by the fact that it is the only country in the region that runs a regional trade deficit in parts and components.

As a consequence of this restructuring, East Asia's overall export activity has shifted away from the United States and the European Union and towards East Asia, and in particular China. On the other hand, China has shifted its export emphasis away from East Asia and towards the United States and the European Union.

Between 1992-3 and 2004-5, the East Asian share of China's final goods exports declined from 49.5% to 26.5%, while the OECD share (excluding Japan and Korea) increased from 29.3% to 50.1%.(31) In fact, China is now the region's largest exporter to the United States and the European Union in absolute and relative terms. Thus, the mirror image of China's surplus in trade with the United States and the European Union is its deficit in trade with East Asia.

As a result of this regional restructuring, China has become the first or second most important export market for almost all East Asian nations. This development has, as noted above, encouraged the belief that China's import dependent production will enable East Asian countries (and those in Latin America and Africa that also export to China) to "uncouple" from the U.S.-dominated international economic order.

However, since this trade activity largely involves an intra-regional trade of parts and components culminating in China-based production with final sales largely directed to the United States and the European Union, East Asia's overall dependence on developed capitalist markets has actually grown stronger rather than weaker. According to various estimates cited by the Asian Development Bank, it appears that the percentage of Asian exports consumed within Asia ranges from a high of 22% to a low of only 11%.(32)

This regional perspective enables us to see more clearly the problematic nature of Chinese growth dynamics (for working people both inside and outside China). The most obvious problem is that China's continued growth (and thus the region's production) is now dependent on the ability of the United States to run ever greater trade deficits. Since it is doubtful that the U.S. economy can continue to sustain such large and growing deficits, it is difficult to see how China (and by extension the East Asian countries that provide China with parts and components) can avoid painful adjustments involving lower rates of growth and a further worsening of majority employment and living conditions.

Chinese growth dynamics remain problematic even if international trade imbalances can be sustained. For example, China's position as final assembly hub within numerous cross-border production chains has significantly weakened Chinese efforts at technological upgrading.

Surveying China's situation five years after the country's 2001 accession to the WTO, the Chinese economist Han Deqiang recalls that he had "argued the greatest damage [of membership] would be to China's capacity to control its industrial and technological development autonomously. I think it's safe to say these last five years have more than proven that true. In China, any industry that wants to develop its own technology or markets has encountered increasingly great barriers."(33)

More problematic still is the fact that in order to maintain the country's key regional position in the face of competition from other countries seeking to improve their own position within cross-border value chains, the Chinese state has had to ensure that wages are kept low and productivity high.

One consequence of China's success is that transnational corporations throughout East Asia (and elsewhere) have been shifting their production to China to take advantage of its more profitable production conditions. This has led to lower rates of investment and growth throughout the region and the implementation of new labor regimes designed to weaken labor protections. As a result, workers throughout East Asia (and elsewhere) have become pitted against each other in a contest to match the level of labor exploitation achieved in China.(34)

The problems for China's main Latin American and African trade partners are somewhat different but also serious. These countries supply China with primary commodities rather than manufactured parts and components. And China's large and growing need for these commodities has certainly boosted Latin American and African foreign exchange earnings and growth. These gains, however, come at significant long-term cost. Trade agreements with China, sometimes supported by Chinese financial assistance and foreign investment, reinforce existing structural imbalances by further strengthening the dominance of the primary commodity sector.(35)

At the same time, Latin American and African efforts to build up manufacturing (and diversify exports) tend to be undermined by China's own export offensive. For example, close to 95% of all Latin American high technology exports face competition from China-based exporters. These threatened high technology exports represent almost 12% of all Latin American exports.(36) Finally, of course, Latin American and African trade with China can also be expected to suffer if Chinese growth falters.

In sum, the market logic driving China's reform strategy promoted an economic transformation that allowed Chinese economic dynamics to become enmeshed in a broader process of transnational restructuring, one that accelerated the reforms in ways guaranteed to ensure the dominance of capitalist imperatives in China.

As a result, far from opening up new possibilities for working people, China's reform strategy has actually strengthened a transnational accumulation process that is generating serious national and international imbalances and tensions that will eventually require correction at considerable social cost.

Final Thoughts

Several conclusions emerge from the above examination of the Chinese experience. First, China's market reform process has led not to a new form of (market) socialism, but rather to the restoration of capitalism (although "with Chinese characteristics"). Concretely, the Chinese growth process has given rise to a new political economy that is hostile to the goals of socialism, the promotion of all-rounded human development, solidaristic relations, cooperative planning and production for community needs, and collective or social ownership of productive assets.

Thus, the Chinese experience stands as a clear warning: socialism cannot be built through the use of markets and a closer integration with global capitalist accumulation dynamics. In fact, the confusion within the left over the nature of the Chinese experience suggests that there has been a loss of clarity about what constitutes socialism and appropriate criteria for evaluating progress towards building it.

Second, China's economic experience reveals much about contemporary capitalism. China is considered a model developer; the country has achieved a sustained and rapid rate of growth, attracted massive inflows of productive capital, and is exporting ever more sophisticated manufactured goods. Yet these accomplishments have not translated into meaningful gains for growing numbers of Chinese workers.

In fact, workers in China face labor and working conditions increasingly similar to those in Latin America and Africa, regions where most countries are considered development failures. Therefore, it appears that the answer to worker problems in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere for that matter, is not to be found in supporting policies designed to achieve "successful" capitalist development, especially those designed to replicate the Chinese experience.

Third, China's growth trajectory has become tied to and dependent upon existing accumulation processes shaped by transnational capitalist dynamics. As a result, China cannot be counted on to assist in the creation of a radically new economic system.

This does not mean that trade with China is to be avoided. It also does not mean that Chinese elites and western (especially U.S.) elites see eye to eye on all geopolitical issues. Capitalist competition is real and differences between these elites can and often does create openings that are helpful for the third world, especially for those countries under threat from the United States.

At the same time, since Chinese elite interests are structurally shaped by capitalist imperatives, there are limits to the types of changes that Chinese leaders can be expected to support. Caution is also in order, given the expected consequences from the imbalances and tensions generated by the above described transnational dynamics.

This critical perspective on the Chinese experience should not be taken as support for those analysts (many of whom write in the United States; some of whom are close to the U.S. labor movement) who view China as the primary cause of most economic problems. Their often repeated claim is that if only the Chinese government were forced to "abide" by the "free-market" rules of acceptable capitalist competition, all would be well in the world economy (and by extension for working people).

An implied assumption is that Chinese workers are enjoying real benefits from their country's "unfair" state interventions, and their employment and income gains are coming at the expense of workers in other countries, especially in the advanced capitalist countries (which are the main market for Chinese exports).

Tragically, this line of argumentation encourages workers outside of China to mistakenly believe that their enemy is China, rather than the system of capitalism that shapes their country's economic relationship to China and pits them against Chinese workers in a destructive competition. In fact, as we saw above, Chinese growth is increasingly dependent on the export activities of transnational corporations, many of which come from the advanced capitalist countries.

Moreover, despite - or in fact because of - their country's rapid growth, Chinese workers, like workers everywhere, are facing hard times. Decent jobs are scarce, social services are disappearing, inequality is growing, and competitive pressures demand ever greater sacrifices.

As noted above, growing numbers of people in China are openly and directly challenging their country's growth strategy. Even more noteworthy, these challenges are now fueling political discussions and debates (many of which are taking place on electronic chat rooms and bulletin boards) about the nature and significance of Mao era experiences and socialism.(37) To this point, farmer and worker participants appear focused on refuting the false claims of ruling elites that the Mao period was both a social and economic disaster by drawing on their own life experiences to illustrate the accomplishments of that period, in particular employment and social security and a sense of national purpose.

This process of political renewal is taking place under very difficult conditions due, most importantly, to the ongoing repression of grassroots organizing and activism by the Communist Party. Additional challenges include tensions between immigrant and urban born state workers over jobs and access to social services; confusion caused by Chinese Community Party claims to be building socialism; and the fact that the strongest resistance to Party policies comes from those who continue to uncritically praise Maoism, despite the fact that Mao generally opposed farmer and worker self-organization and direct participation in political and economic decision-making.

Despite their current limitations, these struggles, discussions and debates represent a promising development, one that we can learn from and hopefully contribute to by finding ways to share our own understandings of socialism and experiences in movement building with Chinese participants. It makes our own efforts to better understand the nature of the Chinese reform experience ever more important.

* While a majority of those on the left are now critical of China’s market reform strategy, a significant number of defenders remain. People want to believe that there are workable alternatives to neoliberalism, and belief in the progressive nature of China’s social transformation is no doubt encouraged by the fact that China continues to be demonized by the U.S. government; China makes loans to, invests in, and trades with Cuba and Venezuela; and the Chinese Communist Party still rules and publicly proclaims its commitment to socialism. More specifically, I have participated in international conferences and meetings where Cuban and Venezuelan economists have supported the Chinese market reform strategy and argued for adoption of similar policies in their own countries. Defenders of the Chinese growth process also continue to argue their position on numerous left internet discussion lists. The journal Critical Asian Studies had no trouble in organizing a roundtable in which several editors of the journal took issue with Paul Burkett and my critique of China’s market reform experience as expressed in our book China and Socialism, Market Reform and Class Struggle (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005). The criticisms and then our response were published in the journal (Critical Asian Studies, September 2005 and December 2005). In addition, well known scholars such as Giovanni Arrighi, David Schweickart, and Immanuel Wallerstein continue to publish articles and books in which China’s rise as a non-capitalist/socialist power is celebrated. For a recent example of such writings see Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, London: Verso, 2007.

Notes

For a discussion of the reform process see Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett, China and Socialism, Market Reforms and Class Struggle (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005), especially Chapter 2.
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OECD, OECD Economic Surveys: China, OECD Economic Surveys, 2005, 29.
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Data in this and the following paragraph come from Ibid, 133.
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Ibid, 82.
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Willy Lam, "China's Elite Economic Double Standard," Asia Times Online, 17 August 2007.
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UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2002: Transnational Corporations and Export Competitiveness, New York: United Nations, 2002, 17.
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Eva Cheng, "China: Foreign Capital Controls Three-quarters of Industry," Green Left Weekly, 18 May 2007.
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John Whalley and Xian Xin, "China's FDI and non-FDI Economies and the Sustainability of Future High Chinese Growth," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper Series, Number 12249, 2006; Tom Miller, "Manufacturing That Doesn't Compute," Asia Times Online, 22 November 2006.
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Enrique Dussel Peters, Economic Opportunities and Challenges Posed by China for Mexico and Central America, Bonn, Germany: German Development Institute, 2005, 102.
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Ajit K. Ghose, "Employment in China," International Labor Organization, Employment Analysis Unit, Employment Strategy Papers, 2005.
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China Labor Bulletin, "Subsistence Living for Millions of Former State Workers, 7 September 2005.
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John S. McClenahen, "Outsourcing," IndustryWeek.com, 1 July 2006.
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Craig Simons, "New Labor Movement Afoot in China," Statesmen, 4 February 2007.
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China Labor Bulletin, "Migrant Workers in China," June 2008.
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Ibid. In 2005, the central government gave local governments the authority to reform the registration system, including ending distinctions between rural and urban residents. The great majority have refused to make any changes; most local officials are closely allied with local business interests and do not want to jeopardize enterprise (or their own personal) profitability.
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The Economist, "A Workers' Manifesto for China," 11 October 2007.
back to text
Ibid.
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Asian Development Bank, Inequality in Asia, Key Indicators 2007, Special Chapter Highlights, Manila: Asian Development Bank, 2007, 3, 6.
back to text
Wu Zhong, "China's 'Most Wanted' Millionaires," Asia Times Online, 19 September 2007.
back to text
Robin Kwong, "China's Billionaires Begin to Add Up," Financial Times, 22 October 2007.
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Samuel Shen, "For China, A Full Embrace of Luxury, High-end Retailers Take Aim at Mainland's Monied Class," International Herald Tribune, 16 October 2006.
back to text
Bruce Einhorn, "In China, A Winter of Discontent," Business Week, 30 January 2008.
back to text
Ariana Eunjung Cha, "New Law Gives Chinese Workers Power, Gives Businesses Nightmares," Washington Post, 14 April 2008.
back to text
International Trade Union Confederation, "China: Some Steps Forward, but Trade-Related Worker Exploitation Persists," 21 May 2008; Kinglun Ngok, "The Changes of Chinese Labor Policy and Labor Legislation in the Context of Market Transition," International Labor and Working Class History, Spring 2008.
back to text
Peter Kwong, "The Chinese Face of Neoliberalism," Counterpunch, 7/8, October 2006.
back to text
Lam, "China's Elite Economic Double Standard."
back to text
Asian Development Bank, Asian Development Outlook 2007: Growth Amid Change, Hong Kong: Asian Development Bank, 2007, 68.
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Asian Development Bank, Asian Development Outlook 2006, Hong Kong: Asian Development Bank, 2006, 273.
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Data in this and the following paragraph come from Prema-chandra Athukorala and Nobuaki Yamashita, "Production Fragmentation in Manufacturing Trade: The Role of East Asia in Global Production Networks," in Filippo di Mauro, Warwick McKibbin and Stephane Dees (eds.), Globalization, Regionalization and Economic Interdependence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
back to text
Asian Development Bank, Asian Development Outlook 2008, Workers in Asia, Hong Kong: Asian Development Bank, 2008, 22.
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Prema-chandra Athukorala, "The Rise of China and East Asian Export Performance: Is the Crowding-out Fear Warranted?" Australian National University, Division of Economics, Working Paper No. 2007/10, September 2007.
back to text
Asian Development Bank, Asian Development Outlook 2007, 70.
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Stephen Philion, "The Social Costs of Neoliberalism in China, Interview With Economist Han Deqiang," Dollars & Sense, July/August 2007. For a more detailed discussion of the negative consequences of the reforms on China's technological capacities see Martin Hart-Landsberg, "The Chinese Market Reform Experience, A Critical Assessment," forthcoming.
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Asian Development Bank, Asian Development Outlook 2007, 32-3; Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett, "China, Capital Accumulation, and Labor," Monthly Review, May 2007.
back to text
He Li, "Red Star Over Latin America," NACLA, September-October 2007; Eva Cheng, "Is China Africa's New Imperialist Power?" Green Left Weekly, 2 March 2007.
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Kevin P. Gallagher and Roberto Porzecanski, "Climbing up the Technology Ladder? High-technology Exports in China and Latin America," Center for Latin American Studies, University of California, Berkeley, Working Paper 20, 2008, 14.
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For a discussion of this development see Mobo Gao, The Battle for China's Past, Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2008.
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ATC 137, November-December 2008

Capitalism and the Curse of Energy Efficiency - The Return of the Jevons Paradox

2010-11-05T01:42:00.004+11:00

from Monthly Review

John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York

The curse of energy efficiency, better known as the Jevons Paradox—the idea that increased energy (and material-resource) efficiency leads not to conservation but increased use—was first raised by William Stanley Jevons in the nineteenth century. Although forgotten for most of the twentieth century, the Jevons Paradox has been rediscovered in recent decades and stands squarely at the center of today’s environmental dispute.

The nineteenth century was the century of coal. It was coal above all else that powered British industry, and thus the British Empire. But in 1863 the question was raised by industrialist Sir William George Armstrong, in his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, as to whether Britain’s world supremacy in industrial production could be threatened in the long run by the exhaustion of readily available coal reserves.1 At that time, no extensive economic study had been conducted on coal consumption and its impact on industrial growth.

In response, William Stanley Jevons, who would become one of the founders of neoclassical economics, wrote, in only three months, a book entitled The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines (1865). Jevons argued that British industrial growth relied on cheap coal, and that the increasing cost of coal, as deeper seams were mined, would lead to the loss of “commercial and manufacturing supremacy,” possibly “within a lifetime,” and a check to economic growth, generating a “stationary condition” of industry “within a century.”2 Neither technology nor substitution of other energy sources for coal, he argued, could alter this.

Jevons’s book had an enormous impact. John Herschel, one of the great figures in British science, wrote in support of Jevons’s thesis that “we are using up our resources and expending our national life at an enormous and increasing rate and thus a very ugly day of reckoning is impending sooner or later.”3 In April 1866, John Stuart Mill praised The Coal Question in the House of Commons, arguing in support of Jevons’s proposal of compensating for the depletion of this critical natural resource by cutting the national debt. This cause was taken up by William Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who urged Parliament to act on debt reduction, based on the uncertain prospects for national development in the future, due to the anticipated rapid exhaustion of coal reserves. As a result, Jevons’s book quickly became a bestseller.4

Yet Jevons was stunningly wrong in his calculations. It is true that British coal production, in response to increasing demand, more than doubled in the thirty years following the publication of his book. During the same period in the United States, coal production, starting from a much lower level, increased ten times, though still remaining below the British level.5 Yet no enduring “coal panic,” due to exhaustion of available coal supplies, ensued in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jevons’s chief mistake had been to equate the energy for industry with coal itself, failing to foresee the later development of energy substitutes for coal, such as petroleum and hydroelectric power.6 In 1936, seventy years after the parliamentary furor generated by Jevons’s book, John Maynard Keynes commented on Jevons’s projection of a decline in the availability of coal, observing that it was “overstrained and exaggerated.” One might add that it was quite narrow in scope.7

The Jevons Paradox

But there is one aspect of Jevons’s argument—the Jevons Paradox itself—that continues to be considered one of the pioneering insights in ecological economics.8 In chapter 7 of The Coal Question, entitled “Of the Economy of Fuel,” Jevons responded to the common notion that, since “the falling supply of coal will be met by new modes of using it efficiently and economically,” there was no problem of supply, and that, indeed, “the amount of useful work got out of coal may be made to increase manifold, while the amount of coal consumed is stationary or diminishing.” In sharp opposition to this, Jevons contended that increased efficiency in the use of coal as an energy source only generated increased demand for that resource, not decreased demand, as one might expect. This was because improvement in efficiency led to further economic expansion. “It is wholly a confusion of ideas,” he wrote, “to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth. As a rule, new modes of economy will lead to an increase of consumption according to a principle recognised in many parallel instances….The same principles apply, with even greater force and distinctness, to the use of such a general agent as coal. It is the very economy of its use which leads to its extensive consumption.”9

“Nor is it difficult,” Jevons wrote, “to see how this paradox arises.” Every new technological innovation in the production of steam engines, he pointed out in a detailed description of the steam engine’s evolution, had resulted in a more thermodynamically efficient engine. And each new, improved engine had resulted in an increased use of coal. The Savery engine, one of the earlier steam engines, he pointed out, was so inefficient that “practically, the cost of working kept it from coming into use; it consumed no coal, because its rate of consumption was too high.”10 Succeeding models that were more efficient, such as Watt’s famous engine, led to higher and higher demand for coal with each successive improvement. “Every such improvement of the engine, when effected, does but accelerate anew the consumption of coal. Every branch of manufacture receives a fresh impulse—hand labour is still further replaced by mechanical labour, and greatly extended works can be undertaken which were not commercially possible by the use of the more costly steam-power.”11

Although Jevons thought that this paradox was one that applied to numerous cases, his focus in The Coal Question was entirely on coal as a “general agent” of industrialization and a spur to investment goods industries. The power of coal to stimulate economic advance, its accelerated use, despite advances in efficiency, and the severity of the effects to be expected from the decline in its availability, were all due to its dual role as the necessary fuel for the modern steam engine and as the basis for blast furnace technology.

In the mid-nineteenth century, coal was the key material input for blast furnaces in the smelting of iron—the crucial industrial product and the foundation of industrial dominance.12 It was by virtue of its greater development in this area, as “the workshop of the world,” that Britain accounted for about half of world output of iron in 1870.13 Greater efficiency in the use of coal thus translated into a greater capacity to produce iron and expand industry in general, leading to spiraling demand for coal. As Jevons put it:

If the quantity of coal used in a blast-furnace, for instance, be diminished in comparison with the yield, the profits of the trade will increase, new capital will be attracted, the price of pig-iron will fall, but the demand for it [will] increase; and eventually the greater number of furnaces will more than make up for the diminished consumption of each. And if such is not always the result within a single branch, it must be remembered that the progress of any branch of manufacture excites a new activity in most other branches, and leads indirectly, if not directly, to increased inroads upon our seams of coal.14

What made this argument so powerful at the time was that it seemed immediately obvious to everyone in Jevons’s day that industrial development depended on the capacity to expand iron production cheaply. This meant that a reduction in the quantity of coal needed in a blast furnace would immediately translate into an expansion of industrial production, industrial capacity, and the ability to capture more of the world market—hence more demand for coal. The tonnage of coal consumption by the iron and steel industries of Britain in 1869, 32 million tons, exceeded the combined amount used in both general manufactures, 28 million tons, and railroads, 2 million tons.15

This was the age of capital and the age of industry, in which industrial power was measured in terms of coal and pig iron production. Output of coal and iron in Britain increased basically in tandem in this period, both tripling between 1830 and 1860.16 As Jevons himself put it: “Next after coal…iron is the material basis of our power. It is the bone and sinews of our laboring system. Political writers have correctly treated the invention of the coal-blast furnace as that which has most contributed to our material wealth….The production of iron, the material of all our machinery, is the best measure of our wealth and power.”17

Hence none of Jevons’s readers could fail to perceive the multiplier effects on industry of an improvement in efficiency in the use of coal, or the “increased inroads” upon “seams of coal” that this would tend to generate. “Economy,” he concluded, “multiplies the value and efficiency of our chief material; it indefinitely increases our wealth and means of subsistence, and leads to an extension of our population, works, and commerce, which is gratifying to the present, but must lead to an earlier end.”18

A Natural Law

In treating coal as the “chief material” of British industry, Jevons emphasized what he saw as a shift in industrial development over time from what he referred to as one “staple produce of the country” to another. The great battle over the Corn Laws had already pointed to the fact—noted by his father, Thomas Jevons, among others—that a lower price for a staple product would greatly expand demand and ultimately scarcity (which, in the case of corn, was to be satisfied by imports).19 But by the late nineteenth century, it was coal, not corn, that was the focus of a kind of Malthusian scarcity.20

“It was Jevons’s thesis in this book,” Keynes noted, “that the maintenance of Great Britain’s prosperity and industrial leadership required a continuous growth of her heavy industries on a scale which would mean a demand for coal increasing in a geometrical progression. Jevons advanced this principle as an extension of Malthus’s law of population, and he designated it the Natural Law of Social Growth….From this it is a short step to put coal into the position occupied in Malthus’s theory by corn.”21

Extending Malthus’s theory to coal, Jevons wrote: “Our subsistence no longer depends upon our produce of corn. The momentous repeal of the Corn Laws throws us from corn upon coal. It marks, at any rate, the epoch when coal was finally recognised as the staple produce of the country;—it marks the ascendancy of the manufacturing interest, which is only another name for the development of the use of coal.” Jevons contended that although population had “quadrupled since the beginning of the nineteenth century,” the consumption of coal had increased by “sixteenfold,” and that this growth of coal production “per head” was a necessity of rapid industrial development, which must come to an end.22

Yet the chief contradiction behind the paradox that Jevons raised—the whole dynamic of accumulation or expanded reproduction intrinsic to capitalism—was not analyzed in The Coal Question. As one of the early neoclassical economists, Jevons abandoned the central emphasis on class and accumulation that distinguished the work of the classical economists. His economic analysis took the form of static equilibrium theory. There is nothing in his argument resembling Karl Marx’s notion of capital as self-expanding value, and the consequent need for continual expansion.

Jevons’s economic framework was thus ill equipped to deal concretely with issues of accumulation and economic growth. The expansion of population, industry, and the demand for coal (as the “central material” of industrial life) was, in his view, simply the product of an abstract Natural Law of Social Growth, building on Malthus. Viewing capitalism more as a natural phenomenon than a socially constructed reality, he could find no explanation for continuously increasing economic demand, other than to point to individual behavior, Malthusian demographics, and the price mechanism. Rather than emphasizing the profit motive itself, he drew on Justus von Liebig’s abstract law of power: “Civilisation, says Baron Liebig, is the economy of power, and our power is coal.”23 The forces driving economic expansion, feeding industrialization, and resulting in the growing demand for coal, were thus strangely weak and undeveloped in The Coal Question, reflecting the fact that Jevons lacked a realistic conception of a capitalist economy and society.

Industrial Hegemony, Not Ecological Sustainability

British hegemony, rather than ecology, lay at the bottom of Jevons’s concerns. Despite the emphasis he placed on resource scarcity and its importance for ecological economics, it would be a mistake to see The Coal Question as predominantly ecological in character. Jevons was unconcerned with the environmental problems associated with the exhaustion of energy reserves in Great Britain or the rest of the world. He even failed to address the air, land, and water pollution that accompanied coal production. Charles Dickens, decades before, had described the industrial towns, with their concentrated coal burning, as characterized by a “plague of smoke, [which] obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air” in a ceaseless progression of “black vomit, blasting all things living or inanimate, shutting out the face of day, and closing in on all these horrors with a dense dark cloud.”24 Of this, there is not a trace in Jevons. Similarly, the occupational illnesses and hazards confronting workers in the coal mines and coal-fed factories did not enter his analysis, though such concerns were evident in the work of other nineteenth-century analysts, as witnessed by Frederick Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England.25

Indeed, there was in Jevons no concern for nature as such. He simply assumed that the mass disruption and degradation of the earth was a natural process. Although the shortage of coal, as an energy source, generated questions in his analysis about whether growth could be sustained, the issue of ecological sustainability itself was never raised. Because the economy must remain in continual motion, Jevons disregarded sustainable sources of energy, such as water and wind, as unreliable, limited to a particular time and location.26 Coal offered capital a universal energy source to operate production, without disruption of business patterns.

Jevons therefore had no real answer to the paradox he raised. Britain could either rapidly use up its cheap source of fuel—the coal on which its industrialization rested—or it could use it up more slowly. In the end, he chose to use it up rapidly: “If we lavishly and boldly push forward in the creation of our riches, both material and intellectual, it is hard to over-estimate the pitch of beneficial influence to which we may attain in the present. But the maintenance of such a position is physically impossible. We have to make the momentous choice between brief but true greatness and longer continued mediocrity.”27

Expressed in these terms, the path to be taken was clear: to pursue glory in the present and accept the prospect of a drastically degraded position for future generations. Since Jevons had no answer to what he saw as the inevitable and rapid depletion of Britain’s coal stocks—and British capital and the British government saw no other conceivable course than “business as usual”—the response to Jevons’s book largely took the form, oddly enough, of an added justification for reduction of the national debt. This was presented as a precautionary measure in the face of the eventual slowdown of industry. As Keynes wrote, “The proposition that we were living on our natural capital” gave rise to the irrational response that it was necessary to effect “a rapid reduction of the dead-weight debt.”28

Indeed, nearly the entire political impact of Jevons’s book was confined, ironically, to its penultimate chapter, “Taxes and the National Debt.” Jevons and other figures, such as Mill and Gladstone, who took up his argument, never seriously raised the idea of the conservation of coal. There was no mention anywhere in Jevons’s analysis of the point raised by Engels in a letter to Marx, in which industrial capitalism was characterized as a “squanderer of past solar heat” as evidenced by its “squandering [of] our reserves of energy, our coal, ore, forests, etc.”29 For Jevons, the idea of an alternative to business as usual was never discussed, and doubtless never entered his mind. Nothing was further from his general economic outlook than the transformation of the social relations of production in the direction of a society governed, not by the search for profit, but by people’s genuine needs and the requirements of socio-ecological sustainability. In the end, the problems he foresaw were delayed in the actual historical course of events by the expansion in the use of other fossil fuels—oil and natural gas—as well as hydroelectric power, and by the ongoing exploitation of the resources of the entire globe. All of this, however, has prepared the way for our current planetary dilemma and the return of the Jevons Paradox.

The Rediscovery of the Jevons Paradox

The Jevons Paradox was forgotten in the heyday of the age of petroleum during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, but reappeared in the 1970s due to increasing concerns over resource scarcity associated with the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth analysis, heightened by the oil-energy crisis of 1973-74. As energy efficiency measures were introduced, economists became concerned with their effectiveness. This led to the resurrection, at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, of the general question posed by the Jevons Paradox, in the form of what was called the “rebound effect.” This was the fairly straightforward notion that engineering efficiency gains normally led to a decrease in the effective price of a commodity, thereby generating increased demand, so that the gains in efficiency did not produce a decrease in consumption to an equal extent. The Jevons Paradox has often been relegated to a more extreme version of the rebound effect, in which there is a backfire, or a rebound of more than 100 percent of “engineering savings,” resulting in an increase rather than decrease in the consumption of a given resource.30

Technological optimists have tried to argue that the rebound effect is small, and therefore environmental problems can be solved largely by technological innovation alone, with the efficiency gains translating into lower throughput of energy and materials (dematerialization). Empirical evidence of a substantial rebound effect is, however, strong. For example, technological advancements in motor vehicles, which have increased the average miles per gallon of vehicles by 30 percent in the United States since 1980, have not reduced the overall energy used by motor vehicles. Fuel consumption per vehicle stayed constant while the efficiency gains led to the augmentation, not only of the numbers of cars and trucks on the roads (and the miles driven), but also their size and “performance” (acceleration rate, cruising speed, etc.)—so that SUVs and minivans now dot U.S. highways. At the macro level, the Jevons Paradox can be seen in the fact that, even though the United States has managed to double its energy efficiency since 1975, its energy consumption has risen dramatically. Juliet Schor notes that over the last thirty-five years:

energy expended per dollar of GDP has been cut in half. But rather than falling, energy demand has increased, by roughly 40 percent. Moreover, demand is rising fastest in those sectors that have had the biggest efficiency gains—transport and residential energy use. Refrigerator efficiency improved by 10 percent, but the number of refrigerators in use rose by 20 percent. In aviation, fuel consumption per mile fell by more than 40 percent, but total fuel use grew by 150 percent because passenger miles rose. Vehicles are a similar story. And with soaring demand, we’ve had soaring emissions. Carbon dioxide from these two sectors has risen 40 percent, twice the rate of the larger economy.

Economists and environmentalists who try to measure the direct effects of efficiency on the lowering of price and the immediate rebound effect generally tend to see the rebound effect as relatively small, in the range of 10 to 30 percent in high-energy consumption areas such as home heating and cooling and cars. But once the indirect effects, apparent at the macro level, are incorporated, the Jevons Paradox remains extremely significant. It is here at the macro level that scale effects come to bear: improvements in energy efficiency can lower the effective cost of various products, propelling the overall economy and expanding overall energy use.31 Ecological economists Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi argue that the Jevons Paradox can only be understood in a macro-evolutionary model, where improvements in efficiency result in changes in the matrices of the economy, such that the overall effect is to increase scale and tempo of the system as a whole.32

Most analyses of the Jevons Paradox remain abstract, based on isolated technological effects, and removed from the historical process. They fail to examine, as Jevons himself did, the character of industrialization. Moreover, they are still further removed from a realistic understanding of the accumulation-driven character of capitalist development. An economic system devoted to profits, accumulation, and economic expansion without end will tend to use any efficiency gains or cost reductions to expand the overall scale of production. Technological innovation will therefore be heavily geared to these same expansive ends. It is no mere coincidence that each of the epoch-making innovations (namely, the steam engine, the railroad, and the automobile) that dominated the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries were characterized by their importance in driving capital accumulation and the positive feedback they generated with respect to economic growth as a whole—so that the scale effects on the economy arising from their development necessarily overshot improvements in technological efficiency.33 Conservation in the aggregate is impossible for capitalism, however much the output/input ratio may be increased in the engineering of a given product. This is because all savings tend to spur further capital formation (provided that investment outlets are available). This is especially the case where core industrial resources—what Jevons called “central materials” or “staple products”—are concerned.

The Fallacy of Dematerialization

The Jevons Paradox is the product of a capitalist economic system that is unable to conserve on a macro scale, geared, as it is, to maximizing the throughput of energy and materials from resource tap to final waste sink. Energy savings in such a system tend to be used as a means for further development of the economic order, generating what Alfred Lotka called the “maximum energy flux,” rather than minimum energy production.34 The deemphasis on absolute (as opposed to relative) energy conservation is built into the nature and logic of capitalism as a system unreservedly devoted to the gods of production and profit. As Marx put it: “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!”35

Seen in the context of a capitalist society, the Jevons Paradox therefore demonstrates the fallacy of current notions that the environmental problems facing society can be solved by purely technological means. Mainstream environmental economists often refer to “dematerialization,” or the “decoupling” of economic growth, from consumption of greater energy and resources. Growth in energy efficiency is often taken as a concrete indication that the environmental problem is being solved. Yet savings in materials and energy, in the context of a given process of production, as we have seen, are nothing new; they are part of the everyday history of capitalist development.36 Each new steam engine, as Jevons emphasized, was more efficient than the one before. “Raw materials-savings processes,” environmental sociologist Stephen Bunker noted, “are older than the Industrial Revolution, and they have been dynamic throughout the history of capitalism.” Any notion that reduction in material throughput, per unit of national income, is a new phenomenon is therefore “profoundly ahistorical.”37

What is neglected, then, in simplistic notions that increased energy efficiency normally leads to increased energy savings overall, is the reality of the Jevons Paradox relationship—through which energy savings are used to promote new capital formation and the proliferation of commodities, demanding ever greater resources. Rather than an anomaly, the rule that efficiency increases energy and material use is integral to the “regime of capital” itself.38 As stated in The Weight of Nations, an important empirical study of material outflows in recent decades in five industrial nations (Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, and Japan): “Efficiency gains brought by technology and new management practices have been offset by [increases in] the scale of economic growth.”39

The result is the production of mountains upon mountains of commodities, cheapening unit costs and leading to greater squandering of material resources. Under monopoly capitalism, moreover, such commodities increasingly take the form of artificial use values, promoted by a vast marketing system and designed to instill ever more demand for commodities and the exchange values they represent—as a substitute for the fulfillment of genuine human needs. Unnecessary, wasteful goods are produced by useless toil to enhance purely economic values at the expense of the environment. Any slowdown in this process of ecological destruction, under the present system, spells economic disaster.

In Jevons’s eyes, the “momentous choice” raised by a continuation of business as usual was simply “between brief but true [national] greatness and longer continued mediocrity.” He opted for the former—the maximum energy flux. A century and a half later, in our much bigger, more global—but no less expansive—economy, it is no longer simply national supremacy that is at stake, but the fate of the planet itself. To be sure, there are those who maintain that we should “live high now and let the future take care of itself.” To choose this course, though, is to court planetary disaster. The only real answer for humanity (including future generations) and the earth as a whole is to alter the social relations of production, to create a system in which efficiency is no longer a curse—a higher system in which equality, human development, community, and sustainability are the explicit goals.

Notes

↩ Sir William George Armstrong, Presidential Address, Report of the 33rd Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Held at Newcastle-upon-Tyne (London: John Murray, 1864), li-lxiv. See also William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines, ed. A. W. Flux (London: Macmillan, 1906 [1865]), 32-36.
↩ Jevons, The Coal Question, xxxi, 274.
↩ John Herschel, quoted in Juan Martinez-Alier, Ecological Economics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 161-62.
↩ Michael V. White, “Frightening the ‘Landed Fogies’ Parliamentary Politics and the Coal Question,” Utilitas 3/2 (November 1991): 289-302; Leonard H. Courtney, “Jevons’s Coal Question: Thirty Years After,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 60/4 (December 1897): 789; John Maynard Keynes, Essays and Sketches in Biography (New York: Meridan Books, 1956), 132. Gladstone’s approach to Jevons’s work was primarily a tactical ploy, used politically to justify a debt reduction argument that was never actually implemented in the budget.
↩ Courtney, “Jevons’s Coal Question,” 797.
↩ Jevons was not alone in making such an error. John Tyndall, one of the premier physicists of the day, observed in 1865: “I see no prospect of any substitute being found for coal, as a source of motive power.” Quoted in Jevons, The Coal Question, xi. It is worth noting that the drilling of Edwin Drake’s historic oil well in northwestern Pennsylvania had only occurred six years before, in 1859, and its full significance was not yet understood.
↩ Keynes, Essays and Sketches in Biography, 128.
↩ Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi, “Another View of Development, Ecological Degradation, and North–South Trade,” Review of Social Economy 56/1 (1998): 24-26; John M. Polimeni, Kozo Mayumi, Mario Giampietro, and Blake Alcott, eds., The Jevons Paradox and the Myth of Resource Efficiency Improvements (London: Earthscan, 2008).
↩ Jevons, The Coal Question, 137-41.
↩ Ibid., 141-43.
↩ Ibid., 152-53.
↩ As late as 1842, British fireplaces still consumed two-thirds of the country’s coal, but by the time Jevons wrote his book, more than two decades later, this had diminished to about a fifth of national consumption and barely entered his argument, which focused on the industrial demand for coal as the major and indispensable source of demand. As Jevons said, “I speak not here of the domestic consumption of coal. This is undoubtedly capable of being cut down without other harm than curtailing our home comforts, and somewhat altering our confirmed national habits.” See Jevons, The Coal Question, 138-39; Eric J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (London: Penguin, 1969), 69.
↩ Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1873 (New York: Vintage, 1996), 39-40.
↩ Jevons, The Coal Question, 140-42.
↩ The data for 1869 was provided in A.W. Flux’s annotated edition of Jevons’s work. By 1903 the relationships had changed, with the iron and steel industries accounting for 28 million tons of coal consumption (less than in Jevons’s day), while the consumption of general manufactures had grown to 53 million tons and the railways to 13 million tons. See Jevons, The Coal Question, 138-39.
↩ Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 70-71.
↩ Jevons, The Coal Question, 245.
↩ Ibid., 156.
↩ Ibid., 195, 234-41; Thomas Jevons, The Prosperity of the Landholders Not Dependent on the Corn Laws (London: Longmans, 1840).
↩ Malthus himself denied the possibility of scarcity in minerals, arguing that raw materials, in contrast to food, “are in great plenty” and “a demand…will not fail to create them in as great a quantity as they are wanted.” See Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population and a Summary View of the Principle of Population (London: Penguin, 1970), 100.
↩ Keynes, Essays and Sketches in Biography, 128-29.
↩ Jevons, The Coal Question, 195-96. Jevons’s discussion of industrial development in terms of various staple products anticipated the work of Harold Innis and the staple theory of economic growth. See Mel Watkins, Staples and Beyond (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006).
↩ Jevons, The Coal Question, 142.
↩ Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1908), 327.
↩ Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Chicago: Academy Publishers, 1984). See also John Bellamy Foster, The Vulnerable Planet (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994), 50-59; Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster, “The Environmental Conditions of the Working Class: An Introduction to Selections from Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844,” Organization & Environment 19/3 (2006): 375-88.
↩ Jevons, The Coal Question, 164-71.
↩ Ibid., 459-60.
↩ Keynes, Essays and Sketches in Biography, 132.
↩ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. 46, 411.
↩ Blake Alcott, “Historical Overview of the Jevons Paradox in the Literature,” in Polimeni, et al., The Jevons Paradox, 8, 63. For the Club of Rome study, see Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972).
↩ Juliet B. Schor, Plenitude (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), 88-90. For a detailed discussion of the empirical data on the Jevons Paradox, see John M. Polimeni, “Empirical Evidence for the Jevons Paradox,” in Polimeni, et al., The Jevons Paradox, 141-71.
↩ Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi, “The Jevons Paradox,” in Polimeni, et al., The Jevons Paradox, 80-81.
↩ For a discussion of epoch-making innovations, see Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 219-22.
↩ Alfred J. Lotka, “Contributions to the Energetics of Evolution,” Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences 8 (1922): 147-51; Giampietro and Mayumi, “The Jevons Paradox,” 111-15.
↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1976), 742.
↩ John Bellamy Foster, Ecology Against Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), 22-24.
↩ Stephen G. Bunker, “Raw Materials and the Global Economy,” Society and Natural Resources 9/4 (July-August 1996): 421.
↩ Robert L. Heilbroner, The Nature and Logic of Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985).
↩ Emily Matthews, Christof Amann, Stefan Bringezu, Marina Fischer-Kowalski, Walter Hüttler, René Kleijn, Yuichi Moriguchi, Christian Ottke, Eric Rodenburg, Don Rogich, Heinz Schandl, Helmut Schütz, Ester van der Voet, and Helga Weisz, The Weight of Nations (Washington, D.C.: World Resources Institute, 2000), 35.

I Cry

2010-10-14T23:56:00.004+11:00

Sometimes when I'm alone
I Cry,
Cause I am on my own.
The tears I cry are bitter and warm.
They flow with life but take no form
I Cry because my heart is torn.
I find it difficult to carry on.
If I had an ear to confiding,
I would cry among my treasured friend,
but who do you know that stops that long,
to help another carry on.
The world moves fast and it would rather pass by.
Then to stop and see what makes one cry,
so painful and sad.
And sometimes...
I Cry
and no one cares about why.

by 2Pac (Tupac Amaru Shakur, 1971-1996)

My journey from weak to strong atheism, to yet stronger atheism

2010-08-18T00:49:00.195+10:00

In the beginning was my atheism. That is, my lack of belief in God or gods. I was an atheist about God in the same sense that I was about lots of things: fairies, invisible unicorns, Santa Claus, and so forth. I rejected the notion that these things exist - but I didn't positively assert that they didn't exist. In fact, I (just) allowed for the possibility that they exist (since we "can't be absolutely sure about anything"). And so I allowed for the possibility of God (which I nevertheless always imagined to be very slim indeed).

Then, I changed my tact to what's known as "strong atheism", which goes beyond the "weak atheist" claim that there is no evidence for God, and onto the stronger claim that the evidence shows that there is no God.

I have now migrated to a still stronger position, which is this: not only is there no evidence for God; not only is there evidence against God. I now reject even the possibility of God. There cannot be such a thing as God.

I take God to be that which most religious people subscribe to: a personal being as advertised in the Bible, the Koran, and other holy books. Victor J. Stenger handily dealt this God a public death blow in God: The Failed Hypothesis - How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist. There, he addressed the personal God that most people believe in, not the nebulous and fashionable cliche of "Something out there" that a lot of otherwise rational folks suspect must exist (of course, there is a genuine sense in which one can't escape the notion that there must indeed be something out there, simply by virtue of the sheer size of the universe. It's so big that it's not at all inconceivable for an atheist like me to seriously entertain the possibility that there could be deities of a sort: extremely powerful extraterrestrials whose technology has advanced to such a stage that we would regard them as divine if we were ever to encounter them. But these beings would not be supernatural, because they too would have undergone a cumulative process of evolution and would ultimately be bound by the laws of physics). By testing whether the effects that should be detectable if God is real actually prevail, one can test for that God's existence.

Such a God necessitates a mind, and, in most modern theological formulations, IS a mind. In fact, God is often touted as being devoid of a body or any other physical baggage. Some have even gone so far as to call him "pure will". Upon closer examination, these sorts of claims are exposed as completely vacuous because they don't convey anything. But then, theology isn't meant to enlighten. It's meant to obscure, to avoid ever having to explain. Thus the easy resort to words that have no meaning in the context in which they're used.

In the last few weeks, I've been thinking a little more about the nature of minds. Minds are strange, wonderful things - and, like most strange, wonderful things, most people do not think at all clearly about them. There is a deep seated sense in which minds lend themselves to a sort of "assumption of precedence", as I'll call it: that they (or it) somehow had to be here first, "before" physical matter. Partly, this is because the manner in which humans relate to each other and their artifacts (in terms of schemes, designs and purposeful interrelations) manifests itself in an assumption that the universe must also be "for" something (otherwise, "What's the point?" That there is an ultimate point to the existence of matter and the physical universe is taken as a given, which pretty much guarantees that the conclusion arrived at - of a cosmic overlord/mind that put everything into motion and overseas nature and humanity - will be one that vindicates that assumption). Humans are also natural dualists: they are predisposed, for good evolutionary reasons, to thinking about intentionality as a distinctive kind of "thing", separate from the body. These "folk psychology" reasons for humanity's infatuation with the mind as an agent that is fundamentally disjointed from the physical universe are partial answers to why it is so difficult for people to break free from the notion that physical reality itself must originate from mind; and why it is so difficult for many to understand, let alone accept, the scientific alternative: that mind is an "emergent" property of the brain that arrived late in the universe, and that, ultimately, "bubbled up" from simplicity through the ratchet of evolution.

It seems clear to me now that if the being called God is supposed to be a "disembodied mind", then God is, by definition, necessarily nonsensical and therefore utterly impossible.

The most general reason for this is that mind cannot exist as a stand-alone entity. A mind is a high-level, abstract view of an evolving physical system. This high-level view is a manifestation of a process involving transitions between states, retrieval of information from registries, retention of information (often highly biased and distorted), the formation of an ongoing set of representations about the world, and a way of linking all of these together (and, if we're also talking about consciousness, a way of making it seem as though there is a central I in control). These representations exist as patterns in an appropriately organised apparatus. For a mind to exist, it must "reside", as it were, in some apparatus made of stuff, and that stuff must do something very specific. If you doubt this, then think about what it would mean to run computer software that does not ultimately reside on some physical medium. It is clear that a mind requires heterogeneous structure at some level, like computer software does.

God, when he wasn't so lame, oddly enough. Still, he was more of a cunt.

In the theological narrative, matter is almost taken as an obscenity (there was even a religious order back in the middle ages called the Cathars who believed that the physical universe was the creation of the Devil. Needless to say, the ruling class didn't take too kindly to these poor sods - the monarchy naturally wanted religion to legitimate its ascendant position in society - and so the Cathars were dealt the same fate that awaited all too many do-gooders and smart-arses: torture and death). Matter is crude stuff that drips with the Sin of Eve's transgression. To die is to graduate to a realm "beyond matter". The rotten physical world is left behind (this should be kept in mind when dealing with creationists, who like to extoll the grace of God through the complexity and intricacy of the physical world. These people will implore atheists to "just look around" and "see for yourselves evidence of the Creator's handiwork'', to which the atheist can reply, "But why so anxious to leave?"). The world is an arena on which to "test" us, a harsh, often pitiless theatre.

After death, we're transported to a place (though not a place in a spatial sense, curiously enough) where pain and suffering are unknown (however, many formulations take heaven to be suspiciously like the physical world. The reasons aren't far to seek, if we suppose that religions are crafted in the historical-material context in which their makers lived). As mentioned, God himself is taken to be "beyond" matter, indeed not even composed of it. Matter behaves in predictable ways; God is Pure Will, not reducible to the machinations of blind processes, which would constrain his degrees of freedom.

Something that's never explained is how this non-material being could ever interact with matter. God is supposed not to possess any spatial or temporal components (unless he chooses to use them as avatars). As mentioned, some have described him as "pure will". The question then arises: what is "doing the willing"? Does God will through one part of himself (if he has parts) and create things through another? Interestingly, some people have tried to describe God as a simple being, but it's clear that such a scheme is unworkable if this being can do even a tiny fraction of the things he is purported to be capable of. If, nevertheless, he could be a simple being (which I don't grant), then we arrive back at the problem of how God's thoughts and mental states can be organised if there is no requisite structure with which to organise them.

More power than God. Literally. Rather prettier as well, don't you agree?

If there is imagined to be some sort of continuity of mind with matter (with mind in the form of God, and matter in the form of the stuff that he produced through volition), then why not have matter precede mind anyway, and simply go with what the science (and the resultant logic) says? Why get hung up on lobbying for matter to be the product of mind? If there be a continuity, then have it go the other way, in which case you get this for free: you don't even need to make the stretch of saying that matter "creates" mind, in the sense of matter producing some independent thing that could exist outside of or beyond it. Rather, the philosophical materialist claim is that mind is an "emergent" property (or better, process) of appropriately organised matter. Thus, the matter-before-mind narrative makes less extraordinary claims, is consistent with what we know from neuroscience and psychology, and it escapes the logical absurdities of the mind-before-matter narrative.

The following things corroborate that mind is indeed a manifestation of physical processes in the brain:

- the induction of different mental states and even personalities through the administration of drugs, sleep deprivation, trauma, etc.

- the strengthening of synapse connections when a skill is practised (this drives home the notion of mind being part of an evolving physical system)

- genetic heritability for intelligence

- the correspondence of different parts of the brain to our various senses. When these parts of the brain are damaged or neutralised, the sense they correspond to is incapacitated (or eventually taken up by another part of the brain)

- thinking requires energy, which attests to the physical process that thinking is. If "the soul" was the thing that thinks, we wouldn't get drowsy from lack of sleep before the final exam the next morning, or crash our vehicles after a night on the town

- degenerative diseases that diminish our ability to remember or recognise people and situations, and that often make us "lose our minds" (literally, in some extreme cases)

- the effects of aging on our memory

Take away all the physical structures and processes alluded to here and what are you left with? Nothing.

There is no ghost in the machine. The machine is the ghost. In the absence of matter, there is not only no medium for thoughts to be "on", there are no things for them to be about. Thoughts are ultimately the result of physical stimuli and their interactions with patterns in the brain (abstractified as memories, thoughts, sensations and feelings). However, if God precedes physical matter, then he exists in a void that is absent of anything for his thoughts to represent. Additionally, God has no sensory organs by which to absorb and organise information about physical existence (in the theological narrative, there wasn't even such a thing to begin with); he is purported to somehow just "know everything" (another convenience afforded by gibberish notions such as "spiritual power"). Religious people take something that is an emergent property of the brain (mind and consciousness), and then assume that it can be detached and made meaningful outside of the brain.

It can't.

Let's assume, though, that there is something called "the soul" which survives physical death. What are the properties of this soul supposed to be? Does it continue, for example, to possess the deficiencies of its respective person while they lived? For example, if someone was severely mentally "diminshed" in some way (the result of, say, developmental abnormalities) does the soul continue to be afflicted with this shortcoming? Does the soul "spring back" to full functionality when it's liberated from the body? Is it an entity that never forgets anything? But if so, then how does it store the requisite information? And what happens as the information continues to pile up? If there be some mechanism to facilitate the flow of thoughts in a soul, then this soul is a heterogeneous entity that needs to be understood as a system. But the only system that could in principle act as the facilitator of thoughts, consciousness, memories and so on is something very much like the brain - which, while not necessarily needing to share the particular details of the hominid brain with which we have direct experience, must nevertheless have some equivalent "logical" structure to it. Homogeneous entities don't and can't think, because they do not have components that allow for the differential functionality that a mind necessarily requires. It is no coincidence, after all, that we have hugely complex brains, and that our brains are more complex than those of other animals. The only reference point we have for talking about minds is brains, which are really biological computers.

One of these goes a long way, biatches.

For God to do any of the things he is purported to be capable of, he must therefore be highly complex. We can immediately see why God can't be an adequate ultimate explanation for anything: if we're interested in explaining complexity, it simply won't do to invoke a gargantuan wallop of it from the very outset, and then leave that complexity unexplained; if we allow ourselves this lazy way out, we might as well say that people and horses and cats don't require explanations either. As the philosopher David Hume knew in his day: if a Designer is required to explain complexity, then all the more must that very Designer require an explanation through the invocation of design, and therefore another Designer, and so and on. Invoking design doesn't terminate the regress one iota; it bumps it up another notch, and in so doing, ends up irredeemably compounding it. It not only fails to solve the problem, it fails to solve the problem with a white-hot vengeance.

Theologians and other religious apologists often try to wriggle out of these tight spots by saying that God is an "uncaused cause". Why God should be allowed to get away with being an unexplained "first cause" is never adequately addressed, other than that it's required by the narrative. But what, let us ask, exempts God from requiring an explanation while the universe is reckoned to need one? Why not just cut out the superfluous deity and say that the universe doesn't require an explanation either? Of course, we then come to the crux of belief: a universe that is not haunted by an overlord spirit is unsatisfactory for emotional reasons. And given the boundless pride of human beings, it follows that the universe must have been created with us in Mind (God's!). In a bid to make science and religion "go hand in hand", increasingly nebulous schemes are concocted and massaged to help people overcome the suspicion that their beliefs are a litany of lies and falsehoods. The language becomes ever fuzzier in this New Age, hip sort of "reasonable" religion. Credit to those who don't completely strong-arm science to make it jive with their Sky Daddy beliefs. But even they are subscribing to concepts that, in the final analysis, are the sheerest of nonsense - and yes, are also unscientific.

To repeat, the religious are taking a phenomenon from within the physical universe and trying to apply it "beyond" this domain, imagining it to have efficacy in some other realm. There is not the slightest bit of evidence, of course, that such realms exist or, more importantly to my point, that they could exist. Most tellingly, it is not even clear that such notions make the slightest bit of sense, given what we know now about the nature of minds.

Again, if by God we mean a disembodied mind that precedes the physical universe (to the extent that this temporal narrative can be made intelligible), then God is a logical - not just an empirical - impossibility. He is not only a non-starter in the sense of the infinite regress problem that Hume and Dawkins have expounded. He's just not there as a possibility to begin with.

The lesson from all this is simple: God doesn't exist.

============

Further reading: this excellent article by Scott Harrison. It talks about the deep analogy between mind/brain and software/hardware. It is written from a Marxist perspective (which can be both a good and bad thing). In particular, it lays out the case for seeing minds as high-level, abstract ways of viewing evolving physical systems, and why things like ethereal souls and disembodied minds are impossible (and hence, likewise, are any sort of "God"). This is really the article that nudged me over the line to strong, hardcore atheism. Scott has also commented that Dawkins and others, including even neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists - whose science strikes the final hammer blow against God - have not picked up on the obvious implications for theism. Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion, even allows for the (extremely slight) possibility of God. Using evolution and physics in defence of atheism is fine, but the science that definitively demonstrates it has not been taken enough advantage of by atheists. This is largely an artifact of the philosophical idealist remnants that linger in the minds of even hardened atheist scientists. Needless to say, most of the rest of the population are nowhere near realising the implications of an authentically materialist conception of the universe, and still wallow in notions like disembodied minds, souls, spirits, and the like.

Why "geek" is a derogatory term

2010-08-14T20:42:00.004+10:00

Tell someone that you're into science, and you're likely to be told that you're a "geek". This label - which I will argue is a vicious and unbecoming one - somehow doesn't have the same resonance when applied to, say, people who are employed in law, or business, or marketing. It's reserved almost exclusively for those working in the sciences, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in technology roles.

What is it about these occupations and interests that lend themselves to such labelling? There are multiple reasons, all connected to each other. One of them is that science doesn't bow to the insipid drivel that passes as "culture" in our society. Those who pursue science are thereby seen as untrustworthy and unreliable outsiders, out of touch with the rest of "the community" (that is, white, "middle-class", Christian males), and so forth. In other words, they're weirdos. And weirdos, as we know, need to be mocked and sidelined, so that the cool people (whoever the fuck they are) can go their way unmolested and so that we may fawn over them and heap deference upon them so that they may be reminded of their coolness and perhaps, just maybe, let us into their coterie of coolness so that we too may become like them. Hence the name calling.

Another reason is that the pathetic lack of scientific literacy among the general population leads them to adopt some very erroneous conceptions of what science is. Science is "boring" and "impractical", "too complicated", and blahdy fucking blah. So it must follow that anyone who pursues it is an impractical weakling with strange tastes. I suppose another reason, less obvious, could be jealousy (?). Scientists are smart. People with nary a brain cell to rub on often don't take kindly to folk who use their grey matter for things other than manipulating their limbic system. This culture of ours requires plenty of people who are ready to allow themselves to become as stupid as it's possible for a human being to be, and this context, it's just not safe to have everyone being too damned smart. So the sciencey people are the fall guys.

Are the attributes that the word "geek" implies actually embodied in scientists? Sometimes (and even then, in varying degrees). And sometimes not. This is why it's sad to see people willingly label themselves as geeks, like as though it's cute or some shit, even when they lack these attributes. Lack them, entirely and utterly. What part of the label, then, are they acknowledging about themselves which they think warrants the label in the first place? What part of it is supposed to converge on some feature of themselves? The "I'm smart" bit? So basically, then, anyone who's not a geek is "not smart". If smarties use it to convey pride in their own intelligence, technical proficiency, or keen attention to detail, why do they denigrate this by advertising it through a loaded term like "geek" which clearly conveys other things that distract from this smartness? By willingly wearing the label, they are encouraging the stereotype. And get the fuck out of my face with the "But there's nothing wrong with being a geek" line. A huge chunk of the whole fucking society is telling you that there's something wrong with you, and instead of thinking that there might something screwed up about the society, you acquiesce to it, and even take pride in your "weird" pass times and interests. Well fuck you. I guess you really are a geek. You just can't seem to get it through your head that the proper response to being labelled isn't to embrace and celebrate the label; the proper response comes in the form of the phrase, "Go suck a dick, bitch."

But whatever. If people want to label themselves as geeks (and thereby reduce themselves to the lowest common denominator that others have assigned for them), that's no skin off my nose. If they like being placed into a category by which others can judge them, go for it. Just don't bring that shit anywhere near me or the scientific profession in general. I'm just saying.

The problem of evil, disembodied minds, and other ponderings

2010-08-07T14:38:00.039+10:00

"What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind. Hehehehe."

-- Homer Simpson

"I absolutely believe in God. And I absolutely hate the fucker."

-- Riddick, as seen in "Pitch Black"

There is an entire branch of theology, called theodicy, dedicated to solving the problem of evil ("If God is all-powerful and good, why is there evil in the world?"). Try as they might, though, the theologians and other religious apologists cannot solve this problem, because it embodies a fundamental contradiction, an irreconcilable dichotomy between two opposing propositions. A God who is the epitome of good is the antithesis of the presence of evil.

Here is the most waffling (and amusing) "solution" to this insurmountable problem:

"God wants to test us. Life is a series of trials and challenges to gauge whether each individual will pass the test of His approval."

This seems half-way plausible - until you give it a second's thought. Then it collapses in a mangled heap of contradictions.

Firstly, in order for a test to count as a measure of merit, it has to be fair. In other words, it must be the same for everyone, and everyone must also have been given the same study material and an opportunity to study it. Is this what we see? A cursory look at the world tells us that it's the exact opposite of what we see. Through no choice of their own, every person on this planet was was born into a different set of circumstances, in some way or other. Some people were born into environments of relative safety and affluence, others were born into environments of brutal destitution. And everything in between. Some have access to a world of knowledge and intellectual stimulation, others are denied these assets. So immediately, we can see that the proposition that life is a test has to be the sheerest of rubbish, something that doesn't even rise to the level of idiocy. But for the sake of argument, I'll assume that this first stumbling block can be surmounted. The apologist might retort, "But the world is the way it is because humans made it that way. Humans are free to commit acts of evil because God gave them free will." Exactly. So how then does God justify using using the life we live on Earth - the circumstances of which are largely dictated by other humans, who made decisions in a context determined largely by the actions of previously living humans - as a test if He isn't even setting the rules Himself? The part I find most pernicious and outrageously insulting to human dignity is this: what "test" is an innocent child supposed to "pass"? Only a monster would require a child to actually undergo the brutality of being prematurely terminated for the sake of this sick examination.

The argument that life is a test is thus not only logically doomed, it's also a thoroughly repugnant and vile doctrine.

Secondly, it makes absolutely no sense for a Good God to actually make ANYONE go through the agony of his test if he is also infinitely powerful and all-knowing. Surely, he could gauge whether someone would do something, without them needing to do it, and determine on that basis whether the person has passed the gauntlet. Apparently, however, God is a benevolent sadist, since actual, rather than simulated, pain is required by him as part of his examination of our worth.

Riddick. He doesn't like God.

Thirdly, on what basis is this God actually supposed to judge people? Suppose someone is born into a well-to-do family, and that they never carry out any especially wicked acts. This person is more or less nice to other people, is kind to friends and family, performs his or her civic duties, and, to top it off, regularly attends church (or mosque or synagogue). But he/she, in spite of being given the best opportunities in life, is not as good as he or she could have been. Does this person, if we're to suppose that they are being "tested", therefore fail the test? Does this person "deserve" to spend the rest of ETERNITY (and try wrapping your head around that notion) in Hell? What about people who have spent their lives in war zones? Are these people expected to show the same nuances of humanity and kindness as those who had the fortune (through pure accident) of being born into safe and nurturing environments?

Fourth, even assuming that one's life is a test, why should this particular test be the gauge for whether I am "good" or "evil", against the backdrop of the other possible lives I could have lived, and which would also surely be relevant in such a calculus of virtue? Wouldn't it be fairer (though more painful) if God made us pass through, say, a thousand different permutations of lives and then seen how we came out on average, rather than judging us on the basis of a statistically worthless sample of one permutation? (and here I am restricting myself to those people who reached adulthood, rather than the millions of infants and children who die every year in some miserable part of God's "perfectly designed world" through absolutely no fault of their own). In science, when we want to test for an effect, we set up what are known as multiple replicates and see what happens across these replicates. Apparently, God is also a poor statistician. But then, this makes sense, given that Ronald Fisher lived well after the Bible and the Koran were written (it's always interesting to note how God is invariably afflicted with the ignorance of his human contemporaries, and how it's always - always - left to human beings to produce new knowledge). Unfortunately, the impulse to find excuses for God continues to this day, simply because emotional rather intellectual imperatives are being served.

God, and other logical impossibilities

When we talk about God, what are we actually talking about? Through their own admission, many religious people don't themselves have much of an idea. For example, Muslims are encouraged to believe that God is unknowable, but that humanity was bestowed with a number of "signs" of his existence (notice the masculine vernacular - which doesn't originate with me - and how this tells us something about the inherent sexism of the monotheistic faiths, which should itself tell us something about the societal configurations that these faiths have so forcefully lent themselves to propping up). This makes no sense. If something is unknowable, then what can possibly act as a "sign" for its existence? A sign for what? It's unknowable, remember, which means that you don't know what it is. In order for something to be a sign for that other thing's existence, then we need to know what that thing is. Otherwise, what the hell are we talking about? It should pass without comment - if we haven't lost our senses - that this provides a pretty lame basis for human morality. Notice the "if".

For the remainder of this rant, I'll limit myself to the personal God that most religious people believe in. Many people will object to critiques of God like Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (in spite of much vitriol about Dawkins being a "fundamentalist" in his own right, the book lays to rest most of the arguments for religion). They charge that Dawkins is attacking a caricature of their deity. "That's not my God. You're attacking an outdated 'man in the sky' image which no one subscribes to nowadays." Are these critics right? Nope. I love you guys, but you're talking pure horseshit - and some part of you knows it. What Dawkins actually attacks is the personal God that most people believe in, because what most people believe in is an entity with the following attributes: it bestows moral maxims; it judges people; it feels anger at our indiscretions; it wreaks miracles; it listens to prayers. These are all attributes of a volitional, conscious entity - that is, a personal being. What other type of "God" would be worthy of the name? Many people claim that "The universe is God" or that "God is energy". This is nothing more than an exercise in word-play. If the universe is God (or vice-versa; what's the difference?), then I suppose I could be a believer. But not one jot of understanding is added by simply labelling the universe, or energy, as God. What's more, it's disingenuous. By energy, scientists mean something precise: a quantity that can neither be destroyed nor created, but which is conserved and is interchangeable with mass-matter. By God, people mean an immaterial entity with a plan for humanity. Does "energy" have a plan for humanity? If not, then please stop abusing the English language. We are talking about two fundamentally different propositions that have nothing at all to do with each other. You're free to describe this being or entity or whatever you think it is, but don't, please, call it "energy". The vague notion of God as "energy" or "oneness" is useful, however, because it allows the believer to retreat to safety when the personal God they actually pray to and worship is refuted. When the need to impress the atheist has subsided, it's straight back to the judgmental, human-centric God that Dawkins actually talks about (rather than the God of the theologians that hardly anyone pays any attention to).

Ain't so tough.

So a personal God it is, then. A non-personal God is exactly the same thing as the physical universe.

While all of physics, biology, chemistry, geology and astronomy have shown absolutely no "sign" whatsoever of God's existence, it might still have been plausible to suppose that God, in spite of his conspicuous absence, existed. This was until cognitive psychology came onto the scene, which showed that there cannot be such things as disembodied minds. Minds are inherently tied to the physical medium in which they are, well, tied. When you feel drowsy from lack of sleep, that isn't because your "soul" is getting tired. It's because the synapses in your brain have had enough, or some such thing. When you "lose your mind" from dementia, the "soul" doesn't stay sane (incidentally, things like dementia make the case for a soul even more difficult to take seriously, because it messes with free will, and if someone doesn't have free will, they aren't morally responsible for what they do, and can't be judged as deserving of punishment or reward). Your consciousness is determined by physical events happening in the physical universe. The mind is a dynamical set of interrelationships and representations about the world - a place which also happens to be physical. The mind requires an apparatus to transfer stimuli from the sense organs (also physical) into the brain (also physical). So we have a system that is entirely physical, and yet some people would have us believe that the mind - which is produced by physical processes and which is comprised of representations OF physical processes - can exist outside the physical universe, in some "realm" independent of matter (this is when they're not tripping over themselves to equivocate God with "energy", which, as I mentioned, is interchangeable with mass-matter, and is hence part of a physical system, making a mockery of the claim that God is independent of the physical universe. If God isn't independent of the physical universe, then why not just stop at the universe instead of trying to explain its existence through something "outside" of it? It's of course never explained why this "other" thing is exempt from requiring an explanation. But if this consciousness in the void doesn't require an explanation, why should the physical universe require one? If a primordial cognitive complexity is a natural feature of existence in the form of God, why can't physical simplicity also be a natural feature of existence in the form of the universe?).

Very thoughtful.

How, then, is God supposed to be a "mind" that precedes the physical universe if that mind had nothing to think about? Mind and consciousness, by the way, also require a temporal component. They require that thoughts be processed, so they must, by definition, be part of a dynamical system, as I mentioned - a system of information transfer comprising inputs and outputs, registered states, and an evolution from one state to another. As this requires that the system be describable in temporal terms (as time is a measure of the interval between events), God, being "timeless", is thus ruled out. And if God is eventless (which is implied by his timelessness), then he can't think. Hence, not a mind. A "timeless mind" is a complete contradiction. But even supposing that such a thing were possible, why not, by the same token, suppose that the universe, in some form, was itself "eventless" and that it has always existed?

"Where did the universe orginate?". The question that should immediately follow from this - "Where did the cosmic mind - God - originate?" - is somehow off-limits, because it's simply ASSUMED that the universe had to "come from" somewhere (and yet, conveniently, God didn't need to come from somewhere, because "he was always there". But that takes us straight back to the alternative: why couldn't the universe, in some form, have always existed, and therefore not require an origin of any sort?).

Talking about an eternal mind that just sort of hangs there in a void of nothingness makes as much logical sense as talking about circular triangles. It's not just that there isn't any evidence for God; it's not just that there is evidence against God. It's that there cannot be a God, because the very concept of such a being is inherently contradictory.

As good a candidate as any for Top Job.

Theism: the most epic dad-wank known to Homo sapiens; a pile of intellectual excrement that has corrupted, defiled and retarded centuries of human thought and progress; an unwashed stain on the conscience of humankind. We can squander the brain that evolution gave us by grovelling to Sky Daddies. Or we can use it to free ourselves from our imaginary masters and build a society with human agency as its centrepiece.

"I don't want to question my beliefs" and "Science is another religion"

2010-06-03T21:15:00.006+10:00

A few years ago I was talking to a friend about some religious idea or other. I don't remember exactly what it was about, but she said something that I recently got to thinking about: "I don't want to question my beliefs." That terminated the discussion.

It struck me how odd that actually is. At the time it didn't, because that phrase has been repeated to the point of cliche. It's like the phrase "This is how it's always been done", or "That's what I was taught", or "That's what everyone else believes". It's just a given; you're supposed to accept it, because...hmmm. In other words, it's stupid. But it's stupid in a clever way. Some things are just self-evidently stupid. This one isn't, at least not initially. They reflect habits of thought. I won't go into this but will just note in passing that there are stupid things that are easily rejected because believing them isn't conducive to survival and getting along in a social context, and things that are. "I don't want to question my beliefs" is an example of the latter flavour of stupid.

If one doesn't want to question one's beliefs, how does one even know that those beliefs are good ones in the first place? If you have beliefs, shouldn't you WANT to question them, given that 1) they're YOU'RE beliefs, and beliefs are highly personal things that hang around in your head, and 2) because you should want to be assured that they can stand up to scrutiny. "I don't want to question my beliefs" is really a subconscious admission of the inherent shakiness of those beliefs. If those beliefs are so shaky that you're afraid that they won't stand up to scrutiny, why should you actually want to have those beliefs? Do they actually make sense to you, or do you just subscribe to them because they make you feel good?

On a related aside, I'm often reminded of the need to "respect" other people's beliefs, as though beliefs, by virtue of their simple existence, are automatically entitled to my respect. Of course, we're talking here about religious beliefs, not artistic views, political beliefs, parental preferences, and so on. Sorry chumps, but religion doesn't get the all-clear just because people choose to get "offended". What is particularly galling is that there is no symmetry in this whole accounting. Apparently I'm not entitled to consider what those beliefs actually say; I'm just supposed to acquiesce to this notion of beliefs having protection even from critique, and this acquiescence is supposed to precede and in fact preclude my right and duty to examine the said belief. In the parlance of our times, "fuck dat shit". Take your totalitarian reflexes and disingenuous appeals to "respect" and shove them up are your arseholes.

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The next dumb assertion is "Science is another religion". I was told this solemnly in response to my atheism recently. A friend (or rather, acquaintance of a friend) asked me what religion I subscribe to, and I answered that I didn't subscribe to any religion. "Science is another religion" is really just an excuse to abdicate one's responsibility to actually THINK about one's positions. If it can be shown that science is another religion, then doesn't that validate ALL religion (or at least one's own, which always happens to be the "true" religion)? But science ISN'T "another religion". It's a completely different beast. It's a methodology for systematically interrogating nature. It's one of humanity's greatest inventions and institutions.

The notion that science is no different to religion is a product of our asinine, cynical, selfish culture, where we pick and choose what we want to believe like so many products in a shopping mall. Want to believe in something for which there is no evidence? No problem, amigo. Just slap the label "religion" onto science to take the latter a few rungs down (and to avoid having to admit that science sustains your hypocritical mug and that you use the products made available by it on a daily basis like a stoned idiot), and there you have it: instant credibility for your crazy-arse beliefs (many of which don't even rise to the level of idiocy, but then neither do most music videos these days. When you live in a world that constantly pumps shit and tries to convince you that it smells like a rose, it's no surprise that dumb-arsery is going to rise to the surface every now and then). If you have to say that science is another religion, you're either 1) a moron beyond reproach, 2) your beliefs have no redeeming qualities, and can only be sustained by taking a dump on the excellence that is science, or 3) both. I charitably assume that I am dealing with the second scenario whenever I encounter a "Science is another religion" case, but in my heart of hearts I often feel that I'm dealing with the third scenario. It's ironic that stupidity has such Darwinian resilience, given that Darwinian evolution is such an elegant and beautiful edifice (to be sure, too much stupidity will get you killed, but a nice mix of nominal intelligence and stupidity pretty much guarantees that you've got it made in the mindless void of our consumerist society).

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Well that's what I wanted to rant about.

The Improbability Pump

2010-04-27T01:02:00.006+10:00

Just a note before the actual article by Jerry Coyne (evolutionary geneticist and all-round rationalist good guy): I notice that some fucking scumbag is littering the comments section with advertising for useless shit. All such messages will be promptly deleted. Say something pertinent to the content of the post, or fuck off.

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The Improbability Pump

by Jerry A. Coyne

(this article first appeared in the May 2010 edition of The Nation)

Imagine for a moment that a large proportion of Americans--let's say half--rejected the "germ theory" of infectious disease. Maladies like swine flu, malaria and AIDS aren't caused by micro-organisms, they claim, but by the displeasure of gods, whom they propitiate by praying, consulting shamans and sacrificing goats. Now, you'd surely find this a national disgrace, for those people would be utterly, unequivocally wrong. Although it's called germ theory, the idea that infections are spread by small creatures is also a fact, supported by mountains of evidence. You don't get malaria unless you carry a specific protozoan parasite. We know how it causes the disease, and we see that when you kill it with drugs, the disease goes away. How, we'd ask, could people ignore all this evidence in favor of baseless superstition?

But that's fiction, right? Well, not entirely, for it applies precisely to another "theory" that is also a fact: the theory of evolution. Over the past quarter-century, poll after poll has revealed that nearly half of all Americans flatly reject evolution, many clinging to the ancient superstition that the earth was created only 6,000 years ago, complete with all existing species. But as Richard Dawkins shows in his splendid new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, the theory of evolution is supported by at least as much evidence as is the germ theory of disease--heaps of it, and from many areas of biology. So why is it contemptible to reject germ theory but socially acceptable to reject evolutionary theory?

One answer is religion. Unlike germ theory, the idea of evolution strikes at the heart of human ego, suggesting that we were not the special object of God's attention but were made by the same blind and mindless process of natural selection that also built ferns, fish and rabbits. Another answer is ignorance: most Americans are simply unaware of the multifarious evidence that makes evolution more than "just a theory," and don't even realize that a scientific theory is far more than idle speculation.

While Dawkins has produced several brilliant books on the marvels of evolution and natural selection, he's never before written at length about the evidence for evolution. The Greatest Show on Earth can be seen as his response to ongoing and nonscientific opposition to evolution. In his previous book, The God Delusion, Dawkins mounted a withering attack on belief that was surely motivated in part by his incessant battles with faith-based creationism. In The Greatest Show on Earth he finally addresses the problem of ignorance, drawing together the diverse evidence for evolution to show that "evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact." Dawkins has two goals here. The first is to change the minds of those who doubt or deny evolution by presenting them with more than 400 pages of scientific evidence. But changing minds is a big job, at least in the United States: in a 2006 Time magazine poll, 64 percent of Americans declared that if science disproved one of their religious beliefs, they'd reject the science in favor of their faith. (The British aren't quite so defiant: one week after its publication, The Greatest Show on Earth debuted at No. 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list.) More realistically, Dawkins hopes to bolster those who already accept evolution but "find themselves inadequately prepared to argue the case." And here he succeeds brilliantly.

In contrast, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (hereafter "F&P") think the case should be dismissed. In their provocatively titled What Darwin Got Wrong they contend that ever since the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species, scientists and laymen alike have been bamboozled by Darwin's key idea: natural selection, which F&P see as logically incoherent and lacking in empirical support. Since the authors are neither creationists nor crackpots--Fodor, a respected philosopher of mind, and Piattelli-Palmarini, a cognitive scientist, both accept the fact of evolution--their arguments deserve careful scrutiny. Unfortunately, in the end their critique proves as biologically uninformed as it is strident, and despite their repeated avowals that Darwinism is dead, it refuses to lie down.

Demonstrating the truth of natural selection is just one of Dawkins's aims, for the theory of evolution is composed of several more or less independent parts, which I like to describe in one longish sentence: "Life on earth evolved gradually, beginning with one primitive species; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species--and the process producing the illusion of design in organisms is natural selection." This sentence constitutes a scientific theory, which is not just a guess but an informed statement about the general principles that explain many observations about nature.

Establishing that all these principles are true is a tall order, clearly demanding lots of evidence. And for most people, the evidence boils down to one thing: fossils. Although Darwin was faced with a scant fossil record (it played almost no role in his Origin of Species), since 1859 paleontologists have unearthed a wealth of fossils demonstrating not only gradual change of species over time but also the branching of lineages and the so-called "missing links" that connect major groups of animals. We see marine plankton, whose fossil record is superb, changing slowly and gradually, and early horses branching off into numerous descendants (only a few of which survive today). We have transitional fossils between fish and amphibians, mammals and reptiles, whales and their deerlike ancestors, birds and feathered dinosaurs, and, of course, fossils that link Homo sapiens to our cranially challenged ancestors. Evolution, you might say, is written in the rocks.

But as Dawkins points out, "we don't need fossils in order to demonstrate that evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution would be entirely secure, even if not a single corpse had ever fossilized." What is this other evidence?

One type lies within the bodies of living organisms. In a wonderful chapter called "History Written All Over Us," Dawkins shows that animal anatomy is like a medieval palimpsest, carrying traces of our evolutionary ancestry. Human goose bumps, for instance, serve no function: they're remnants of the muscles used by our mammalian ancestors--and our living relatives like cats--to erect their fur, making them warmer and giving enemies the illusion of greater size. Modern genome sequencing has also uncovered vestigial DNA: useless, broken genes that are functional in our relatives and presumably were too in our ancestors. Our own genome, for instance, harbors nonfunctional genes that, in our bird and reptile relatives, produce egg yolk. Embryology--the study of development--brings more proof to the table. The pharyngeal arches of the early, fishlike human embryo are derived directly from the gill arches of fish, though they go on to become, among other things, our larynx and eustachian tube.

Even more evidence for evolution comes from the "bad designs" of animals and plants, which, Dawkins observes, look nothing like de novo creations of an efficient celestial engineer. His favorite example--and mine--is the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which runs from the brain to the larynx. In mammals it doesn't take the direct route (a matter of a few inches) but makes a curiously long detour, running from the head to the heart, looping around the aorta and then doubling back up to the neck. In the giraffe, this detour involves traversing that enormous neck twice--adding about fifteen feet of superfluous nerve. Anyone who's dissected an animal in biology class will surely agree with Dawkins's conclusion: "the overwhelming impression you get from surveying any part of the innards of a large animal is that it is a mess! Not only would a designer never have made a mistake like that nervous detour; a decent designer would never have perpetuated anything of the shambles that is the criss-crossing maze of arteries, veins, nerves, intestines, wads of fat and muscle, mesenteries and more."

Creationists often object to this sort of argument, saying that it's not scientific but theological. God is inscrutable, they claim, so how could we possibly know how he would or would not design creatures? But this misses the point, for the "bad design" we see is precisely what we'd expect if evolution were true. The laryngeal nerve takes that long detour because, in our fishy ancestors, it was lined up behind a blood vessel, with both nerve and vessel servicing the gills. As the artery moved backward during its evolution to the mammalian aorta, the nerve was constrained to move behind it, although its target (the larynx, an evolutionary descendant of the gill arch) remained up in the neck. If you insist that such designs reflect God's plan, then you must admit that his plan was to make things look as if they had evolved.

Finally, Dawkins provides evidence from a completely different realm: that of biogeography, the study of how plants and animals are distributed over the earth. Why do volcanic islands like Hawaii have plenty of unique plants, birds and insects (most resembling species from the nearest mainland) but no native amphibians, freshwater fish or land mammals? Such patterns defy explanation by any form of creationism. Instead, they bespeak long-distance migration of ancestors to newly formed islands, followed by the evolution of new species.

Fossils, embryology, bad design, molecular biology, vestigial traits, biogeography--all conspire to demonstrate the truth of evolution. All are described in Dawkins's famously lyrical prose and lavishly illustrated with color photos. Two chapters stand out. One, "You Did It Yourself in Nine Months" (the title is a reprise of evolutionist J.B.S. Haldane's reply to a woman who insisted that it was impossible for evolution to change a single cell into a complex human body), is simply the best existing description of how a linear DNA sequence codes for a three-dimensional body. The other deals with "Evolutionary Theodicy," Dawkins's idea that ecosystems reflect not harmonious central planning but inefficient natural selection. In an efficiently designed world, for instance, trees would be only a few feet tall; in an evolved one, natural selection among individuals competing for sunlight produces a lot of extra wood.

Dawkins's specialty has always been exploring and extolling natural selection, and this is where The Greatest Show on Earth really shines. But first, since selection is so uncontroversial to Dawkins yet so maligned by F&P, it behooves us to understand what it is. In principle, natural selection is simple. It is neither a "law" nor a "mechanism." It is, instead, a "process"--a process that is inevitable if two common conditions are met. First, some genes must harbor variation because of mutation; and second, some of those mutant genes must be better at replicating than others--usually because they improve the survival and reproduction of their carriers. Suppose, for instance, that the brown-colored ancestors of the polar bear included some carrying mutations in "pigment genes" that gave them lighter coats. These mutant bears would have an advantage: being more camouflaged in the snow than their darker confreres, they'd be able to sneak up on seals more easily and so get more to eat. Because well-fed individuals leave more offspring, over time the bear gene pool would become increasingly enriched in light-color genes. Eventually the species would evolve the familiar white polar bear coat. And this is the way, we think, that all organisms acquire that appearance of "design" that, before Darwin, was attributed to God.

Although we evolutionary biologists might describe the polar bear scenario as "natural selection acting on coat color," that's only our shorthand for the longer description given above. There is no agency, no external force of nature that "acts" on individuals. There is only differential replication of genes, with the winners behaving as if they were selfish (that's shorthand, too).

Dawkins describes selection as an "improbability pump," for over time the competition among genes can yield amazingly complex and extraordinary species. Here's how he describes the evolution of tigers:

A tiger's DNA is also a "duplicate me" program, but it contains an almost fantastically large digression as an essential part of the efficient execution of its fundamental message. That digression is a tiger, complete with fangs, claws, running muscles, stalking and pouncing instincts. The tiger's DNA says, "Duplicate me by the round-about route of building a tiger first."

Only Dawkins could describe a tiger as just one way DNA has devised to make more of itself. And that is why he is famous: absolute scientific accuracy expressed with the wonder of a child--a very smart child.

Natural selection has always been the most contested part of evolutionary theory. Many people who have no problem with evolution bridle at the thought that it's all driven by a mindless and unguided natural process. Indeed, while most scientists accepted the notions of evolution and common ancestry soon after Darwin proposed them in 1859, natural selection wasn't widely accepted by biologists until about 1930. The main problem was, and still is, a paucity of evidence. While the idea of natural selection seems eminently sound, people want to see it actually changing species in nature. And since the process is usually very slow, that evidence is hard to get for living organisms and nearly impossible for fossils.

It's this difficulty that leads Dawkins to observe that natural selection is on wobblier legs than the other tenets of evolutionary theory, such as evolutionary change and the branching pattern of life. "Nowadays it is no longer possible to dispute the fact of evolution itself--it has graduated to become a theorum," Dawkins writes, using a neologism for a scientific theory, "or obviously supported fact--but it could (just) be doubted that natural selection is its major driving force."

Well, maybe, but I think Dawkins is a bit too timid in his defense of natural selection. While biologists agree that natural selection is not the only cause of genetic change in populations, the evidence is strong that it's the only one that can produce the remarkable adaptations of animals and plants to their environment--the elephant's trunk, the cactus's spines, the tiger's fangs and so on--the designlike quality of organisms that, as Darwin put it, "most justly excites our admiration." For one thing, none of the alternatives seem to work. A once-popular rival of natural selection, for instance, was Lamarckism, the idea that the changes acquired by an individual during its lifetime could somehow be imprinted onto its genes and passed on to succeeding generations. This idea failed for two reasons. First, it is incapable of explaining "design" in general: most adaptations, like the tiger's fangs and cactus's spines, can't be credibly explained as acquired changes that later became genetic. Further, it turns out that almost no acquired changes are inherited. One example: despite millenniums of circumcision, Jewish boys are still obstinately born with foreskins.

In contrast, artificial selection has been stunningly successful. Virtually everything that we eat, grow or pet has involved transforming a wild species, through selective breeding, into something radically different. (Bear in mind that the ancestor of the Chihuahua is the wolf.) And of the thousands of selection experiments performed on species in the laboratory, I know of fewer than a dozen that have failed to elicit a response. Why is this relevant to natural selection? As Dawkins observes, "Artificial selection is not just an analogy for natural selection. Artificial selection constitutes a true experimental--as opposed to observational--test of the hypothesis that selection causes evolutionary change." That's because both processes inexorably result from genetic variation that is adaptive in the current environment, with the "environment" in one case dominated by humans who decide which individuals get to live and breed.

Further, the kinds of adaptations that we find--and don't find--in nature are precisely what we'd expect if they were built by natural selection. Natural selection, for instance, can't produce features in one species that are good only for members of a different species. And we never see such features: if one species does something that helps another species, it also helps itself (cleaner fish remove parasites from other species, but thereby get a free meal). Natural selection also predicts that "altruistic" behaviors should be preferentially directed at relatives, who carry the same genes. This, too, is what we see, starting with one's closest relatives--siblings and children. Natural selection builds features that benefit individuals, not populations or species. As expected, we find features beneficial to individuals but harmful to groups (when male lions usurp a pride of females, they kill the females' cubs, earning them the right to reproduce but reducing the population of lions).

Finally, we've observed natural selection in real time: bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics, plants to herbicides, insects to insecticides. This is genuine natural selection, even though the species are responding to human interference with the environment. And if you don't like those, biologists have cataloged dozens of "real" cases of natural selection in which species ranging from plants to birds adapt to natural changes in the environment.

Of course, it's impossible to prove that every useful feature of organisms was built by selection. The evolution of some species happened when we weren't around, and other species are impossible to experiment on. Nevertheless, the evidence for selection is sufficiently strong that, although Dawkins notes that the importance of selection might "(just) be doubted," he also observes, "All reputable biologists go on to agree that natural selection is one of [evolution's] most important driving forces, although--as some biologists insist more than others--not the only one."

Although F&P aren't biologists, they couldn't disagree more. While accepting the notion of evolution (grudgingly admitting that it's "perfectly possible--in fact entirely likely"), they assert, loudly and repeatedly, that natural selection is not just wrong but "quite possibly fatally wrong," not just flawed but "irredeemably flawed." They conclude that natural selection "falls radically short of explaining the appearance of new forms of life."

Could biologists really have been so mistaken these past 150 years? It seems unlikely, but scientific consensus has been wrong before (the idea of continental drift, for instance, was once widely rejected), so let's examine F&P's claims. These fall into two groups. The first is that scientists have recently discovered a lot of things about genetics and development that make natural selection look ineffective:

Contrary to traditional opinion, it needs to be emphasized that natural selection among traits generated at random cannot by itself be the basic principle of evolution. Rather, there must be strong, often decisive, endogenous constraints and hosts of regulations on the phenotypic options that exogenous selection operates on.

In other words, Darwin's assertion that species are "quite plastic" is wrong: organisms are so constrained by their biological nature that they're not free to change, even if it would be good for them to do so. So what are these "constraints" and "regulations" that render natural selection impotent? F&P proffer a long list (I count at least two dozen items), including the following phenomena: horizontal gene transfer (movement of DNA between individuals of the same generation and between different species), alternative splicing of genes, robustness, modularity, molecular drive, entrenchment, developmental noise, phenotypic plasticity and self-organization. To the layman, this salvo of arcane terms is daunting, and even I, an evolutionary geneticist of forty years' standing, was taken aback. But not for long, because on close inspection we find that none of these phenomena put much of a brake on natural selection.

Let's look at one of these: phenotypic plasticity. This refers to the ability of a phenotype--an observable trait or characteristic of an organism--to change within a single generation in response to environmental fluctuations. This is what happens, for instance, when you get a tan. If you have an outdoor cat, its fur gets thicker in winter. The plumage of Arctic animals like the ptarmigan, ermine and Arctic hare changes color from brown to white as winter comes on. Even the lowly brussels sprout has sophisticated plasticity: when it detects that a sprout-eating butterfly has laid eggs on the plant, it changes its leaf chemistry to attract parasitic wasps that destroy those eggs.

F&P imply that somehow--they're not clear about how--this ability to undergo adaptive developmental change within a generation prevents natural selection from causing genetic change between generations. But that isn't the case. In fact, far from being an impediment to natural selection, the ability of an individual to adapt to a changing environment is a product of natural selection! Individuals who can tan in the sun (and thus prevent melanomas) have an advantage over those whose pigmentation is fixed. Cats are better off if the length of their fur suits them to the seasons. Genes that are able to respond to predictable variation in the environment will always outcompete those that produce only a fixed (and hence episodically maladaptive) trait.

And so it is with all the "constraints" on selection detailed by F&P. A reader lacking training in science might skim over the rather tedious discussion of these phenomena and assume that F&P know what they're talking about. That reader would be wrong. Look at it this way: if there really were so many constraints on selection, and if development really were so complex and tightly interconnected that organisms could not respond to natural selection, then why would artificial selection be so effective at changing animals and plants?

Indeed, virtually none of the biologists who study the "constraints" described by F&P share their dim view of natural selection. That's because, over and over again, selection has wrought the most improbable and unpredictable changes in animals and plants. F&P claim, for example, that selection could never produce winged pigs because of developmental constraints: "Pigs don't have wings because there is no place on pigs to put them. There are all sorts of ways you'd have to change a pig if you wanted to add wings. You'd have to do something to its weight, and its shape, and its musculature, and its nervous system, and its bones; to say nothing of retrofitting feathers."

Haven't F&P heard of bats? Bats evolved from small four-legged mammals, probably resembling shrews. You could say the same thing about shrewlike beasts that F&P did about pigs: how could they possibly evolve wings? And yet they did: selection simply retooled the forelegs into wings, along with modifying the animal's weight, shape, musculature, nervous system and bones for flying (no feathers needed). One of the great joys of being a biologist is learning about the many species in nature whose evolution would appear, a priori, impossible.

Beyond distorting the scientific literature, F&P make a number of claims that are simply silly. I mention just one: "The textbook cases of Mendelian inheritance, in spite of their great historical and didactic importance, are more the exception than the rule." This came as a surprise to me. In fact, cases of Mendelian inheritance (the random assortment of parental genes into sperm and eggs) are the rule; if they weren't, genetic counseling would be useless. Statements like this typify the authors' attitude toward science throughout their book: they seize on some new wrinkle in the scientific literature, like a rare gene that doesn't behave according to Mendel's rules, and interpret it as a revolution that nullifies all of mainstream biology. This lack of grounding is often seen in work by science journalists who make their living touting "revolutionary" new findings, but it is inexcusable in a supposedly serious book written by academics.

Given F&P's expertise, you'd expect them to be on firmer ground with their second objection to natural selection, which is philosophical. But again they founder, making illogical arguments and distorting how biologists work. Natural selection is philosophically incoherent, they claim, because it doesn't "support counterfactuals." (A counterfactual is a conditional statement about what hasn't happened but could if certain conditions were met. The paradigmatic example is Tevye's song "If I Were a Rich Man," from Fiddler on the Roof.) What F&P mean is that in real organisms, evolution often involves simultaneous changes in several features, and we simply don't know which changes reflected natural selection (that is, which traits had variation that directly affected survival or reproduction) and which traits were what they call "free riders": features that weren't subject to selection but were carried along, perhaps as nonadaptive byproducts of genes that evolved.

Here's an example: during the evolution of mammals from reptiles, several features changed at the same time. The limbs moved underneath the body, the teeth became differentiated, some jawbones shrank and the braincase got bigger. Now, which of these traits evolved by natural selection, and which, if any, might have only been byproducts? Maybe selection acted to enlarge the cranium but the reduced jawbones were only a passive, nonselected byproduct of "braincase" genes.

Even single traits have several effects that could, in principle, respond differently to natural selection. The hemoglobin in our blood, for example, carries oxygen but also happens to be red. How do we know that selection didn't favor the color itself (perhaps to make anger or blushing more evident) rather than the oxygen-transport ability?

Finally, some "traits" are inseparable even in principle: how can we tell whether the ancestors of whales experienced selection for "swimming" as opposed to "flapping their flukes up and down?" Fluke-flapping, of course, causes swimming. Evolutionary biologists aren't much concerned with this sort of distinction, and I won't consider it further.

Because biologists can't make any of these distinctions, say F&P, natural selection is incoherent. They call this the "selection-for" problem. And they add that artificial selection doesn't suffer from this problem. Since animal and plant breeders consciously select for certain traits, like higher milk yield or uglier bulldogs, we know exactly which features experience selection (the bulldog's puggish face) and which are byproducts (the respiratory problems that come with puggish faces). F&P therefore find Darwin's analogy between artificial and natural selection dubious, for "only minds are sensitive to distinctions among counterfactuals," and "natural selection doesn't have a mind." In the end, declare F&P, natural selection cannot be true because "a theory that doesn't determine the truth values of relevant counterfactuals cannot explain the distribution of traits in the actual world."

But wait a minute. If you translate that last sentence into layman's English, here's what it says: "Since it's impossible to figure out exactly which changes in organisms occur via direct selection and which are byproducts, natural selection can't operate." Clearly, F&P are confusing our ability to understand how a process operates with whether it operates. It's like saying that because we don't understand how gravity works, things don't fall.

What's worse is that, contra F&P, evolutionary biologists have grappled for decades with the question of how to decide which evolving features of species experience natural selection and which do not. And they've devised observational, experimental and statistical ways to make this distinction. In the case of hemoglobin, the answer is obvious: selection couldn't act on color because in many animals the blood can't be seen through the skin. More important, mutant hemoglobins that have lost their ability to carry oxygen but remain red are invariably lethal.

Here's a more realistic example. Perhaps the most famous case of natural selection in action is the color change that occurred in Britain's "peppered moth" over the past 150 years. Before the Industrial Revolution, these moths had white wings speckled lightly with black, although avid collectors found a few all-black mutants. As pollution from manufacturing increased the concentration of suspended particles in the air, black moths became more numerous, and eventually predominated in many places. When clean air laws reduced Britain's pollution in the 1950s, the evolution of wing color reversed, and in most places the white color once again became common. The difference between white and black moths was shown to reside at a single gene.

What caused these evolutionary changes? There were several theories. One was that the target of selection wasn't the moth's color but the survival of caterpillars that, while not showing the color differences of adults, happened to be affected by the same gene. Another suggestion was that natural selection acted on color: perhaps sharp-sighted birds picked off moths whose color contrasted with that of the trees on which they rested. In unpolluted woods, lichen-covered trees are light-colored but turned black as pollution increased. This would give a selective advantage first to the dark-colored moths and then, as pollution abated, to light-colored moths.

F&P would presumably counsel us to give up at this point, since we can't, they say, distinguish between the counterfactuals of selection "for" larval survival and "for" adult color. But we can! Breeding experiments in the laboratory showed that the survival of caterpillars couldn't explain the increase and subsequent decline of the black form. In contrast, field experiments that involved observing predation on dead moths of different colors fastened to trees of different colors, and on live moths of different colors released in unpolluted woods, showed that selection on color was strong, easily able to explain the evolutionary changes observed in nature.

And we now have dozens of similar studies--in fish, birds, insects and plants--all successfully distinguishing those traits experiencing natural selection from those that are "free riders." Sadly, F&P show no awareness of this literature, which is hardly obscure, since it includes some of the famous cases, like the peppered moth, that we use to teach evolution to undergraduates.

Of course, in many cases we'll never know exactly which features experienced direct natural selection or how that selection worked. We can't return to the Jurassic, for instance, and find out why the stegosaurus had those big plates on its back. Were they radiators for regulating body temperature? Did they fend off predators? Or were they only a byproduct of some other adaptive change in the skeleton? Our inability to understand all the details, though, is hardly a reason to claim that natural selection doesn't work.

So if natural selection played at best a trivial role in evolution, what do F&P offer as an alternative explanation for the marvelous adaptations of plants and animals? Nothing. They finally admit that "we don't know what the mechanism of evolution is. As far as we can make out, nobody knows exactly how phenotypes evolve. We think that, quite possibly, they evolve in lots of different ways." After much demurring, they float the idea that "organisms 'catch' their phenotypes from their ecologies in something like the way that they catch their colds from their ecologies." Although this "explanation" links evolution to ecology, it's completely meaningless. How did ancestral whales catch their flukes and flippers from the water? How did ancestral birds catch their wings from the air? F&P don't say.

I've pondered long and hard how two thoughtful intellectuals could go so wrong. Behind much of F&P's animus toward natural selection, it seems, is their disdain for evolutionary psychology, which sees much of modern human behavior as the product of natural selection acting on our ancestors. (What Darwin Got Wrong includes an appendix of quotations from evolutionary psychologists, whom F&P label "unabashed adaptationists.") Here F&P have a point, for while much of evolutionary psychology is interesting, worthwhile science, it includes a speculative fringe (especially inviting to journalists) that proposes fanciful stories about how natural selection could produce behaviors like music-making, rape, clinical depression and even religion.

Fodor has long been an extreme rationalist who believes the mind is a logic machine and that the orderliness of our world must be deducible a priori from elegant laws. It's no surprise, then, that F&P produce a long diatribe against B.F. Skinner's behaviorism, the theory that animals (including humans) initially behave randomly and then repeat those behaviors that get rewarded. In its randomness, messiness and contingency, behaviorism resembles natural selection. And F&P are clearly infuriated by evolutionary psychologists' use of natural selection to explain not only human behavior but the human mind.

But evolutionary psychology is a red herring here. F&P are surely entitled to criticize evolutionary psychology, and evolutionary psychologists may be expected to reply. Motivations aside, F&P's attempt to undermine evolutionary biology is a quixotic and misguided undertaking. Their claim to have nullified 150 years of science, and one of humanity's proudest intellectual achievements, with some verbal legerdemain, is not only breathtakingly arrogant but willfully ignorant of modern biology. In the end, F&P's contrarian efforts are all belied by the world of Richard Dawkins--the flourishing field of modern evolutionary biology, where natural selection remains the only explanation for the wondrous adaptive complexity of organisms.

=============================

Incidentally, Coyne also wrote a book dealing with the evidence for evolution, called "Why Evolution is True", and it's a ripper of a read. The chapter on biogeography alone is worth the asking price, and I encourage people to buy the book (as well as Dawkins') to distirbute to friends and others.

The Day of the Jackels

2010-04-25T12:24:00.003+10:00

Talk by Arundhati Roy from May 2003, filmed at the United for Peace and Justice Teach-In

Listen to the heroes of Israel

2010-04-03T20:54:00.002+11:00

25 Feb 2010

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger reminds us of the struggle by an extraordinary few in Israel against the repression and lawlessness of the occupation of Palestine. They are the inspiration to break the loud silence in the Jewish diaspora.

I phoned Rami Elhanan the other day. We had not spoken for six years and much has happened in Israel and Palestine. Rami is an Israeli graphic designer who lives with his family in Jerusalem. His father survived Auschwitz. His grandparents and six aunts and uncles perished in the Holocaust. Whenever I am asked about heroes, I say Rami and his wife Nurit without hesitation.

Soon after when we met, Rami gave me a home videotape that was difficult to watch. It shows his daughter Smadar, aged 14, throwing her head back, laughing and playing the piano. “She loved to dance,” he said. On the afternoon of 4 September, 1997, Smadar and her best friend, Sivane, had auditions for admission to a dance school. She had argued that morning with her mother, who was anxious about her going to the centre of Jerusalem. “I didn’t want to row,” said Nurit, “so I let her go.”

Rami was in his car when he turned on the radio to catch the three o”clock news. There had been a suicide bombing in Ben Yehuda shopping precinct. More than 200 hundred people were injured and several were dead. Within minutes, his mobile phone rang. It was Nurit, crying. They searched the hospitals in vain, then the morgue; and so began, as Rami describes it, their “descent into darkness”.

Rami and Nurit are two of the founders of the Parents Circle, or Bereaved Families Forum, which brings together Israelis and Palestinians who have lost loved ones. “It’s painful to acknowledge,” he said. “but there is no basic moral difference between the [Israeli] soldier at the checkpoint who prevents a woman who is having a baby from going through, causing her to lose the baby, and the man who killed my daughter. And just as my daughter was a victim [of the occupation], so was he.” Rami describes the Israeli occupation and the dispossession of Palestinians as a “cancer in our heart”. Nothing changes, he says, until the occupation ends.

Every “Jerusalem Day” – the day Israel celebrates its military conquest of the city – Rami has stood in the street with a photograph of Smadar and crossed Israeli and Palestinian flags, and people spit at him and tell him it was a pity he was not blown up, too. And yet he and Nurit and their comrades have made extraordinary gains. Rami goes to Israeli schools with a Palestinian member of the group, and they show maps of what ought to be Palestine, and they hug each other. “This is like an earthquake to children who have been socialised and manipulated into hating,” he said. “They say to us, ‘You have opened my eyes’.”

In October, Rami and Nurit sat in the Israeli High Court while the state counsel, “stammering, unprepared and unkempt,” wrote Nurit, “stood like a platoon commander in charge of new recruits and refuted... the allegations”. Salwa and Bassam Aramin, Palestinian parents, were there, too. Tears streaked Salwa’s face. Their ten-year-old daughter Abir Aramin was killed by an Israeli soldier firing a rubber bullet point-blank at her small head while she was standing beside a kiosk buying sweets with her sister. The judges seemed bored and one of them remarked that Israeli soldiers were rarely indicted, so it would be best to forget it. The state counsel laughed. This was normal.

“Our children,” said Nurit at a rally last December to mark the anniversary of the Israeli assault on Gaza, “have learned this year that all the disgusting qualities which anti-semites attribute to Jews are actually manifested among our leaders: deceit, greed and the murder of children... What values of beauty and goodness can we squeeze into such a sophisticated apparatus of brainwashing and reality distortion?”

Rami now tells me the High Court has decided to investigate the case of Abir Aramin after all. This is not normal: it is a victory.

“Where are the other victories?” I asked him.

“In America last year, a Palestinian and I spoke five times a day in front of thousands. There is a big shift in American public opinion, and that’s where the hope lies. It’s only pressure from outside Israel – from Jews especially – that will end this nightmare. People in the West must know that while there is a silence, this looking away, this profane abuse of Israel’s critics as anti-Jew, they are no different from those who stood aside during the days of the Holocaust.”

Since Israel’s onslaught on Lebanon in 2006, its devastation of Gaza in 2008-9 and Mossad’s recent political murder in Dubai, the criminality of the Israeli state has been impossible to disguise. On 11 February, the influential Reut Institute in Tel Aviv reported to the Israeli Cabinet, which it advises, that violence had failed to achieve Israel’s ends and had produced worldwide revulsion. “In last year’s Gaza operation,” said the report, “our superior military power was offset by an offensive on Israel’s legitimacy that led to a significant setback in our international standing and will constrain future Israeli military planning and operations...”. In other words, proof of the murderous, racist toll of Zionism has been an epiphany for many people; justice for the Palestinians, wrote the expatriate Israeli musician Gilad Altzmon, is now “at the heart of the battle for a better world”.

However, his fellow Jews in Western countries, particularly Britain and Australia, whose influence is critical, are still mostly silent, still looking away, still accepting, as Nurit said, “the brainwashing and reality distortion”. And yet the responsibility to speak out could not be clearer and the lessons of history – family history for many - ensure that it renders them culpable should their silence persist. For inspiration, I recommend the moral courage of Rami and Nurit.

Some reading material on Haiti

2010-03-13T15:39:00.003+11:00

The recent and devastating earthquake that struck Haiti exposed the rotten underbelly of capitalism. Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, is also one of the most abused on the planet, having suffered everything from colonial brutality, slavery, invasion, racial segregation, dictatorship, coups, and now a ruthless neo-liberal regime imposed on the country by foreigners (while its democratically elected leader is not even permitted to enter the country). Oh, and arsehole evangelicals blaming Haiti for its suffering because the Haitians fell out of favour with God in some way. When "help" is administered, like the much lauded US troop deployment, self-congratulatory platitudes are flung about extolling how wonderful the foreign power is. "We will not abandon you in your time of need," said Obama to the Haitian people. It's not enough to denigrate and drive the victims into the dirt; one also has to extract emotional capital from them.

The tragedy of Haiti isn't that it's sitting along a geological fault line. It's that it's sitting along a political-economic one. That is what set up the context for its current woes.

Anyway, "enjoy".

=====================================================================

Chapter Eight of Year 501 (by Noam Chomsky)

The Tragedy of Haiti

1. "The First Free Nation of Free Men"

"Haiti was more than the New World's second oldest republic," anthropologist Ira Lowenthal observed, "more than even the first black republic of the modern world. Haiti was the first free nation of free men to arise within, and in resistance to, the emerging constellation of Western European empire." The interaction of the New World's two oldest republics for 200 years again illustrates the persistence of basic themes of policy, their institutional roots and cultural concomitants.

The Republic of Haiti was established on January 1, 1804, after a slave revolt expelled the French colonial rulers and their allies. The revolutionary chiefs discarded the French "Saint-Domingue" in favor of the name used by the people who had greeted Columbus in 1492, as he arrived to establish his first settlement in Europe's New World. The descendants of the original inhabitants could not celebrate the liberation. They had been reduced to a few hundred within 50 years from a pre-Colombian population estimated variously from hundreds of thousands to 8 million, with none remaining at all, according to contemporary French scholars, when France took the western third of Hispaniola, now Haiti, from Spain in 1697. The leader of the revolt, Toussaint L'Ouverture, could not celebrate the victory either. He had been captured by deceit and sent to a French prison to die a "slow death from cold and misery," in the words of a 19th century French historian. Medical anthropologist Paul Farmer observes that Haitian schoolchildren to this day know by heart his final words as he was led to prison: "In overthrowing me, you have cut down in Saint-Domingue only the tree of liberty. It will spring up again by the roots for they are numerous and deep."1

The tree of liberty broke through the soil again in 1985, as the population revolted against the murderous Duvalier dictatorship. After many bitter struggles, the popular revolution led to the overwhelming victory of Haiti's first freely elected president, the populist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Seven months after his February 1991 inauguration he was driven from office by the military and commercial elite who had ruled for 200 years, and would not tolerate loss of their traditional rights of terror and exploitation.

"As soon as the last Duvalier had fled Haiti," Puerto Rican ethnohistorian Jalil Sued-Badillo recounts, "an angry crowd toppled the statue of Christopher Columbus in Port-au-Prince and threw it in the sea," protesting "the ravages of colonialism" under "a long line of despots" from Columbus to Duvalier, and on to today's rulers, who have reinstated Duvalier savagery. There were similar scenes in the neighboring Dominican Republic, subjected to a US-imposed terror regime after another Marine invasion in 1965 and a victim of IMF Fundamentalism from the early 1980s. In February 1992, President Balaguer "unleashed his security forces to beat peaceful demonstrators who were protesting the exorbitant expenditures shelled out for the 500-year celebration while the average Dominican starves," the Council on Hemispheric Affairs reported. Its centerpiece is a multi-million-dollar 100-foot-high half-mile-long recumbent cross with powerful searchlights that "rises above a slum of rat-infested shacks where malnourished, illiterate children slosh through the fetid water that washes through the streets during tropical rainstorms," the news services reported. Slums were cleared to accommodate its sprawling terraced gardens, and a stone wall conceals "the desperate poverty that its beams will soon illuminate." The huge expenses "coincide with one of the worst economic crises since the '30s," the former president of the Central Bank pointed out. After ten years of structural adjustment, health care and education have radically declined, electricity cutoffs up to 24 hours are used to ration power, unemployment exceeds 25 percent, and poverty is rampant. "The big fish eat the little ones," one old women says in the nearby slum.2

Columbus described the people he found as "lovable, tractable, peaceable, gentle, decorous," and their land as rich and bountiful. Hispaniola was "perhaps the most densely populated place in the world," Las Casas wrote, "a beehive of people," who "of all the infinite universe of humanity, ...are the most guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity." Driven by "insatiable greed and ambition," the Spanish fell upon them "like ravening wild beasts, ... killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples" with "the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before, and to such a degree" that the population is barely 200 persons, he wrote in 1552, "from my own knowledge of the acts I witnessed." "It was a general rule among Spaniards to be cruel," he wrote: "not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh and bitter treatment would prevent Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings." "As they saw themselves each day perishing by the cruel and inhuman treatment of the Spaniards, crushed to the earth by the horses, cut in pieces by swords, eaten and torn by dogs, many buried alive and suffering all kinds of exquisite tortures, ...[they] decided to abandon themselves to their unhappy fate with no further struggles, placing themselves in the hands of their enemies that they might do with them as they liked."

As the propaganda mills ground away, the picture was revised to provide retrospective justification for what had been done. By 1776, the story was that Columbus found "nothing but a country quite covered with wood, uncultivated, and inhabited only by some tribes of naked and miserable savages" (Adam Smith). As noted earlier, it was not until the 1960s that the truth began to break through, eliciting scorn and protest from outraged loyalists.3

The Spanish effort to plunder the island's riches by enslaving its gentle people were unsuccessful; they died too quickly, if not killed by the "wild beasts" or in mass suicide. African slaves were sent from the early 1500s, later in a flood as the plantation economy was established. "Saint Domingue was the wealthiest European colonial possession in the Americas," Hans Schmidt writes, producing three-quarters of the world's sugar by 1789, also leading the world in production of coffee, cotton, indigo, and rum. The slave masters provided France with enormous wealth from the labor of their 450,000 slaves, much as in the British West Indian colonies. The white population, including poor overseers and artisans, numbered 40,000. Some 30,000 mulattoes and free Negroes enjoyed economic privileges but not social and political equality, the origins of the class difference that led to harsh repression after independence, with renewed violence today.

Cubans may have seemed "of dubious whiteness," but the rebels who overthrew colonial rule did not approach that status. The slave revolt, which had reached serious proportions by the end of 1791, appalled Europe, as well as the European outpost that had just declared its own independence. Britain invaded in 1793; victory would offer "a monopoly of sugar, indigo, cotton and coffee" from an island which "for ages, would give such aid and force to industry as would be most happily felt in every part of the empire," a British military officer wrote to Prime Minister Pitt. The United States, which had lively commerce with the French colony, sent its French rulers $750,000 in military aid as well as some troops to help quell the revolt. France dispatched a huge army, including Polish, Dutch, German, and Swiss troops. Its commander finally wrote Napoleon that it would be necessary to wipe out virtually the entire black population to impose French rule. His campaign failed, and Haiti became the only case in history "of an enslaved people breaking its own chains and using military might to beat back a powerful colonial power" (Farmer).

The rebellion had broad consequences. It established British dominance of the Caribbean, and impelled its former colonies a long step further on their westward course as Napoleon, abandoning his hopes for an empire in the New World, sold the Louisiana territory to the United States. The rebel victory came at tremendous cost. Much of the agricultural wealth of the country was destroyed, along with perhaps a third of the population. The victory horrified Haiti's slave-holding neighbors, who backed France's claims for huge reparations, finally accepted in 1825 by Haiti's ruling elite, who recognized them to be a precondition for entry into the global market. The result was "decades of French domination of Haitian finance" with "a catastrophic effect on the new nation's delicate economy," Farmer observes. France then recognized Haiti, as did Britain in 1833. Simon Bolívar, whose struggles against Spanish rule were aided by the Haitian Republic on condition that he free slaves, refused to establish diplomatic relations with Haiti on becoming President of Greater Colombia, claiming that Haiti was "fomenting racial conflict" -- a refusal "typical of Haiti's welcome in a monolithically racist world," Farmer comments. Haitian elites continued to be haunted by fear of conquest and a renewal of slavery, a factor in their costly and destructive invasions of the Dominican Republic in the 1850s.

The US was the last major power to insist that Haiti be ostracized, recognizing it only in 1862. With the American Civil War underway, Haiti's liberation of slaves no longer posed a barrier to recognition; on the contrary, President Lincoln and others saw Haiti as a place that might absorb blacks induced to leave the United States (Liberia was recognized in the same year, in part for the same reason). Haitian ports were used for Union operations against the rebels. Haiti's strategic role in control of the Caribbean became increasingly important in US planning in later years, as Haiti became a plaything among the competing imperial powers. Meanwhile its ruling elite monopolized trade, while the peasant producers in the interior remained isolated from the outside world.

2. "Unselfish Intervention"

Between 1849 and 1913, US Navy ships entered Haitian waters 24 times to "protect American lives and property." Haiti's independence was scarcely given even "token recognition," Schmidt observes in his standard history, and there was little consideration for the rights of its people. They are "an inferior people," unable "to maintain the degree of civilization left them by the French or to develop any capacity of self government entitling them to international respect and confidence," Assistant Secretary of State William Phillips wrote, recommending the policy of invasion and US military government that President Woodrow Wilson soon adopted. Few words need be wasted on the civilization left to 90 percent of the population by the French, who, as an ex-slave related, "hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars..., forced them to eat shit, ... cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitos, ...threw them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup" -- when not "flaying them with the lash" to extract the wealth that helped give France its entry ticket to the rich men's club.

Phillips captured prevailing attitudes with accuracy, though some, like Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, found the Haitian elite rather amusing: "Dear me, think of it, Niggers speaking French," he remarked. The effective ruler of Haiti, Marine Colonel L.W.T. Waller, who arrived fresh from appalling atrocities in the conquest of the Philippines, was not amused: "they are real nigger and no mistake...real nigs beneath the surface," he said, rejecting any negotiations or other "bowing and scraping to these coons," particularly the educated Haitians for whom this bloodthirsty lout had a special hatred. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt, while never approaching the racist fanaticism and thuggery of his distant relative Theodore Roosevelt, shared the feelings of his colleagues. On a visit to occupied Haiti in 1917, he recorded in his diary a comment by his travelling companion, who later became the Occupation's leading civilian official. Fascinated by the Haitian Minister of Agriculture, he "couldn't help saying to myself," he told FDR, "that man would have brought $1,500 at auction in New Orleans in 1860 for stud purposes." "Roosevelt appears to have relished the story," Schmidt notes, "and retold it to American Minister Norman Armour when he visited Haiti as President in 1934." The element of racism in policy formation should not be discounted, to the present day.

Such thoughts were not unusual at the time of Wilson's intervention, not only in the United States. We may recall that shortly after, Winston Churchill authorized the use of chemical weapons "against recalcitrant Arabs as experiment," denouncing the "squeamishness" of those who objected to "using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes," mainly Kurds, a policy that he strongly favored, expecting that it "would spread a lively terror." For England itself, he had somewhat different plans. As Home Secretary in 1910 he had secretly proposed sterilization of 100,000 "mental degenerates" and the dispatch of tens of thousands of others to state-run labor camps so as to save the "British race" from inevitable decline if its "inferior" members are allowed to breed -- ideas that were within the bounds of enlightened opinion of the day, but have been kept secret in Home Office files because of their sensitivity, particularly after they were taken up by Hitler.4

Given the cultural climate of the day, the character of Wilson's 1915 invasion comes as no great surprise. It was even more savage and destructive than his invasion of the Dominican Republic in the same years. Wilson's troops murdered, destroyed, reinstituted virtual slavery, and demolished the constitutional system. After ruling for 20 years, the US left "the inferior people" in the hands of the National Guard it had established and the traditional rulers. In the 1950s, the Duvalier dictatorship took over, running the show in Guatemalan style, always with firm US support.

The brutality and racism of the invaders, and the dispossession of peasants as US corporations took over the spoils, elicited resistance. The Marine response was savage, including the first recorded instance of coordinated air-ground combat: bombing of rebels (Cacos) who were surrounded by Marines in the bush. An in-house Marine inquiry, undertaken after atrocities were publicly revealed, found that 3250 rebels were killed, at least 400 executed, while the Marines and their locally recruited gendarmerie suffered 98 casualties (killed and wounded). Leaked Marine orders call for an end to "indiscriminate killing of natives" that "has gone on for some time." Haitian historian Roger Gaillard estimates total deaths at 15,000, counting victims "of repression and consequences of the war," which "resembled a massacre." Major Smedley Butler recalled that his troops "hunted the Cacos like pigs." His exploits impressed FDR, who ordered that he be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for an engagement in which 200 Cacos were killed and no prisoners taken, while one Marine was struck by a rock and lost two teeth.

The leader of the revolt, Charlemagne Péralte, was killed by Marines who sneaked into his camp at night in disguise. In an attempt at psywar that prefigured some of Colonel Edward Lansdale's later exploits in the Philippines, the Marines circulated photos of his body in the hope of demoralizing the guerrillas. The tactic backfired, however; the photo resembled Christ on the cross, and became a nationalist symbol. Péralte took his place in the nationalist Pantheon alongside of Toussaint.

The invaders "legalized" the Occupation with a unilateral declaration they called a "treaty," which the client regime was forced to accept; it was then cited as imposing on the US a solemn commitment to maintain the Occupation. While supervising the takeover of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Wilson built his reputation as a lofty idealist defending self-determination and the rights of small nations with impressive oratory. There is no contradiction. Wilsonian doctrine was restricted to people of the right sort: those "at a low stage of civilization" need not apply, though the civilized colonial powers should give them "friendly protection, guidance, and assistance," he explained. Wilson's Fourteen Points did not call for self-determination and national independence, but rather held that in questions of sovereignty, "the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined," the colonial ruler. The interests of the populations "would be ascertained by the advanced nations, who best comprehended the needs and welfare of the less advanced peoples," William Stivers comments, analyzing the actual import of Wilson's language and thinking. To mention one case with long-term consequences, a supplicant who sought Wilson's support for Vietnamese representation in the French Parliament was chased away from his doors with the appeal undelivered, later surfacing under the name Ho Chi Minh.5

Another achievement of Wilson's occupation was a new Constitution, imposed on the hapless country after its National Assembly was dissolved by the Marines for refusing to ratify it. The US-designed Constitution overturned laws preventing foreigners from owning land, thus enabling US corporations to take what they wanted. FDR later took credit for having written the Constitution, falsely it appears, though he did hope to be one of its beneficiaries, intending to use Haiti "for his own personal enrichment," Schmidt notes. Ten years later, in 1927, the State Department conceded that the US had used "rather highhanded methods to get the Constitution adopted by the people of Haiti" (with 99.9 percent approval in a Marine-run plebiscite, under 5 percent of the population participating). But these methods were unavoidable: "It was obvious that if our occupation was to be beneficial to Haiti and further her progress it was necessary that foreign capital should come to Haiti..., [and] Americans could hardly be expected to put their money into plantations and big agricultural enterprises in Haiti if they could not themselves own the land on which their money was to be spent." It was out of a sincere desire to help the poor Haitians that the US forced them to allow US investors to take the country over, the State Department explained, the usual form that benevolence assumes.

Elections were not permitted because it was recognized that anti-American candidates would win, hindering the US programs to help the suffering people. These programs were described as "An Experiment in Pragmatism" by one not untypical intellectual commentator, who observed that "The pragmatists insist that intelligent guidance from without may sometimes accelerate the process of national growth and save much waste." We have already seen some illustrations of that "intelligent guidance" in the case of beneficiaries from Bengal to Brazil and Guatemala. We turn to the Haitian experience in the next chapter.6

The Occupation "consistently suppressed local democratic institutions and denied elementary political liberties," Schmidt writes. "Instead of building from existing democratic institutions which, on paper, were quite impressive and had long incorporated the liberal democratic philosophy and governmental machinery associated with the French Revolution, the United States blatantly overrode them and illegally forced through its own authoritarian, antidemocratic system." "The establishment of foreign-dominated plantation agriculture necessitated destruction of the existing minifundia land-tenure system with its myriad peasant freeholders," who were forced into peonage. The US supported "a minority of collaborators" from the local elite who admired European fascism but lacked the mass appeal of their fascist models. "In effect," Schmidt observes, "the Occupation embodied all the progressive attitudes of contemporary Italian fascism, but was crippled by failures in human relationships" (lack of popular support). The only local leadership it could mobilize was the traditional mulatto elite, its racist contempt for the great mass of the population now heightened by the even harsher attitudes of "ethnic and racial contempt" of the foreigner with the gun and the dollar, who brought "concepts of racial discrimination" not seen since before independence, and the "racist colonial realities" that went along with them.

The Occupation thus reinforced the internal class/race oppression that goes back to the days of French colonialism. One consequence was the rise of the ideology of Noirisme, in response to the racism of the occupiers and their elite collaborators. "Papa Doc" Duvalier would later exploit this backlash when, 20 years after the Marines left, he took the reins with the pretense of handing power to the black majority -- in reality, to himself, his personal killers (the Tontons Macoutes), and the traditional elite, who continued to prosper under his murderous kleptocracy.

"The Occupation worsened the economic crisis by augmenting the peasantry's forced contribution to the maintenance of the State," Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes. "It worsened the crisis of power by centralizing the Haitian army and disarming [citizens in] the provinces," "putting in place the structures of military, fiscal, and commercial centralization" that were to yield a "bloody finale" under the Duvalier dynasty.

Through the bloodiest years of the occupation, the media were silent or supportive. The New York Times index has no entries for Haiti for 1917-1918. In a press survey, John Blassingame found "widespread editorial support" for the repeated interventions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic from 1904 to 1919, until major atrocity stories surfaced in 1920, setting off congressional inquiry. Haitians and Dominicans were described as "coons," "mongrels," "unwholesome," "a horde of naked niggers," the Haitians even more "retrograde" than the Dominicans. They needed "energetic Anglo-Saxon influence." "We are simply going in there...to help our black brother put his disorderly house in order," one journal wrote. Furthermore, The US had a right to intervene to protect "our peace and safety" (New York Times).

Times editors lauded the "unselfish and helpful" attitude that the US had always shown, now once again as it responded "in a fatherly way" as Haiti "sought help here." Our "unselfish intervention has been moved almost exclusively by a desire to give the benefits of peace to people tormented by repeated revolutions," with no thought of "preferential advantages, commercial or otherwise," for ourselves. "The people of the island should realize that [the US government] is their best friend." The US sought only to ensure that "the people were cured of the habit of insurrection and taught how to work and live"; they "would have to be reformed, guided and educated," and this "duty was undertaken by the United States." There is a further benefit for our "black brother": "To wean these peoples away from their shot-gun habit of government is to safeguard them against our own exasperation," which might lead to further intervention. "The good-will and unselfish purposes of our own government" are demonstrated by the consequences, the editors wrote in 1922, when they were all too apparent and the Marine atrocities had already aroused a storm of protest.

Some contemporary scholars adopt the same stance. As Haiti reentered the sphere of public awareness with the fall of Duvalier, Harvard historian David Landes presented some background, explaining that the Marines had "provided the stability needed to make the political system work and to facilitate trade with the outside," though "even a benevolent occupation creates resistance...among the beneficiaries" and protest by "more enlightened members of the dominant society," a constant problem faced by benefactors. Another noted scholar, Professor Hewson Ryan of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, was even more effusive in his praise for what we had accomplished in "two centuries of well-intentioned involvement." Indeed, he observed, Haiti has been uniquely privileged: "Few nations have been the object over such a sustained period of so much well-intentioned guidance and support." He described the achievements with no little awe, particularly our kind insistence on eliminating such "unprogressive" features of the constitutional system as the provisions against takeover of lands by foreigners.7

With the barriers to foreign ownership of the country now overcome -- admittedly, by somewhat "high handed methods" -- US investors quickly moved in to take large tracts of land for new plantations. Extremely cheap labor was another inducement. A New York business daily described Haiti in 1926 as "a marvelous opportunity for American investment": "The run-of-the-mill Haitian is handy, easily directed, and gives a hard day's labor for 20 cents, while in Panama the same day's work cost $3." These advantages gained prominence as the remnants of Haiti's agricultural wealth were steadily destroyed. From the 1960s, assembly operations for US corporations grew rapidly in the Caribbean region, in Haiti, from 13 companies in 1966 to 154 in 1981. These enterprises furnished about 40 percent of Haitian exports (100 percent having been primary commodities in 1960), though limited employment or other benefits for Haitians, apart from new opportunities for enrichment for the traditional elite.

In the 1980s, IMF Fundamentalism began to take its customary toll as the economy deteriorated under the impact of the structural adjustment programs, which caused agricultural production to decline along with investment, trade and consumption. Poverty became still more terrible. By the time "Baby Doc" Duvalier was driven out in 1986, 60 percent of the population had an annual per capita income of $60 or less according to the World Bank, child malnutrition had soared, the rate of infant mortality was shockingly high, and the country had become an ecological and human disaster, perhaps beyond hope of recovery. Through the 1970s, thousands of boat people fled the ravaged island, virtually all forced to return by US officials with little notice here, the usual treatment of refugees whose suffering lacks propaganda value. In 1981, the Reagan Administration initiated a new interdiction policy. Of the more than 24,000 Haitians intercepted by the US Coast Guard in the next ten years, 11 were granted asylum as victims of political persecution, in comparison with 75,000 out of 75,000 Cubans. During Aristide's brief tenure, the flow of refugees dropped dramatically as terror abated and there were hopes for a better future. The US response was to approve far more asylum claims. Twenty-eight had been allowed during the ten years of Duvalier and post-Duvalier terror; 20 during Aristide's seven and a half months in office. After Aristide's overthrow, a new surge of boat people reached several thousand a month, most of them forcibly returned in callous disregard of the grim circumstances that awaited them. For the few permitted to apply for asylum under a new policy, treatment was hardly better. One of the first was an Aristide supporter whose application was rejected on the grounds that he suffered only "petty harassment" when soldiers raked his home with gunfire and destroyed his shop.

A USAID-World Bank development strategy was initiated in 1981-1982, based on assembly plant and agro-industrial exports. The effect was to shift 30 percent of cultivated land from food for local consumption to export crops. AID forecast "a historic change toward deeper market interdependence with the United States" in this rising "Taiwan of the Caribbean." A 1985 World Bank report, "Haiti: Policy Proposals for Growth," developed the usual ideas further, calling for an export-oriented development strategy, with domestic consumption "markedly restrained in order to shift the required share of output increases into exports." Emphasis should be placed on "the expansion of private enterprises," the Bank recommended. Costs for education should be "minimized," and such "social objectives" as persist should be privatized. "Private projects with high economic returns should be strongly supported" in preference to "public expenditures in the social sectors," and "less emphasis should be placed on social objectives which increase consumption" -- "temporarily," until the famed trickle-down effects are detected, some time after the Messiah arrives. The recommendations, it is understood, are a precondition to aid, and a bright future is sure to follow.

Of the array of predictions, one came to pass: the intended migration of the rural population to urban areas, and for many, to leaky boats attempting the dangerous 800-mile passage to Florida, to face forcible return if they make it (many don't). Haiti remains Haiti, not Taiwan.

Reviewing US aid and development strategy for Haiti, Amy Wilentz writes that it "achieves two strategic U.S. goals -- one, a restructured and dependent agriculture that exports to U.S. markets and is open to American exploitation, and the other, a displaced rural population that not only can be employed in offshore U.S. industries in the towns, but is more susceptible to army control."8

3. "Politics, not Principle"

In June 1985, the Haitian legislature unanimously adopted a new law requiring that every political party must recognize President-for-Life Jean-Claude Duvalier as the supreme arbiter of the nation, outlawing the Christian Democrats, and granting the government the right to suspend the rights of any party without reasons. The law was ratified by a majority of 99.98 percent. Washington was impressed. It was "an encouraging step forward," the US Ambassador informed his guests at a July 4 celebration. The Reagan Administration certified to Congress that "democratic development" was progressing, so that military and economic aid could continue to flow -- mainly into the pockets of Baby Doc and his entourage. The Administration also informed Congress that the human rights situation was improving, as it always is when some regime requires military aid to suppress the population in a good cause. The Democrat-controlled House Foreign Affairs Committee had given its approval in advance, calling on the Administration "to maintain friendly relations with Duvalier's non-Communist government."

These gratifying developments were short-lived, however. By December, popular protests were straining the resources of state terror. What happened next was described by the Wall Street Journal two months later with engaging frankness:

An administration official said that the White House concluded late last year, following huge demonstrations that hadn't been seen on such a scale before, that the regime was unraveling...U.S. analysts learned that Haiti's ruling inner circle had lost faith in the 34-year-old president for life. As a result, U.S. officials, including Secretary of State George Shultz, began openly calling for a "democratic process" in Haiti.

The cynicism was underscored by the fact that the very same scenario was then being enacted in the Philippines, where the army and elite made it clear they would no longer support another gangster for whom Reagan and Bush had expressed their admiration, even "love," not long before, so that the White House "began openly calling for a `democratic process'" there as well. Both events have, accordingly, entered the canon as a demonstration of how, particularly in the 1980s, we have "served as inspiration for the triumph of democracy in our time" (New Republic).9

Duvalier was duly removed, flown out in a US Air Force jet and sent to comfortable exile in France. Armed Forces chief General Henri Namphy took power. This long-time US favorite and close Duvalier associate was "Haiti's best chance for democracy," Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams announced, revealing once again the dedication to democracy for which he was famous. Not all were pleased. A rural priest in a small church, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, said that "we're glad Duvalier is gone" but "what we now have is Duvalierism without Duvalier." Few listened, but events were to prove him right in short order.

Elections were scheduled for November 1987, but Namphy and his associates, the army and the old elite, were determined that nothing would go wrong. The Tontons Macoutes were reorganized, terror continued. A particularly gruesome massacre took place in July 1987, involving the army and the Macoutes. The same groups sponsored escalating violence, leading up to an election day massacre that provided Namphy with a pretext to cancel the elections. Throughout, US military aid continued on grounds that it helped the army keep order -- which was disrupted by army-Macoute violence and atrocities. Military aid was finally suspended after the election day terror, with over 95 percent of the 1987 funds already disbursed.

A fraudulent military-run election followed, then a coup restoring Namphy to power and a rash of Duvalierism-without-Duvalier atrocities by the army and Macoutes, including repeated attacks on union offices and peasant groups. Asked about these events by US human-rights organizations, Ambassador Brunson McKinley said, "I don't see any evidence of a policy against human rights." True, there is violence, but it is just "part of the culture." Whose, one might wonder.10

A month later, a gang of killers attacked Aristide's church as he was saying mass, leaving at least 13 dead and 77 wounded. Aristide fled underground. In yet another coup, Duvalierist General Prosper Avril arrested Namphy and expelled him. The Haitian head of Aristide's Salesian order authorized him to return to his church, but not for long. To the dismay of the conservative Church hierarchy, Aristide continued to call for freedom and an end to terror. He was duly ordered by his superiors in Rome to leave the country. Popular protests blocked his departure, and he went into hiding. At the last minute, Aristide decided to take part in the December 1990 elections. In a stunning upset, he won 67 percent of the vote, defeating the US candidate, former World Bank official Marc Bazin, who came in second with 14 percent. The courageous liberation theologist, committed to "the preferential option for the poor" of the Latin American bishops, took office in February as the first democratically elected President in Haiti's history -- briefly; he was overthrown by a military coup on September 30.

"Under Aristide, for the first time in the republic's tortured history, Haiti seemed to be on the verge of tearing free from the fabric of despotism and tyranny which had smothered all previous attempts at democratic expression and self-determination," the Washington Council on Hemispheric Affairs observed in a post-coup review. His victory "represented more than a decade of civic engagement and education on his part," spearheaded by local activists of the Church, small grassroots-based communities, and other popular organizations that formed the basis of the Lavalas ("flood") movement that swept him into power, "a textbook example of participatory, `bottom-up' and democratic political development." With this popular base, his government was committed to "the empowerment of the poor," a "populist model" with international implications that frightened Washington, whose model of "democracy" does not entertain popular movements committed to "social and economic justice, popular political participation and openness in all governmental affairs" rather than "the international market or some other current shibboleth." Furthermore, Aristide's balancing of the budget and "trimming of a bloated bureaucracy" led to a "stunning success" that made White House planners "extremely uncomfortable": he secured over half a billion dollars in aid from the international lending community, very little of it from the US, indicating "that Haiti was slipping out of Washington's financial orbit" and "demonstrating a degree of sovereignty in its political affairs." A rotten apple was in the making.11

Washington was definitely not pleased. With its ally Duvalier gone, the US had in mind the usual form of democracy committed to the preferential option for the rich, particularly US investors. To facilitate this outcome, the bipartisan National Endowment for Democracy (NED) directed its "democracy building" grants to the Haitian International Institute for Research and Development (IHRED) and two conservative unions. IHRED was associated with Bazin and other political figures with little popular base beyond the NED, which portrayed them as the democratic movement. The State Department approached AIFLD, the AFL-CIO affiliate with a notorious record of anti-labor activities in the Third World, to join its efforts in Haiti "because of the presence of radical labor unions and the high risk that other unions may become radicalized." AIFLD joined in, expanding the support it had given from 1984 to a union group run in part by Duvalier's security police. In preparation for the elections, NED extended its support to several other organizations, among them a human rights organization headed by Jean-Jacques Honorat, former Minister of Tourism under Duvalier and later an opponent of his regime. By way of the right wing Puebla Institute, NED also provided pre-election funding to Radio Soleil, which had been anti-Duvalier but shifted well to the right under the influence of the conservative Catholic hierarchy.

Following Aristide's victory, US funding for political activities sharply increased, mainly through USAID. According to Kenneth Roth, deputy director of Human Rights Watch, the aid was intended to strengthen conservative groups that could "act as an institutional check on Aristide," in an effort to "move the country in a rightward direction." After Aristide was overthrown and the elite returned to power, Honorat became de facto Prime Minister under the military regime. The popular organizations that supported Aristide were violently suppressed, while those backed by NED and AID were spared.12

One of the closest observers of events in Haiti, Amy Wilentz, writes that Aristide's brief term was "the first time in the post-Duvalier era that the United States government has been so deeply concerned with human rights and the rule of law in Haiti" (not that there was more than rhetoric under the Duvaliers). The State Department is reported to have "circulated a thick notebook filled with alleged human rights violations" under Aristide -- "something it had not done under the previous rulers, Duvalierists and military men," who were deemed proper recipients for aid, including military aid, "based on unsubstantiated human-rights improvements":

During the four regimes that preceded Aristide, international human-rights advocates and democratic observers had begged the State Department to consider helping the democratic opposition in Haiti. But no steps were taken by the United States to strengthen anything but the executive and the military until Aristide won the presidency. Then, all of a sudden, the United States began to think about how it could help those Haitians eager to limit the powers of the executive or to replace the government constitutionally.

USAID's huge "Democracy Enhancement" project was "specifically designed to fund those sectors of the Haitian political spectrum where opposition to the Aristide government could be encouraged."13

All absolutely normal, simply further evidence that "democracy" and "human rights" are regarded purely as power instruments, of no intrinsic value, even dangerous and objectionable; precisely as any rational person with some knowledge of history and institutions would expect.

Before deciding to run for office, Aristide had observed that "Of course, the U.S. has its own agenda here," adding that it was natural for the rich to make investments and want to maximize return. "This is normal, capitalist behavior, and I don't care if the U.S. wants to do it at home... But it is monstrous to come down here and impose your will on another people," whom you do not understand and for whom you care nothing. "I cannot accept that Haiti should be whatever the United States wants it to be." It's obvious why he had to go.14

There are few surprises here, well into the post-Cold War era with its heralded New World Order.

Immediately after taking power on September 30, 1991, the army "embarked on a systematic and continuing campaign to stamp out the vibrant civil society that has taken root in Haiti since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship," Americas Watch reported in December. At least 1000 people were killed in the first two weeks of the coup and hundreds more by December, "generally reliable Haitian human rights groups" estimated, though they knew little about what is happening in the countryside, traditionally the locus of the worst atrocities. Terror increased in the months that followed, particularly after the reconstituted Macoutes were unleashed in late December. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands are in hiding. Many regard the terror as "worse than Papa Doc." "The goal of the repression is twofold: first, to destroy the political and social gains made since the downfall of the Duvalier dynasty; and second, to ensure that no matter what Haiti's political future may hold, all structures for duplicating those gains will have been laid waste." Accordingly, unions and popular organizations were specifically targeted for violent repression, and the "lively and combative radio stations -- the main form of communication with Haiti's dispersed and largely illiterate population" -- were suppressed. The rascal multitude must remain dispersed and scattered, without unions or other popular organizations through which they might act to formulate and express their interests, and without independent means of communication and information.

If it sounds familiar, that's because it is. In the Haitis of the world, the means can be quite direct.

De facto Prime Minister Jean-Jacques Honorat justified the coup. "There is no relationship between elections and democracy," he said. Haiti is being defamed by foreign "racists" in the press and French Embassy. It is right to return Duvalier thugs to power as rural section chiefs because "No society can exist without police." Along with landholders, they "are taking revenge against those who were persecuting them," notably priests, Christian base communities, and the nonviolent Papaye Peasant Movement, who are guilty of "terrorism." "The military was systematically persecuted" by these elements, who believed "they could do anything" under Aristide's rule, he informed the visiting human rights delegation, blaming Aristide for the coup. When a press conference of the Federation of Haitian Students at the national university was attacked by armed soldiers, clubbing and arresting participants, Honorat's wife "offered fifty of the students their freedom if they taped a statement saying they had been treated well in detention," Kenneth Roth reports.

"As Haitians began in early November to flee this violence and persecution in large numbers," the Americas Watch report continues, "the Bush Administration changed from an outspoken proponent of human rights and democracy in Haiti to a shameful apologist." The State Department "issued a fraudulent opinion asserting that political persecution of Aristide's supporters had ceased," providing "rhetorical cover to the army's ongoing campaign of repression" and laying the basis for the forcible return of fleeing refugees to the terror of the coup regime. "Evidently fearful that continuing honest and outspoken criticism of military abuses in Haiti would jeopardize the legal defense of its interdiction efforts, which had come under challenge in U.S. courts, the Administration stopped public criticism altogether. Since late October, Haiti has been immune from censure by the State Department on human rights grounds."15

The Bush Administration quickly "distanced itself from" deposed President Aristide "in light of concerns over his human rights record," the press reported with no detectable embarrassment; the White House "refus[ed] to say that his return to power was a necessary precondition for Washington to feel that democracy has been restored in Haiti" (Thomas Friedman). The same day, the head of the OAS delegation stated that "We have come down with an extremely clear mandate that Aristide must be restored."

It was the notes sounded by Washington, however, that reverberated in the press. Aristide was regarded as "an insular and menacing leader who saw his own raw popularity as a substitute for the give and take of politics," Times correspondent Howard French wrote. He governed "with the aid of fear," leaning "heavily on Lavalas, an unstructured movement of affluent idealists and long-exiled leftists" whose model was China's Cultural Revolution -- the Times version of the "textbook example of participatory, `bottom-up' and democratic political development" depicted by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. Aristide's power hunger led to "troubles with civil society," another concept of Times-speak, excluding the large majority of the population, which continued to support him with passion and courage. Furthermore, "Haitian political leaders and diplomats say, the growing climate of vigilantism as well as increasingly strident statements by Father Aristide blaming the wealthier classes for the poverty of the masses encouraged" the coup; such statements are outrageous and absurd, we are to understand. "Although he retains much of the popular support that enabled him to win 67 percent of the popular vote in the country's December 1990 elections, Father Aristide was overthrown in part because of concerns among politically active people over his commitment to the Constitution, and growing fears of political and class-based violence, which many believe the President endorsed."

As this well-informed correspondent knew, the "political and class-based violence" was a near monopoly of the military and the elite, whose "commitment to the Constitution" was invisible and who turned at once to terror to demolish the "politically active people" and their organizations -- which were much too "structured" and effective for the tastes of those who qualify as "civil society" by Administration-Times standards. What they call "civil society" intends to retain their traditional power and privilege, and the army, which, French assures us, "made it clear that it had no desire to hold on to power," will doubtless be happy to permit "civil society" to rule as in the past, on condition that the army can "hang on to effective control of the country and resume its highly lucrative activities such as the transshipment of narcotics from South America to North America" (Financial Times).16

Ruminating on the dilemmas of the post-Cold War era, the editor of Foreign Affairs, William Hyland, observed that "In Haiti it has not been so easy to differentiate among the democrats and the dictators"; the distinction between Aristide, on the one hand, and Duvalier and his latter-day clones, on the other, is too subtle even for the discriminating eye. It should not be thought that Hyland is lacking in human concerns. Our worthy commitment to "pragmatism," he warned, should be tempered by the recognition that the US "owes a moral debt to the people of Israel"; accordingly, we must not allow policy to succumb to the "virulent antisemitism" that lies "beneath the veneer of support for Israel," and is "beginning to break through in the debate over Israeli settlements." In Haiti, in contrast, it is hard to detect anyone who might merit our support.

Commentators who found it possible to distinguish Aristide from Papa Doc and the ruling generals hoped that he would find some way to convince the White House of his good faith. A visit to Washington, Pamela Constable wrote, might "bolster his image as a reasonable leader committed to democracy and thus win him a strong public endorsement by the Bush administration" -- which, surely, was holding back only because of its reservations on this score.17

The OAS at once imposed an embargo, which the US joined, suspending trade on October 29. It was denounced by the ruling elite, and cheered by those who suffer most from its effects. In the slums, "news of the O.A.S. embargo was the only thing many people could find to cheer about as hundreds of people squeezed into overloaded buses to the countryside to flee the expected nightly violence by soldiers," Howard French reported on October 9. Trade should be cut off, "anxious-looking residents" told reporters: "It doesn't matter how much misery we get. We'll die if necessary." Months later, the mood remained the same. "Keep the Embargo" was the popular refrain among the poor: "Titid [Aristide] gave us dignity and hope... We are ready to suffer if it means Titid will come back."

The embargo was loosely observed and ineffectual. Europe disregarded it, and members of "civil society" continued to fly to Miami and New York to satisfy their wants, or to trade with the Dominican Republic, a practice that provided alms for the Dominican military as well. Washington, which knows how to twist arms when some serious power or profit interest is at stake, could find no way, in this case, to call upon its allies to save Haitian democracy and stop the terror. One recalls the delicate sensibilities that prevented Bush from lending any support to Kuwaiti democrats after the Gulf war, so profound as to bar mention of the word "democracy" even in private communications to the Emir, because, officials explained, "You can't pick out one country to lean on over another." Oil tankers, mainly from Europe, arrived faster "than they can unload," a senior State Department official said in April 1992.18

The Administration had not carried out such obvious measures as "freezing any U.S. assets of military officers who participated in the coup, and of their wealthy Haitian backers," or even "temporarily lifting U.S. visas to these people, who travel frequently to the U.S.," Wall Street Journal Washington correspondent Robert Greenberger reported in January 1992. But there is a reason: Aristide's defects. Liberal Democrat Robert Torricelli, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Western Hemisphere affairs, took time from his democracy-inspired efforts to tighten the embargo on Cuba to explain that "The democratic process doesn't always produce perfect results"; given "Mr. Aristide's record," it isn't easy to gain support for stronger action against Haiti. Cuban terrorists pose no such problems. Though "overwhelmingly elected in Haiti's first free election" and "immensely popular with the poor," Greenberger continues, "his fiery rhetoric sometimes incited class violence," something that always deeply disturbs the Journal whenever their keen eyes discern traces of it in Haiti, Guatemala, Brazil, Indonesia, and elsewhere.

Torricelli called for an end to the Haitian embargo and supported the forcible repatriation of Haitian refugees from Guantanamo, illustrating still more clearly the passion for democracy and human rights that inspires his Cuban initiatives.19

Many pondered the difficult choices faced by the Bush Administration. Time suggested that Bush might "ease the toll on Haitians by loosening the embargo on plants that assemble goods for U.S. companies, restoring as many as 40,000 jobs" -- and, incidentally restoring profits to US investors, though the motive could only be to "ease the toll on Haitians" who are calling on the US to "keep the embargo," as the same article reports.

We might take note of another standard item of PC usage. The word "jobs" has taken on an entirely new meaning: "profits." Thus when George Bush takes off to Japan with a bevy of auto executives in tow, he waves the banner "jobs, jobs, jobs," meaning "profits, profits, profits," as a look at his social and economic policies demonstrates without equivocation. The press and air waves resound with impassioned proposals to increase "jobs," put forth by those who do what is in their power to send them to low-wage, high-repression regions, and to destroy what remains of meaningful work and workers' rights, all in the interest of some unmentionable seven-letter word.

Bush had wasted no time in following Time's advice. On February 4, the US lifted the embargo for the assembly plants that use cheap Haitian labor for goods for export to the US, most of them US-owned. A few months later, it was reported in the small print that while "the Administration is tightening rules on ships trading with Haiti" in accord with a May 17 OAS resolution, "it is apparently continuing to relax controls on goods going to Port-au-Prince from the United States," allowing export of seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides from the US to Haiti. All for "jobs, jobs, jobs."

The Administration had been "under heavy pressure from American businesses with interests in Haiti," the Washington Post reported. The editors felt that the February 4 decision was wise: the embargo was a "fundamental political miscalculation" that "has caused great suffering, but not among the gunmen. Since it hasn't served its purpose, it is good that it is being relaxed" -- not tightened so as to serve the professed purpose, as those undergoing the great suffering plead. But for the US to repatriate refugees by force, the editors continue, is not in keeping with "its deep commitment to human rights" -- which they see manifested wherever they turn.20

Washington's unilateral relaxation of the OAS embargo was condemned by the Secretary General of the OAS, who had urged the State Department against this action. The forcible return of refugees was condemned by the UN High Commission on Refugees (UNCHR), which rarely confronts the US, knowing what that entails. In November 1991, UNCHR had called on the US to admit all refugees "for determination of their refugee status." UNCHR pointed out that the UN Conventions on refugees proscribe their return "in any manner whatsoever" to territories where their lives or freedom would be endangered, with "no exception." In May 1992, UNCHR again declared the forced return to be in violation of international agreements; the adjacent column in the New York Times quotes a conservative businessman with close ties to the US, who reports "a tremendous increase" in death squad-style killings: "People are being terrorized, and a bunch of people are being killed," a "spate of violence" that coincided with Washington's decision to "directly repatriate" Haitians trying to reach the US.21

The relaxation of the embargo "was greeted enthusiastically by assembly plant owners," Lee Hockstader reported, but not by "many of the workers most directly affected by the sanctions," who have "applauded them as the best way to promote the return of Aristide." "All indications are that Aristide's massive popular support among the poor majority...remains intact... It is difficult to find anyone on the street, either in the capital or in the provinces, who does not support the priest-turned-politician." His associates bitterly condemned the US move. A priest who is a close adviser to Aristide denounced Washington as having "totally" betrayed him "from the beginning." US policy, he said, is "the most cynical thing you can ever find on earth... I don't think the U.S. wants Aristide back," because he "is not under their control. He is not their puppet."22

The assessment is plausible enough. That the US should have sought to establish "Duvalierism without Duvalier" could surprise only the willfully blind. For similar reasons, the Carter Administration sought desperately to institute "Somocismo without Somoza" after its efforts to salvage the tyrant collapsed, and its successor turned to more violent means to achieve the same end, with the general approval of enlightened opinion, tactical disagreement aside.23

Superfluously perhaps, the priest's assessment is reinforced by a leaked secret document allegedly authored by a staff member of the US Embassy in Port-au-Prince at the behest of Prime Minister Honorat and other Haitian officials. Its authenticity was questioned by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), and denied by the State Department, but "later research has now validated [it] as being completely reliable," COHA concluded. The document lays out a plan to allow a symbolic "restoration" of Aristide as a PR ploy, with his complete removal later on, when attention has declined.

By the time the document surfaced in January 1992, most of its applicable recommendations had been implemented, COHA noted. Others were to follow shortly. The embargo was rendered still more toothless on February 4. Three weeks later, Aristide accepted what COHA described as "a near-total defeat for Haitian democracy," "a tragic sell-out by a desperate man" who was forced to agree to a "government of national unity" in which he would have only a symbolic role. Aristide "was effectively left with no option but to mutilate his own stature by signing away his powers in exchange for the still uncertain prospect of his restoration to what will now be a figurehead presidency," COHA stated. The "national unity" government brought together two partners: a group headed by René Théodore, who represented 1.5 percent of the electorate, the Haitian military and elite, and the US government; and another led by Aristide, with 67 percent of the electorate but no other assets. Given the balance, the outcome is not obscure; and it is not surprising that Assistant Secretary of State Bernard Aronson declared his satisfaction with the agreement.

COHA raised an obvious question. Suppose that "after a hypothetical coup [in Nicaragua] in which [President Violeta Chamorro] was forced to flee for her life, she had been made to accept a major Sandinista figure as her prime minister who would exercise effective control of the country in order to be allowed back. Would Aronson be pleased with such a formula if the FSLN had overthrown and exiled her, violently had beaten and killed at least 2,000 of those who backed her, and had induced her to give up real powers in order to be restored?" Or to make the analogy more exact, if in addition the FSLN were a party with no popular base and a record of terror in the style of US clients? No one troubled to respond.

The military in Haiti celebrated the agreement, along with "civil society." One Haitian Senator commented happily that "it would be surrealistic to believe or to print that [Aristide] can return by June 30, or any other specific date for that matter." "The military thugs down there understand...that they have got a nod and a wink from the U.S. government," Congressman John Conyers said.

All that was left was to replace Théodore by the original US favorite Marc Bazin. That result was achieved in June 1992, when Bazin was inaugurated as Prime Minister. "The Vatican and the Haitian bishops' conference...walked into the National Palace and blessed Haiti's new army-backed government," the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) commented, though the Vatican was alone in extending formal recognition. The Vatican had waited until Aristide was exiled to fill the position of papal nuncio. The formal recognition "shows they're really out to get Aristide and to align themselves with Haiti's traditional powers -- the army and the bourgeoisie," a Western diplomat told NCR. Liberation and human rights were a grand cause in Eastern Europe; in the Caribbean and Central America, they must be crushed, in the service of traditional privilege, and "the preferential option for the poor" is definitely not welcome. Bazin delivered his inauguration address in French to a "stifling official gathering of men in dark suits and perfumed women in white dresses," Howard French reported; Aristide had given his in Creole, the language of the population, receiving the presidential sash from a peasant woman.24

Democracy marches on.

An adviser of the Bazin government, echoing Aristide, said that "all it would take is one phone call" from Washington to send the army leadership packing. "Virtually all observers agree" that little more would be necessary, Howard French writes. But "Washington's deep-seated ambivalence about a leftward-tilting nationalist whose style diplomats say has sometimes been disquietingly erratic" precludes any meaningful pressure. "Despite much blood on the army's hands, United States diplomats consider it a vital counterweight to Father Aristide, whose class-struggle rhetoric...threatened or antagonized traditional power centers at home and abroad." The "counterweight" will therefore hold power with the "erratic" nationalist in exile, and class-struggle rhetoric and terror will continue with the tacit support of traditional power centers.25

The New York Times sought to place the proper spin on the February 4 decision to advance the anti-Aristide scenario and benefit US businesses. Under the headline "U.S. Plans to Sharpen Focus of Its Sanctions Against Haiti," Barbara Crossette reported from Washington that "The Bush Administration said today that it would modify its embargo against Haiti's military Government to punish anti-democratic forces and ease the plight of workers who lost jobs because of the ban on trade." The State Department would be "fine tuning" its economic sanctions, the "latest move" in Administration efforts to find "more effective ways to hasten the collapse of what the Administration calls an illegal Government in Haiti." The naive may find the logic a bit obscure: how the move punishes the anti-democratic forces who applauded it, while easing the plight of workers who strenuously opposed it, is left a mystery. Until we translate from PC to English, that is. Then all is clear.26

A more straightforward account appeared a few days later in a report from Port-au-Prince under the heading: "Democracy Push in Haiti Blunted: Leaders of Coup Gleeful After U.S. Loosens Its Embargo and Returns Refugees." Howard French writes that "the mood in army and political circles began to turn from anxiety to confidence that the United States, feeling no particular domestic pressure now from Haiti's problems, would leave them in peace." The same day, the anniversary of Aristide's inauguration, New York traffic was tied up by a large protest march against the US actions, as in Miami. That is not what is meant by "domestic pressure," however; mostly black, the protestors merited little notice -- though the actions were reported in the Alaska press, where one could also read the statement by Haiti's consul general in New York, who said "There is a tacit collaboration between the Haitian military and the State Department. The Americans will have the last word. And the Americans don't want Aristide's return." Time quoted a "disillusioned Republican congressional staffer" who said, "The White House is banking on the fact that people won't care. Politics, not principle, is the overriding consideration."27

That much seems beyond dispute. For those who choose to hear, the italicized words tell the story that is solidly based on two centuries of history. Without popular support here, Toussaint's tree of liberty will remain deeply buried, at best a dream -- not in Haiti alone.

1 Lowenthal, Reviews in Anthropology, 1976, cited in Farmer, AIDS and Accusation, the source for much of which follows along with Schmidt, US Occupation. The classic account of the revolution is C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins. The high population estimates are from Sherburne Cook and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean (California, 1971) (see Farmer, Stannard, American Holocaust).

2 Sued-Badillo, Monthly Review, July/August 1992. COHA press release, Feb. 18; Anne-Marie O'Connor, Cox News Service, April 12, 1992. On the IMF programs, see McAfee, Storm Signals; DD, 7.3.

3 Farmer, AIDS, 153; Las Casas, passages in Chicago Religious Task Force, Dangerous Memories, Stannard, American Holocaust, Sale, Conquest. See also Koning, Columbus. Smith, Wealth, Bk. IV, Ch. VII, Pt. I (ii, 70).

4 Ch. 1, n. 29. Sterilization, Churchill biographer Clive Ponting, Sunday Age (Australia), June 21, 1992. Racism-policymakers, DD, 52-3.

5 TTT, 46. Stivers, Supremacy, 66-73.

6 Ulysses B. Weatherly, "Haiti: an Experiment in Pragmatism," 1926, cited by Schmidt.

7 Trouillot, cited by Farmer, AIDS. Blassingame, Caribbean Studies, July 1969. Times editorials, DD, 280. Landes, NR, March 10; Ryan, CSM, Feb. 14, 1986. For more on these and other scholarly analyses, see PI, 68-9, TTT, 153f.

8 Deere, Shadows, 144, 35, 174-5 (excerpt from Josh DeWind and David Kinley, Aiding Migration [Westview, 1988]). McAfee, 17; PI, 68; Wilentz, Rainy Season, 272ff. Refugees, PEHR, II 50, 56 (1970s); Wilentz, NR, March 9; Bill Frelick, NACLA Report on the Americas, July 1992; Pamela Constable, BG, Aug. 21, 1992.

9 PI, 69f.; WSJ, Feb. 10, 1986. NR, p. 194, above.

10 Wilentz, Rainy Season, 341, 55, 326, 358. Wilentz gives a vivid eyewitness account of the years 1986-89.

11 COHA, "Sun Setting on Hopes for Haitian Democracy," Jan. 6, 1992.

12 The NED Backgrounder, Inter-Hemispheric Education Resource Center (Albuquerque), April 1992.

13 Wilentz, Reconstruction, vol. 1.4 (1992).

14 Wilentz, Rainy Season, 275.

15 Americas Watch, National Coalition for Haitian Refugees, and Physicians for Human Rights, "Return to the Darkest Days," Dec. 30, 1991. Roth, "Haiti: the Shadows of Terror," NYRB, March 26, 1992.

16 Friedman, French, NYT, Oct. 8, 1991. French, NYT, Oct. 22, 1991; Jan. 12, 1992. Canute James, FT, March 10, 1992.

17 Hyland, "The Case for Pragmatism," Foreign Affairs, America and the World, 1991-92. Constable, BG, March 13, 1992.

18 Americas Watch, "Return." French, NYT, Oct. 10, 1991. Time, Feb. 10; FT, April 3, 1992. Bush-Kuwait, Andrew Rosenthal, NYT, April 3, 1991.

19 Greenberger, WSJ, Jan. 13, 1992. COHA press release, Feb. 5, 1992.

20 Time, Feb. 10; Barbara Crossette, NYT, May 28; Lee Hockstader, WP weekly, Feb. 17; editorial, WP weekly, Feb. 10, 1992.

21 Frelick, op. cit.; Lee Hockstader, WP weekly, Feb. 10; Barbara Crossette, French, NYT, May 28, 1992.

22 Hockstader, WP weekly, Feb. 10; WP-MG, Feb. 16, 1992.

23 DD, chs. 8, 10; NI, 61-6; Sklar, War.

24 COHA press release, Jan. 10, Feb. 25, 1992. Barbara Crossette, NYT, Feb. 26; French, NYT, Feb. 27, June 21; James Slavin, NCR, Aug. 14, 1992.

25 French, NYT, Sept. 27, 1992.

26 Barbara Crossette, NYT, Feb. 5, 1992.

27 French, NYT, Feb. 7, my emphasis; Pierre-Yves Glass, AP, Anchorage Times, Feb. 17; Time, Feb. 17, 1992.

=======================================

February 24, 2010

How NGOs are Profiting Off a Grave Situation

Haiti and the Aid Racket

By ASHLEY SMITH

It's now more than a month since the earthquake that laid waste to Port-au-Prince, killing more than 200,000 people and thrusting millions of people into the most desperate conditions.

But according to the U.S. government, Haitians have a lot to be thankful for.

On February 12, the U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Ken Merten boasted, "In terms of humanitarian aid delivery...frankly, it's working really well, and I believe that this will be something that people will be able to look back on in the future as a model for how we've been able to sort ourselves out as donors on the ground and responding to an earthquake."

Bill Quigley, the legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, had a simple response to Merten's claim: "What? Haiti is a model of how the international government and donor community should respond to an earthquake? The ambassador must be overworked and need some R&R. Look at the facts."

What are the facts? The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that "more than 3 million people--one in every three Haitians--were severely affected by the earthquake, of whom 2 million need regular food aid. Over 1.1 million people are homeless, many of them still living under sheets and cardboard in makeshift camps. The government of Haiti estimates that at least 300,000 people were injured during the quake."

So far, the relief effort has only managed to provide 270,000 people with basic shelters like tents. More than 1 million people still have little access to food and water and have to scrape by to find sustenance. Even worse, because the relief operation is so inefficient, Haitians report that some of the food spends so long at the airport that it is rotten by the time it gets to the hungry.

On February 7, thousands of Haitians marched in the Petionville suburb of Port-au-Prince to protest their desperate circumstances and the failure of aid delivery.

Those conditions will only worsen as rainy season approaches. Médicins sans Frontières (MSF) summed up the grave situation:

It's hard to believe that four weeks after the quakes, so many people still live under bedsheets in camps and on the street...One can only wonder how there could be such a huge gap between the promise of a massive financial influx into the country and the slow pace of distribution. MSF is concerned that with the onset of the rainy season, we'll be facing new medical emergencies, when people who are living without shelter come to us with diarrhea or respiratory infections.

* * *

THE U.S. ambassador couldn't be more wrong about the relief operation in Haiti.

While some NGOs like Partners in Health have done and are doing amazing work to provide services for quake victims, overall, the catastrophe in Haiti revealed the worst aspects of the U.S. government and the NGO aid industry.

As many analysts have noted, the U.S. in fact used its "relief" operation to disguise a military occupation of Haiti, intended to prevent a flood of refugees reaching the U.S., impose even greater sweatshop development on Haiti, and signal to the rest of Latin America, the Caribbean and the world's most powerful governments that U.S. aims to reassert its power in the region.

As a result, relief aid from the U.S. has played second fiddle to its imperial ambitions--and the NGO-centered aspect of its response is an important part of its strategy.

Instead of aiding the Haitian state and building up its capacity to handle the crisis, the U.S. is funneling $379 million in aid through its own agencies and then through NGOs. According to the Associated Press:

Each American dollar roughly breaks down like this: 42 cents for disaster assistance, 33 cents for U.S. military aid, nine cents for food, nine cents to transport the food, five cents for paying Haitian survivors for recovery efforts, just less than one cent to the Haitian government, and about half a cent to the Dominican Republic.

Most of the privately raised funds have been funneled to NGOs that have a checkered history in Haiti, not ones with a real commitment to invigorating Haitian self-organization. As Bill Quigley writes:

Donations for Haiti to private organizations have exceeded $644 million. Over $200 million has gone to the Red Cross, which had 15 people working on health projects in Haiti before the earthquake. About $40 million has gone to Partners in Health, which had 5,000 people working on health in Haiti before the quake.

The big NGOs, which are getting the bulk of the money, see the crisis as an enormous opportunity to raise funds and their profile. Thus, instead of a centralized and logical relief effort, something only a sovereign state could provide, the NGOs are competing with one another, literally branding areas they serve with their logos. As a result of this competition, they provide spotty and chaotic relief provision. According to the British medical journal The Lancet, the NGOs are:

jostling for position, each claiming that they are doing the most for earthquake survivors. Some agencies even claim that they are "spearheading" the relief effort. In fact, as we only too clearly see, the situation in Haiti is chaotic, devastating and anything but coordinated.

Polluted by the internal power politics and the unsavory characteristics seen in many big corporations, large aid agencies can be obsessed with raising money through their own appeal efforts. Media coverage as an end in itself is too often an aim of their activities. Marketing and branding have too high a profile. Perhaps worst of all, relief efforts in the field are sometimes competitive, with little collaboration between agencies, including smaller, grassroots charities that may have better networks in affected counties, and so are well placed to immediately implement emergency relief.

Even worse, the NGOs, because of their close collaboration with the U.S. military, have adopted a paranoid obsession with security to the detriment of providing actual help. According to Sasha Kramer, a co-founder of the non-profit Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods who was in Haiti at the time of the earthquake and remains there today:

One friend showed me the map used by all of the larger NGOs, where Port-au-Prince is divided into security zones: yellow, orange, red. Red zones are restricted; in the orange zones, all of the car windows must be rolled up, and they cannot be visited past certain times of the day; even in the yellow zone, aid workers are often not permitted to walk through the streets, and spend much of their time riding through the city from one office to another in organizational vehicles.

The creation of these security zones has been like the building of a wall, a wall reinforced by language barriers and fear, rather than iron rods--a wall that, unlike many of the buildings in Port-au-Prince, did not crumble during the earthquake.

Fear, much like violence, is self-perpetuating. When aid workers enter communities radiating fear, it is offensive, the perceived disinterest in communicating with the poor majority is offensive, driving through impoverished communities with windows rolled up and armed security guards is offensive...

Despite the good intentions of the many aid workers swarming around the UN base, much of the aid coming through the larger organizations is still blocked in storage, waiting for the required UN and U.S. military escorts that are seen as essential for distribution. Meanwhile, people in the camps are suffering, and their tolerance is waning.

* * *

THE U.S. policy of bypassing the Haitian state to fund NGOs is nothing new--this has been U.S. practice in the Third World since the turn to neoliberalism in the 1970s.

The U.S. has used IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs to force Third World governments to privatize government industry, cut wages and government programs, lower trade barriers, and open economies to U.S. trade and investment. At the same time, the U.S. and corporate donors started funding NGOs to address the social crisis created by neoliberal policies.

As David Harvey argues in his book A Short History of Neoliberalism:

The rise of advocacy groups and NGOs has...accompanied the neoliberal turn and increased spectacularly since 1980 or so. The NGOs have in many instances stepped into the vacuum in social provision left by the withdrawal of the state from such activities. This amounts to privatization by NGO. In some instances, this has helped accelerate further state withdrawal from social provision. NGOs thereby function as "Trojan horses for neoliberal globalization."

The NGOs are, in fact, businesses in their own right. They sport well-paid bureaucrats that raise money off of the disastrous impact of neoliberalism around the world. They are not accountable to the local populations they supposedly serve, but instead to the international donors that fund them--most often, corporate-backed formations like George Soros's Open Society Institute and capitalist governments.

Moreover, given that NGOs can pay local leaders more than either the government or social movements, they often recruit people who would traditionally lead leftist movements. As Mike Davis in The Planet of Slums:

Third World NGOs have proven brilliant at co-opting local leadership as well as hegemonizing the social space traditionally occupied by the Left. Even if there are some celebrated exceptions--such as the militant NGOs so instrumental in creating the World Social Forums--the broad impact of the NGO/"civil society revolution"...has been to bureaucratize and deradicalize urban social movements.

Davis argues that NGOs are, in fact, a form of "soft imperialism." They play a role very similar to the one that missionary religious institutions played in the earlier history of empire. They provide moral cover--a civilizing mission of helping the hapless heathens--for the powers that are plundering the society. And just as religious institutions justified imperial war, many NGOs, abandoning their traditional standpoint of neutrality in conflicts, have become advocates of military intervention.

Nowhere is this pattern more clear than in Haiti. The U.S. convinced the dictator Baby Doc Duvalier in the 1980s to implement a neoliberal development plan which Haitians call "the plan of death," which dropped tariffs on American agriculture, encouraged sweatshop development in Port-au-Prince and opened tourist resorts for the international elite.

Predictably, the plan produced a social catastrophe; it increased absolute poverty by 60 percent. But the Haitian poor, workers and peasants rose up to build a mass movement, Lavalas, that eventually elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide president in 1990 on a platform of anti-neoliberal reform.

The U.S. saw Aristide's mild reformism as a threat, backed a coup in 1991 and used the coup regime's reign of terror to crush the Lavalas social movement. It also convinced Aristide to implement the "plan of death" as the condition of his restoration in 1994. Under threat from the U.S., Aristide and his successor, René Préval implemented much of the plan.

The U.S. used yet another coup against Aristide in 2004 and another coup regime to force through the rest of the plan. Now, Haiti has the most neoliberal economy in Latin American and the Caribbean.

Thus, as noted Haitian academic Robert Fatton argues, "The emasculation of the state is no accident...It is partly the consequence of the neoliberal regime implanted in the country by the major international financial institutions. By advocating the withdrawal of the state from its social and regulating obligations, and by promoting the supremacy of the market, this regime has contributed to an economic, political and social disaster."

At the very same time, the U.S., other powers and the international donors started funding the NGOs. Soon, the World Bank reported that there were 10,000 NGOs in the country, doing everything from trash collection to health care and food provision in a chaotic patchwork of services that have replaced the incapacitated state.

These NGOs are non-governmental only in name. Peter Hallward documents inDamming the Flood that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other similar government bureaucracies from other countries provide 70 percent of the funding for NGOs. The other 30 percent comes from corporate formations and individual contributors.

Unsurprisingly, as Hallward argues, "the bulk of USAID money that goes to Haiti and to other countries in the region is explicitly designed to pursue interests--the promotion of a secure investment climate, the nurturing of links with local business elites, the preservation of a docile and low-wage labor force, and so on."

Haitians now commonly refer to their own country as the "Republic of NGOs." But that is a misnomer, since Haitians have no democratic control over the NGOs. In reality, Haiti has been ruled by an American NGO Raj.

* * *

WHILE SOME NGOs like Partners in Health have been set up to develop Haitian grassroots self-organization and control, most major NGOs have been accomplices in the neoliberal catastrophe the U.S. wrought in Haiti.

First of all, the NGOs have reproduced and exacerbated class inequality in Haiti. Since the NGOs can pay much better than anyone else, including the Haitian state, they have swept up middle class professionals into their ranks. Haitian actually now call them the "NGO class." As anthropologist Mark Schuller writes:

In addition to higher salaries, NGO employees have access to many privileges: clean drinking water, electricity to charge cell hones, e-mail and the ever-prized U.S. visa. These privileges in turn plug individuals into the global economy. People's first visits to the U.S. solidified neoliberal ideologies. This artificial, dependent middle class--the "NGO class"--thus directly support a form of economic globalization, accomplishes ideological work and further stratifies the Haitian population, selecting a chosen few for privileges denied Haiti's poor majority.

The NGOs themselves are in the business of poverty, not its eradication, and they have proliferated in lockstep with the collapse in the Haitian standard of living. This has led many Haitians to rightly see them as profiting off their crisis.

As Sove Lavi told Schuller, the NGOs "take the illness [of AIDS] and turn it into a business. They let people die...Thanks to this illness, many people have become gran neg [bigwigs], many people have become rich. Many people drive fancy cars, fancy motorcycles. Many people are achte [making a lot of] money on the backs of people who are living with the illness. Many people living with the illness, we continue to die."

These NGOs have left in their wake a litany of projects that, far from improving the condition of impoverished Haitians, has in fact worsened it.

Anthropologist Timothy Schwartz documents the disastrous impact of the NGOs in his book Travesty in Haiti. In particular, he shows how CARE International--which claimed its mission in Haiti was to provide food aid to the "poorest of the poor"--not only failed in its mission, but also actually exacerbated the food crisis.

When the U.S. implemented its "plan of death" in Haiti, which undercut peasant agriculture and flooded the market with subsidized U.S. products, it caused a food crisis. Peasants were no longer able to find a market for their produce, and were therefore thrust into poverty, often unable to meet their own food needs because of their collapsed standard of living. They then became dependent on food aid.

USAID, in turn, funded CARE International to feed the impoverished peasants. The NGO began to distribute U.S. crops as food aid, during both bad and good harvests, further undermining Haitian peasants ability to compete for the market. Often, the food aid was taken by local elites and sold on the market, with the CARE brand still affixed to the packaging. CARE seemed to care so little that it never really followed up on the consequences of its food aid program.

Meanwhile, it put on conferences in fancy hotels inside and outside Haiti for its U.S. government and corporate backers. Schwartz writes that this amounted to "a perversion of American charitable ideals, with its false claims to be aiding 'the poorest of the poor' when what it was really doing was throwing exquisite banquets at plush hotels, while carrying out U.S. political policy in the interests of international venture capitalist and industrialists."

In another example, Schwartz tells the story of NGO-sponsored orphanages that degenerated into a cover for trafficking in children.

NGOs like World Vision, Compassion International and Christian Aid Missions collectively sponsor tens of thousands of children in orphanages. On the surface, this sounds like a benevolent plan. But as Schwartz shows, the middle-class operators of the orphanages took the money from the NGOs and ran a scam.

In some cases, these operators housed not actual orphans, but children of the local elite. In other cases, they offered money to impoverished Haitians for their children, with the promise that they would be cared for, educated and given a chance at a better life. The bulk of actual orphans--impoverished street kids--didn't get places. The orphanages were filled up with middle-class kids or children bought from their parents--that is, fake orphans.

Schwartz writes that he "had zero doubt that orphanages for Haitians and for many Americans who were helping them procure funds were businesses." He calls it "false charity. I believe it is tantamount to robbing from impoverished children themselves. The money is theirs, and they are not, in the overwhelming majority of cases I encountered, getting it."

Even worse, the most cynical of the people trading in children sell the poorest of the children into slavery or the sex trade. Often, these children are marketed abroad. UNICEF reports a conservative estimate that each year, 2,000 Haitian kids are sold into the Dominican Republic alone.

Schwartz also shows how the disastrous impact of both U.S. neoliberal economic policies and the failure or complicity of the NGOs has left people so desperate that they turned to narco-trafficking as a source of income. Of course, the U.S. then uses this as a further justification for its military occupation and imposition of yet another sweatshop development plan.

Schwartz conclusions are absolutely correct:

The world's largest multinational charities--CARE, CRS, World Vision and ADRA--executed the political will of institutions, governments and lobbyists that had identified Haiti's comparative advantage as low wages--i.e. poverty--and in doing so, these charitable organization dedicated to helping the poorest of the poor wound up working to make the people of Haiti even poorer.

* * *

WHILE THE U.S. used the NGOs to help impose neoliberalism in Haiti, they also manipulated them to build political opposition to any reform movement. The U.S. stepped up funding for the NGO racket in the run-up to its second coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. At the very same time that it enforced an embargo on Aristide's government for alleged electoral manipulations, it escalated the funding of NGOs that were in opposition to Aristide.

As Hallward writes, they made "use of tried-and-tested tactics of democracy promotion. In Haiti as elsewhere, the main vehicles for delivering the policy were USAID, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, and the International Republican Institute. Altogether, from 1994 to 2002, Washington would contribute some $70 million--a staggering sum by Haitian standards--to 'train' an appropriate political opposition to Aristide."

Many, if not most, of the NGOs that ended up organized in the elite opposition's political front, the Group of 184, and that supported the coup were on the U.S. payroll.

Such NGO collaboration with the coup completes a vicious circle--the NGOs aided and abetted the "plan of death"; exacerbated through failure, mismanagement and corruption the impact of neoliberalism on Haiti; and then supported the coup against the democratically elected government.

In so doing, they undercut the sovereignty of Haitian people, all under the gloss of helping people overcome their poverty--poverty that they, in fact, helped create.

The Marine Gen. Smedley Butler from the early decades of the 20th century said he served as a "racketeer for capitalism." The same could just as easily be applied to the NGOs and humanitarian aid today--it is a racket for empire.

Ashley Smith writes for the Socialist Worker, where this originally appeared. He can be reached at: ashley05401@yahoo.com

===========================

The kidnapping of Haiti

by John Pilger

28 Jan 2010

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the "swift and crude" appropriation of earthquake-ravaged Haiti by the militarised Obama administration. With George W. Bush attending to the "relief effort" and Bill Clinton the UN's man, The Comedians, Graham Greene's dark novel about exploted Haiti comes to mind.

The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States secured “formal approval” from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to “secure” roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in an American naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training.

The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now an American military base and relief flights have been re-routed to the Dominican Republic. All flights stopped for three hours for the arrival of Hillary Clinton. Critically injured Haitians waited unaided as 800 American residents in Haiti were fed, watered and evacuated. Six days passed before the US Air Force dropped bottled water to people suffering thirst and dehydration.

The first TV reports played a critical role, giving the impression of widespread criminal mayhem. Matt Frei, the BBC reporter dispatched from Washington, seemed on the point of hyperventilation as he brayed about the “violence” and need for “security”. In spite of the demonstrable dignity of the earthquake victims, and evidence of citizens’ groups toiling unaided to rescue people, and even an American general’s assessment that the violence in Haiti was considerably less than before the earthquake, Frei claimed that “looting is the only industry” and “the dignity of Haiti’s past is long forgotten.” Thus, a history of unerring US violence and exploitation in Haiti was consigned to the victims. “There’s no doubt,” reported Frei in the aftermath of America’s bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003, “that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East... is now increasingly tied up with military power.”

In a sense, he was right. Never before in so-called peacetime have human relations been as militarised by rapacious power. Never before has an American president subordinated his government to the military establishment of his discredited predecessor, as Barack Obama has done. In pursuing George W. Bush’s policy of war and domination, Obama has sought from Congress an unprecedented military budget in excess of $700 billion. He has become, in effect, the spokesman for a military coup.

For the people of Haiti the implications are clear, if grotesque. With US troops in control of their country, Obama has appointed George W. Bush to the “relief effort”: a parody surely lifted from Graham Greene’s The Comedians, set in Papa Doc’s Haiti. As president, Bush’s relief effort following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 amounted to an ethnic cleansing of many of New Orleans’ black population. In 2004, he ordered the kidnapping of the democratically-elected prime minister of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and exiled him in Africa. The popular Aristide had had the temerity to legislate modest reforms, such as a minimum wage for those who toil in Haiti’s sweatshops.

When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing, binding machines at the Port-au-Prince Superior Baseball Plant. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti’s sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the cities and towns and jerry-built housing. Years after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their specialty from the Philippines to Afghanistan.

Bill Clinton is another comedian, having got himself appointed the UN’s man in Haiti. Once fawned upon by the BBC as “Mr. Nice Guy... bringing democracy back to a sad and troubled land”, Clinton is Haiti’s most notorious privateer, demanding de-regulation of the economy for the benefit of the sweatshop barons. Lately, he has been promoting a $55m deal to turn the north of Haiti into an American-annexed “tourist playground”.

Not for tourists is the US building its fifth biggest embassy in Port-au-Prince. Oil was found in Haiti’s waters decades ago and the US has kept it in reserve until the Middle East begins to run dry. More urgently, an occupied Haiti has a strategic importance in Washington’s “rollback” plans for Latin America. The goal is the overthrow of the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, control of Venezuela’s abundant oil reserves and sabotage of the growing regional cooperation that has given millions their first taste of an economic and social justice long denied by US-sponsored regimes.

The first rollback success came last year with the coup against President Jose Manuel Zelaya in Honduras who also dared advocate a minimum wage and that the rich pay tax. Obama’s secret support for the illegal regime carries a clear warning to vulnerable governments in central America. Last October, the regime in Colombia, long bankrolled by Washington and supported by death squads, handed the US seven military bases to, according to US air force documents, “combat anti-US governments in the region”.

Media propaganda has laid the ground for what may well be Obama’s next war. On 14 December, researchers at the University of West England published first findings of a ten-year study of the BBC’s reporting of Venezuela. Of 304 BBC reports, only three mentioned any of the historic reforms of the Chavez government, while the majority denigrated Chavez’s extraordinary democratic record, at one point comparing him to Hitler.

Such distortion and its attendant servitude to western power are rife across the Anglo-American corporate media. People who struggle for a better life, or for life itself, from Venezuela to Honduras to Haiti, deserve our support.

What Do We Really Want?

2010-01-08T01:58:00.003+11:00

From www.monbiot.com

The richer we are, the more miserable we become.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 27th August 2002

There is scarcely a discussion of climate change on the radio or television which does not involve a “climate sceptic”: someone who believes there is no problem. This would be unexceptionable if the media always promoted dissent: if, for example, someone was brought in to attack capitalism every time the economy was discussed. But the coverage the anti-environmentalists receive suggests that the dissent which reinforces an underlying orthodoxy is welcome, while that which challenges it is not. Whatever the explanation may be, the airtime their views receive is out of all proportion to the scientific support they muster.

But let us, for a moment, assume that they are right. Let’s imagine that climate change does not exist, that pollution does no damage to either ecosystems or human health, that fisheries are not collapsing, freshwater reserves are not drying up, topsoil is not eroding, and forests and coral reefs are not disappearing.

Let’s pretend too that there is no conflict between two of the avowed goals of the current earth summit: relieving poverty in the poor nations while enhancing economic growth in the rich ones. Let us pretend that there is no competition for resources between rich and poor. Let us accept, in other words, the myths of neoliberalism.

This is the position taken by the farmer and philosopher Simon Fairlie in his new pamphlet The Prospect of Cornutopia. He envisages the future which most of the rich world’s governments, economists and media foresee. In this vision, economic growth proceeds at some 3% a year, without threatening the earth’s capacity to support us. By 2100, if this rate is sustained, we will be 18 times richer than we are today.

Fairlie asks the question which so many economists have ducked. When we possess this fabulous wealth, how will we spend it? “A fraction of this amount,” he notes, “will provide all of us with the one car per two people which appears to be the saturation rate. … What next? Will everyone be jetting around the world on a weekly basis from airports in every town? Will each home have 10 rooms and a swimming pool, and if so where are we going to build them?” Will we then inhabit the terrestrial heaven which the advocates of endless growth have promised us?

I hardly dare to mention this, for fear of being accused of romanticising poverty, or somehow conspiring to keep people in the picturesque state to which I would never submit myself. But it is impossible not to notice that, in some of the poorest parts of the world, most people, most of the time, appear to be happier than we are. In southern Ethiopia, for example, the poorest half of the poorest nation on earth, the streets and fields crackle with laughter. In homes constructed from packing cases and palm leaves, people engage more freely, smile more often, express more affection than we do, behind our double glazing, surrounded by remote controls.

This is not to suggest that poverty causes happiness. In southern Ethiopia people desperately want better healthcare, better education, better housing and sanitation, not to mention smart clothes, motorbikes, refrigerators and radios. But while poverty does not cause happiness, there appears to be some evidence that wealth causes misery. Since 1950, 25-year-olds in the United Kingdom have become ten times more likely to be affected by depression. And it is surely fair to say that most of us suffer from sub-clinical neuroses, anxiety or a profound discomfort with ourselves.

Perhaps one of the reasons why people in Ethiopia appear to be happier than we are is that they have less to lose by letting other people into their lives. The more wealth we possess, the more isolated we become. We must defend it, and ourselves, against the intrusions of other people.

An increase in wealth is always either preceded or followed by an increase in property rights. Over the past 20 years, for example, wealthy people have laid claim to human genes, public archives, town squares and village greens, playing fields, beaches, even clouds and landing spaces on the moon. Having enhanced their wealth, they retreat to gated communities, hire guards and install CCTV and movement sensors.

The rich lock themselves in and lock everyone else out. So many fences rise to exclude us that after a while we are no longer shut out but shut in. And if we try to cross those barriers, we pay dearly, for the increasing freedom of capital has been accompanied by unprecedented rates of imprisonment. For both the secluded and the excluded, the fruits of economic growth become a substitute for human interaction: we watch TV rather than talking to our neighbours.

There is also plenty to suggest that as we become richer, we become less content with ourselves. It is incorrect to say that necessity is the mother of invention. In the rich world, invention is the mother of necessity. When people already possess all the goods and services they need, growth can be stimulated only by discovering new needs. Advertising creates gaps in our lives in order to fill them. We buy the products, but the gaps remain.

Already, in the rich nations, the beneficiaries of development spend much of their money on escaping from it: it costs a fortune now to live in a place which does not assault your eyes and ears with ugliness. To absorb our increasing wealth we must keep building. Our new cars need new roads on which to run, our new goods and services must come from new shops and warehouses and offices. One day there may be nowhere left in which we can shut the noise out of our heads.

Wealth also appears to reduce our capacity to act. Our reliance upon technology supplants our reliance upon ourselves and other people. As George Orwell suggested, “the logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle”.

In other words, as Simon Fairlie argues, the rich world is approaching the point at which “satiation turns into deprivation”. Even if we were to forget the damage our growing economies inflict upon the environment, even if we were to ignore the conflict between our greed and the fulfilment of other people’s needs, we should be able to see that economic growth in nations which are rich enough already is a disaster.

Environmentalists have been fudging this issue for far too long. We have been demanding an accommodation between the unreconcilable objectives of ever-increasing wealth and environmental protection, an accommodation we call “sustainable development”. We know that the world is already rich enough to meet all real human needs, but that this wealth is not trickling down from rich to poor. We know that while there is a desperate need for redistribution, further growth in the rich world is likely to make everyone more miserable. We know that wealth has been romanticised. Yet we are afraid to ask for what we really want. Unless we are brave enough to confront the notion that growth is good, the world will shop until it drops.