Global Geography 12, R.

Wheadon

Industrialization & Power:

Colonialism & Multinational Corporations
Summary This lesson introduces students to the history of colonialism and how it relates to the production of primary/secondary resources and power networks. It then extends these concepts and links into modern multinational corporations and sweatshop labour in an attempt to draw connections between historical colonialism and what might be described as neo-colonialism. The lesson looks at how production/consumption inuences power networks on an international scale. Students should gain an understanding of the history of colonialization and how it has impacted the formation of the world and the distribution of wealth (this will be further developed in the lesson that follows). Students should understand primary/secondary resources and how these create or redistribute wealth. Additionally, students should develop a sense of the continuity between colonialism and multinational corporations, and the way in which globalization has shaped the world. Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel:The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton, 1999. The Corporation. Dirs. Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. Zeitgeist, 2003. (Netix) Africa: States of Independence. Episode 1: The Scramble for Africa. Al Jazeera English. (YouTube) The Scramble for Africa. The Economist. Millennial Issue. 23 December 1999. (http://www.economist.com/node/347120) Khalek, Rania. 21st Century Slaves: How Corporations Exploit Prison Labor. AlterNet. (http://www.alternet.org/story/151732/21stcentury_slaves%3A_how_corporations_exploit_prison_labor) Ainger, Katharine. The Scramble for Africa: Wars for Africas Wealth. New Internationalist 367 (2004): 9-12. Braeckman, Colette. The Looting of the Congo: Wars for Africas Wealth. New Internationalist 367 (2004): 13-16. Redesigning the Global Economy. New Internationalist 320 (2000): 4 pag. Should Foreign Investment Replace Aid for Africa? New Internationalist 445 (Sept. 2011): 34-36. Nandy, Ashis. Paternal Deceits. New Internationalist 405 (Oct. 2007): 10-11. Lummis, C. Douglas. Development as Forced Labour. New Internationalist 324 (2000): 26-28. 1

Objectives

Materials

Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon Pre-Work Ensure access to videos Print off multiple copies of resource articles Divide into groups for Literature Circle Ensure each group has assigned readings for Guns, Germs, and Steel Develop/photocopy hand-outs for Expository Text Literature Circle Photocopy reection sheets for Africa: States of Independence and The Corporation OR prepare questions for log entries Determine which articles will be used for jigsaw groups Break students into groups & assign articles

Plan Warm-Up Before the warm-up class, assign students into groups of (2 classes) approximately 3-4 members. Each group will receive a section from Guns, Germs, and Steel for an expository text literature circle. Chapters to be discussed will be: Prologue: Yalis Question (p. 13-32), Chapter 12: Blueprints and Borrowed Letters (p. 215-238), Chapter 13: Necessitys Mother (p. 239-264), Chapter 19: How Africa Became Black (p. 376-401). Students will have class time to read the chapter and to work through their literature circles. They will connect the content from the chapter to the unit content, but will be able to form their own connections as well. After Literature Circles are complete, each group will write out key points and terms on chart paper and put it up around the classroom. Students will then circulate and, as a class, we will draw parallels and connections as a foundation for the rest of the unit. Main Act 1. Review key terms and concepts. Terms include: colonialism, (3 classes) corporations, globalization, industrialization, primary resource, secondary resource, developing nation, developed nation, development, trade. 2.View Africa: States of Independence (Scramble for Africa) (from 0:00 approximately 20:00) and The Corporation (from 19:00-0:24). Distribute critical reection sheets OR give learning log prompts. 3. Break students into assigned groups and distribute supplementary articles. Students should read articles. It is important that students have a night to think about the article; do not go directly into group discussion. If class wraps up early, encourage students to delve into the other supplementary articles or review concepts they may nd unclear through research (textbooks may be useful here).

Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon 4. Students will reconvene in their small groups and discuss the articles. They should be sure they can summarize their article, articulate whether they agree or disagree, and connect the content of the article to the material we have viewed and the concepts weve discussed thus far. 5. Students will each develop a summary sheet of their article and of the unit content this can be written, visually depicted, idea clouds, etc. Be sure to check on these as theyre developed. This will aid students who may have difculty in memory recall or in articulating their thoughts. 5. Jigsaw: Split up group members so that one member of each group is present in a jigsaw group. Students should then discuss their articles and how they relate. If discussion is slow, give students thematic prompts. All articles in your le have notes on them for key themes and many will riff off each other. Conclusion 1. Class-wide discussion in which the concepts students have (1 classes) encountered in the lesson are formalized. How has industrialization impacted the distribution of wealth in the world? How are colonialism and globalization connected? What are some repercussions to development? What does development mean? 2. Learning log prompts: What do students think theyve learned? How do they expect their knowledge to change/deepen as we progress through the unit? What questions would they expect their classmates to be able to answer on this part of the unit? Assessment Informal assessment: Check student engagement while circulating and observing student discussion. Check in on each students summary sheet to see if theyre grasping the concepts and the connection between real world injustice and the conceptual framework. Students should be able to generate multiple connections; a lack of connection may indicate that students have not grasped what has been covered so far. If this is the case, keep an eye on students during jigsaw groups to determine if teaching the content has helped them. No specic adaptations required, but ensure that weaker readers have articles with an easier vocabulary. Visual learners may benet from articles with charts or other visual representations. Students who complete learning logs early should be encouraged to review the articles they didnt have a chance to read. Direct them to the extension folder for this unit. Students could also be encouraged to look at King Leopolds Ghost or to write on a proposal for positive/non-exploitative development. They could weigh in on the foreign investment vs. foreign aid debate.

Adaptations

Extensions

Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon Research/ Resources King Leopolds Ghost (Adam Hochschild) -- Non-Fiction Book The End of Poverty (Jeffrey D. Sachs) -- Non-Fiction Book Resource Wars: The Facts. (Sven Tornn) The New Internationalist 367, Article. (See Attached Articles)

Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon

The Scramble for Africa, The Economist Millennial Issue

The Europeans were slow to seize black Africa, ruthless in doing so, harsh when they had done itbut by no means doers only of harm

Dec 23rd 1999

OF ALL the targets of European empire-builders, Africa was nearest; and black Africa among the least advanced. Yet, save for its far south, it was the last to be grabbed. Its coast had been known to Europeans for centuries and was dotted with their trading posts. But until around 1860 the interior was protected. Fevers killed off intruding white men, roads were few and cataracts blocked access by river. Then, setting off from their enclaves along the shores, European explorers began to walk old Arab trade routes. They searched for the truth of ancient stories about the dark continent and the sources of its mighty rivers. By 1862 they had reached the source of the Nile. A little later, they traced the route of the Niger. They confirmed the reality of Africa's fabled richesivory, gold, diamonds, emeralds, copper. Entrepreneurs also saw that, instead of buying crops like cotton or palm oil from its villagers, they could set up plantations and use cheap local labour to work them. Africa was becoming too valuable to be left to the Africans. Besides these were violent, savage and backward, in need of Christianity and civilisation, were they not? Yet, ripe for takeover as Africa was, the European grab for it was neither inevitable nor consistent. Britain at first opposed a carve-up, but ended with the richest parts: today's South Africa, Ghana and Nigeria. Belgium's King Leopold II was one of Europe's least powerful rulers. But once he had carved out the Congo basin as a personal fief, other countries were quick to stake claims. Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of the strong new Germany, put in a bid for huge chunks of East and West Africa. Europeans, quick to fight each other at home, were loth to do so for slices of a continent that they barely knew. Besides, it would set a bad example to the natives. So in 1884 the powers met in Berlin to share Africa out. In some areas, ignorant of people and geography alike, they made frontiers simply by drawing straight lines on the map. The Africa they seized was technologically in the iron age, and politically divided into several thousand units, some based on language and culture, others on conquest, paying tribute to their conquerors. Much of the continent was in turmoil, as slaving gangs sent out by some of its own rulers spread war and sent communities fleeing. Some Africans resisted the takeover, but the Europeans, no slouches at savage violence, most often swept their spear-wielding armies aside with the Maxim gun and repeater rifle, and brutally crushed local resistance. Much of Africa gave in without a fight, its kings signing away their sovereignty with a thumb-print. Many allied with the intruders, maybe believing that these would not stay long and would give help against some local rival. Some tried to play one set of Europeans off against another. Others were overawed by technology: the kingdoms of northern Nigeria surrendered to forces, led by a handful of white men, far smaller than their own. By 1914 Europeans ruled all of Africa, bar Liberia, the state founded by America for its ex-slaves, and Abyssinia (Ethiopia), an ancient kingdom which had fought off the Italians in 1896. Posing as parents to Africans, Europeans counted them, taxed them and ordered their communities into tribesor, where true tribes did not exist, invented them. Meanwhile, the best

Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon

land was taken for plantations, and the minerals dug out and shipped off to be processed in Europe (a division of labourand, inversely, of profitswhich, except in South Africa, largely continues today). The storehouse was steadily exploited, but Africans saw little of its wealth. Yet not all was oppression, nor plunder. King Leopold's arm-choppers were no improvement on the past; Christian missionaries mostly were. Europeans brought schools and hospitals; and order, and the start of modern administration, on which independent states would later be built. Not late enough, thought many colonial administrators. The European occupation of black Africa was short-livedbarely a generation in some areas. After the second world war (in which many Africans died fighting for the Allies), America wanted an end to European imperialism, and African leaders, often socialist and aided by the Soviet Union, wanted self-rule. In Algeria, Kenya and Rhodesia, white settlers tried to keep power by force, but in time lost support from home. White South Africansfar more numerous and longer in placeheld out into the 1990s, but, facing unrest and outside pressure, had to give up. It is too soon to draw up a balance-sheet of colonialism. Perhaps the Africans' worst loss was not of land or power but self-respect, as the newcomers taught them that their ways, cultures and gods were inferior and should be abandoned. The alien religion put in their place often caught on; but the Europeans kept their version of politics, which arguably was indeed superior, for use at home, merely chucking Africa a few tattered pretences at it as they lowered the flag. Africa was left both psychologically and politically impoverished. Much of it still is so. The result today is a continent of states stranded between its old ways and modernity. African rulers grabbed the European-style institutions bequeathed to them, but nearly everywhere ran them into the ground, without creating new ones based on African traditions and values. Whose fault was it? In 1998, on the 100th anniversary of the battle of Omdurman, the British ambassador to Sudan was asked if he planned to apologise to his hosts for that butchery of their Mahdist forefathers resisting invasion. Why not? he said, as long as we also apologise for the roads, hospitals, schools and university; indeed for creating a country called Sudan.

Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon

21st-Century Slaves: How Corporations Exploit Prison Labor

July 21, 2011| Rania Khalek, AlterNet

In the eyes of the corporation, inmate labor is a brilliant strategy in the eternal quest to maximize prot.

There is one group of American workers so disenfranchised that corporations are able to get away with paying them wages that rival those of third-world sweatshops.These laborers have been legally stripped of their political, economic and social rights and ultimately relegated to second-class citizens.They are banned from unionizing, violently silenced from speaking out and forced to work for little to no wages.This marginalization renders them practically invisible, as they are kept hidden from society with no available recourse to improve their circumstances or change their plight. They are the 2.3 million American prisoners locked behind bars where we cannot see or hear them.And they are modern-day slaves of the 21stcentury. Incarceration Nation Its no secret that America imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in history.With just 5 percent of the worlds population, the US currently holds25 percent of the world's prisoners."In 2008, over 2.3 million Americans were in prison or jail, with one of every 48 working-age men behind bars," according to astudyby theCenter for Economic and Policy Research(CEPR).That doesnt include the tens of thousands of detained undocumented immigrants facing deportation, prisoners awaiting sentencing, or juveniles caught up in the school-to-prison pipeline.Perhaps its reassuring to some that the US still holds the number one title in at least one arena, but needless to say the hyper-incarceration plaguing America has had a damaging effect on society at large. The CEPRstudyobserves thatUS prison rates are not just excessive in comparison to the rest of the world, they are also "substantially higher than our own longstanding history."The study nds that incarceration rates between 1880 and 1970 ranged from about "100 to 200 prisoners per 100,000 people."After 1980, the inmate population "began to grow much more rapidly than 7

Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon the overall population and the rate climbed from "about 220 in 1980 to 458 in 1990, 683 in 2000, and 753 in 2008." The costs of this incarceration industry are far from evenly distributed, with the impact ofexcessive incarceration falling predominantly on African-American communities.Although black people make up just 13 percent of the overall population, they account for40 percentof US prisoners.According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics(BJS), black males are incarcerated at a rate "more than 6.5 times that of white males and 2.5 that of Hispanic males and "black females are incarcerated at approximately three times the rate of white females and twice that of Hispanic females." Michelle Alexander points out in her bookThe New Jim Crowthat moreblack men"are in prison or jail, on probation or on parole than were enslaved in 1850." Higher rates of black drug arrests do not reect higher rates of black drug offenses. In fact, whites and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales at roughly comparable rates. Incentivizing Incarceration Clearly, the US prison system is riddled with racism and classism, but it gets worse.As it turns out, private companies have a cheap, easy labor market, and it isnt in China, Indonesia, Haiti, or Mexico.Its right here in the land of the free, where large corporations increasingly employ prisoners as a source of cheap and sometimes free labor. In the eyes of the corporation, inmate labor is a brilliant strategy in the eternal quest to maximize prot.By dipping into the prison labor pool, companies have their pick of workers who are not only cheap but easily controlled.Companies are free to avoid providing benets like health insurance or sick days, while simultaneously paying little to no wages.They dont need to worry about unions or demands for vacation time or raises.Inmatesworkfull-time and are never late or absent because of family problems. Extending the Discussion: How do you think corporations justify this type of exploitation? Recall the discourse described in both The Scramble for Africa and The Corporation.

Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon

Redesigning the Global Economy

New Internationalist, 320 (2000). Grab your mortar and trowel! Wayne Ellwood reckons the time is right to bend our backs and rebuild the nancial system so that it benets us all, not just a narrow elite. From where I'm standing right now, smack in the middle of the Canadian prairies, people may not be able to put their nger on the global nancial system as the source of their diculties. But they sure know something is wrong. Here in Saskatchewan, the most agricultural of Canadian provinces and the heartland of the country's vaunted wheat lands, it's not been a good year. Too much rain in the Southeast. Too dry in the Southwest. And the price of grain has been drifting down all summer. Today, on the road from Yellow Grass to Weyburn, local farmers are out in force protesting the perilous state of farm incomes and the decline of their once-vibrant rural communities. Frustrated tourists in camper vans and townspeople in sedans and station wagons creep along behind a convoy of farmers in tractors. 4x4s, grain haulers and pickup trucks. The queue of vehicles stretches back for several kilometres in the burning prairie sun. These farmers are angry. The leaet that they're handing out as the trac slows to a halt sets out the cause of their upset. 'The reason we're slowing down trac today is to bring to the attention of the Government and the public that the family farm is disappearing. We're in danger of losing our farms because we are not realizing enough out of crops to cover the costs of producing these commodities.' The leaet continues: 'In the past number of years shipping costs and input costs have increased dramatically while the prices of our products have been steadily dropping.' In fact, net farm incomes in Saskatchewan plummeted by over 40 per cent in 1998 and are still falling. Last year the price of canola (the oil-seed grain sometimes called rapeseed) was so low a grower would have had to produce 25-per-cent above average yields just to break even. In the face of this squeeze farmers have few options. Thousands simply throw in the towel: rows of combine harvesters, seeders and tractors sit in abandoned farm yards where they await the auctioneer's gavel. Other farmers, those with more guile or luck, take another tack. Instead of getting out, they get bigger -- in an attempt to lower unit costs and make the economics of farming work in their favour. Even those who work 2,000 hectares or more live modestly. Most of their capital is tied up in land and machinery and there's precious little left after the bills are paid.

Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon Still, thousands of the province's farmers leave the land every year. The results of the rural exodus are startlingly visible across the countryside. Short-line railways have been abandoned. Hundreds of the distinctive brightly coloured grain elevators which once dotted the countryside have been demolished. Small communities are decaying as schools and shops close. A way of life is dying. This is the human face of industrial agriculture and it's a pattern which will worsen dramatically if the global economic system continues on its current course. Free trade in farm products -- what the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the sanitized language of bureaucracy calls the 'fair and market-oriented agriculture trading system' -- is one of the main goals of the WTO. If that goal is reached, if countries are forced to remove all protection for their domestic food producers, this would be an immense catastrophe. It would change irrevocably the ability of the global community to feed itself and of individual nations to control their own food security. Small-farm experts like Peter Rossett warn that economic globalization is 'the single gravest threat faced today by the world's peoples and ecologies'. Rossett, of the California- based Institute for Food and Development Policy, says that further 'liberalization' of trade in agricultural products will mean 'greater freedom for the big to drive out the small'. He adds that it will force people everywhere to depend on distant global markets with unpredictable price swings for their daily meals. This would prompt another mass exodus from rural areas, further the growth of cities and 'could lead to the nal triumph of inecient and ecologically destructive monocultures over ecologically rational and sustainable farming practices'.[1] Free-trade advocates ground their faith in the notion of economic eciency. Success is measured not by healthy, living communities but by protability: money supersedes all else. In the case of farming, subsidized grain from the US and the European Community is dumped on Third World countries, destroying internal markets for local foodstus and favouring the expansion of export crops like palm oil or pineapples. In today's global market, competition means keeping costs low, and the easiest costs to control are wages. Open markets in farm products, as in shoes or computers, pit farmers and workers in dierent countries against each other in what globalization critics call 'a race to the bottom'. We may end up with cheap bananas or a bargain-basement microwave. But at what price for society as a whole? Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) smashed trade barriers between Canada, the US and Mexico the US has lost more than 250,000 jobs and it is estimated that Mexico has lost more than two million. Meanwhile, in Canada more than 100,000 public-sector jobs have been cut since 1994 and wages for those who still have them have been frozen for nearly a decade. All to please big investors who demand 'scal prudence' from governments -- ie balance your budgets no matter what the cost, unless you want the rug pulled out from under your currency. 10

Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon This ratcheting down of standards is all in aid of 'comparative advantage' in the marketplace. Slash education and healthcare spending? Pollute the air, water and land? Sell o state-owned enterprises? Merge corporations and cut jobs? It's all to the good as long as it's 'economically ecient'. Many would argue that this is the central principle on which the current economic model of 'neo-liberalism' is based. Neo-liberalism adds a new twist to the old liberal faith in free trade of goods and services -- an uninching, dogmatic belief in the rights of private capital. It is a system with a Western (and particularly a US) world view which puts economic values and goals rst and social goals a distant second. It calls for a world prised open to the free movement of both goods and capital, though not labour. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the WTO and the World Bank are the institutions which manage and enforce the laws of neo-liberalism. These three function as an unelected world state accountable to no-one except the bond traders in London and Tokyo and the mega- corporations that are the major beneciaries of the emerging global system and whose resources dwarf those of most nation-states. Maybe Karl Marx was right after all when he said 'modern state power is merely the executive committee charged with managing the aairs of the bourgeoisie'. The system wasn't meant to function that way. The roles of the IMF, the WTO (formerly GATT, or the General Agreement on Taris and Trade) and the World Bank have changed radically since they were rst dreamed up at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in July 1944. As World War Two drew to a close, 44 nations met in the New England resort village to erect a new framework for the post-war global economy. The economic frenzy of the 1920s had spiralled into worldwide depression in the 1930s and led to the collapse of an international exchange system based oil the gold standard. The aim of the Bretton Woods conference was to build a stable, co-operative international monetary system which would promote national sovereignty and prevent future nancial crises. The main proposal was for a system of xed exchange rates -- oating rates were seen as inherently unstable and destructive of national development plans. The three global institutions which emerged from the conference each had a distinct role (see The Bretton Woods Trio, right). But none of them had the authority which they have since arrogated to themselves. Their key job was to sort out temporary balance-of- payments problems; they had no control over the economic decisions of particular countries nor could they intervene in national policy. The original Bretton Woods agreements specically sought to limit the movement of nance capital and contain it within national borders. Britain's delegate, John Maynard Keynes, was especially adamant about this. 'Nothing is more certain,' he wrote, 'than that the movement of capital funds must be regulated.' 11

Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon Otherwise the money would 'shift with the speed of a magic carpet and these movements would have the eect of disorganizing all steady business'. So Article VI of the IMF Articles of Agreement allows members 'to exercise such controls as are necessary to regulate international capital movements'. It was not to be. Sparked by the radical right-wing policies of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US, free trade found a new audience and restraints on global investment were slowly unbuckled. With London and Wall Street leading the way, deregulation and the computer revolution combined to transform banking, nance and investment. The Bretton Woods institutions, essentially controlled by the G7 group of rich nations, were pulled into this frenzied rush to free markets, spreading strictly enforced structural-adjustment programmes across the Third World. And what is structural adjustment but neo-liberalism with a dierent name, another way to shift wealth into the pockets of the already well-o? The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has meticulously documented the transfer of wealth from wages to prots in dozens of countries over the past two decades. And not only in the South. Even in the US real wages (adjusted for ination) have fallen and income equality has worsened since the Bretton Woods agreements fell apart. The top one per cent of Americans have doubled their share of the national wealth since the mid-1970s and now control 40 per cent of the total. The result is that national governments, both North and South, have become subordinate to the dictates of supra-national organizations with apparently limitless power. As the Harvard economist Jerey Sachs has stated, the IMF now dictates economic policy for 1.4 billion people or nearly 60 per cent of the developing world outside China and India which are not under its programmes.[2] True believers in the neo-liberal agenda would prefer a pliable nation-state, one which supports them when it's necessary and stands aside the rest of the time. 'National governments can't be trusted to be either rational or ecient,' they crow. Never mind that we're talking here about all national governments, including those that are democratically elected. The thoughts of an employee of the Lehman Bros investment rm after the downfall of the Social Democratic Government in Sweden a few years back are instructive. 'The international nancial markets,' he quipped, 'are on a religious crusade to roll back social democracy.'[3] And not just social democracy. What is being challenged fundamentally is the ability of national governments to implement economic policy in the interests of their citizens. In this sense neo-liberalism is as great a threat to democracy and national sovereignty as we've seen this past century. Nevertheless, there are signs that what is sometimes called the 'Washington consensus' is beginning to wear thin. Distinct cracks have emerged in the neo-liberal facade since the catastrophic economic meltdown in Asia two years ago and the subsequent crises in 12

Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon Russia, Brazil and parts of Latin America. More than 20 million people are estimated to have lost their jobs since the crisis rst erupted. Social unrest and anger has been growing. In Indonesia it led to the downfall of the Suharto dictatorship. In Brazil thousands have protested against IMF-imposed spending cuts. Even G7 leaders like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton have made soothing noises about 'taming speculators' and rebuilding the 'global nancial architecture'. But, more importantly, the crisis has invigorated a worldwide citizens' movement whose insistent calls for change are attracting increasing numbers of supporters. And those in power are taking note. US Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky recently said that 'there is growing distrust' of globalization in both the North and the South. 'The single greatest threat' to the global nancial system, she admitted, is 'the absence of public support'. At New Internationalist we see this as a sign of hope. National governments are either too weak or too compromised in their dealings with the current global nancial order. An international citizens' movement is the only way to convince states to act in the interests of their people. There is now a growing popular movement to redesign the Bretton Woods architecture from the ground up. And that means more than just tinkering with the wiring. Instead, we need a radical rethink that will put humans in control, at the heart of the global economy. The goal should be a new international nancial architecture that will restore the social vision of meaningful employment and human rights. One that will prejudice the local over the global. And one that will restore the ecological health and natural capital of our planet. Tens of thousands of people in dozens of countries around the globe are now working on this project. Many of the ideas found in this issue are rooted in their inspiration and vision in what we feel will become the most critical debate of our time -- at the start of this new millennium.

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Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon

Development as Forced Labour

Lummis, C. Douglas. New Internationalist 324 (2000): 26-28. Democracy: Bulldozing It Several years ago, in a book called Radical Democracy, I wrote that: 'Economic development... is antidemocratic in that it requires kinds, conditions and amounts of labour that people would never choose - and, historically have never chosen - in a state of freedom. Only by giving society one undemocratic structure can people be made to spend the greater part of their lives labouring "eciently" in elds, factories or oces, and handing over the surplus value to capitalists, managers, Communist Party leaders, or technocrats.' A book reviewer for the prestigious journal Foreign Aairs responded tersely that in fact 'the people have been voting with their feet in favour of capitalist prosperity pretty convincingly for some time now'. This is the myth, stated with ne succinctness. Industrial capitalism was freely chosen. How can anyone call it antidemocratic? Of course what most of the people in the world actually got, whatever they may have voted for, was capitalist poverty. But did this voting actually take place, and if so, when? 'For some time now' could mean recent decades or recent centuries. Are we supposed to believe that, at the beginning of the industrial revolution in England, the farmers who trudged into the cities to become the rst generations of industrial wage workers were voting retroactively with their feet in favour of having been driven o their land by enclosure? Are we supposed to believe that the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America voted in favour of being colonized? Perhaps the reviewer is thinking of the era following World War Two, when colonialism and imperialism gave way to an allegedly more benign policy of 'the development of underdeveloped countries'. For while few have claimed that colonialism had the consent of the colonized, part of the ideology of development implies such consent. Without it, how could development - which means the restructuring of societies such that they will sustain the industrial capitalist mode of production - support its claim to be dierent? When Harry Truman in 1949 announced his 'bold new program' for 'the development of underdeveloped areas', he was launching the most massive sustained assault on both nature and culture that history has ever known. At the same time he was launching a massive paradigm shift in political economy. Before his announcement, 'modernization' did not exist as a technical term in the social sciences and the only thing that could be 'underdeveloped' was camera lm. After his announcement the world was covered with under- developed countries in which development and modernization were either taking place or just about to. 14

Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon The ideological power of the concepts of 'modernization' and 'development' comes from their use of retroactive teleology. Put bluntly, this means redening something so that what you are about to do to it appears as its predetermined destiny. For example, we call a certain kind of stone 'iron ore', which means that if we crush it to powder and subject it to intense heat, it will yield iron. It wasn't 'ore' until this technology was discovered. But once we have the technology, we redene the stone such that extracting iron from it is seen as the actualization of its latent potential, its fated end, its telos. Not only that: the dictionary denes 'ore' as 'native metal from which precious or useful metal may be protably extracted' (Oxford English Dictionary; emphasis added). Even the market system is retroactively implanted into our denition of this natural object: when the market value drops, what was ore today may be stone tomorrow. 'Underdeveloped society' is a word like 'ore'. It is a redenition made possible by the fact that the leaders in the industrial capitalist countries believe they have the power and the technology to smash such a society, melt it down and remold it on the industrial capitalist model. At the same time, the word gives the impression that to do this is to fulll that society's predetermined destiny. This conceals the violently antidemocratic nature of development. In the heady rst years after Truman's speech, the new modernization/development ideologues propagated the myth that the chief motivating force behind development would be 'the revolution of rising expectations' brought about by the 'demonstration eect' of industrial capitalist life. Merely being exposed to this way of life - whether through pictures in magazines, or movies, or stories you got from your cousin who scrubs oors at the local Hilton - would cause the scales to fall from your eyes, after which you would drop everything (culture, tradition, values, whatever) to have it. But at the very time the ideologues were popularizing this myth, they knew well that it wasn't really happening. In 1963, in his Communications and Political Development, Lucian Pye wrote: 'It is no longer possible to assume that people in traditional societies will readily experience a revolution of rising expectations simply by being exposed to the prospect of new standards of material life... Instead of having to cope with an agitated population carried away with exaggerated expectations, most governments in transitional societies are confronted with the problem of a disturbingly apathetic public which is inured to all appeals for action.' Merely renaming the stones 'ore' did not, it seems, cause them to disintegrate into powder and leap into the furnace on their own. But this did not cause the developmentalists to abandon the revolution of rising expectations. The myth persists to this day. There is a doublethink here. What matters is not what people actually want but what they are theoretically bound to want. Underdevelopment is to development what

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Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon the acorn is to the oak. Development is what the acorns want by their very nature, and if they aren't aware of that, well, they'll nd out soon enough. Developmentalists engage in a similar kind of doublethink with regard to the history of colonialism and imperialism. These unfortunate things happened, as Marion Levy argued in his Modernization and the Structure of Societies, but they weren't essential to the inevitable process of modernity overcoming tradition. To focus on imperialism can only be a distraction, since 'the morals of imperialists are essentially irrelevant to the problems faced by members of relatively non-modernized societies in contact with modernization'. Of course, this won't do. What happened in colonial and imperial times is not peripheral to the story of economic development - it is the rst chapter in that story. In the 1933 International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, written before the shift to the development paradigm, there is an entry which discusses forced labor in the modern world. In most tropical areas the 'white man' is unable or unwilling to perform manual labor and enterprise must rely either upon the local population or upon imported coolie labor. Since the material wants of primitive peoples are few and they are unfamiliar with a money economy and unaccustomed to arduous and continuous toil, they are usually unwilling to work for European entrepreneurs. Out of this conict between native indierence and the desires of governments and industrialists, forced labor arose. Many of the chief tropical railways and roads have been constructed by forced labor. Indeed, it is doubtful whether the tropics could have been held and developed without it. Forced labor, the author continues, is still - ie in the 1930s -practised in all of Central Africa, French Algeria and Indo-China, British India, Dutch East Indies, Belgian Congo, British East Africa, Madagascar and French West Africa, Liberia, Portuguese West Africa, Dutch Java. The author goes on to describe some of the actual consequences. When the 'native' is suddenly and forcibly thrown into contact with industrial civilization their psychological resistance to diseases such as tuberculosis is lowered. Because of the compulsory methods used in the construction of the Congo-Ocean railway in French Equatorial Africa and a lack of adequate precautions, 17,000 native workers engaged on the enterprise died between 1925 and 1929. The author then summarizes the justication colonialists oer for using forced labor, an argument in which we can see the postwar ideology of development in its embryonic form: 'Many businessmen [sic] and some colonial ocials... defended forced labor for private enterprises on the ground that primitive peoples will not progress until they learn to work and that the wealth of the tropics cannot be exploited for the outside world unless forced labour is employed.' Still, in most colonies direct forced labor was used only for public works and not by private enterprise. In some colonies, however - for example, parts of British South and East Africa - indigenous people, having been deprived of land adequate enough for 16

Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon independent economic existence, were literally compelled to labor for European mine or plantation owners. They may also have been indirectly subjected to heavy cash taxes which they could not pay except out of wages. Here we nd the rst generation of 'underdeveloped' people 'voting with their feet' for the life of the industrial wage earner. When you are driven o the land by new laws of private ownership, or when the forest from which you draw your livelihood is cut down and replaced by a plantation, there may be nothing for it but to trudge down the road to the owner's house and ask for a job. And remember, this process - the transformation of the natural, social and legal environment such that wage work becomes the only choice - is not something that disappeared when colonialism was replaced by development. This is development. In the 1968 revised edition of The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences the entry 'Forced Labor' has disappeared. It is hardly ever mentioned in any work on economic development. Industrial capitalism is a system of rule; it rules people by gaining control over their means of subsistence. Economic development is the extension of this system of rule to every corner of the globe. In the age of colonialism this required direct forced labor. In the age of development it is done by means of indirect forced labor, supplemented by the political power of the Development Dictatorship. In the age of globalization the process seems to be nearing completion: industrial capitalism is now claiming to be The Only Game in Town. In this situation, to look at the long column of development refugees trudging down the road from the blasted countryside into the slums of the cities in search of jobs, and to say these people are 'voting with their feet for capitalist prosperity', is to make a bad joke. Isn't a plebiscite where there is just one candidate supposed to be a symbol of tyranny? But of course this is not really the only game in town, nor the only set of rules. In recent decades people's movements all over the world have deed 'economic common sense' to block development projects that threaten their subsistence. The search for an alternative economic logic - or non-economic logic - is something that no longer takes place only in books. The Zapatista chant - 'the First World ? Ha, ha, ha!' promises to echo deep into the 21st century. The real election of the feet - the long march to a democratized economy - is yet in the future.

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Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon

Resource Wars: theFacts

The New Internationalist, 367
Sven Tornn / Panos / www.panos.co.uk

War

During the 1990s 5 million people around the world are estimated to have been killed in con<licts; 6 million <led to neighbouring countries and a further 11-15 million were internally displaced.1 In Africa, economic losses due to war are approximately $15 billion per year.2 However, since 1990 the world has been signi<icantly safer from con<licts between nations; the risk of such con<licts was only half as great during the 1990s as during the Cold War.3 Between 1989-2001 there have been 115 armed con<licts around the world, 108 of which were civil con<licts. The most serious of these have been in Africa.4

Loot

States dependent on primary resource exports are over 20 times more likely to suffer a civil war than non-dependent countries.5 The more that states rely on exporting raw materials, the worse their standard of living is likely to be. The greater a countrys level of mineral dependence, the lower its ranking in the Human Development Index between 1991-98.6 The more that states rely on mineral exports, the smaller the share of income that accrues to the poorest 20% of the population.6 Countries highly dependent on oil and mineral exports are more vulnerable to economic shocks as prices have grown more volatile since 1970.6

Poverty and resource-dependence: the links6

This table indicates statistically signi<icant links between poor development indicators and countries reliance on mineral and oil exports (controlling for the in<luence of per capita GDP).

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Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon

Resource dependence reduces economic growth:

Estimated revenue from conict resources, selected cases1

Combatant Resource Period Estimated revenue UNITA (Angola) diamonds 1992-2001 $4,000 million total RUF (Sierra Leone) diamonds 1990s $25 - 125 million/year Charles Taylor (Liberia) timber Late 1990s $100 - 187 million/year Government of Sudan oil Since 1999 $400 million/year Government of Rwanda coltan 1999-2000 $250 million total

Forgotten wars
Tens of millions of people are threatened by con<lict and violence, but response to their needs is led by political expediency. Focus on the war on terror has exacerbated the neglect of ongoing humanitarian crises while wealthy countries are reluctant to commit troops to UN peacekeeping.7

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Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon

Small but deadly

The real weapons of mass destruction. 90% of civilian casualties are caused by small arms. Around the world one person every minute is killed with conventional weapons. In that same minute, 15 new arms are manufactured for sale.2 The ;irearm stockpile for sub- Saharan Africa (44 countries) is estimated at less than 30 million <irearms.3 Deadly trade. Despite the relatively small size of the arms market, the prevalence of weak and non-existent states, rebel 20

Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon movements and endemic civil violence make the sub-Saharan African gun trade deadly.3 Smuggling. Illicit and smuggled weapons may rival the number of legal weapons in sub- Saharan Africa.3 It is estimated that 80-90% of illegal small arms start off in the legal trade.2 The illegal trade in small arms could be worth up to $10 billion per year.3 Small arms. Most small arms sold to sub-Saharan Africa appear to be cheap, second-hand weapons from sources that are dif<icult to trace, mostly originating in Central and Eastern Europe or in Asia. Russia is a major supplier of small arms to African countries.3 The big exporters. The worlds most powerful countries are also the worlds biggest arms suppliers. France, Russia, China, Britain and the US together account for 88% of the worlds conventional arms exports. In the last four years the US, Britain and France earned more income from arms exports to Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America than they provided in aid.2Military spending in sub-Saharan Africa averages $9.8 billion; in 2001 Angola spent 3.1% of GDPon the military compared with 2.7% on education; Sierra Leone spends 3.6% of GDP on the military and 1% on education.10

Human cost

Since the end of the Cold War, 90% of those killed in con<lict have been non-combatants, compared with 15% at the beginning of the century.11 Children account for at least half of all civilian casualties.10 Beyond its direct cost in human lives, con<lict can undermine economies, destabilize governments, damage infrastructure, disrupt social service delivery and provoke mass movements of people.10 Forced migration: according to the UNHCR, armed con<lict is now the driving force behind most refugee <lows as people are forced to <lee their homes. There are some 13 million refugees and asylum-seekers worldwide Africa is host to a quarter of them.12 More than 14 million people face hunger due to present or recent con<licts globally.10 Today, as many as 300,000 children under 18 serve in government forces or armed rebel groups, some as young as eight years old.2 In some militaries of sub- Saharan Africa more than half the soldiers are HIV-positive.1
Sven Tornn / Panos / www.panos.co.uk

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Global Geography 12, R. Wheadon

1. 2. Michael Renner, The Anatomy of Resource Wars, Worldwatch Institute 2002 Control Arms campaign media brie<ing, Key facts and <igures, http://www.controlarms.org 9 October 2003 3. Small Arms Survey 2002, 2003, Oxford University Press 4. Michael Ross, Natural Resources and Civil War, University of California 2002 5. Paul Collier, Economic Causes of Civil Con<lict and their Implications for Policy, World Bank, 15 June 2000 6. Michael Ross, Extractive Industries and the Poor, Oxfam America 2001 7. Beyond the Headlines: an agenda to protect civilians in neglected con<licts, Oxfam International 2003 8. United Nations Peacekeeping Operations Monthly Summary of Contributors (military observers, civilian police and troops) as of 31 January 2004. 9. Forgotten Wars: Coverage of wars and con<licts in Africa in International TV News programmes, Agenda Setting Newsletter, http://www.agendasetting.com 2003 10. UNDP Human Development Report 2003, Oxford University Press 11. Saferworld (2003) Cost of ConElict, http://www.saferworld.co.uk/media/stats.htm 12. World Refugee Survey 2003

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