>The US ruling class promoted cigarette
>consumption for 400 years. The reason it has taken action lately is not
>because of anti-working class snobbery, but because it is a public health
>hazard.
'Public Health Hazard'. It is utterly naive to think that when governments announce 'public health hazards' they are what they appear to be. Amongst previous public health hazards, announced by the British government and health professionals, for example, sexual promiscuity, masturbation, bicycling (during the great anti-cycling panic of 1898), television, Sony walkmans etc etc. The fact that the government seeks now to penalise smokers is not born of a concern for their health, nor even for the dent in the public purse, but because it relishes the opportunity to dictate behaviour.
>What interests me is the impact of the coffee, tea, tobacco, sugar, coca,
>cocoa and tobacco trade on third-world countries. The plantation system was
>put in place to enrich the mother country at the expense of the subjugated
>colony. The British East India company is the object of my analysis, not
>the vicissitudes of bourgeois society with respect to what is taboo and
>what is not.
But you fall into the characteristic trap of confusing the difference between the capitalist market and the particular industries that it promotes. Capitalism is wholly indifferent to whether it makes money selling opium or bibles, all they are interested in is the bottom line. You fetishise the particular kind of product, reducing the domination of capitalism to 'Coca-cola capitalism' or 'Tobacco-capitalism', substituting a morlistic tut-tutting for a real critique.
>
>Jim, I have the distinct sense that you have gone your entire life without
>reading the sort of literature that Monthly Review puts out on the
>exploitation of the third world, from Eric Williams to Andre Gunder Frank.
>You have an innocence about you when it comes to subjects like Nigerian
>oil, or "development" in the Amazon rainforest that is quite striking for
>someone with your generally impressive erudition. I think it is because the
>reality of what you might find in this literature will shake up your
>notions of a "developing" third world.
It was through the critique of the literature you describe that I first got drawn into a study of Marxism. The Underdevelopment thesis put forward by Frank and Amin in the sixties was a systematic revision of Marxist theory. It re-located the central contradiction in capitalism as between the developed and the underdeveloped world. In itself that was not entirely without reason, but it was a one-sided interpretation. The popularity of this kind of third-worldist literature in the West was due principally to the US left's failure to make any headway in the American working class.
Solidarity work in the interests of winning workers to oppose imperialism is an honourable thing. But the kind of solidarity work that the US (and the British) left was involved in was something else. Increasingly it was a substitute for working with any numbers of US workers. How many left-wing parties gee'd up their young recruits with protests outside embassies, tales of torture in Latin America, endless rounds of talks on repression in faraway places.
The cahracter of such 'solidarity' work gradually changed. No longer was the appeal for solidarity made on the basis of a common interest between those in the third world and those in the first. Instead of solidarity, the activists were playing upon their audiences' guilt. Instead of making common cause, the activists were telling workers in the first world that their greed and indifference was responsible for third world suffering. With that step solidarity had become transformed into its opposite. Working class solidarity gave way to middle class moralising.
These middle class activists moralistically condemned the mass of people for their greed. The underdevelopment theses gave a bogus marxoid justification for that. They argued that the people of the first world *as a whole* were exploiting the third world. This is a misreading of the real situation. American workers produce much more than they consume, and are themselves the victims of exploitation. This much Marx anticipated when he described the difference in the rate of exploitation between advanced and backward countries in Capital (his example, Poland). But this chapter of Marx's work remained closed to the underdevelopment theorists. They were busy condemning the working class of US and Europe for its excessive consumption. No wonder that this was music to the ears of sanctimonious middle class activists whose religious up-bringings predisposed them to look down on the greedy plebs.
Of course it should be said that the underdevelopment and dependency theses were a disaster for the third world, too. The import substitution policies promoted by the underdevelopment theorists were a feeble version of thrid world nationalism that stood little chance against international capital. Writing off the working class of the first world, the underdevelopment theorists saw no option but to support indigenous capital in third world nations. The financial squeeze put on Latin America and Africa in the eighties put paid to dreams of indigenous economic growth. In the nineties, political independence was trashed too as US 'human rights' activists overran Africa and Latin America telling the natives how to 'democratise'.
Not surprisingly these self-same 'human rights' activists are drawn from the third-worldists of the left. For them the lesson they learnt was that US capitalism is largely conflict-free and that repression is a problem located primarily in the third world. Having left the camp of working class solidarity they embraced instead the strategy of attacking third world despots in the name of universal values that turned out to be American prejudices. All over the third world now, such ativists lecture people in destitution that they must not leave the countryside for the towns, that they should not aspire to Western standards of living, but Western values of ecological austerity. -- Jim heartfield