BOOKS
Ecology and capitalism
SUSAN RAM Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis; Verso, London and New York, 2001; pages 464, £20 (hardback).
EVERY age has its prevailing mythology - established, embellished and militantly propagated by the ruling interests of the day. A century ago, upholders of British imperialism could loftily present the Raj in India as an exercise in munificence, an outpo uring of charity unparalleled in human history. Today, the globalising free market is purported, by its extollers, to exert a similarly beneficial impact on needy people the world over: neo-liberalism, untrammelled by state meddling and Luddite oppositio n, will (so the claim runs) bring growth, opportunity, betterment for all.
If imperialism-as-charity today finds few adherents, important elements of the mythology of empire live on. In Britain, the view that colonisation had a 'civilising' impact still persists, and not merely within the older generation. One university studen t this writer encountered recently believed the British had fought the Opium Wars in China in order to stop the opium trade. More insidiously, imperialist ideology shapes general perceptions of the world about us. For people living in advanced cap italist economies, this takes the form of consigning much of the rest of humanity to a 'third world' slough of backwardness that is assumed to be centuries deep. India, China, Brazil, Africa are commonly perceived as historical 'lands of famine' only now stumbling into the modern age. Western colonialism - for all its excesses, its racist attitudes, its cruelties - is still understood as an agent of transformation, stirring the world's backwaters and propelling entire tradition-locked societies into the future. The counterpart view, held by some disillusioned citizens of former colonies, is that 'things were better' in the halcyon days of empire; it would have been much better if the British (or the French, or the German) had never left.
The achievement of Mike Davis, in a new book that is an incendiary fusion of scholarship and moral outrage, is to cut to the quick of capitalist mythology and stand such assumptions on their head. Nothing is more 'modern' and of these times, he reveals, than the emiseration of millions, the transformation of large parts of the world into lands ravaged by hunger, disease and environmental degradation. Far from acting as an agent of progress, globalising world capitalism has functioned as an engine of cat astrophe, generating riches for the few while locking millions into dehumanising, life-threatening poverty. And at specific moments in the recent past, the economic imperatives of the world capitalist system have interacted with cyclical climatic factors to produce killing fields almost beyond our powers of imagination. In particular, three great drought-famines of the late 19th century, triggered by the synchronous weather system known as the El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), but transformed by the imperatives of empire into cataclysmic events with a combined toll of 30 million human lives, deserve to be seen for what they are: not as 'natural' events but as holocausts in which the requirements of global capitalism, interpreted and executed by wilf ul human agents, decreed that millions must perish.
Davis argues that if we are to gain the measure of these events, to fathom the complex interplay of human and natural forces, classical Marxist analysis needs to be extended into, and married with, the evolving new science of ecology. A veteran of the la bour movement in the United States (he worked as a meat-cutter, and a long distance truck driver before becoming a teacher of urban theory), Davis has in a sequence of controversial, assumption-challenging studies explored the explanatory potential of ra dical political ecology. Much of his previous work has focussed on the Californian experience. His Ecology of Fear, an analysis of the ways in which capitalism has turned Los Angeles into a potential disaster zone, provoked outrage among the city' s bourgeois elite for its suggestion that the affluent Malibu suburbs, insanely built in fire traps within a parched landscape characterised by endemic incendiary outbreaks, might best be left to burn.