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The Erosion of Rural Life by Louis Proyect 22 May 2002 21:30 UTC |
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(This is an excerpt from a very important article that unfortunately is not online. I urge one and all to track down the print journal and read it in its entirety.) Race and Class, May, 2002 The Soul Of Man Under Globalism By Jeremy Seabrook [Jeremy Seabrook is the author of, among other books, In the Cities of the South (Verso, 1996) and Freedom Unfinished: fundamentalism and popular resistance in Bangladesh today (Zed, 2001). His Globalisation and Local Cultures will be published by Zed later this year.] There are many macro-economic accounts of globalisation, but we rarely learn how it affects the psyche and sensibility of lives uprooted and radically reshaped by the penetration of their world by the market economy. This essay is an attempt to convey the common subjective experience of people all over the world as they enter the global market. It shows how, once they do so, the path they will follow is predictable. The market generates immediate and obvious benefits, while longer-term losses are deferred. The freedoms bestowed by the market obscure the forfeit of deeper liberties. The people of the South may pursue the western way of wealth, but the possibility that everyone in the world will attain the same degree of affluence is remote, for at least two reasons. One, that the accumulation of wealth is attended by growing inequality and, two, that the transformation of the planet required to bring this about probably exceeds its capacity to bear it. In many parts of the world, people are still entering the market economy for the first time or, at least, are coming into more direct contact with its compulsions. For some, this is no longer a consequence of migration from farms and villages to urban areas. The market economy thrusts itself into their lives, whether they want it or not. Sometimes it happens violently, as when the natural resources of traditional cultures - forest-dwellers or slash-and-burn cultivators - are enclosed and taken for an omnivorous market. For others, it takes place by stealth, as has occurred with millions of subsistence fanners through the industrialisation of agriculture. The Green Revolution, with its hybrid high-yielding seeds, and the chemical fertilisers and pesticides these required, created hybrid societies, neither truly rural nor urban, as an ancient peasant psyche collided with an invasive industrialism. The erosion of rural life all over the planet, and the movement to cities has been a matter of dispute since the time of early industrialism in Britain. There has been continuous, and unresolved, argument over how far industrialisation raised the living standards of the people, particularly of the generations who were the first to experience it. E. P. Thompson pointed out, in his Making of the English Working Class, that the early nineteenth century saw the final abandonment of the values of an older moral economy - the notion of the 'just price' fell into decay, as did the idea of a wage determined by social or moral sanctions as opposed to the operation of free market forces. Thompson asserts that, even if it can be statistically proved that the real income of industrial workers rose between 1790 and 1840, they may still have felt the non-economic losses - the uprootings and migrations, the impersonality of industrial relationships, the hostile environment of raw city slums - were more important; indeed, so traumatic that they could scarcely be compensated for by any rise in wages. This argument is important, for it recurs in the contemporary world, although in a slightly different form. The question of the one-way movement of people from country to city has been framed in the context of the attraction of the city, its job opportunities and 'bright lights', against the declining power of poor farmers and the degradation of rural life. The seductions of the town are invoked to 'prove' the revulsion against traditional country life and custom of the young, who cannot wait to leave home and take up residence in the nearest city slum. That this is happening, and at an accelerating rate, is undeniable. But how decisions to depart are arrived at is more complicated than any sudden revelation of the wonders of city life. In the slums of Dhaka, Mumbai and Jakarta, most people say they prefer life in the city for the simple reason that, in the city, they do not go hungry. If they had been assured of sufficiency in the village, they would never have thought of leaving. As for the brightness of lights, country people are rarely so foolish as to believe that these are likely to provide them with sustenance. They leave a ruined subsistence for the sake of survival. Of course, since the time of early industrialism, the iconography of wealth and the technology which diffuses it worldwide, have advanced spectacularly. The festive logos of transnational fizzing over the polluted night skies of the world's megacities serve as material evidence of the lure of the towns. But this gaudy attraction only masks less visible pressures on the life of the countryside - the cheating of farmers by middlemen, the pressures of declining productivity and falling income, the degradation of village life. Since farmers must bring their crop to market as soon as it is harvested, they have no option but to sell when the price is at its lowest; whereas those with warehouses and godowns can afford to wait until prices rise before they release goods on to the market. FROM THE COUNTRY Once in the town, it is always possible to find work. In Barisal, an overblown country town of about 400,000 people in the south of Bangladesh, thousands of former farmers have found employment, renting and driving cycle-rickshaws. They can be seen, waiting on every pot-holed street-corner, at the bus stand, close to the river terminal, standing in rain and sun along the main roads. The vehicles, with their coloured plastic canopies and painted panels, are curiously dainty, even picturesque, objects. Yet each delicate carriage represents measureless pain; the experience of lost land and ruined livelihood. No one would take up such arduous and uncertain labour if there were an alternative. The stringy bodies of the drivers, many of them young men prematurely used up with work, speak of demands on human energy with which no one can keep pace. Indeed, the dispossessed come to resemble the land they have forfeited: they cannot maintain their energy any more than they could keep up with the fertiliser and pesticides for the earth they tended. Land was lost because a dowry had to be found for the marriage of a sister or daughter. Land was lost because the rich took advantage of the illiteracy of the owners to cheat them of it. Land was lost because it was mortgaged at a time of sickness. Land was lost because it had to be divided between too many heirs. Land was lost because it became waterlogged, saline or unproductive as a result of developmental projects nearby. Land was lost because money was required to pay an agent for a job in the Gulf. Land was lost for the sake of the children's education - that wager that sets continuous harvests against the regular income from secure employment in government or private service. But there is always a job in the town. Labour is always required to push carts, to break bricks, in transport, on construction sites, as guards and security personnel in private houses or places of employment, to sell fruit and vegetables, to offer roses to transients in five-star hotels. Women and children can work as domestic labour or at brick-breaking, or make festival decorations or paper bags at home. Women are needed to service hungry male exiles, a peacock-blue cloth spread on a wooden bed in a dim windowless room. If that fails, work can be created - credit for a handful of overripe bananas, a tray of combs, some chewing gum or cigarettes; selling newspapers at the traffic lights, plastic goods, toys; mending cycles, umbrellas, shoes; in small workshops making metal goods, repairing engines and machines. Boys crouch over ornamental grilles in a fountain of blue and gold sparks on the sidewalk. Children collect and sell firewood, plastic, cloth; they can carry bags at bus stands and railway stations. They recycle all kinds of garbage in cities in which nothing is wasted but their own skinny bodies. But there is always the promise of a daily income. And those too frail or too weak for work, beg. Even the grudging streets are not empty of compassion. The men with features or hands worn away by leprosy, the elderly women sent to beg in the park to augment the family income, the young woman whose body is a torso on a wheeled platform, and who propels herself by chappals which she wears on her hands, the mothers with their crumpled babies in grubby bonnets on the river terminal, the disabled children abandoned at the bus station, are usually fed by stallholders or by passing strangers who throw coins on to the jute sack spread on the pavement. There is always something to sustain those at the edge of destitution. The freedoms bestowed by the market economy are tangible. But they depend upon a continuously rising disposable income which enables people to keep pace with the necessary goods and services enclosed and commoditised within it. If the market frees people from the anxieties of traditional subsistence and ancient arts of eking out a living, the maintenance of that freedom requires uninterrupted economic growth. And, as we have seen in our time, this necessity for growth may subvert some of the very freedoms for which the market is celebrated: the consequences of economic 'success' involve serious social and environmental costs which confront the 'advanced' economies at every turn. If the intangibles of well-being which E. P. Thompson spoke about in the early industrial period were subsequently allowed to lapse, these issues have been raised again in our time, in the form of the social and human costs elided in the years of economic euphoria. In the early stages of entering the market economy, the gains are usually clear and seem significantly to outweigh any losses. It is the objective of the managers of the global economy to play down the latter; indeed, by ingenious accounting-systems, to make them invisible. They prefer to dwell only upon the emancipatory power of the market. This is dangerous, as is dependency upon any other fragile ideological construct which risks, at any moment, coming into collision with direct - and discontinuing - experience. When the market economy falters and contracts, whenever it is inflected by technological change, people who lose income become angry and resentful, in ways which they do not in subsistence economies. Of what use is it to curse a spoiled harvest, a late frost that ruins the crop, rains that fail to arrive when the fields are ready for planting? The market, being a human-made artefact, is perceived to be within human control, whereas everyone knows that the vagaries of climate are not susceptible to our will. And what rich possibilities the market economy offers to new migrants to the city, particularly to those who receive, occasionally for the first time in their lives, cash-money (as they call it in Bangladesh) for their labour! With what sense of liberation and wonder do they discover that the money in hand can procure the food, clothing, housing and other necessities of life, when, until this moment, they had laboured under a burning sun, ankle-deep in water in the paddy-fields, constantly scanning the skies for signs of advancing storms and inspecting leaves and stalks for pest or blight. The first thing the city offers is shelter against nature and its unpredictability. Indeed, people feel they are out of reach of its sometimes cruel power. All you have to do is pass over the price of the goods you want to a shopkeeper, and you will receive whatever you ask for. The ease, the absence of effort -market transactions banish what was once our own labour to a distant and unseen elsewhere. To move into the market economy is to pass an invisible frontier into another country, where everything, at first sight, represents clear improvement and progress. What can be easier than buying? Who ever needs instruction in shopping? As the rice cascades into the scales from the worn shiny scoop, the money you have earned gives you permission to forget the effort required for its cultivation. And then, to make clothes at home was always laborious and time-consuming for women, and the end product always appeared rough and improvised. When there are so many cheap and colourful garments in the local market, why waste time stitching and mending shabby home-made things? Indeed, the very words 'home-made', instead of meaning a guarantee of freshness and self-reliance, take on an aura of faint but unmistakable shame. The fabric of the city itself, the sights and sounds, speak of variety and diversity which strike the psyche of peasants and country-people with the shock of a revelation. So much is going on! A rich and simultaneous tumult of activity, of excitement, of energy. They did not realise how poor they were until they saw it made material: what stares at them out of the glittering imagery of the riches of the city and the kaleidoscopic confusion of its streets is a growing awareness of their own impoverishment. It takes some time before the first disadvantages appear and, even then, they do so only at the margins, as minor irritants in the journey of discovery which this epic transhumance of humanity has been. First of all, the money earned, the daily wage, is always insufficient for necessities or, more mystifyingly, for what have become necessities since farm and village were left behind. The actual power of the money you hold always lags behind what it promises. Money in hand always appears substantial; only, when set against prices, it seems to melt away. It dawns upon newcomers that survival within the market imposes different burdens from those demanded by subsistence survival. Of course, many of the skills that came with them from the countryside can be used in the city. The men, who came first, found lodgings in shared rented rooms; three or four from the same village living together in the feral loneliness of a tin-and-bamboo slum house or a crumbling tenement in the old city. When it is time for their families to join them, they want to build their own houses. In the village, wood, bamboo and woven bamboo panels, palm-leaves, clay and cow dung were always available, and houses could be constructed for next to nothing. In the city, each bamboo stave, each rectangle of corrugated metal, every plank of wood, every sheet of polythene and plastic is rigorously costed. What is more, the only places in which people are permitted to build (or, rather, are not prevented from building) are those required for no other purpose. This usually means dangerous terrain - an unhealthy area of marshland susceptible to flooding, beside railway tracks and polluted ponds, on arid rocky land exposed to sun and desiccating summer winds. Drinking water may have to be bought or carried long distances. And even this land belongs either to some government department or to private individuals; or ownership may be disputed, the subject of long court battles. The unsafe site will not, however, prevent slumlords from demanding protection money, or stop unelected gangs from regulating the lives of the people. The police, too, must often be paid, simply to allow residents to remain in peace. Despite all this, new settlements are appearing all the time; if no longer in the central areas of the town, then on the outer edges where amenities are non-existent and from where transport to places of work is costly and slow. But still they persevere and, one day, they go to the bus stand to meet their families, with their battered cases and trunks and the few articles they have brought from home, after tearful farewells to mothers and aunts and grandparents whose eyes followed them until the bus had disappeared over the bumpy road, behind the last cluster of trees shading the devastated landscape. And the newcomers look with the same wonder at the soaring buildings, the treeless concrete, the tangled skein of wires above the city streets that carry light and voices through the air; and they fall silent at the recognition that this is now to be home. -- Louis Proyect, lnp3@panix.com on 05/22/2002 Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org
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