rough draft Article III of "On Wage Slavery and Notions of Socialism"

“Capitalist patriarchy and religious patriarchy share the following aspects: domination of men with religious or economic power over other humans and the earth; devaluation of women, workers, and other beings; and disconnection from the earth and living cultures and economies.”

- Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy

Article III

It is necessary to establish causes before solutions. Of course, claiming to definitively know either is a dangerous prospect. Nonetheless, it is important to iterate some idea of causality before ever claiming any solution, even in part. Having the latter without the former makes for a futile effort, an exercise in rhetoric more than theory.

John Isbister, in Promises Not Kept, points out the basic fact that "the modern world is what economists sometimes call rational. It is inhabited by people who are constantly trying to do the best they can for themselves, to optimize, to maximize…"  He further explains that "it is based on competition and on the laws of the marketplace that reward success." This is a fairly obvious understanding of not only our modern Consumer Capitalist system but even earlier proto-capitalist models. Still, it is important to look deeper than mere rationality (here, of course, using the loaded socio-political, economic term, without necessarily suggesting that it is indeed rational (by the dictionary definition) to subscribe to capitalism in whatever form. Isbister goes on to suggest that "the modern world is forward-looking committed to growth and improvement.” But, here this approach must differ. To suggest that the modern world, in entirety is forward-looking or committed to growth and improvement is at best a shallow measure. Well, perhaps it is committed to growth, economic growth, capitalist growth. And, perhaps it finds some "improvement" toward which to work, but improvement is an inherently subjective term, and modern consumer capitalism is hardly committed to any improvement except that in the financial ledger.

Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, suggests that the operative belief in Western civilization depends on the notion that "man was born to turn the world into a paradise, but tragically he was born flawed. And, so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidity, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness." This belief that man is flawed is essential not only to Western civilization but all the Abrahamic religions and their offshoots. If we are not inherently flawed, inherently incomplete, then God, in whatever form, has no place in handing down rules by which we should live. If we are not inherently flawed, then we would be capable of living naturally and getting along. The few indigenous peoples of the world that are left are clear demonstrations of ways of life built over centuries, millennia, without the influence of God. But, rather than look to any of them when we find them to discover something old, we sweep them into our culture, allow our modern civilization to devour theirs, subsume it, exploit it, use it not for lessons in life but for resources to push the capitalist agenda. Previously, it was the colonial agenda, before that the imperialist agenda, but all these agendas are of the same cloth, the exploitation of the periphery by the core, falling right in line with World Systems Theory, with Dependency Theory. This also fits the basic Marxist model of capitalism; no man, no nation can profit without someone else losing something. We find ways of pretending the exchange is close to equal, that wages are fair. But, in the end, it is the same thing over and over again, man selling his effort (not his product) toward another man's profit. As Daniel Quinn put it in My Ishmael:

 "What [our] economy is all about: making products in order to get products. Obviously, I'm using the word product in an extended sense, but anyone in a service industry will certainly know what I'm talking about if I refer to his or her product. And for the most part, what people get for their products is money, but money is only one step removed from the products it can buy, and it's the products people want, not the little pieces of paper."

But, what is the point to all of this? One might try to argue that exploitation is natural, that it is part of our genetic makeup. Except, historically, as discussed in Article II, exploitation came after the locking up of the food, after the closing of the commons. The creation of our modern notion of private property, the notion of financial success being the measure of a man--these our recent constructs. Other mammals do not exploit as such. But, according to our modern mythology, "man is by definition a biological exception. Out of all the millions of species, only one is an end product. The world wasn't made to produce frogs or katydids or sharks or grasshoppers. It was made to produce man. Man therefore stands alone, unique and infinitely apart from all the rest" (Daniel Quinn, Ishmael, 104). This anti-Darwinist, Whiggish take on biology puts man on a pedestal, not only allowed but encouraged to control, exploit and conquer the world and all that is in it. Genesis makes it quite explicit, God instructing man on more than one occasion on how he is above the world. And, Western civilization--and, for matter most all cultures we would call "civilized"--has subscribed fully to this idea. And, if there was ever any doubt, in stepped government, in stepped religion to reinforce our place on the pedestal.

Still, there are higher pedestals and lower pedestals, those who are on top, those who are on the bottom, even while all of us are placed above the animals, above nature. Max Weber argued in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:

"The tenets of Protestantism played an instrumental role in (1) legitimating individualistic profit seeking by making it a duty willed by God, (2) justifying capitalist exploitation and work discipline by making conscientious labor a sacred duty, and (3) creating a cultural climate in which poverty was seen as a result of individual failing” (Timothy Lim, Doing Comparative Politics, 107).

This accounts, of course, specifically for American Consumer Capitalism, being fueled and reinforced regularly by the Protestant ethic. But, it can be seen as representative of broader patriarchal, monotheistic notions of modern life. While here this selling of labor may happen in spite of the American dream... because of the American dream, around the world, it is virtually the same idea that drives the same voluntary submission to exploitation. And, it only succeeds as long as those being exploited feel they are choosing their role as worker, that at worst it is a stop gap measure on the way to their own capitalist success.

Herein lies the important distinction between chattel slavery and wage slavery; the chattel slave has no choice while the wage slave has the illusion of choice. Indeed, the wage slave may have choice as far as specific occupation, the choice to apply for only certain positions, to accept or reject only certain positions. But, he does not have the choice to choose not to work at all... unless he is willing to accept the consequences within capitalist society, hunger and homelessness, but not so immediately as to necessarily frighten him directly back into the capitalist system but slow enough, gradually enough, piecemeal so that he is on the road to starvation before he realizes, on the road to homelessness before he realizes, and by the time he has come to these paths, it is likely far too late for him to turn back and accept his "proper" place in our modern capitalist society. And so you get suicide epidemics (like that in India mentioned in Article I) among farmers, whose very livelihood should make it impossible for them to suffer from hunger or want.

Church and State both serve to reinforce the values that hold one inside this system, and in theory both carry the burden of lifting up those who "fall through the cracks" of the system; but what of those who deliberately slip through the system out of protest, conscious or unconscious? What of those who are born already beneath the cracks? And, how shall Church and State lift everyone up when the system itself needs them to be down?

But, Church does not whither out of the way of this process. Instead, the poor are all too often enticed into religion as a supposed solution to their problems. God enters the picture not as cause but as solution. Religion separates man from nature, puts him into a position where exploitation is necessary, even valued, then when he is exploited, he turns again to religion for answers. And, easy answers are provided, notions of the naturally flawed condition of man, notions of original sin, of having to resist nature and instinct to be civilized.

And, the state does not whither out of the way either. Lenin suggested in State and Revolution that "the state will be able to wither away completely when society has realised the rule: ‘From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs’; i.e., when people have become accustomed to observe the fundamental rules of social life, and their labour is so productive, that they voluntarily work according to their ability." The key element here is perhaps the "voluntarily." Just as modern consumer capitalism needs the wage slave to volunteer to be exploited, this new Church-less, State-less system requires also that man act voluntarily. Except, he is not acting toward his own exploitation by others. Lenin goes on to suggest:

"'The narrow horizon of bourgeois rights,’ which compels one to calculate, with the hard heartedness of a Shylock, whether he has not worked half an hour more than another, whether he is not getting less play than another—this narrow horizon will then be left behind. There will then be no need for any exact calculation by society of the quantity of products to be distributed to each of its members; each will take freely ‘according to his needs.’”

Those who readily subscribe the notion that man is inherently flawed find it hard to accept the idea that man will not submit to greed in a socialist or communist system. They find example in Communist Russia, the Soviet Union, neglecting the basic fact that Communist Russia was not communist, and was more totalitarian than socialist. Similar example may be found in modern day China, still politically led by the Communist Party, but increasingly leaning toward capitalist goals to lift itself out of exploitative, even fascist methodology. Just because something calls itself communist does not mean that it is. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but a foul smelling plant, if called a rose, will not then smell sweet. Soviet Russia is all too often cited as the singular failure of communism, of socialism, of Marxism, but the failure was not communism failing to work but in Russia failing to be communist, fueling even in this more honest portrayal the notion that man is flawed, for certainly the leaders of the Communist Party in Soviet Russia were so corrupt as to prove this notion as a rule.

Still, those who subscribe to this notion, those who turn to capitalism as the solution to man's problems—they also suggest merely by their adherence to capitalism that any individual can stand out by working hard. But, this very notion that a single individual can stand out from the crowd suggests that, also, a single corrupt leader—or even dozens or hundreds of them--cannot be presented as proof that a communist system cannot succeed... Really, the very notion of having leaders is antithetical to a communist system. Communism is the economic counterpart to pure democracy, built on the equality of individuals and, rather than man as inherently flawed, a notion more befitting the stereotypical religion (but somehow missing from it), that man is inherently good.

John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration, targets atheists, saying, “those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist." Yet, many an atheist has held to bonds, to oaths. If we require mythical beings and invented divine laws in order to get along, mankind is doomed. For, as long as their are differing religions competing for believers, just as capitalist exploiters compete for resources, there will never be peace. Locke suggests that "the taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all; besides also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion..." The problem here is that Locke finds that last detail to be a fault in our modern civilization. And, of course, so do many. Considering the argumentation and evidence above, taking clear links between Protestantism and Capitalism (as a representative example), it must be concluded that religion, especially in the form of the monotheistic religions we have dominating the globe, influences, justifies, and definitively creates an atmosphere for exploitation, of the world, of resources, of animals, of other human beings.

Still, even Marxists do not reject Capitalism outright. As John Isbister points out in Promises Not Kept, though “Karl Marx and many of his followers argued that imperialism was frequently a progressive force, breaking down rigid social structures and opening societies to capitalist development, which was a necessary step on the road to socialism and prosperity, for most people in the third world, however, it brought oppression and poverty." Unfortunately, however, as already point out above, those most exploited by modern Consumer Capitalism are also quite often the ones most likely to turn to religion, which merely fuels the extension of the system rather than produce any motion toward an exit.

Food as a Weapon in the Third-World War - Losing Food Sovereignty, Enclosing the Commons, and Losing our Way of Life in the Wake of Mother Culture and Her Civilization

In Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, it’s suggested that “any species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion” (1). In that book and its sequel, My Ishmael, Quinn refers to our “locking up the food” after the agricultural revolution. This same act went on to become Vandana Shiva’s “enclosure of the commons.” Essentially, civilization decided that man should not necessarily toil in the fields for his food but should work many varied jobs, fulfill many varied roles, and earn money to pay for his food instead. This results, as we will see, in starvation and poverty and death for those who should be making a living… or perhaps simply subsisting on their farming. This results in “food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries” (2). The market economy “proposes its own expansion as the solution to [this] ecological and social crisis it has engendered” (3); when this new system fails, the obvious solution: more of the same. This is only one aspect of what Quinn calls Mother Culture, a counter to Mother Nature that came with civilization, but it is in our modern age possibly one of the most dangerous. Nations do not simply go on expansionist, Imperialist military campaigns anymore, with overt violence, so the war on the Third-World (hereafter referred to as the Third-World War) is fought instead with neocolonial, globalist policies that bring monocultures and fatal agricultural and political policies. As Shiva puts it, “at a time when a quarter of the world’s population is threatened with starvation due to erosion of soil fertility, water, and genetic diversity, chasing the mirage of unending growth becomes a major source of genocide. Killing people through the destruction of nature is an invisible form of violence which threatens justice, peace, and survival” (4). She goes on to point out how editor and author Claude Alvares calls this destruction the Third-World War, “a war waged in peacetime, without comparison but involving the largest number of deaths and the largest number of soldiers without uniforms” (5). We have taken agriculture, fundamentally built on keeping us alive, responsible for growing the human population of the world almost exponentially, and today we use it to control the world, to control its people, to narrow the focus of power to a handful of corporations at the expense of livelihoods and lives, “those who die in the shadow of capital” (6). While Imperialism brought for the Imperialists “railways and roads, it brought new technology, and for some, it brought educational opportunities, for most people in the third-world, however, it brought oppression and poverty” (7). We control the use of seed and allow nature itself to be patented, we mandate the growing of monocultures at the expense of soil, at the expense of water, and when these things result in poverty and starvation, we ignore the Third-World individuals as long as we in the First-World have wondrous choice in the Grocery Store. Food, or the control of it, is a weapon in this new Third-World War, and Food Sovereignty, taking back the Commons, unlocking the food—that is the only way for the Third-World to have any victory.

The most obvious (lately) way we control the world’s food is not some overt action, like when Serb and Muslim sides in Bosnia would interfere with UN relief efforts to each other (8). Instead, what has become obvious—to those paying attention anyway—started quite subtly; farming gradually drifted into the hands of a small group of agribusinesses, agricultural giants pushed their way into Third-World countries—Dole and Chiquita suing their way into Jamaica’s banana market (9), for example—and some of those corporations, like Monsanto, were allowed to patent life (10), and take not only control but also ownership of seed itself. Daniel Quinn suggests that Mother Culture has taught us that “the world was made for us [so] it belongs to us, and we can do what we damn well please with it” (11). And so, when Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser’s canola crop was contaminated with Monsanto’s Round Up ready canola, it was not Schmeiser who sued the contaminator but the contaminator who sued Schmeiser, for “intellectual property theft” (12). Ultimately, Schmeiser was forced to destroy his stored seed on the chance it might all be contaminated with Monsanto’s. Shiva argues that this “robs us of our human right and human duty to be seed savers” (13). W. R. Grace claimed a patent on the use of the neem tree for controlling pests and diseases in agriculture, something that had been going on in India for over 2000 years. After a decade-long campaign, Shiva and more than 100,000 others involved, got the European Patent Office to revoke the patent (14). While this comes across as a success, the fact that it took a decade, the fact that W. R. Grace—and in other cases, Monsanto and others—could get the patent in the first place is key to understanding the trouble here. Humans managed for a long time without agriculture at all; we hunted and we gathered. Eventually, groups of us became more sedentary and started planting seeds for things we wanted to eat instead of just gathering what was around. And, with the agricultural revolution, we let farming be a specialty for some and we locked up the food, made the rest of us earn it through work. Or, as Shiva describes it—though she seems to be referring specifically to a more recent, more capitalist addition to this—we enclosed the commons; instead of letting the world be the world and our farms be our farms, we assigned ownership, we conquered the natural world just as we would conquer the political world in the form of various empires. We twisted the natural order around until we held godlike sway over the genetic makeup of seed and we patented it. But, that wasn’t enough. As with the Grace example above, we started allowing patents on seed varieties and methodologies that already existed. And, we made laws—in India, as Shiva describes repeatedly, in Earth Democracy, but many other places as well; for example, in Iraq, Bremer’s 100 Orders include, in Order 81, material that “deals specifically with Plant Variety Protection (PVP) because it is designed to protect the commercial interests of corporate seed companies” (15)—laws that leave the farmer in no position but to submit to agribusiness. Saving seed, a tradition older really than farming (i.e. organized agriculture) itself, has become illegal in places. In 1997, RiceTec was granted a patent on basmati rice lines and grains, which Shiva points out “has been grown for centuries on the subcontinent” (16). RiceTec’s patent included genes developed by farmers and “allowed RiceTec to collect royalties from farmers growing varieties developed by them and their forefathers” (17). This one took four years to overturn. In Ireland, seed potato growers were disallowed in the early 1990s from trading in reproductive material with other seed potato growers, merchants or farmers (18). In 1994, the Plant Variety Act here in America was amended to “eliminate farmers’ privilege to save and exchange seed and establish an absolute monarchy for the seed industry” (19). And the list goes on. We have made it illegal for farmers to save, store or even sell their own seed. And, Monsanto has even purchased the company—Delta & Pine Land—that developed the so-called “terminator” seed which will simply die after one generation, making farmers even more dependent on purchasing new seed time and time again (20). While some farmers fight—according to Shiva, some 5 million peasants in India have “taken a pledge to continue to save and exchange seed” regardless of any law that says they cannot, such as the Seed Act of 2004 (21)—in the meantime, there are further issues than just ownership.

Forcing farmers to grow certain crops (patented or not) results in monocultures, far from the variety there has been with traditional agriculture. Shiva uses the example of rice in India, how in the various climates of the subcontinent there have been many different strains of rice developed; “there are varieties to fit thousands of ecological niches all over the country, from the temperate high hills of the Himalayas to the tropical lowlands to deep-water and salt-water marshes of the sea coasts” (22). But, now, farmers are growing fewer strains and this lack of biodiversity, combined especially with no more intercropping, means less sustainability. While “genetic diversity provides security for the farmer against pests, disease, and unexpected climatic conditions” (23), this system demands that a farmer maintain a very specific, modern quality to his land to harvest his crops. This involves chemical fertilizers, the use of which “has led to the growing crisis of soil erosion and depleted soil quality” (24), and modern irrigation, both of which damage the land itself, ruining it for future generations of plants and people.

And, these chemical fertilizers cost money, as does modern irrigation, as do modern seeds. So farmers, who used to be able to save their own seeds and let nature (or intercropping) take care of much of the watering and fertilizing, are now paying out of pocket to maintain what should be a subsistence way of life. And, of course, it goes without saying, all this so they can produce far more than ever before, because this is not just subsistence farming but a support system for the whole First-World. These farmers are now producing not for themselves but for export, and putting more money into it than they ever had to before. And, so these farmers are put into debt, find themselves living impoverished lives, going hungry when they are the ones feeding the world. I deliberately have not mentioned NGOs like the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank, the organizations that often drive all of these new policies into these Third-World nations, because while they are the tools we and Mother Culture use to push new agendas, I would argue that they are not themselves the problem but yet another symptom, a self-promoting part of a destructive way of life that it is getting harder and harder to back down from. But, here I must reference the WTO in the case of Lee Kyung Hae. In 2003, the WTO held a meeting in Cancun. Lee and other farmers and peasants from around the world—Lee himself from Korea, where the WTO had forced the opening of “its rice markets to dumping by US agribusiness giants like Cargill and ConAgra” (25)—camped near the site of the meeting and marched upon it on the morning of its first day. They came to a barricade and Lee Kyung Hae, wearing a sign which read “WTO kills farmers,” climbed it and stabbed himself. He had a note with him that read, “I am taking my own life so others may live” (26). Sixteen thousand farmers in India committed suicide during 2004 alone, as “the policies of corporate-driven globalized and industrialized agriculture deliberately destroy small farms, dispossess small farmers, and render them disposable” (27).

Daniel Quinn argues that we “believe profoundly that, however bad things are now, they’re still infinitely preferable to what came before” (28). We have conquered the natural world, mandated that we work for our food, and we are consistently destroying the means by which we get it, but still, we take the Whiggish approach; this is what history has been leading us to, so it must be the right way of doing things. As long as we in the First-World can go to our local grocery store and find a great variety of choices, we don’t take the time to care whose lives were destroyed in getting those choices to us. Vandana Shiva argues that “patents on life and the rhetoric of the ‘ownership society’ in which everything—water, biodiversity, cells, genes, animals, plants—is property express a worldview in which life forms have no intrinsic worth, no integrity, and no subjecthood” (29). I would add humans to that list. This worldview devalues and essentially dehumanizes the Third-World individual, and small farmers, even here in the First-World, are losing the Third-World War. There are those who stand up against the patents, those who still trade seed (like Via Campesina, which states that “food sovereignty is the right of peoples to develop and maintain their own food systems” (30)) even where it has been made illegal, and there are those like the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) (31) who are demanding their legal right to have land and have the use of it, without being dictated to by NGOs or agribusiness corporations. Shiva suggests that “liberation in our genocidal times is, first and foremost, the freedom to stay alive” (32). But, we cannot simply be content with ourselves being alive. We must support the Third-World in this war; when the MST marches onto a piece of land, chanting “Occupy! Resist! Produce!” the individuals must know that they have support around the world. When an Indian or a Korean or even an American farmer, impoverished by debt growing our food, is at the point where taking his own life seems like his only viable option, he needs to believe that we will make it better, that we can take back food sovereignty for farmers, that we can give the commons back to the people, that we will not let life itself be patented and owned by corporations who care more about the bottom line than the lives of billions of individuals the world over. We need to reject Mother Culture, reject the dark recesses dug into our world by globalization, as “the discussion on ‘food power’ consequently not an exception but a symptom of a general global situation” (33). We must demand sustainability over overconsumption, demand a right to sustenance, demand biodiversity, demand nourishment over destruction, peace and life over war and death, demand democracy over corporate greed.

(1) Quinn, Daniel, Ishmael, New York: Bantam, 1992, 138.
(2) Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review, 2000, 43.
(3) Shiva, Vandana, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, Cambridge: South End, 2005, 50.
(4) Ibid, 52.
(5) Ibid, citing Alvares’ “Deadly Development,” Development Forum 11:7 (1973), 3. Alvares and Shiva, of course, do not use my hyphenated “Third-World War.”
(6) Chatterjee, Piya, “Teas’s Fortunes and Famines: Global Capital, Women Workers, and Survival in Indian Plantation Country,” The Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policies, Repression, and Women’s Poverty, edited by Amalia L. Cabexas, Ellen Reese, and Marguerite Waller, Boulder: Paradigm, 2007, 58.
(7) Isbister, John, Promises Not Kept: Poverty and the Betrayal of Third World Development, 6th ed, Bloomfield: Kumarian, 2003, 99. The hyphen, again, is mine.
(8) Maass, Peter, “Bosnian Factions Using Food as a Weapon; Serb, Muslim Sides Interfere With U.N. Relief Deliveries but for Different Reasons,” The Washington Post 17 February 1993.
(9) Life and Debt, Stephanie Black, director, 2001.
(10) Interestingly, Monsanto points out on its own blog that, “in actuality the first patent on a living organism dates back to 1873 when Monsieur Louis Pasteur was awarded U.S. Patent #141,072 with a claim to yeast. This was actually one of the first food production related patents–the yeast was for beer production to reduce spoilage of the beer.” (http://www.monsantoblog.com/2009/06/19/seed-patent-history/)
(11) Quinn, 63.
(12) Shiva, 94. The Schmeiser case is also a big part of the documentary The Future of Food, Deborah Koons Garcia, director, 2004.
(13) Ibid.
(14) Ibid, 146.
(15) Truong Sun Traveler, “Food as a Weapon – The Rape of Iraq,” Daily Kos 9 April 2008. Citing Global Research (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=1447).
(16) Shiva, 147.
(17) Ibid, 148.
(18) Shiva, 149.
(19) Ibid, 150.
(20) F. William Engdahl, “Monsanto buys ‘Terminator’ Seeds Company,” Geopolitics – Geoeconomics 27 August 2006. (http://www.oilgeopolitics.net/GMO/Monsanto/monsanto.html)
(21) Shiva, 151.
(22) Ibid, 98.
(23) Ibid, 100.
(24) Shiva, 100.
(25) Ibid, 77.
(26) Shiva, 76.
(27) Ibid, 120.
(28) Quinn, 221.
(29) Shiva, 3.
(30) Camila Montecinos, “The Seeds of Sovereignty,” New International September 2010, 13.
(31) Raiz Forte (Strong Roots), Global Exchange, producer, 2001.
(32) Shiva, 185.
(33) Peter Wallensteen, “Scarce Goods as Political Weapons: The Case of Food,” Journal of Peace Research 13:4 (1976), 277.