Economic and Political Weekly September 30, 20003566

BERNARD MBEKI

Here in Venezuela you have the right todo what you like with your capital. Thisright is dearer to me than all the politicalrights in the world.1

Never have the agonies, pillage andexploitation of a continent beendepicted with such rare passion,poignancy, literary grace and dignity asEduardo Galeanos Open Veins of LatinAmerica.2 We are in the presence of oneof the worlds greatest men of letters. Inso describing him, Ive eschewed delib-erately the constricted label of social sci-entist. Monthly Review deserves our high-est encomiums for republishing this mas-terwork which and I do not believe itis hyperbole remains imperishable. AsI said earlier in my review of FredericClairmonts work on Economic Liberal-ism,3 there is no such thing as an objec-tive evaluation of any work of art, ofpolitical and ideological currents.

We measure in all ways the enduringpower of a works impact on our cerebralnervous systems, through our subjectivelenses, the torments of our individual ex-istence. And from the all-embracing so-cial milieu from which we emanate, andthe skin, unlike a serpents, that we cannever shed. It was true then when I readsurreptitiously in my youth The Commu-nist Manifesto, concealed in brown wrap-ping paper, that was criminal reading inthe South African Gulag and indeed in allcolonies.

Galeano, a son of the third world, anative of Uruguay, in the tradition of thegreat Mexican muralists, has painted aportrait of his continent but that againwould be to diminish his achievement. Forwhat he has to say applies to all of us indifferent segments of our universe.

Certainly his voice is regionally specificlike his language but the message isuniversal. As teachers and writers, par-ticularly at a moment when neo-classicalverbiage has debased the language withits trivialised, ignominious mumbo-jumboand mathematical inanities, Galeano stepsforth in a prose that is exuberant, elatingand translucent as the flowing waters ofa spring lake.

As teachers and publicists we can do nobetter than to quote that inimitable sen-tence which is the lodestone of his being:I know I can be accused of sacrilege inwriting about political economy in thestyle of a novel about love or pirates. ButI confess I get a pain from reading valuableworks by certain sociologists, politicalexperts, economists, and historians whowrite in code. Hermetic language isnt theinvariable and inevitable price of profun-dity. In some cases it can simply concealincapacity for communication raised tothe category of intellectual virtue. I sus-pect that boredom can thus often serve tosanctify the established order, confirmingthat knowledge is a privilege of the elite.

It is for this reason that Open Veins, ashis trilogy Memory of Fire, have beenanathematised by the class oligarchies ofthe third world in their precipitous anddemented plunge into the inferno of neo-liberalism. The book is divided into threeparts: mankinds poverty as a consequenceof the wealth of the land; development isa voyage with more shipwrecks than navi-gators; and a bracing conclusion splashedwith humour, a vibrant part of his dev-astating armory. As he diffidently tells us,the most favourable reviews came notfrom any prestigious critic but from themilitary dictatorships that praised the bookby banning it.

The millennium marks 500 years of Latin

Americas colonisation. During my recentsojourn in Brazil I read the comment ofan American journalist4 describing theproletarian-children that straggled into thegiant corporate sisal farms early in themorning; their faces still pinched withsleep as they prepared to begin their 10hour workday. Their ages were 9 to 15.Here was a murderous encapsulation ofthe capital accumulation process thatremains timeless. The children of coursewere people of colour: Negro, Indian andmixed. Here is an extrapolation of onemore hideous fact that would easily fit intohis vast social tapestry.

The young proletarians began their dayby sharpening their long knives and ma-chetes for the dangerous job: cutting, pilingand hauling the long, leathery leaves thatwill be transformed into rugs, rope andhandbags to be sold in the US and else-where. The sisal farm is a transnationalfirm. This wretchedly exploited labourforce has many with punctured eyeballs,scarred legs and amputated arms. Theseare the creators of wealth in one of thepotentially richest countries on earth.

Listen to the shrill testimony of Valdineidos Santos a child proletarian, 14, who hasslaved on sisal farms since he was 8 forsubsistence pickings. I saw a boy lose hishand. He had it one minute. Then he didnthave it the next. He was working the sisalshredder. He was crying a lot, and he wasbleeding on his clothes, on the ground.This utterance in its eloquent heart-rend-ing simplicity is the theme of Galeano; itis the subject matter of Latin AmericasOpen Veins; the dispossessed natives andothers have come and gone; from the startthe victims had been reduced to Christian-ity. What we must never forget is that thissisal farm is but a microcosm of 500 yearsof human debasement. It depicts themechanisms of surplus value, of despo-liation and of plunder. The bourgeois order,be it in the mantle of embryonic accumu-lation of the mercantilist phase or nor-mal accumulation discards the fiction ofhuman rights; it embraces only one right:the right of private property and the profitsthat flow from it, at home and abroad, tobe preserved in the interests of a possess-ing class, invariably of a different colour.

Adam Smith, prime ideological engi-neer of economic liberalism, at a crucialturning point in the birth of industrialcapitalism, gave a graphic description ofthe unfolding historical drama in AnEnquiry into the Nature and Causes of theWealth of Nations (1776): The discovery

Homage to EduardoGaleanoAgonies and Struggles of Latin AmericaEduardo Galeano was not only a social scientist but one of thegreatest men of letters. In his writings he depicted the pillage andpain of South America with rare passion and dignity. He rejectedjargon-ridden writing as writing in code, and instead wroteabout political economy in the style of a novel about love orpirates.

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of America, and that of the passage to theEast Indies by the Cape of Good Hope,are the two greatest events recorded in thehistory of mankind...to the natives, how-ever, both of the East and West Indies, allthe commercial benefits which can haveresulted from those events have been sunkand lost in the dreadful misfortunes whichthey have occasioned...it is impossible thatthe whole extent of their consequences canhave been seen...what benefits, or whatmisfortunes to mankind may hereafter resultfrom those great events, no human wisdomcan foresee.

These dreadful misfortunes that he re-fers to but does not elaborate, are amongthe greatest crimes against humanity. Thereis the reality of the Middle Passage andof the Triangular Trade in which tens ofthousands of Africans perished. But theplantations flourished. From the 16th tothe 18th century prodigious wealth hadbeen created. Millions of Indians had beenwiped out in one of the worlds greatestgenocides in recorded history. Perhapsno human wisdom could have foreseenwhat would transpire in the 19th century.This time it was the extermination of theIndians unambiguously dictated byCalifornias governor, Peter Burnett, in hisannual message of 1851: A war of ex-termination will continue to be wagedbetween the two races until the Indian racebecomes extinct.

Physical extermination was not by armsalone. The discoverers carried with themviruses and bacteria and those includedsmallpox and tetanus, tuberculosis, syphi-lis and gonorrhea, trachoma and typhus,leprosy and yellow fever, etc.

It is this historical conjuncture set inmotion during the mercantilist phase thatilluminated Marxs penetrating analysis inCapital: The discovery of gold and silverin America, the extirpation, enslavementand entombment in mines of the Indians,the onset of the conquest and pillage ofthe East Indies, the turning of Africa intoa warren for the commercial hunting of theblack-skins, signalised the rosy dawn ofthe era of capitalist production. Theseidyllic proceedings are the chief momentof primitive accumulation.5

A by-product of this conquest was thescourge of racism that it germinated. Negroand Indian slavery was not a product ofracism, but rather racism was incubated byslavery. Moreover, climate was as irrel-evant as the dodo. Its origin was to befound in the frenzied quest for gold andother minerals and other major primary

commodities notably king cotton, sugarand tobacco. In the 18th century alone,Brazils gold output surpassed the totalvalue of gold that Spain grabbed from itsslave colonies in two previous centuries.

The sheer size of the manpower ab-sorbed were nothing short of staggeringin Brazil alone from conquest to abolitionmore than 10 million slaves were trans-ported from Africa. In France, the slaveswere called ebony wood; in PortugueseAfrica they were named the coins of theIndies after they had been weighed,measured and marketed. Proof sufficientthat they had become marketable com-modities.

I had the greatest of good fortunes ofhaving a self-taught Cape coloured school-master who travelled the world over as asailor. He had studied profoundly thehistory and ethnography of the Americasand spoke and read Spanish fluently. Inone of our history or geography lessonshe was asked why it was called LatinAmerica. The only thing Latin in America,he said, was the church. He told us thedesignation was false because blacks andIndians had created the wealth first for theSpaniards and Portuguese and then forothers. A fact that South Africans graspedas soon as we sprung from our motherswombs. He treaded dangerous ground.Blacks and Indians, he went on, had neveraccepted their status as exploited sub-human beings with meek acquiescence.We understood what he meant then but itwas only later that I came to grips withthe linkage of Africa to South and NorthAmerica and the Caribbean. It was on oneof my first missions to South America thatI first confronted the viciousness of racein the Americas.

I might add a minor parenthesis. I learntdecades later to my pleasant surprise (wehad no idea then) that this erudite sailor/schoolmaster was a close friend of JoeSlovo and one of the oldest clandestinemembers of the Communist Party. Onewho was tortured; and died, how quixoticit now seems, in exile in South America.

The international division of labour thatwas nailed on Latin America was no his-torical aberration. You believe, perhaps,gentlemen, pungently noted Karl Marx in1848, that the production of coffee andsugar and cotton and tobacco is the naturaldestiny of the West Indies. Let me remindyou that two centuries ago, however,nature, which does not trouble herselfabout trade and marketing, had plantedneither sugarcane nor coffee trees there.

Commodity production and slavery withgalloping genocide proceeded perfectlymeshed with the progression of mercan-tilist capitalism.

Indubitably, the quest for gold and theprecious metals were the galvanising logicof mercantilist accumulation and rapacity.It was Christopher Columbus on his sec-ond voyage (1493) that transported thefirst sugarcane roots from the CanaryIslands, first planted in Santo Domingoand then into every orifice of fertile Ameri-can soil. Demand for sugar generated theplantation that became the focal point forthe production, marketing and distributionof a key commodity in less than fourdecades. It signalled the birth of the worldmarket, internationalisation of all com-modities and finance and its concomitantslavocracy.

Santo Domingo the greatest jewel in mycrown, as Louis the XIV proclaimed, wasthe microcosm of the historical forces thatwere rippling through the Americas. Itaccounted for around two-thirds of Francesoverseas trade; it was by far the largestmarket for African slaves. As C L R Jamespithily puts in his great work, The BlackJacobins,6 Santo Domingo was thecentrepiece of mercantilism; the worldsmost flourishing colony; the greatest prideof the Bourbons since the British hadgrabbed their Indian and North Americancolonies. This imposing edifice reposedon the foundation stone of the labour powerof half a million blacks.

The year 1789 was to be one of the mostcrucial years of all times. Like all oppress-ing classes the slavocracy and their alliesin Paris had ignored the writing on thewall. In August 1791, the most devastatingof slave liberation struggles in the Ameri-cas erupted. And yet these half nakedsavages as Napoleon castigated themfought the white planters and his militarylegions for 12 long years. Nor should itbe obscured that the dictators wife, PaulineBonaparte was a Creole slave owner. Theliberators crushed the local slavocracy, aswell as a Spanish invasion, a Britishexpedition of over 60,000 and a Frenchforce of similar numbers, dispatched byNapoleon. One year before the slaveuprising a free Mulatto asked: Why shouldthe masters, and the church and the mer-chants live so well and we should live insuch misery, dying like flies? That is therevolutionary question of all times to whichthere always will be a revolutionary re-sponse. Toussaint lOuverture thunderedthat message home. The white suprema-

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cists, who now ceased to be supreme, hatedthe blackskins but blossomed on the prof-its of their labour. The Africans and theIndians fuelled the engine of industrialcapitalism.

The US slave-dominated Congress whenit came to the black man bared its fangs;it hammered an embargo on Haiti at thebequest of France. It was class and racesolidarity in its pristine form. Never mindthe empty rhetoric of the declaration ofindependence. The boundless hatred ofblacks was epitomised in the extermina-tory verdict of general Leclerc in his letterto his brother-in-law Napoleon after cap-turing Toussaint LOuverture in 1802condemned to wither away in a colddungeon in eastern France with his wife:Here is my opinion about this country:all the blacks in the mountains, men andwomen must be crushed, keeping only thechildren under 12; half the blacks in theplains must be exterminated, and not asingle mulatto with epaulets must be leftin the colony. But that was not the end.In 1825, France recognised the birth of thefirst black nation in history on conditionthat it pays massive reparations. As Galeanoputs it, the first free American nation wasborn in ruins and it remains one of thepoorest in the Americas.

The black liberation of Santo Domingoredounded to the gain of slave Cubadestined to be the worlds largest sugarproducer. Napoleons debacle was trailedby the triumphant march of the Britishindustrial revolution. The rumblings ofindependence from Spain were to blazenew horizons to the Pax Britannica.Mercantilism and its entire works were tobe damned in the name of free trade.Britains foreign secretary, George Can-ning, a politician with massive investmentsin the burgeoning iron and textile indus-tries, and Indias tea plantations, graspedthe significance of the looming second ElDorado.7

The plunder of India was now in fullswing; on the super profits of that plunderwas superimposed the free republics ofLatin America. Primitive accumulation hadnow metamorphosed into the normal ac-cumulation of the Promethean bourgeoi-sie. Unerringly, Canning grasped the nettle:The deed is done, the nail is driven, SpanishAmerica is free; and if we do not misman-age our affairs sadly, she is English.

The neo-colonies were caught in thefamiliar debt trap; their embryonic bank-ing, credit, freight and insurance businesseswere increasingly subordinated to British

commercial supremacy. As in India, theindustrial infanticide of much of theemergent nations industrial sectorsstemmed from the imposition of economicliberalism. British hegemony had beensustained well into the end of the century.

It was Marx who, in his masterly Frenchessay The Poverty of Philosophy (1847),exploded the myths of economicliberalisation and free trade a pre-figu-ration of his masterwork, Das Capital.All the destructive phenomena whichunlimited competition gives rise to withinone country are reproduced in more gigan-tic proportions on the world market. Hewent on to clinch the argument: If thefree-traders cannot understand how onenation can grow rich at the expense ofanother, we need not wonder, since thesesame gentlemen also refuse to understandhow within one country one class canenrich itself at the expense of another.8

New predators were on the prowl no lessvicious in their exploitative propensitiesthan their British and Spanish predeces-sors. The Spanish American war of 1898had opened the floodgates to Americanimperialism, A succulent appetiser to themain course. Several US Congressmenwere clamouring for the annexation ofCuba. By the middle of the century, theUS was taking a third of all Cuban imports.The Louisiana Planter at the end of thecentury captured the rationale of imperi-alism: Little by little the whose island ofCuba is passing into the hands of UScitizens, which is the simplest and safestway to obtain annexation to the US. Asizeable chunk of Cuba, Guantanamo, astill festering sore on Cubas sovereignty,was to be permanently grabbed.

The political and economic conquest ofCuba was followed by the grim conquestof central America, which in the decadesahead would contribute directly and indi-rectly to the genocide of more than halfa million Indians. Theodore Roosevelt, thegrand rapist of Cuba, proceeded to thedismemberment of other countries. ThisNobel Prize winner boasted of his ampu-tation of Colombia and Panama as hisspecial creation: I took the Canal Zoneand let Congress debate.

In 1912, president Taft proclaimed theNazi doctrine of the superman althoughthe doctrine was already enshrined by thefounding fathers of the American republic.The whole hemisphere will be ours in factas, by virtue of our superiority of race, itis already ours morally. Hence militaryintervention is imperative to secure for

our merchandise and our capitalistsopportunity for profitable investment (Ital-ics mine). What is remarkable about thatmorsel of arrogance is its contemporaryring, and compared to the stupidrationalisations of Clinton and others inits genocidal brutality it at least has themerits of straight talking.

Nowhere was the possibility of givingour capitalists opportunity for profitableinvestment more coherently framed thanin the conscience stricken autobiographyof general Smedley Butler of the US Marine(1935). Whats glaring about it is that ithas remained ageless.

I spent thirty-three years and four monthsin active service as a member of ourcountrys most agile military force theMarine Corps. I served in all commis-sioned ranks from a second lieutenant tomajor general. And during that period Ispent most of my time being a high-classmuscle man for big business, for WallStreet and the bankers. In short, I was aracketeer for capitalism...Thus I helpedmake Mexico and especially Tampico safefor American oil interests in 1914. I helpedmake Haiti and Cuba a decent place forthe National City Bank to collect revenuesin...I helped purify Nicaragua for the in-ternational banking house of Brown Broth-ers in 1909-1912, I brought light to theDominican Republic for American sugarinterests in 1916. I helped make Hondurasright for American fruit companies in1913. In China, in 1927, I helped see toit that Standard Oil went its way unmo-lested.During those years I had, as the boys inthe back room would say, a swell racket.I was rewarded with honours, medals andpromotions. Looking back on it, I feel Imight have given Al Capone a few points.The best he could do was to operate hisracket in three city districts. We Marinesoperated on three continents.Smedleys crimes were of course crimes

against humanity executed in the name ofthe defence of US property rights andnational security but they were on a lesserscale compared to the ensuing holocaustfrom the 1940s to the 1980s, sedulouslydownplayed or better still ignored, in thecorporate media. The Koran mentions thebanana among the trees of paradise,recalls Galeano, but they were capitalismscreation or in contemporary jargon theyhad become integrated into the worldmarket. Having the gall to label thesecountries banana republics, the verywords being descriptive of the fascistcontempt for its peoples, indicates thatit is a tree of hell.

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The oppressed Indians and Mestizos ofGuatemala rose up; in much the same wayas Augusto Cesar Sandino and his peasantforce did in the early 1930s in Nicaragua;his assassination was sponsored by theWashington power brokers in conjunctionwith the US transnational plantationowners. The hit man was West Pointeducated Anastasio Somoza, subse-quently branded the butcher ofNicaragua. His West Point son, one of thebiggest cocoa and coffee plantationowners in the Americas, proved an igno-minious successor and an even moresuccessful killer.

By the mid-1940s the whole of centralAmerica was on the boil. The United FruitCompany, (possessor of more than 1,00,000hectares of land) the octopus extendedits imperial landholdings from ocean toocean. The striving to modify that gro-tesque imbalance by a modest land reformwas deemed a gross violation of propertyrights. More to the point the yellow pressof William Hearst discovered that com-munism was beating at our gates. Arbenzmust go. Nine years after the genocide in1954 general Eisenhower flatly declared:We had to get rid of a communistgovernment which had taken over. Thekey words are get rid of. It summarisesthe motive force of imperialism. A demo-cratically elected government was obliter-ated using one of its native killers: generalCastilllo Arms.

By a strange concatenation of events1954 was also the year of Dienbienphu;it marked the onset of Algerias liberation;and the first rumblings of the Cuban revo-lution that proved a nemesis to imperial-ism. Indeed the Cuban revolution as wenow perceive after more than four decadesis one of the proudest feats of socialemancipation of all times and which,victoriously, continues to battle for thefreedom and sovereignty of Latin America and beyond.

Like an individual life, a book is anorganic creation that must come to an end,and hence cannot be updated permanently.It is this that Marx and Engels had in mindwhen they stated, with no vanity intended,that it should remain as it was written in1848. Today, that imperishable documentis a permanent clarion to revolution theworld over, the source of unblemishedinspiration. Galeanos book is closed butit shall never leave our spirit.

Latin American capitalism is in the throesof one of its most momentous upheavals.It is dominated by the ruling ideology of

transnational capital incarnated in theworlds top 200 corporations. As an Af-rican I have never been inured to poverty.What I saw in Latin America in my recentvisit was the genocide through poverty,with the singular and noble exceptionof Cuba. There are few native LatinAmerican banks that have not been gobbledup by the triad powers: US, Europe andJapan.

The structural adjustment policies of neo-liberalism have turned the region into acesspool. Take the case of debt. Thirdworld debt stands at over $ 2.5 trillion andthat of Latin America at around one tril-lion. The debt of course has already beenpaid off if we examine the manner in whichit is contracted, the brutal manipulationsof the financial markets, the arbitraryupsurge, adverse terms of trade and tum-bling commodity prices. What the magni-tude of the debt numbers reveals is thatthe principal and interest on the debt willnever be reimbursed.

It suffices to indicate the velocity atwhich commodity prices have plummeted.Relative prices of major Latin Americancommodities as cocoa sugar, coffee, ba-nana and many others are around a fifthof what there were in 1960. One does notneed a barrage of statistical data, althoughit is useful to have it, to tell us that therich and the super rich are becoming in-creasingly richer while the poor are be-coming immensely more numerous andalarmingly poorer. To say this is to repeatthe most cruel of banalities. Just walk thestreets of the major cities, night and day,and youll get the answer.

Within a short compass I cannot plungeinto the weighty political changes that havetranspired in the region since the last editionof Galeanos work. Certainly on the eco-nomic front one is staggered by the scaleof the omnipresent scale of pauperisation,the massive, rising levels of unemploy-ment of which the rise in the informalsector is but one salient example; themounting class and income polarisationand rampant corruption; and racism againstthe Indian. Almost half the populationaccording to UN data is floundering belowofficial poverty levels; 35-40 per cent ofthe population are illiterate; in conformitywith the World Banks catechism of di-saster, spending on education, health andsocial programmes are being slashed;privatisation of the public patrimony atknock-down prices has been pushedthrough wiping out the fruits of decadesof social accumulation; the transnational

corporations have extended their lethalreach into every niche; scientific researchhas touched its lowest ebb accompaniedby the familiar brain drain; the culturaldomination of the big corporate media isswiftly demolishing the cultural heritage;the alarming and uncontrollable spread ofsexually transmitted diseases and childprostitution; inseparable from this are themillions of children on the streets; andneed I say that there is no social or medicalinsurance to speak of. And of course thereis the entire apparatus of class repressionand the death squads.

No doubt this lamentable list can beprolonged and I do not want to give theimpression that all is bleak, for this is notso. What matters and here we join thethought of Galeano are the revolutionarychanges that are thundering through thisregion. The peasant uprisings in Brazil andEcuador and the forces of CommandanteMarcos in Mexico are beacons of thedirection of change. What this demon-strates is that the world economic orderconstructed by imperialism is not onlyriven with contradictions, but it is whollyunsustainable, as the regions elite wouldadmit privately with misgivings and attimes publicly. This is tantamount to say-ing that Latin America has become one ofthe crucial focal points in the battle againstimperialism. On that score it is well torecall the vitalising perception of Marxthat it is merely history that will pull usout of the bigger and bigger hell hole thatinternational capital is digging for us all:History does nothing; it possesses noimmense wealth; it fights no battles. It israther man, real living man who doeseverything; it is he who possesses andfights.

Notes1 Time, September 18, 1952. This was the verdict

of a top American petroleum executive at thetime of the oil bonanza.

2 Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuriesof the Pillage of a Continent (1978), New York,1999.

3 Exposing the Corporate Gulag, Economic andPolitical Weekly, May 18, 1996.

4 Washington Post Service, March 17, 2000.5 Capital, 1867, Chapter 3.6 The Black Jacobins: Toussaint LOuverture

and the Santo Domingo Revolution, New York,1938.

7 Quoted in The Cambridge History of BritishForeign Policy, Cambridge, Vol 2, 1923.

8 La misere de la philosophie, Paris, 1847. Thiswas the crushing riposte to Proudhons, Laphilosophie de la misere. This essay was thefoundation stone of historical materialism.

EPW