Jeremy Seabrook: Creating refugees

[struggle4progress]

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“Development” itself is a major cause of both conflict and disturbance. By pitting countries against one another in an intensified international competition, each must maximise its “competitive advantage”, whether by drawing millions of countrywomen into garment footwear or toy factories, by transforming subsistence farmers into growers of a single export commodity – coffee, tea, broccoli, wood-pulp, asparagus, carnations or gerberas, or by permitting MNCs to plough up ancient croplands for strip mining. This radically unsettles ways of life and makes more and more human environments uninhabitable.
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... The destruction of livelihoods is as coercive a mechanism for driving people from their homeland as an army of occupation; only economic forces have an agreeably abstract quality, which absolves named individuals from human rights abuses. This is why the West is so insistent on “naturalising” the workings of economics, so that these appear as inevitable as sunrise or the onset of winter.

Globalisation is not a mixture of natural forces and historic inevitability. It is a construct, designed by governments in support of their multinationals, which now account for 70 per cent of world trade. The maintenance of this structure requires priority access to the world’s natural resources and to its labour. Some workers must be admitted into the citadels of privilege in order to perform the least desirable tasks and to keep wages down, but the majority must remain “on the periphery”, that is, to serve in mines, construction, factories, assembly units in their own countries.

Such convenient divisions are not sustainable. People will not remain in the captivity to which globalisation has sentenced them; but will find ways out, and through the protected borders of the countries which are the true agents of their dispossession. No wonder we hate them. No wonder we call them thieves and cheats and pimps and traffickers and drug-smugglers: they confront us with the consequences of grave injustices against them. Their misery is indispensable to our well being. And if this remains curiously haunted and unquiet, full of a violence we don’t understand, this is because the real relationship between ourselves and the creation of these uprooted and houseless people has been suppressed.

http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=4&theme=&usrsess=1&id=50061