Professor Jeffrey Sachs is the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is the author of many best selling books, including The End of Poverty and The Ages of Globalization.
HowTheLightGetsIn Conference, Institute of Art and Ideas, London, September 2021
Translated by Andy Barton, Tlaxcala
I
Strategy and dogma
To declare the abolition of traditional slavery for their possessions in the Caribbean, the British envisioned a new type of enslavement that the new slaves would themselves desire. On 10th June 1833, Rigby Watson, a member of parliament, clearly summarised this idea: “To make them labour, and give them a taste for luxuries and comforts, they must be gradually taught to desire those objects which could be attained by human labour. There was a regular progress from the possession of necessaries to the desire of luxuries; and what once were luxuries, gradually came, among all classes and conditions of men, to be necessaries. This was the sort of progress the Negroes had to go through, and this was the sort of education to which they ought to be subject in their period of probation”.
In 1885, Henry Dawes, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts recognised as an expert in indigenous matters, gave a report on his most recent visit to the Cherokee territories that still remained. According to this report, “there was not a family in that whole nation that had not a home of its own. There was not a pauper in that nation, and the nation did not own a dollar. It built its own capitol, and it built its schools and its hospitals. Yet the defect of the system was apparent. They have got as far as they can go because they own their land in common … There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilisation. Til this people will consent to give up their lands, and divide them among their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates, they will not make much more progress…”. Naturally, the opinions of people like Dawes would prevail, in other words, those who manage others’ success, and the Cherokee territories would be divided up and generously offered back to their inhabitants as private property. The Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz would impose the same exact privatisation programme on the communal production system as a way to emulate the success of the United States, achieving the feat of leaving 80% of the rural population without any land of their own, something which would culminate in the Mexican Revolution many years later.
In 1929, Samuel Crowther, the journalist and prized asset of the United Fruit Company (and Henry Ford’s friend), reported that in Central America “people only work when they are forced to. They are not used to it because the land gives them what little they need… However, the desire for material things is something that must be cultivated… Our advertising is slowly having the same effect as in the United States —and it is reaching the mozos. For when a periodical is discarded, it is grabbed up, and its advertising pages turn up as wallpaper in the thatched huts. I have seen the insides of huts completely covered with American magazine pages and with the timetables and folders issued by our railroads… All of this is having its effect in awakening desires”. Samuel Crowther viewed the Caribbean as the lake of the U.S. empire, which protected and guided the destiny of its constituent countries towards glory and universal development.
The political defeat of the pro-slavery Confederacy around this time was avenged by various cultural and ideological victories. All passed by unnoticed. In record timing, hundreds of monuments to the defeated ‘heroes’ were erected, films were made idealising the proponents of slavery and the theories about a superior race in danger of extinction flooded the desks of politicians and army generals.
One of these secret victories consisted in idealising the masters and demonising the slaves. In modern terms: the owners and the salaried workers. For that reason, in the many generations that were to follow, the United States would celebrate “Memorial Day” (in memory of the casualties of war) and “Veterans Day” (in honour of the former soldiers in these imperialist wars), all in the name of defence and of freedom, a carbon copy of the rhetoric of the Southern slaveowners who forayed into indigenous, Mexican and overseas territories and created the new American empire.
Translated by Andy Barton
Eduardo Madroñal Pedraza (Madrid, 1951) is a pedagogical advisor, author of poetry, writer of articles, member of the National Platform for the Constitutional Protection of Pensions (Mesa Estatal por el Blindaje de las Pensiones-MERP), member of Zero Budget Cuts (Recortes Cero) and activist of Unificación Comunista de España (UCE) Author of : Prosas y otros versos (2012), Versos y otras prosas (ed. Contrabando, 2014) and Anomalías (ed. Contrabando, 2018).
“From the deepest basements to the highest attics, it was possible to admire different regions and traditions superposed over one other, societies in various states of existence that slotted in and out of each other like a global chest of drawers” (Benito Pérez Galdós in Los ayacuchos)
A spectre haunts the consciousness of world’s Hispanic communities. It is the spectre of their own identity. Meanwhile, united in holy alliance, the world’s imperialist powers crow out in unison: “the blame for your underdevelopment lies with Felipe II.” From Wall Street to the French intellectual left-wing, stopping by the German radicals along the way, all tirelessly repeat that “Spanish colonisation, with the repercussions of its fanatism and intransigence, its greed and its sheer idleness, its arbitrariness and its despotism, is the root of all your current ills”.
Which city in the Spanish-speaking world with a sense of self worth does not have its own museum dedicated to the Spanish Inquisition to demonstrate the supposedly undeniable truth that it is all Felipe II’s fault? How many seemingly lucid minds in the Hispanic world are not plagued by the plaintive “if only we were Anglo-Saxons”?
After nearly two centuries of Anglophone-led division and exploitation of Ibero-American nations, including wars, annexations, interventions, invasions, “Panamization” and “Pinochetization”, an unbelievable, incredibly ambitious exercise in subverting the collective memory and alienating individual consciousnesses is currently underway. Its goal is to ensure that Hispanic nations renounce their shared history, their common cultural universe, their blood, family and ancestral ties, in a word, their own existence, to become mere spectres in search of a fate of exploitation, looting and destruction, a fate which the indigenous people of North America know better than anyone.
This reality has two consequences: firstly, the identity and unity of Hispanic nations is highlighted by the great imperialist powers as a force to be controlled and neutralised; secondly, as a reaction to the first consequence, it is now time for Hispanic nations to reconstruct and expose, both to the light of day and to the entire world, their own history, a history read from objective facts and data, grounded in reality. In short, a rigorous and accurate reading of our history, not the version of history that suits General Motors.
We need an objective, materialist vision of what we are and how we arrived at this point, starting with the social classes and their struggles. May this exercise reveal and shine a light on the enormous potential of what we could be. The task of writing the history of Hispanic nations is a prerequisite for us to freely decide our destiny.
This revolutionary undertaking is as relevant today as over. The sharp edges of an externally imposed imperial past, paid in fire and blood just like all others, are used to generate divisions and confrontations between Hispanic nations, something that always benefits the powers that have dominated these nations from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean for centuries. We must forge a unified, revolutionary mass that uses individual differences and plurality to reposition each member of the Hispanic world so that, in the face of the USAmerican hegemon that causes so much suffering for Ibero-America, as well as Spain and Portugal, we may defend our own interests and freely decide our destiny.
The shaping of today’s USA
