by PRABHAT PATNAIK
According to a report in the Times of India (November 23), the United States has asked European countries to restrict immigration in order to preserve “Western Civilization”. Many in the Third World would find the term “Western Civilization” laughable, especially if it is used in the sense of denoting something precious and worth preserving. The atrocities committed by Western imperialist countries against people all over the world over the last several centuries have been so horrendous that using the term “civilization” to cover such behaviour appears grotesque. From British colonialism’s unleashing famines in India that killed millions in its rapacious bid to raise revenue from hapless peasants, to Belgium’s king Leopold’s unspeakable brutality against the people of what used to be called the Congo, to German extermination camps in Namibia that wiped out whole tribes, it is a tale of horrible cruelty inflicted on innocent people for no reason other than sheer greed. It is not surprising in this context that Gandhiji, when asked by a journalist what he thought of “Western Civilization”, had wryly quipped: “that would be a very good idea”.
But let us ignore all this cruelty and focus only on the material advance achieved by the West. This material advance itself has been achieved on the basis of an exploitative relationship that the Western imperialist countries had developed vis-à-vis the Third World, a relationship that left the latter in such a state that its inhabitants today are desperate to escape it. Western prosperity is not a separate and independent state achieved through Western diligence alone; it has been achieved through a process of decimation of the economies of countries from which the immigrants are fleeing. What is even more striking is that Western imperialism not only wants to stop the inflow of immigrants; it wants to prevent, even through armed intervention, any change in the societal structure in the immigrants’ home countries that could usher in development that stops this inflow of immigrants.
My argument might of course would be dismissed as hyperbole. After all, Western economies have been characterized by the introduction of remarkable innovations that have dramatically raised labour productivity which in turn has made possible an increase in real wages and the real incomes of Western populations. It is this innovativeness that distinguishes the West and that is lacking in the Third World; it constitutes the differentia specifica between the two parts of the world, the root cause of their divergent economic performances owing to which migrants are seeking to move from one part to another.
Two things about innovations however must be noted. First, innovations are typically introduced when the market for the commodity that would come out of the innovation is expected to expand, which is why innovations do not get introduced during Depressions. Second, innovations do not on their own raise real wages; they do so only when there is a tightness in the labour market that arises for independent reasons. For a very long period in history, the expectation about market expansion for Western products was generated by the seizure of Third World markets. The Industrial Revolution in Britain which started the era of industrial capitalism could not have been sustained if colonial markets had not been available where local craft production could be replaced by the new machine-made goods. The other side of Western innovativeness therefore was deindustrialization of colonial economies that created massive labour reserves there.
Even in countries where innovations were introduced, labour reserves were also created because of technological progress, but these reserves got reduced owing to large scale migration of labour to the temperate regions of settlement abroad such as Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, where they massacred and displaced the local tribes from the land they had occupied and cultivated this land. Within the innovating countries therefore tightness was introduced into the labour market through such large scale emigration, because of which real wages could increase alongside innovations that raised labour-productivity.
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