Strange Labor

 Since the current U.S. presidential administration has repeatedly indicated that it wants to follow the lead of William McKinley by acquiring overseas U.S. territories—I thought it would be a fitting time this month to read J.A. Hobson's classic 1902 treatise Imperialism. There's a lot of insight to be gleaned from the book. But one of the most disturbing and memorable passages (I found) is Hobson's discussion of the problem of forced labor. 

As apologists for the British Empire will be swift to point out, the UK did not practice overt slavery in its colonies during the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Indeed, many European authorities during the "Scramble for Africa" period used their opposition to slavery as a supposed moral justification for the imperial project. Even the blood-thirsty King Leopold of Belgium, perversely enough, claimed to be "liberating" the Congo from the scourge of human slavery—even as he introduced an indistinguishable form of coerced corvée labor in its place. 

Hobson effectively demolishes this apologia for European imperialism in the late nineteenth century. In particular, he shows how the British colonial authorities—even if they didn't practice overt slavery—nonetheless instituted a form of coerced labor that was quite similar in practice. Specifically, they set out deliberately to undermine the traditional economic basis of tribal communities, such that they would effectively be forced to sign wage contracts in British industries. 

Thus, while the colonial governments ostensibly did not recognize slavery, and only employed people on the basis of a money wage—in reality, they created a system that was almost slavery by another name. 

Many of the colonial authorities at the time, Hobson reports, were quite explicit about this. He cites a number of commentators on British possessions in the Caribbean, who lamented that the native inhabitants could not be persuaded to work long hours on the plantations so long as they could support themselves in relative comfort by living off the land. Many Europeans therefore concluded that they needed to drive the local peasantry off their subsistence farms—thereby depriving them of an alternative means of livelihood and effectively forcing them to sell their labor on the plantations to survive.

So too, Hobson quotes from colonial administrators in Africa who argued that it was impossible to convince the natives to work in South Africa's mines, because they were able to support themselves adequately through their traditional herding lifestyle. And so, as Hobson records, many British colonial policies aimed overtly at interfering with the tribal communities' other means of support—dispossessing them of their lands and cattle herds, such that they would be forced to sign a labor contract, travel far from home, and work for the rest of their lives in the underground mines. 

This strategy for effectively coercing labor from people by depriving them of alternative means of livelihood is familiar from other chapters of colonial history around the world. In a course on federal Indian Law that I took last year, we read a number of reports from nineteenth century American administrators of Indian reservations, who talked openly about the need to deprive Native tribes of their traditional means of subsistence living, in order to force them to join the wage economy. In other words: it was a policy of deliberate starvation for the sake of extracting people's labor. 

Of course, Marxists and other socialist radicals have been saying all along that the wage relationship is really slavery by another name. They are the ones who coined the term "wage-slavery" after all. 

But it becomes a lot easier to see what they are talking about, when you can observe governments deliberately setting out to force people to sign a labor contract by willfully depriving them of any alternative means to support themselves. In the modern period, one can typically only observe the early stages of this process in the so-called "developing world" or Global South, where the process of "primitive accumulation" (as Marx called it) is still unfolding apace. But precisely the same process occurred in the "developed West" at the dawn of capitalism—just at a much earlier point in history. 

The modern Western wage employee is the descendent, after all, of people who once supported themselves on their own plots of land (just like the workers in the Caribbean and Africa, whom the colonial administration sought to drive into sweated labor on the plantations and down the mines). In order to turn them into a pauperized surplus army of labor, it was necessary to deprive these peasants of their original means of subsistence, by enclosing the commons and dispossessing them of land—in a process memorably depicted in Oliver Goldsmith's poem, "The Deserted Village." 

In reading Hobson's book, then—and in seeing similar processes still unfolding today in the "developing world," more than a century later (see, for instance, the palm oil plantation industry in Honduras, which is sustained through the expropriation of land from small peasant farmers)—one may be overcome with disgust at the prospect of governments deliberately trying to leverage the threat of starvation to force people to engage in the most debased and miserable forms of labor. One may regret sincerely the arrival of modernity in these lands once inhabited by self-sufficient farmers and herders and hunter-gatherers. 

One may regret, with Giacomo Leopardi—that "our evil greed" and "boundless rage" should "storm" these "kingdoms of wise nature," such that their innocent inhabitants will be "driven to strange labor" (Galassi trans.)—as the great Italian pessimist wrote of the ravages of European colonialism. Indeed, Hobson's argument proves nothing if it does not show clearly how the "greed" of the Western imperialists drove the "assaulted natives" of Africa "to strange labor." 

One should certainly mourn all of this. To those who suffered this fate—who were driven by this injustice, or are now suffering it for the first time today, "I would not dare/ Console you if I could" as Philip Larkin once wrote. 

All I can say by way of cold comfort, to the people experiencing willful displacement from their traditional livelihoods today at the hands of the industrialized West—is that the same thing happened to our ancestors a few centuries ago as well. We too were deprived of the ability to make our own living off the land, so that we would be forced onto the highways and made to sell our own labor for a cash wage. What has happened to subsistence farmers and hunter-gatherers in the modern process of development in the "Third World" is the same thing that happened to English peasants in the early modern period. We have all been "driven to strange labor" too. 

As Shelley wrote of the nineteenth century industrial proletariat, in his great poem of protest about the Peterloo massacre, the "Masque of Anarchy": the "freedom" of the modern European wage employee was really freedom in name only. It was slavery by another name. He wrote: 

What is Freedom? -- ye can tell
That which slavery is, too well --
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.

`'Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In your limbs, as in a cell
For the tyrants' use to dwell[.]

All that has happened since the nineteenth century is the expansion of this form of coerced labor—this "slavery" imposed, not through the lash, but through the threat of starvation and the bare-subsistence wage—from one corner of industrializing Europe to the entire globe. This is the story Hobson recounts in Africa and the Caribbean. It is the process we can see happening today in places like Honduras, where palm oil magnates fight brutal struggles against campesino farmers in order to drive them off their traditional lands and convert their territory into plantations for the benefit of Western consumers.

And by now—in the twenty-first century—the process has gone so far that there is scarcely a single place on Earth that is untouched by it. There is nowhere left on the planet where people can maintain a traditional subsistence livelihood unmolested, without being driven out of business. And so, D.H. Lawrence's complaint, in his poem "Wages"—has come by this point to be a literal statement of economic reality: "[T]he work-prison covers," as he put it, "almost every scrap of the living Earth[.]" 

Lawrence adds, by way of cruel irony: "This is called universal freedom." And indeed, that is the irony that Hobson lays out as well. As Hobson described—the very Western colonial administrators who were forcing people into "strange labor" were—all the time—justifying their actions, perversely, by the need to liberate the natives from "slavery"! It is also the irony of the much-celebrated process of economic "development" in the Global South today. The dispossession of people's traditional ways of supporting themselves is lauded as a great advance for human "freedom." 

And so, as all this modernity proceeds, one feels a great sense of futility. One wonders what all this willful striving and disruption of the simple, easy, straightforward ways of maintaining human life across generations could possibly be accomplishing. What gains in material wealth could possibly make all of this unnecessary suffering worth it? What was the point of even starting down this path of "development" in the first place? "O what"—as Wilfred Owen once wrote (in a poem called "Futility")—"made fatuous sunbeams toil/ To break Earth's sleep at all?"