Abstract
The author reflects on current trends to explore the historical record of the injustices of colonial racism and slavery, and raises the question of whether this changed mood of regret over the past bears any relation to, or significance for, the ongoing depredations visited on the most impoverished of the world today. For these still appear largely invisible. In the process, he encompasses the growing threat of catastrophic global warming and environmental disaster – and some of the movements struggling against this. He excoriates a global system of continuous economic expansion whereby the poor have become a little less poor as the rich have become abusively, unimaginably richer.
It is impossible to deal with the injustices of the present without understanding those of the past. But understanding the past alone is insufficient to deal with the wrongs of the present. Today’s penitential postures by the distant beneficiaries of great historic evils do not erase the multiple and often invisibilised ills of the contemporary world; indeed, lamentations over the past are as likely to obscure as to illuminate them.
When the Guardian’s research discovers that nine of its eleven founders were connected to the slave trade, this acknowledgement is, no doubt, an act of virtue long overdue; but it doesn’t affect the position of the oppressed and persecuted of the present day. The distribution of vast compensatory sums to former slave-owners (‘enslavers’ is the new term), although no secret, is a welcome subject for discussion by the descendants of such beneficiaries, since no reparations were ever made to the enslaved themselves. But the excluded of today, among them the 300 million people of the world’s poorest countries, Burundi, South Sudan, Malawi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, Niger, Mozambique and those devastated by wars in which external powers are or have been involved – Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan and Syria – are equally abandoned and without resource, yet there can be no question of compensation for them. It is also of more than mere historical interest to illuminate the role of the British monarchy in this doleful commerce and to recognise that the mansions, parks and elegant buildings which constitute ‘our heritage’ were often erected on the profit from human trafficking – that sometime lucrative trade which has now become the object of such conspicuous abhorrence.
Politics of penitence
Remorse, guilt and apologies for past wrongs often have other purposes than the ostensible one of clearing the conscience of the accretions of guilt of the ages. For one thing, the politics of perpetual penitence are often used to demonstrate how far we have come from those benighted times, when so many people thought that enslaving other human beings was not only compatible with morality, respectability and the fear of God, but was also an added ornament to these admired attributes. This journey is supposed to illuminate the long arc of progress through time, the rainbow’s end which has delivered us to the light and sunny place which we now occupy. It is essentially a cleansing. After the contrite exaltations of the confessional, we are no longer encumbered by frightful prejudices and irrational hatreds and can look our brethren and sistren in the eye, hopeful they will not suspect that we harbour any vestige of these hateful thoughts in our purified bosom.
The second element of ambiguity in these expressions of atonement for complicity in past evils is that they readily serve as a justification for doing nothing in the here and now, apart from exhibiting our rejection of the brutal practices of the day before yesterday. Although they do indeed illuminate and acknowledge the sombre and hitherto not-so-obscure pathway to the enlightenment of this late, wise age, they offer no precedent for confronting the growing inequalities of our time.
They also elide another uncomfortable reality; namely, that in the contemporary world a majority of the poor and excluded of the earth are still non-white, while most – but by no means all – of the privileged of the earth are still located in the Global North.
This modifies, but does not cancel, direct continuity with the iniquities which are the object of what is undoubtedly sincere and sorrowful regret. Modifies, because the present-day imperium of capital is more subtle than when national entities enslaved, conquered and occupied whole countries, which they subjected to their will. Sensitive to any accusations that the system which produced these things is not radically changed, its apologists offer ‘proof’ that there is no connection with today’s global inequalities and the brutality of enslavement of peoples, occupation of their lands, usurpation of their wealth and subjugation of their populations, by pointing out that China and India combined are now home to more billionaires than the United States. That there are rich and poor in every country is supposed to be the clearest evidence that countries are no longer imperial oppressors. Indeed this is so; and globalism dissimulates the world-wide association of the very rich in the great conspiracy of wealth against humanity.
The result of this is a mutant version of ‘classic’ imperialism, whereby the subjugated, however numerous, are scattered in slums, settlements, depleted rural communities and war-ruined landscapes across the globe. And to ensure that they shall not recognise their kinship with each other, ingenious disguises have been designed by the great costumier of the grand masquerade of transnational capital. The disguises are not restricted to mere apparel, for the bodies of the people have also morphed into unrecognisable shapes: where the poor were formerly starveling-thin and the rich plump and succulent, today in the wealthy parts of the world, it is the poor who have become obese and the privileged slim and lean. No more effective camouflage could be imagined; the more so since, in the countries which, together, shelter half of the world’s poor – India, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Bangladesh – the poorest remain skeletal and emaciated, while the rich retain their Renaissance-painting contours, fleshy bellies and elephantine limbs.
Confusion and incoherence govern this imperium, in which it becomes difficult to distinguish oppressors from oppressed.
This incoherence is made more mystifying by the co-existence of recantation of past wrongdoing with the widespread phenomenon of nostalgia. Longing for a vaporous, distant past also characterises many countries drawn into often resented global dependency: the rhetoric of Erdoğan and his hankerings after a long-defunct Ottoman empire; of Modi who dreams of a time before India had been ‘tainted’ by Muslim influence; or Egypt, where al-Sisi’s pharaonic plans for a grandiose new capital city recall even more ancient empires; and, most malignant of all, Putin’s efforts to realise a blood-drenched fantasy of reviving a baroque imperial Russia combined with the concrete and steel of a Soviet superpower. It is clear that the yearning for past glories is not limited to that of a Britain unable to accommodate itself, even now, to the eclipse of its unassuaged sense of imperial destiny, nor to a time, apparently gone by, when, according to Trump’s supporters, the US was yet to experience a decline in its unrivalled power.
This adds another dimension to the political apologetics which seek absolution for historic wrongs. It provides one more distraction from the contemporary economic and political dynamic which is recreating ancient injustices anew, even as official ideologies which enshrined racism at the core of their credo are renounced or forsworn. It has been only the blink of an eye since such beliefs were the very essence of all that the West cherished and held most dear. At what point were they not only dethroned from their central position, but transformed into shameful ideas for which we are now enjoined to feel a profound revulsion? Was it during the 1950s and 1960s, when the formal dissolution of the European empires took place? Did those entities that had been ‘granted’ their independence, and all their peoples, suddenly attain a status of equality with the great powers which had ‘granted’ them freedom, albeit only after a long period of reaction and resentment, when those who would liberate themselves were known as terrorists and criminals in Algeria, Angola, Indonesia, Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus and scores of other occupied territories?
Was the ceremonial lowering of imperial flags among the plumes and pomp of tropical Government Houses a signal that the era which had relegated such peoples to infantilised status under British, French, Dutch or other tutelage was over, and their role as ‘lesser peoples’ formally declared dead? Or was this theatre of freedom not rather a spectacle, behind which another drama would be played out – namely, the seduction of those countries away from their alliance with socialism, as practised in the Soviet Union, and into the emancipatory embrace of neocolonial economic powers which held out to them the prospect of instantaneous ‘development’ as an alternative to a socialism indefinitely deferred?
The deepening abyss between rich and poor
The model of ‘progress’ in which institutions and individuals come to express their remorse for an apparently extinct imperial racism has been dependent upon a global system of continuous economic expansion, whereby the poor have become a little less poor as the rich have become richer; much richer, abusively, unimaginably richer.
The fretfulness of the descendants of enslavers over their ancestors’ inhumanity does not, in general, extend into the present; for few of them call into question the wisdom of the system which allows them to demonstrate their grief over past wrongs, without demanding any equivalent gesture or action to mitigate the deepening abyss between rich and poor in the present. If they declare their solidarity with today’s descendants of the formerly enslaved, they are not required to exhibit guilt over the position of the injured and humiliated of today, upon whose misery much of their advantage depends. If they assume their sympathy for the poor and oppressed of today goes without saying, they must surely know that anything left unsaid in this age of prolix incontinence soon ceases to exist.
That no remedial action is required for the outcasts of our time has, in theory, been made clear by the promise which the privileged penitents of past injustice have made to their former captive peoples: the solemn assurance that if they will only follow the way of wealth pioneered by their former masters, they, too, will enjoy the prosperity and affluence of the sometime colonial powers. But that way of wealth is blocked, for they have no great stolen hinterlands from which to extract materials, labour and wealth (or, if they do, it is only the residual landscapes of indigenous peoples, forest dwellers, nomads and peripheral territories of India, Brazil or Indonesia). Some of the most energetic – and the most astute – of their peoples have recognised this; and this is why they have, in growing numbers, sought a kind of refuge in the countries which issued those apparently false promises, promises which have brought them only misery, persecution and dispossession. The frieze of asylum-seekers, environmental and political refugees and uprooted peoples making their way to Italy, the US, France or Britain are only tracing to its source their rage and resentment at having been cheated; for it was implementation of the social and economic model proposed to their leaders by the rich world that has led to an experience not of liberation and security, but of bitterness and exclusion. The distinction made by the richest countries between refugees and economic migrants is disingenuous: economic forces drive people out of their countries, their homes, their livelihoods and their minds no less effectively than any other marauders or persecutors.
Planetary degradation
This suggests something more profound than hypocrisy. If there are few serious practical programmes concerned with the runaway exacerbation of social and economic injustice which has set up the great migrations and population movements of the contemporary world, this is because that absence meets and meshes with the inability to address substantially the other great outrage of our time. This, of course, is the issue of planetary degradation, which comprises all the wrongs of ecological ruin – the ingestion of carcinogens and pollutants into the very bodies of the people, the extinction of human languages, cultures and ways of life as well of many other life-forms on earth, the ineradicable stains upon the very elements that sustain life.
For this is the sad consequence and accompaniment of the chastened sensibility which veils the born-again imperium of capital and its remorseful soul-searching, even as it perpetuates itself in the vesture of renewal, promising an extension of the wonders of wealth to a whole world. It is the result of an economic expansionism without limits, the magic formula that was to have reconciled all the peoples of the earth to a single, universal ideology, thereby cancelling all ancient rancours and resentments that had disfigured the world with the cruelties imposed by truly savage societies that conceived of slavery, imperialism and capitalism as the sources of enfranchisement, wealth and happiness for a mere fraction of humankind, with the rest left to misery and degradation. When the ideology of universal development replaced the ‘values’ of white supremacy, it promised a sharing of the wealth of the world with former peoples held hostage by colonialism, the ensnared and subjugated, the chained of the earth. It would be achieved by the same mechanism that had brought the sometime impoverished and wretched people of early industrialism into acceptance of the unforgiving necessities of capitalism – universal growth and perpetual expansion, a dilation without end – the very process which has brought to breaking point a biosphere already suffocating under the weight of the world-wide extractive project of colonialism.
It is not, of course, within the nature of the powerful to admit to impotence in anything; and this is why the ecological crisis is marked by a manic busy-ness, in an effort to devise ways in which the malignant consequences of the dogmas of wealth-creationism can be avoided, concealed or palliated. First of all, the substitution of ‘green growth’ for its industrial predecessor suggests that ‘we’ can continue to ‘have it all’, with no change in that ‘way of life’ which we have advertised to the whole world as the supreme ambition and within the grasp of all humanity, suppressing all mention of the conditions on which this fabulous promise could be fulfilled – a global economy that tears asunder the fragile integument of the entire planet in its search for transcendence. For it has to be asked why, in the effort to halt the derangement of the global climate, if the US produces 160 times the CO2 emissions of Chad or Niger, what would be the multiple of the damaging pollutants of the US by the time those two impoverished entities reached even a quarter of America’s, if the existing developmental paradigm continues? It is true that during the pandemic global emissions shrank by 5 per cent in 2020, only to rebound by 6 per cent in the following year, and a further 0.9 per cent in 2022. 1 Where is the alternative to this fatalistic scenario, which is the same question that hangs over the fatefully widening rift between rich and poor?
Uncontainable resource depletion and irreversible inequality are two aspects of the same process: unstoppable, because it has caught up a majority of the world’s people in its compulsions, has seized the imagination and inspired hope, has numbed reason and taken root in the heart and spirit of humanity. The thermal currents of free-market affluence, which raised so many people in the world out of poverty, have also lifted high into the atmosphere the gases which are stifling the world with their toxic breath.
The urge to radical change
And here we encounter another paradox in the paralysed disquiet of our time. For as well as a worsening of both social and ecological indices, there have never been so many organisations, institutions, activists, individuals and polemicists urging the world to radical change. Nor is this a new development. The earliest movement in the modern world to protect nature and the way of life that depended on it dates probably from 1730, when the Bishnoi community in North India resisted attempts by the King of Jodhpur to fell khejri trees: led by a woman, Amrita Devi, almost 400 people lost their lives while physically protecting the trees.
In the West, the Sierra Club was found by the ‘preservationist’ John Muir, a Scottish-American naturalist, in 1892. The Audubon Society dates from 1905, formed to protect exotic birds from the hunters that killed them for the sake of shimmering feathers for women’s hats. After the second world war, there was growing consciousness of the baleful impact of humanity on the world’s ecosystems. Aldo Leopold, in his essay ‘The land ethic’, was one of the first to articulate the belief that human beings should cease to regard themselves as conquerors of nature and see themselves as citizens of it. 2 The Nature Conservancy, founded in 1951, encouraged regenerative farming, while in Britain the Soil Association, dating from 1946, was concerned with soil erosion and depletion, and the decline in the nutritional value of food. The 1970s saw a new wave of environmental initiatives, including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and a number of popular movements – The Future Is In Our Hands in Norway, the Lifestyle Movement in Britain. This was the time of the publication of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, 3 and of Andre Gorz’s idea of decroissance (de-growth), and of the work of Ivan Illich, E. F. Schumacher (Small is Beautiful), Wendell Berry (The Unsettling of America), Murray Bookchin, and the Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen who rejected Herman Daly’s idea of a ‘steady-state economy’ in favour of de-growth; ideas more recently elaborated in the twenty-first century by Serge Latouche, the Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance, and the Simplicity Institute in 2007 (‘envisioning a prosperous descent’ 4 ). It has also led to the rise of many new militant groups, some of whose members – Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil – have shown themselves willing to go to prison for the sake of what they believe.
Since the 1970s, there has also been a global network of alternative practice in place, from the landless Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra in Brazil, the Consumers’ Association of Penang in Malaysia, formed to ensure the right of all people to the basic elements that sustain life, to the Narmada Bachao resistance to dam-building in India, and the Appiko and Chipko movements to protect forests in North and South India respectively.
These movements are supported by economists (the New Economics Foundation, the Green Economics Institute), academics, lawyers (Earthjustice in the US, ‘because the Earth needs a good lawyer’), scientists – especially by the work of the members of the UN International Panel on Climate Change – farmers, students, teachers, business-owners, writers and journalists, labour unions, educators, photographers, storytellers, film-makers, as well as the politicians of Green and Ecological Parties, bureaucrats, elected government officials. In 2015, 194 ‘parties’ joined the Paris Agreement of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, which committed all signatories to maintaining the increase in temperature of the earth ‘well below 2deg Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels’.
From unquiet present to darkening future
It would be difficult for anyone to remain unaware of the most urgent issues, given the intensity with which they have been articulated. This should, perhaps, make us wonder why so little has changed in daily experience. Has the developmental machine so caught up the whole world in its inextricable compulsions that it has become difficult to trace the elusive frontier where human need ceases and economic necessity begins? Despite the growing consciousness of the need to disengage from a destructive way of life which has the world in thrall, is there not yet a critical mass of opinion prepared to carry into practice what must inevitably occur – if not by conscious choice or design, then by catastrophe? Are as yet unseen emancipatory forces biding their time until the moment arrives for them to reveal themselves? Are projects of liberation being formed in the secret places of the world? Is the barrier to effective political action the fact that existing democratic cultures have become archaic – Christian-Democratic, Social Democratic, Liberal, Conservative, Nationalist, Republican – unresponsive to changing conditions and beliefs and therefore unintelligible, even to people to whose profoundest convictions they once corresponded?
What has appeared as an enduring ideological divide in the world – the once-living vibrant struggle between Left and Right – has been overtaken by upheavals in social, economic and moral landscapes that have reshaped all that seemed settled and permanent. After the seisms and eruptions of the past century, the socio-political topography has been obscured by a fallout of particulates and volcanic ash so that the forces now in contention appear only through a haze, dimly: on the one side, populists, far Right and Fascist, defenders of an unstable and threatened status quo, and. on the other, internationalist, Green and egalitarian, the often scorned visionaries of survival.
Laments by the penitents of slavery and colonialism address these questions only obliquely. If they rarely ask whether a global project of social and economic justice in our time is even possible, is this because it would be regarded as too great a sacrifice to be borne? Would people rather perish than renounce not only some of the spectacular goods which human ingenuity has created, but also the fateful evils which are the spectral but inseparable attendants of all that is so showily and noisily desirable – the rising and contaminated oceans, the indestructible carcinogens inhabiting the bodies of humanity, the extinction of life-forms that have existed for millennia, as well as a gnawing hunger existing side by side with over-consumption, a ragged insufficiency drawing its last breath in the shadow of global plenty?
It is, surely, an error, to confront these issues by wringing our hands and hearts over wrongs for which no one now living was responsible, and to allow the desperate imperatives of the present to be overshadowed by an irremediable past – the paralysed anguish in our time over the impossibility of ‘unpayable debts’.
Tracing continuity between past and present, and acknowledging injustices to those long interred in the overgrown and unvisited graves of former plantations, are vital undertakings, but they should not distract from the far more onerous journey from unquiet present to cloudy and darkening future: for this involves a quite different order of indebtedness from that to those who are now beyond the reach of our reparatory grief, since it is today owed to the stricken of an earth which offers us all only a provisional and increasingly fragile shelter.
For if there really is no alternative to the model that permanently increases the estrangement between rich and poor while at the same time ravaging the protective membrane of an overheating planet, a further, even more disturbing question arises: what happened to what is supposed to be one of our greatest liberties, the freedom to change and to choose? If it is impossible to conceive of any other system than that sanctified and enshrined in the unyielding ideas of ‘our way of life’, ‘our values’, or even ‘our civilisation’, we are unfree. And that unfreedom is a bondage, a form of enslavement. One so unyielding that it makes of all earlier forms of servitude barbaric and experimental forerunners of a deeper captivity from which the way out would require an – as yet – inconceivable movement of liberation.
Footnotes
Jeremy Seabrook is the author, most recently, of Private Worlds: growing up gay in post-war Britain (London: Pluto, 2023); his other recent books include Pauperland: a history of poverty in Britain (London: Hurst, 2013); The Song of the Shirt – the high price of cheap garments from Blackburn to Bangladesh (New Delhi: Navayana, London: Hurst, 2015); Cut Out: living without welfare (London: Pluto, 2016). 2023 marks the sixtieth anniversary of his being published.