It is a disturbing account of how the higher income groups in Europe enjoy a lifestyle that is made possible by the harsh and illegal exploitation of low wage workers in Spain and Italy. The specific study is the fruit industry which supplies fresh fruit into northern Europe to the enjoyment of consumers but under horrific conditions for the manual (mostly migrant) workers who do the labour.<\/p>\n
When I was a postgraduate student, a friend (also a student) and I organised what we rather obviously billed as a Radical Film Festival.<\/p>\n
We found an archive of films that we could get for free held by the Victorian State Library. There were several films available some of which featured labour conditions and attacks on trade unions in nations run by right-wing regimes in Latin America.<\/p>\n
One film – Chircales<\/a> (The Brickmakers) released in 1972 – focused on the life of an impoverished family of non-unionised brick makers in the outskirts of Bogot\u00e1.<\/p>\n It showed how the workers were exploited to enrich the elites and then how the family was forced out by the capitalist when the husband became ill as a result of years of working in unsafe conditions. The final scene of the family (wife and several kids) walking out of the digging to nowhere dragging a picture of the virgin mary is still indelibly etched in my mind.<\/p>\n Another film we showed focused on the low-wage tin miners of Bolivia and the way their attempts at unionising were crushed by the capitalists aided and abetted by the power of the state police and military.<\/p>\n We used to have a discussion at the end of each film. At the end of that particular film someone in the audience said it was all well and good to expose exploitation in poor nations but in Australia our labour laws prevent that sort of thing so what was the relevance of the film ffor us.<\/p>\n I posed the question in response: Who in the audience has ever bought a tin of canned food or drink?<\/p>\n The France24 film brings the same issues into relief again. The better life that many enjoy comes at the expense of other workers on low-wage and living in precarious conditions and being horrendously exploited by one capitalist or another.<\/p>\n It brought back further memories of my postgraduate days.<\/p>\n As a student I also became interested in the work of German academic Andre Gunder Frank<\/a>, who was supervised in his doctoral studies at the University of Chicago by Milton Friedman.<\/p>\n In his later body of work, Gunder Frank was a fierce critic of the free market approach espoused by the Chicago Boys (Friedman’s collection of doctoral students most noted for the damage they did in Chile after the overthrow of Salvatore Allende in 1973 by Pinochet.<\/p>\n The first book from Gunder Frank that I read was his 1967 Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, which built on the earlier work (1949) by the Argentine economist Ra\u00fal Prebisch<\/a> and German economist Hans Singer<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Prebisch-Singer Thesis<\/a> became the basis of Dependency theory<\/a> – a distinct framework for understanding the process of economic development.<\/p>\n Their thesis challenged the traditional neo-classical development theory (which originated from David Ricardo’s notions of comparative advantage) and conjectured that the terms of trade moved against poorer nations without an industrial base in favour of richer industrial nations.<\/p>\n In other words, the world prices of primary commodities (agriculture etc) declines over time relative to the price of industrial goods, which increases income and wealth inequalities across (and within nations).<\/p>\n The policy implications, pushed by the authors, included recommendations that the development process should begin with the creation of a import-competing manufacturing base.<\/p>\n The traditional theory of economic development (modernisation theory) suggested that nations follow a pattern where they begin as undeveloped and primitive societies and through industrialisation (investment, adoption of best-practice technology) and institutional and governance development, begin to operate like developed nations.<\/p>\n A middle class forms and incomes grow. An export-orientation is then encouraged to plug the nation into the world economy<\/p>\n Dependency theory extends that work and posits that the nations that we now consider to be developed were never ‘undeveloped’ in the way we view nations in, say, Africa.<\/p>\n Rather, the nations that are called undeveloped have a unique role in the world system unlike anything that the rich countries have ever played.<\/p>\n Whereas the mainstream view is that Africa, say, is poor, and interventions are required to make it rich.<\/p>\n But dependency theory would consider Africa to be ‘rich’ and those riches are being continually drained to the benefit of the core wealthy nations.<\/p>\n Dependency theory posits that resource flows are from periphery to the core rather than the other way around. The rich nations do not ‘invest’ in the ‘income poor’ nations to make the latter richer.<\/p>\n Rather, the rich nations set up processes (supported by international institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank) to ensure that resources flow to the benefit of the advanced world.<\/p>\n These processes, which include legal frameworks and tax rules, privatisation, and the imposition of fiscal austerity to suppress public good development, undermine the opportunities of the ‘income poor’ nations to use their own resource riches to their own advantage.<\/p>\n In his September 1966 Monthly Review article – The Development of Underdevelopment<\/a> – (this link is to a reprint that appeared in a later collection), which was a precursor to his 1967 book, Gunder Frank wrote:<\/p>\n \n… our ignorance of the underdeveloped countries’ history leads us to assume that their past and indeed their present resembles earlier stages of the history of the now developed countries. This ignorance and this assumption leads us into serious misconceptions about contemporary underdevelopment and development …<\/p>\n It is generally held that economic development occurs in a succession of capitalist stages and that today’s underdeveloped countries are still in a stage, sometimes depicted as an original stage, of history through which the now developed countries passed long ago. Yet even a modest acquaintance with history shows that underdevelopment is not original or traditional and that neither the past nor the present of the underdeveloped countries resembles in any important respect the past of the now developed countries. The now developed countries were never underdeveloped, though they may have been undeveloped. It is also widely believed that the contemporary underdevelopment of a country can be understood as the product or reflection solely of its own economic, political, social, and cultural characteristics or structure. Yet historical research demonstrates that contemporary underdevelopment is in large part the historical product of past and continuing economic and other relations between the satellite underdeveloped and the now developed metropolitan countries. Furthermore, these relations are an essential part of the structure and development of the capitalist system on a world scale as a whole.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Note his use of the term ‘underdevelopment’ as opposed to undeveloped.<\/p>\n Essentially, Gunder Frank argued that it is essential to understand the relationship between the “metropolis and its economic colonies” under capitalism.<\/p>\n The underdeveloped countries were in that state because they were functionally essential to making the developed nations at the core richer.<\/p>\n This was a very conception of the process of economic development that organisations such as the IMF and the World Bank hold out as they impose neo-liberal policy structures onto the underdeveloped world.<\/p>\n What Gunder Frank argued was that these policy structures were not about developing the undeveloped nations but, rather, developing the richer nations further and holding the underdeveloped nations in a state where they could act as resource conduits for the richer nations.<\/p>\n Along the way, the underdeveloped nations will develop a middle class and a localised upper class but they only serve to drain the resources in favour of the richer nations even more efficiently.<\/p>\n Gunder Frank said that the underdeveloped nations serve “as an instrument to suck capital or economic surplus out of … [the] … satellites and to channel … this surplus to the world metropolis”.<\/p>\n He also eschewed the use of export-oriented development – that favoured by the World Bank and the IMF – believing that it destroyed the local subsistence systems and accelerated the transfer of surpluses to the core while leaving the peripheral economies heavily indebted and in precarious states.<\/p>\n I was thinking about all this when I read a recent report about the way the richer nations are draining, with IMF and World Bank support, the riches of Africa and leaving the African nations with poor quality public infrastructure, on-going high levels of poverty and precarious states of debt dependence.<\/p>\n
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