The Philippines is poor because of a 500-year legacy of colonization. Today, the Philippines is in a neocolonial situation: it is an economic colony.
Poverty kills millions per year. And now, in the midst of coronavirus, government violence, corruption, incompetence, and indifference to the poor is exposed more starkly than ever.
This piece begins with vignettes from Deep Green Resistance organizers in the Philippines, and concludes with a piece from the Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal detailing the Duterte administration’s response.
Homeless people are being arrested for not following home quarantine.
A group of children arrested were arrested for violating curfew and put into a dog cage.
Politicians, celebrities, and the rich are able to access coronavirus testing even they don’t have any symptoms, while poor people with symptoms receive no tests.
CoViD-positive patients without serious symptoms are being discharged from hospitals but have nowhere to go.
Philippines: The Duterte regime and the COVID-19 pandemic — the case of a weak but authoritarian state
Update: On March 23, Duterte put to Congress the erroneously titled “Bayanihan Act of 2020”. The word ‘bayanihan’ means community assistance or ‘communitarian’ and the spirit of ‘bayanihan’ means assistance given voluntarily and without any monetary consideration by a member of the community. The title itself is fake, a lie. Nowhere in the bill does the spirit of ‘bayanihan’ prevail. The doctors, nurses, health workers, grocery employees, transport workers and all the frontliners who are heading the fight against COVID19 are not empowered in this bill — instead it extends more power to Duterte, the bureaucracy and his minions. This bill is sinister in many ways, as it aims to give wide powers to a president who’s proven to being incompetent in dealing with the pandemic.
March 23, 2020 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — In the Philippines we have a combination of the worst features of the state under the current conditions of global capitalism. The capacity of the Philippine state to provide even the modicum of public services, systems and related infrastructure, such as health, water, power, housing, public transport, public education, etc., has been gutted after decades of structural adjustment programs, debt and the dictates of neoliberal economic policies imposed by international financial institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, ADB, bilateral and multilateral agreements with imperialist countries, enthusiastically embraced by the country’s technocrats and successive elite governments. This ailing public sector, co-exists with ‘the strong arm’ of a state that has maintained and even increased its capacity to mobilise the military and the police to impose a range of authoritarian measures, from a war against the urban poor resulting in the death of tens of thousands, mainly youth, in the guise of a campaign against drugs, to martial law in the Southern island of Mindanao. Today, this dual character of both a weak and strong armed state, is starkly demonstrated in the Duterte regime’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
As of March 22, the Department of Health reports 380 cases of COVID-19, with 17 recoveries and 25 deaths – a high mortality rate of approximately 7%. With no mass testing undertaken these figures are unreliable. Meanwhile health services are starting to flounder and health workers are falling ill though the anticipated exponential rise of the disease is still ahead of us.
Eleven hospitals and medical centres have issued an “urgent appeal” that an “alarming number” of their personnel were under the 14-day mandatory quarantine for individuals exposed to COVID-19 patients, as persons under investigation “continue to flock” to their emergency rooms every day. These hospitals and medical centres report that most of their “regular rooms have been turned into COVID-19 isolation areas,” leaving less healthcare resources for non- coronavirus patients who also have life-threatening conditions.
“The panic is escalating, mortality is increasing, our supplies of personal protective equipment are running short, our frontline staff are increasingly getting depleted as more of them are quarantined or physically and emotionally exhausted, and a number of our medical colleagues are already hooked to respirators fighting for their lives in various ICUs [intensive care units] … Even our ICUs are getting full. Soon we will have a shortage of respirators. We have every reason to be scared; we are, indeed very scared because we feel that we are on our own to face our countrymen in dire need of help.”
Despite the number of DOH-confirmed cases that is comparably lower to infections in other countries, the appeal points out that they are dealing with COVID-19 patients with “increasing mortality“, which in turn exposes their attending medical staff to more danger than usual. The country has no comprehensive universal health care program and one of the most expensive health services in the region.
Instead of addressing the weakness in the health system and infrastructure as its main priority, the Duterte regime’s strategy has been to declare a lockdown of the entire capital region around Metro Manila – the National Capital Region – from March 15 to April 14, which it describes as “imposing stringent social distancing measures”, with land, domestic air and sea travel to and from Metro Manila suspended, mass gatherings prohibited, community quarantine imposed, government work suspended (except for a skeletal workforce) and the suspension of classes. The announcement was made by President Duterte at a press conference ringed with the chiefs of the PNP and AFP, and police and troops immediately deployed at checkpoints to prevent people from travelling in and out of the NCR. No attempt was made during subsequent press conferences given by the President to explain the public health measures to be undertaken, such as testing programs, for which there is now a rising clamour. This was followed by an announcement on March 17 of the entire island of Luzon placed on lockdown described by government officials as an “enhanced community quarantine,” which limits the movement of people going in and out of the island region, home to at least 57 million.
We are currently under “enhanced community quarantine,” which is strict home quarantine for all households, with transportation suspended, provision for food and “essential health services” regulated, and with a heightened presence of uniformed personnel to enforce quarantine measures. This has been enforced with Barangay checkpoints (local checkpoints within Local Government Units), for which a pass is needed to pass through, with very limited movement which includes only the driver of the vehicle on the main highways such as Edsa or the driver and one assistant. These checkpoints, visible outside my bedroom window, now cordon off and isolate barangays around Metro Manila. Except for groceries and drug stores, all shops have been closed. Some barangays have even imposed 24-hour curfews.
Duterte has repeatedly announced that anyone violating this state of enhanced community quarantine will be arrested, including for “resistance and disobedience to persons in authority” under the provisions of the penal code. Students, workers and people simply trying to shop for food are now being arrested.
Unlike in South Korea where the military and police carried out temperature checks, testing, clean up and disinfecting, the armed personnel at the checkpoints here are doing none of this. In the first few days they weren’t even provided with basic safety equipment, such as masks and hand sanitizer.
The most immediate impact has been on workers and the army of the unemployed who make their livelihoods in the ‘informal sector’, who have been prevented from making a living. On the first day of the lockdown this led to tense scenes at the checkpoints ringing the borders of the NCR, with commuters venting both their anger and despair at the checkpoints. The impact on the livelihoods and lives of working people and the poor has been immediate and devastating. Our organisers are unable to provide assistance to the communities that they work in, such as providing food, masks, etc., in meaningful numbers, at most being only able to assist a couple of hundred households at any one time.
Meanwhile, the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) has announced a one-time financial assistance of P5,000 for every worker who could not work during the one-month lockdown. This is already a very measly amount (USD 3 per day for 30 days), and yet the assistance can only be procured if the employer sends the required documents to the DOLE. Workers are not allowed to do it themselves. Many are also complaining that their employers do not want to avail of this, as they still want workers to report to work during the lockdown. And for those who are locked down outside Metro Manila, they could not even petition their employer to follow up the assistance. Contractual workers are practically blocked from availing of the assistance as their ‘employer’ is a third party agent which may not even be registered in the corporation list of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Workers in the informal sector receive no assistance, and the government merely advise them to contact the local government units for work related to anti-COVID19 campaign in the communities.
The Department of Social Welfare and Development has temporarily suspended its poverty alleviation cash grants for the social pension and unconditional cash transfer (Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program or 4Ps) as well as the distribution of 4Ps cash cards to the country’s poorest families to supposedly “minimize the exposure of the beneficiaries and DSWD employees to the threats of COVID-19”.
The situation in the Philippines stands in stark contrast to other countries in the region, such as Vietnam and South Korea, which are being looked upon as examples of how to deal with the pandemic. Vietnam, bordering China, with a population of around 97 million, has managed to contain the spread of the disease, successfully keeping the number of cases at 76 (as of March 19), with no deaths, over two months after the first cases were reported. A key part of the containment strategy was to develop a fast and affordable test kit in one month, which according to the WHO should have taken four years to develop. The test, developed by a group of Vietnamese researchers from the Institute of Biotechnology under the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, costs about $15, and is capable of returning results within 80 minutes, with a specificity of 100% and sensitivity of five copies per reaction.
South Korea, with a population of around 51 million, as of March 19, has conducted more than 307,000 tests, the highest per capita in the world, with 633 testing sites nationwide. Results are swift, too, coming by text within 24 hours. Korean healthcare, a highly regulated, efficient single payer system, is also prepared to face epidemics. Broad government powers acquired during the MERS crisis has given South Korea one of the most ambitious tracking apparatuses in Asia. Health authorities can sift through credit-card records, CCTV footage, mobile-phone location services, public-transport cards and immigration records to pin down the travel histories of those infected or at risk. Admittedly, a double-edged sword, this tracking system proved to be effective in curbing the recent COVID19 crisis in the country.
Philippines, with a population of 109 million, has only six testing sites across the entire country — three hospitals in the NCR, and one each in Baguio, Cebu and Davao. There’s now a rising clamour for mass testing. A petition by Scientists Unite Against COVID-19, an alliance of more than 1,000 biologists, health experts, and other individuals, as well as 336 organizations, has called for widespread testing to be conducted, as mitigation strategies such as social distancing and community quarantine are not enough and for expanded, decentralized, testing facilities across the country.
According to March 10 media reports, only 2000 kits were available. Duterte’s family members and other Duterte cronies have been given preferential treatment, even though they don’t meet the Department of Health criteria that only the elderly, those with underlying conditions and those whose ailments have progressed to severe or critical would be tested for the virus. People have commented angrily on social media, with some labelling it a “test kits crisis”, describing the preferential treatment given to the President’s family and cronies as “shameless, obscene and disgusting”. On March 21 media reports said that 100,000 new test kits have arrived, donations from China, South Korea and Brunei, but this will only be for testing of severe or vulnerable persons under investigation and not for mass testing.
A test kit was quickly developed by scientists from the University of the Philippines and is capable of fast detection of the novel coronavirus, but it will only be available for use only after two to three weeks, the time it will take the Department of Health to validate the tests.
Some local government units (LGUs) are taking the initiative. The Pasig City Mayor ordered thelimited mobilization of tricycles in the city to bring health workers and patients with immediate medical needs to hospitals. His appeal to the national government to allow the use of tricycles for public health and safety, since a maximum of only two passengers are allowed in the vehicle, was rejected. All Pasig City Hall employees will be paid full salaries with hazard pay and overtime for those employees in the frontlines. The City of Marikina is another LGU taking positive steps, with the initiative to set up local testing units using the University of the Philippines test kits. The regime has responded by threatening mayors with criminal charges, saying they would “closely monitor the compliance of LGUs in the directives of the Office and to file the necessary cases against the wayward officials.”
Duterte has announced a ₱25.1 billion ‘war chest’ to fight COVID-19, but only ₱3.1 billion has been allocated to actually combat COVID-19, including the purchase of test kits and drugs, while the ₱14 billion boost to the tourism budget will, we suspect, be used to “bail out” the anticipated losses of airlines, hotels, casinos, resorts, and tourism-related capitalists. Only ₱2 billion has been allocated to compensate workers affected by the crisis.
The left and progressive movement here has been campaigning against Duterte’s military response to a public health crisis and has been put forward a platform of demands that include: Mass testing for all citizens; Free hospitalization of victims, persons under investigation (PUI), and person under monitoring (PUM) for COVID-19; Mass disinfection in all communities; Food and water rationing for workers and the poor; Distribution of face masks, hygiene kits, vitamins, and contraception; Assistance to farmers, drivers, and other affected workers; Release of 4Ps for beneficiaries; Paid emergency leave to uninsured workers; Refund tuition to students due to class suspension; Price control of commodities; Electricity, water, and communications to be provided 24/7; Allowing vehicles and tricycles to provide transport to medical workers and people with medical needs; Suspension of rent, water, electricity, communications, and other fees; Disarming the large numbers of military and police forces deployed so as not to cause terror to the people; and a debt moratorium.
Internationally, authoritarian trends are also being inflamed, corporate profits prioritised and public health measures relegated to an afterthought at best. According to March 21 media reports, the US Justice Department has asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the coronavirus spreads through the United States. The move has tapped into a broader fear among civil liberties advocates and Donald Trump’s critics — that the president will use a moment of crisis to push for controversial policy changes. And even without policy changes, Trump has vast emergency powers that he could legally deploy right now to try and slow the coronavirus outbreak. British government statements on ‘herd-immunity’ have more than a hint of eugenics.
As of March 23, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has killed 14,655 people worldwide. More than 77% of these deaths are outside China, where it started. In less than three months it has gone from being an outbreak in Hubei Province, to a global medical, economic and social crisis. Data from China suggests many countries are at the beginning of an exponential rise in infections. Comparisons of death tolls and number of cases in different countries show large differences in the death rate between countries. These do not follow a simple, linear pattern of rich countries fairing better than poor countries, although this is one trend (Italy’s GDP per capita is more than three times that of China’s and South Korea’s GDP per capita is slightly lower than that of Italy, for example). They reflect differences between countries in wealth, priority given to healthcare, willingness and ability of governments and states to take control of the economy, social solidarity and trust between society and authorities responsible for the response to the pandemic. Overall, capitalist society is proving unable to respond rationally to the pandemic, which will massively increase the death toll and the social and economic impacts.
The COVID-19 crisis needs to be considered as part of the environmental crisis created by capitalism that is threatening humanity with extinction. Scientists for some time have been warning of increasing frequency and severity of epidemics caused by novel pathogens, with recent pandemics including SARS, MERS and Swine Flu providing warning. Climate change itself increases the spread of pandemics. Moreover, the causes of pandemics such as COVID-19 include many factors also fuelling climate change as well reflecting the more general breakdown in the world’s ecosystems, and their ability to sustain life, as a result of the capitalist mode of production. Factors include industrialised agriculture, wilderness and ecosystem destruction, concentration and movement of people, and pollution. Unless the global environmental crisis is addressed, there will be an in increase in the frequency and severity of novel pandemics. In this regard pandemics are no different to the typhoons, fires, droughts, etc, whose increased frequency and severity is associated with the looming Anthropocene apocalypse.
Imperialism has exacerbated the crisis in many ways. Decades of structural adjustment and imposed debt have left the countries of the Global South without the health and social welfare infrastructure needed for normal times, let alone during a lethal pandemic. The international division of labour that creates unprecedented wealth for the Western capitalist ruling class involves massive labour migration of workers with little or no access to healthcare, while absurd degrees of international travel — for “business” and leisure — are part of elite lifestyles. Imperialist war further degrades the ability of societies to provide healthcare, while horrifically increasing the need for it. War also creates massive population displacement. War, poverty and racist immigration policies have created a large population of highly mobile, undocumented people with no access to healthcare and well beyond the reach of any screening or tracking. The European and US capitalist economies are dependent on the labour of undocumented refugees and migrants.
The use of crippling economic blockades by the Western imperialists, the US in particular, further exacerbates the crisis. Before the COVID-19 pandemic appeared, Venezuela and Iran were both already struggling with severe shortages of medicine and medical equipment due to US sanctions. In Iran this has meant the impact of the pandemic has been particularly devastating. The chaos created by major imperialist wars on Iran’s eastern and western borders means that this devastation is rapidly spreading to neighbouring countries. The six decade-long blockade of Cuba is threatening a particularly perverse impact on the global COVID-19 pandemic. Confirming that the blockade is a response to the positive example set by Cuba’s socialist revolution, the impoverished, blockaded island has prioritised healthcare to such an extent that the US elite cannot hide from its own population the fact that Cubans have significantly better healthcare than working class Americans! Moreover, Cuba has pioneered “medical solidarity” with more doctors and health workers serving poor communities throughout the world than the World Health Organisation. The BBC reported on March 22, that the pandemic-traumatised population of Italy (a rich imperialist country) were enthusiastically welcoming the arrival of Cuban medical personnel while European Union officials fretted over the “bad optics” of Italians seeing aid arrive from Cuba, China and Russian, but not the EU. The Western countries could provide finance and technology to enable Cuba to increase its worldwide medical solidarity. Instead the US is working on tightening anti-Cuban sanctions to prevent countries from receiving Cuban medical aid.
The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated many normally invisible social and economic relationships of capitalist society and has exposed much of its exploitative and irrational nature. Paradoxically — because people are its agent of transmission — the pandemic is both anti-social and social. It is anti-social because the fear of contagion from other people can exacerbate the social divisions, individualism and alienation inherent in capitalist society (and ruling class entities are enthusiastically using the pandemic to fuel these, for example US leaders calling it “the Chinese Virus”). But it is social because combating the virus is dependent on recognising that the overall health outcomes for everyone (included society’s most privileged) is dependent on the outcomes of the whole of society, including the most exploited and marginalised. This is true for both within and between nations.
Marxist geographer David Harvey wrote on March 20: “The economic and social impacts are filtered through “customary” discriminations that are everywhere in evidence … the workforce that is expected to take care of the mounting numbers of the sick is typically highly gendered, racialized and ethnicized in most parts of the world. It mirrors the class-based work forces to be found in, for example, airports and other logistical sectors. This ‘new working class’ is in the forefront and bears the brunt of either being the workforce most at risk from contracting the virus through their jobs or of being laid off with no resources because of the economic retrenchment enforced by the virus. There is, for example, the question of who can work at home and who cannot. This sharpens the societal divide as does the question of who can afford to isolate or quarantine themselves (with or without pay) in the event of contact or infection.”
COVID-19 has also illustrated that the ineffectiveness of military/police/border security responses in protecting the elites from some aspects of ecological collapse (including pandemics) does not stop these being the default responses. The neoliberal capitalist state is unable to deal with crises even when it would benefit capitalist society to do so. Social solidarity is a necessity for surviving catastrophe but in capitalist society social solidarity is a challenge to the existing order. The responses of Vietnam and Cuba reflect the merits of socialism both in terms of rational organisation of society (and use of infrastructure and resources) and in terms of social cohesion.
The inability of capitalism to respond to this pandemic that threatens the whole of global capitalist society — including its elites — is reflective of capitalism’s genocidal and suicidal response to broader environmental apocalypse. The demands that the movement has campaigned for now re-emerge with a deadly relevance and urgency. Let’s put them up again, adapted to the current context. All of the above demands show the necessity of our campaigns and of socialism.
How a culture behaves during a time of crisis is directly related to how it used to behave before the crisis. The capitalist authoritarion nature of the Duterte regime seen now is no more than an extension of the capitalist authoritarion nature of the Duterte regime before the pandemic hit. In the book “Deep Green Resistance“, Aric McBay uses a few potential scenarios to describe how the conditions during a collapse will differ based on what the conditions were before the collapse.
Deep Green Resistance stands for the resistance against the culture of empire, aka civilization. For many people this may sound very new, strange and, understandably enough, frightening; most people associate something positive with the term “civilization”. As a person born into this culture it is not easy to question it, and even harder to perceive the culture itself as the major problem. This is where DGR’s analysis comes in.
So, what is civilization?
History begins about 10,000 years ago, when humans stopped grunting in caves, invented agriculture and gradually settled down. Agriculture and sedentariness enabled the construction of ever larger cities, innovations such as the monetary economy led to trade relations and an increasingly complex division of labor. The development of writing systems made it possible to literally write history. From then on, a period of constant development began, with higher and higher, ever more complex forms of technology. Civilization was so successful that it has spread all over the world to this day.
This is just a short attempt to describe the common myth. Another description from writer Fabian Scheidler1:
“The standard version – the myth of Western civilization – tells of a process of tediously achieved progress which, despite all adversities and setbacks, has led to more prosperity, more peace, more knowledge, more culture and more freedom in the end. In this version wars, environmental devastation and genocides are slips, relapses, setbacks or undesirable side effects of a generally beneficial process of increasing civilization.”
Wikipedia provides the following definition:
“A civilization or civilisation is any complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification imposed by a cultural elite, symbolic systems of communication (for example, writing systems), and a perceived separation from and domination over the natural environment.”2
According to Derrick Jensen, civilization is “(…) a culture – that is, a complex of stories, institutions and artifacts – that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (…), with cities being defined – so as to distinguish them from camps, villages and so on – as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life. Thus a Tolowa village five hundred years ago where I live in Tu’nes (…), now called Crescent City, California, would not have been a city, since the Tolowa ate native salmon, clams, deer, huckleberries, and so on, and had no need to bring in food from outside. Thus, under my definition, the Tolowa, because their way of living was not characterized by the growth of city-states, would not have been civilized. On the other hand, the Aztecs were. Their social structure led inevitably to great city-states like Iztapalapa and Tenochtitlán, the latter of which was, when Europeans first encountered it, far larger than any city in Europe, with a population five times that of London or Seville. Shortly before razing Tenochtitlán and slaughtering or enslaving its inhabitants, the explorer and conquistador Hernando Cortés remarked that it was easily the most beautiful city on earth.”3
Deep Green Resistance uses Derrick Jensen’s definition of civilization. Civilizations are by definition not sustainable and never can be. Yet there are two possible ways for civilizations to end: Either they are consumed by a even larger and/or more powerful civilization, a process which is usually accomplished by the use of brutal violence and leads to deep, intergenerational trauma (as we’ve seen with the example of the Aztecs), or they collapse because they used up their resources and cannot expand any more for some reason (as we’ve seen with historical civilizations, and we experience nowadays with our own industrial civilization, which is on the edge of abyss because it is killing the planet).
This is why we advocate for a culture of resistance and the building of alternatives.
Civilization usually looks good only from the perspective of the civilized; Samuel Huntington puts it very aptly: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”4
We, as members of Western civilization, should listen very carefully and respectfully to the voices of others, in particular indigenous peoples, since they have been and and still are being hit hardest by the violence of our culture. The Osage chief Big Soldier said:
“I see and admire your manner of living. . . . In short you can do almost what you choose. You whites possess the power of subduing almost every animal to your use. You are surrounded by slaves. Every thing about you is in chains and you are slaves yourselves. I fear that if I should exchange my pursuits for yours, I too should become a slave.”5
Apart from indigenous peoples, it is sometimes ethnologists who are able to see our culture from an outside perspective:
“On his expeditions, Lévi-Strauss came across a tribal culture that seemed irritable and highly dangerous to him. It plundered nature, devastated entire regions, worshipped arty idols, massacred its own kind and was notorious for its historical carnages. In the meantime, this exotic tribal culture has defeated all competitors and rules the world. Its name is ‘civilization’.”6
Let me end with the words of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore:
“The civilization of ancient Greece was nurtured within city walls. In fact, all the modern civilizations have their cradles of brick and mortar. These walls leave their mark deep in the minds of men. They set up a principle of ‘divide and rule’ in our mental outlook, which begets in us a habit of securing all our conquests by fortifying them and separating them from one another. We divide nation and nation, knowledge and knowledge, man and nature. It breeds in us a strong suspicion of whatever is beyond the barriers we have built, and everything has to fight hard for its entrance into our recognition.”7
“Civilization, civilization, pride of Europeans… Whatever you strive for, whatever you do, you always move within a lie. When you see it, the tears flow, the pain screams. You are the violence before the law. You are not a torch, you are a conflagration. Everything you touch, you consume.”
“European civilization... is a cannibal civilization; it oppresses the weak and enriches itself at its expense. It lets envy and hatred shoot up everywhere, wherever it goes, no grass can grow anymore… Its power comes from directing all its forces towards the sole aim of enrichment… Under the codename patriotism, it breaks the given word, shamelessly throws out its nets woven from lies, erects monstrous giant images in its temple dedicated to profit, in honor of the God it worships. Without the slightest hesitation we prophesy: this will not last forever!”8
1Fabian Scheidler (2015): Das Ende der Megamaschine, p.10 (translated from German)
By Adon Apamea / Deep Green Resistance Middle East & North Africa
Dubai is an interesting city. A thriving futuristic metropolis in the heart of the desert considered to be the crown jewel of modernity with indoor ski resorts, gulf courses, fully computerized metros, giant air-conditioned shopping malls, and the tallest skyscrapers in the world.
Built upon the oil money and over the desert’s sands starting from 1970s, Dubai is rootless more than any other city in the world. With a few thousand original natives, Dubai attracts millions of people today from around the world who come to live and work, or to just take a look at the legendary city.
The dispossessed, like yours truly, come to Dubai for work when all other possibilities are blocked. Some of the latter enter the city with the dream of doing big money. Some come out of desperation while the rest are forced into cheap labor or sold as slaves for the sex industry.
The possessed – those who have loads of money and are possessed with making more money and power, also come to Dubai. Most of them come to squeeze the life out of the first group for profit while some just want to show off their fortune or discover what the fuss is about.
The dispossessed sit on the bottom while the possessed sit on top. The hierarchy looks something like this: native Emirati men – specifically those possessing money, power and oil – sit on top, white western men sit right next or beneath them managing the growth of one of the fastest cities in the world. Some brown men, mainly from Pakistan and India, sit in the third row, and more whitish people and some Arabs sit somewhere in the fourth row making the middle management and landlords of the city. East Asians sit on the fifth row doing all the blue collar jobs, answering phone calls, making deliveries, and fixing air conditioners. And last a majority of Pakistanis, Indians, Bengalis and Sirilankans sit in the last row, building the city in the scorching heat, cleaning houses, and opening doors. In the shadows, an unknown number of women, from all nationalities of the third world are sex slaves, without passports or means to escape their slavery.
In any work, being a white westerner ensures you get a salary four or five folds the one that any person of a brown nationality would get for exactly the same job. An IT engineer of Indian nationality might get a salary of 1500 USD. A British would get 6000 USD for the same job in the same company, just for being white. This is how the system works. Everyone knows it; brown people make jokes about it. White people rarely laugh. In Dubai you discover that racial hierarchy isn’t a theory in a book.
The dispossessed, however, largely share an illusion absent amongst the possessed, that they can join the upper class if they work hard enough. The banks are especially fond of fostering this hope: it just takes a few weeks of living in Dubai to become eligible for a fat bank loan. Agents will knock on your door, call your phone, and come to your office trying to sell you easy loans and premium credit cards. You can wake up a poor man in the morning, and in the afternoon walk from the doors of a bank with a small fortune.
And thus the mighty machine continues its march onward, greased by the sweat and blood of poor people… and by their dreams as well.
Being in the desert, everything in Dubai is imported and packaged in neat plastic or metal containers: water, food, cars, buildings, furniture, and people. The world’s most exotic fruits and foods are available at any supermarket year round, but everything tastes the same. High-tech electronics and the most sophisticated cars in the world are all here too. Even portable ACs, in case you wanted to sit on the balcony in the summer’s desert and you disagree with the temperature. One building in Dubai for example, Burj Khalifa, spends the equivalent of 29.000.000 lb (13.000 tons) of melting ice in one day on cooling. Dubai has 80.000 multistory buildings.
You don’t even have to go to the grocery store or any place else to buy your stuff; the bottom strata of the dispossessed class will cycle in the scorching heat to deliver anything you need to your front door so you don’t move your ass one inch from the sofa. The dispossessed then get a killing tan and skin diseases. The possessed get fat. Doctors and personal fitness trainers make more money.
People who spend a long time here speak of Dubai as a city designed to take back everything it gives to a person. If you don’t have what it takes, the attractions and the marketed lifestyle in the shiny city will invite you to put all the money you made on doing and buying stuff you don’t need before you step your foot again on a plane. Many people leave Dubai in debt.
Dubai is described as the highest expression of civilization, and it really is. It’s a money making machine, and it does a hell of a good job at it. The people who can see the truth, however, would call it for what it is: a monster. A monster devouring the desert, once filled with delicate ecosystems and countless animals and plants. A monster devouring the world, one packaged fruit at a time. A monster devouring its people, one broken spirit at a time.
Dubai though, is not an exception. If you really think about it, Dubai is every city in the world…
Industrial civilization is systematically destroying everything on the planet that life requires in order to exist. Since civilization demands infinitely increasing resources on a finite planet, its eventual end is unavoidable. It follows that the faster it can be brought down, the more likely it is that any chance at survival will remain for those who inhabit the Earth after the crash.
My friend listens attentively as I speak the words, but she’s smiling the way she always smiles when she thinks I’m at the end of my rhetorical rope. It’s lucky for our friendship that we like to argue on certain subjects, since our views don’t tend to overlap. Our favorite topics of discussion are the ones we’re pretty sure we’ll never agree on. We lived together for a year and never fought once over who last took the trash out, the setting of the thermostat, or the dishes left in the sink. We saved our fighting spirit for health care reform (I wanted a single-payer system, she thought any regulation was obstructing the free market), the relative merits of capitalism (the only fair system said she, the root of all evil said I), and the relationship of religion to morality (inseparable if you asked her, at odds if you asked me).
Our intense discussions at the kitchen table generally lasted long enough to bore our other friends to tears and often got loud enough to wake our other roommates from deep slumber, but today amidst the lunch rush of our favorite restaurant, no one is bothered by our fervor. She and I have prodded each other’s political sensibilities from so many angles that few of her arguments can surprise me anymore, but this time I’m leaning forward across the table in anticipation of her point.
In some ways, it would be a relief to be proven wrong this time. See, new information has been leading me to some unsettling conclusions as of late. Being right about them means that the world I’m used to cannot continue, will not continue, on its current trajectory. Being right means that the situation is a lot more urgent and intractable than I’ve previously been able to appreciate. Being right means that we have a lot of work to do, and not much time in which to do it. Today at lunch I tell some of these conclusions to my friend, more than half hoping that she can talk me back over to the more familiar side of the line.
“Doesn’t that sound a little extreme, and kind of alarmist, Rach?” she asks. If you’d asked me that as recently as two years ago when I first became heavily involved in activism of any sort, I probably would have told you it sounded both alarmist and extreme. I would have argued then, just like my friend proceeds to argue now, that civilization doesn’t destroy the things we need, it provides them for us. It’s a word to describe the highly advanced state of human society that we’ve achieved.
Civilization means progress through scientific prowess, global connection and trade, a longer lifespan through modern medicine, more comfort and leisure time due to mechanization, and a million thoughtless comforts and distractions to improve our lives. The main problem with these definitions is the fact that they are written by the civilized, for the civilized. For me, the word civilization used to connote an almost holy weight, and to bring civilization to a place was synonymous with bringing hope, progress, and power. Here’s a more accurate definition:
Civilization is the phenomenon of people living in cities, more or less permanently at a high enough density to require the routine importation of resources into the city center; the culture of institutions, stories, and artifacts that arises from such an arrangement.
On its face, that definition sounded pretty innocuous to me on a first reading. More than just innocuous, to me that definition sounded absurd. Of course people live in cities, I thought, where else? People have always lived in close proximity to each other because we’re social animals desirous of community and relationship. Of course, I thought, people in cities need to import food and other essentials, but what’s wrong with that? Importation is necessary because without industrial production and agriculture, we couldn’t make enough food and other necessities for everyone, and industrial agriculture needs the empty space outside the city to grow our food. What else would our culture and mythology arise from, if not civilization? How could anyone want anything different?
To even approach beginning to answer these questions, it was necessary to gain a basic understanding of how privilege works within individuals and institutions. When you are the one being privileged, that privilege is usually invisible to you. Most men do not consciously acknowledge that the dominant construction of masculinity is based on hatred and erasure of women, and even fewer can address the ways that hating and erasing women grants them privilege within the system of patriarchy.
During a speech at Occupy Oakland, activist Lierre Keith articulated patriarchy, capitalism, and civilization as the three main frameworks that direct our culture’s interactions with power and oppression. Just like the violence of patriarchy is invisible to those it benefits, the violence of capitalism is either rationalized or outright denied by those middle to upper class individuals that are benefitting from legions of wage slaves below them.
You’ve heard them do it, maybe you’ve even engaged in some rationalization yourself. It sounds like, “anyone can get above their circumstances if they work hard,” or “people get what they deserve.” In a perfect world, that may be true, but in a capitalist world, people get whatever those with more power deign to give them. A privilege can be the power to oppress or use others, or it can be insulation from the violence that permeates and enforces the system. I’ve been sensing the blinders of privilege in my periphery, like a dog senses a cone around its neck. The occasional glimpse of the outside world is illuminating, but there’s no getting the cone off, and so the scene will always be incomplete.
The violence of patriarchy and capitalism did not become visible to me overnight – I’m a white, middle class American, a social position that carries enough privilege to blind most to the inherent flaws in these two systems, which means that even once the basic systems are visible to me, most of the effects of those systems are still invisible to me. Still, these systems were relatively easier to identify as oppressive than the third system, civilization.
The first person to suggest to me that civilization itself is inherently destructive and unsustainable was my roommate, Sam, shortly after she moved in with me. The first time she mentioned it, I rejected the idea out of hand. Humans have always lived in close-knit communities, I said, and our need for community is one of the most intrinsic attributes of humanity. To reject civilization seemed equivalent to rejecting the whole spectrum of human social behavior as inherently destructive. I recognized much of human activity as destructive, but labeling our every activity as inherently destructive seemed a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If humans themselves are irredeemable, then what can we possibly be working toward?
My understanding changed when I read a different definition of civilization – people living in cities. To me, cities once seemed eternal and inevitable. As a young child, I learned that the first cities appeared less than ten millennia ago in the Middle East. On the same day, I learned that humans are evidenced in the fossil record for two hundred thousand years.
For the bulk of human existence, we lived outside the bounds of civilization, and without the framework of privilege and oppression that civilization necessitates and enforces through violence. At the time, my still-developing brain had no conception of the width of one year, much less the scope of change that stretches between ten and two hundred millennia. To my child’s perception, that day’s history lesson were not facts, they were a familiar story. We each know the trope by heart: regardless of whether they exist by design or by chance, humans gained intelligence surpassing that of all other species. Over time, we used our superior faculties to improve life for ourselves. The changes we have created are inherently good as well as ultimately inevitable, and working toward the spread and advancement of these changes is both noble and necessary.
We all know this story, and to call it a story gets much closer to the point than calling it history. Someone wrote down the facts in our history, if they are indeed facts at all, and that person or group of people had to decide what to include or omit, which words to use, and how to arrange those words. There is no objective account, no hard historical fact. Even when solid empirical evidence can be produced for a historical “fact,” each kernel of physical reality comes to us swaddled in a story, a fabric of accrued belief to which is added a final and significant layer – the gloss of supposed objectivity is a tool of erasure based on privilege. Those who benefit from a system are likely to protect it and speak well of it. Those who have to live the violent cost of our culture don’t tend to get jobs writing curricula.
What cost? Well, I’m glad you asked, but I probably would have told you even if you hadn’t. I’ve observed fear and violence from the security of a suburban bubble, seen the desperation of lack and then returned home to stocked shelves, and glimpsed the reality of civilization’s true nature only from the window of a moving car. If, as I hope, I’ve managed to learn anything about how the real world works, I need to acknowledge that my charmed life has afforded me an education from a safe distance.
More each day, I know that the comfort and safety I call home are wrung from the pain and violation of others, and if the guilt you feel at this knowledge doesn’t tear at the pit of your gut, you may as well be a fucking corpse. The nagging suspicion that the certainty and urgency I feel in this moment will subside with my youth and naiveté offers little relief. The picture of reality that’s taking shape behind my eyes doesn’t fit with the story I once knew best, and there isn’t room for them to coexist. Increasingly, I’ll relay the conflict to anyone who’ll listen, as though my frenetic speech was an incantation to exorcise the myth from my mind.
I still haven’t answered the question – what cost? The answer can and does fill volumes, and this paragraph should be proof enough for no one, but here is what I’ve been coming to understand. Today, let’s take only our source of food as an example. A given ecosystem can only support a certain number of organisms living on it at one time. If the population surpasses its carrying capacity of organisms, members of the species consume too much of whatever it is they need to eat, and the population’s numbers plummet as resources inevitably become scarce.
Not only do members of the species die, but the carrying capacity of that land is lowered lastingly. If there are too many deer on an island, the deer food on the island is unable to replenish itself fast enough to support them. The upward motion on the population graph comes down hard, and can never rise as high again. That island will likely never hold as many deer as it once did.
Now, when humans began living in high concentrations in cities, these physical laws were an immediate obstacle. If a square mile of land can only produce enough resources for one person to survive, placing fifty people in that square mile means that the resources need to come from somewhere else. Every industrialized city in existence exceeds the carrying capacity of the land its built on, so where does the sustenance come from?
In the case of food, the answer is agriculture. We grow food outside of the bounds of the city and ship it in to the people living in the center – these people could not grow enough food for themselves if they wanted to, because in most cases, the environment that yields nutrients has been replaced by concrete. Are we on the same page so far? Good. Here’s where things get dicey. This arrangement appears to work well to the people in the city, since the food (usually) arrives consistently from beyond its borders, but the less copasetic effects of agriculture are two pronged.
First, the only way that monocrop agriculture (the most controllable method in the short term and, predictably, far and away the most profitable for some) can successfully produce food is by waging a war against all other parts of nature. A monocrop means killing everything on a piece of land, all the way down to the bacteria in the soul, so that nothing interferes with the growth on the desired plant. The clearing of the land is only the first wave of death that agriculture sets in motion.
There are reasons that monocrops don’t exist in nature. The only way to maintain the biotically sterile environment necessary to grow anything with a monocrop is the use of pesticides, and the gut-wrenching realities of even the most mild of these are demonstrated best by the scars they’ve left on our land, lives, and limbs. In addition, plants overshoot the carrying capacity of soil just as organisms do their habitats – too many in one place, and the necessary nutrients run out. Soil takes thousands of years to regenerate, and we don’t have thousands of years – most of the soil on the planet is already dust. If you’ve followed my explanation, which I hope you have, you can guess what happens next.
Here’s a hint: the exact same thing that would happen to any other species. The human population graph stays steady until the start of civilized societies with agriculture, and then the line climbs straight for the heavens. It hasn’t been stopped yet, but it will be. What will be left when we get there? Agriculture also necessitates backbreaking labor to actively maintain its war against biodiversity. We commonly refer to technologies as “labor saving,” but in most cases, we just saving the labor for someone else. More specifically, we’re saving it for someone who we can justify exploiting.
Fewer people buy their slaves nowadays, but renting them is all the rage. When wringing labor value from someone else’s body and time doesn’t work, we wring it from the Earth itself. All the unpaid labor in the world cannot change what monocrops do to soil, but fossil fuels are buying us time. The fertilizer used in industrial agriculture is derived from oil. When we inevitable use up this nonrenewable resource, we won’t be able to ask any more of our dead and desiccated soil – it will have blown away for good. We’ve only looked at food in the last couple paragraphs, but different examples yield similar results. The basic organization and priorities of our society as it exists are fundamentally dissociated from the reality of how life works on this planet. If we want to live, it all has to stop, and soon.
To put it simply, circumstances are a lot more dire than I previously realized. When two conflicting ideas coexist in the same brain, the result is cognitive dissonance. She who experiences the conflict can choose to preserve her existing framework by ignoring or rationalizing one idea at the expense of the other. Alternatively, she can choose to critically examine both in light of the available evidence and hopefully construct a more realistic and effective framework for action. The framework of industrial civilization is not redeemable, because it conflict on the most basic levels with the continuation of life on the planet.
When the first bit of doubt lodged itself between the lines of the familiar story, I ignored it. When it grew, distorting the consistency of the only plot I could follow, I rationalized it. I’m not going to do either one anymore. Some things are obvious – we need food, water, and air, and we need them without poison, thank you very much. The fundamental illogic and insanity of our current system, the need to dismantle it without delay – when food, water, and air are our priorities, these facts become obvious too.
At lunch with my friend, I finish the last sentence of this argument, and we’re both silent for a moment. I gulp some water, and she picks at the remnants of her food and bites her lip contemplatively. For a moment, perhaps a longer moment than I’d like to admit, I hope that she can talk me out of this. If any of what I’ve just said is true, then the future will look very different than what I’ve expected. If it’s true, my very existence within this system is predicated on the exploitation of other life, including other humans. If it’s true, then my actions need to reflect the urgency of the situation, and we’re out of time for vacillation.
“You make some good points,” she says. “Well, if it’s true, what do we do about it?” Now it’s my turn to contemplate silently, because the truth is that I’m not sure. These problems span the planet, and even if my answer wasn’t stunted by the lies that insulate my privileges, it can’t be universally true. Resistance needs to look different in different places, act different according to context, and I definitely don’t have very much of that answer yet. Luckily, I’m not asking the question in a vacuum. There are others, here and across the world, asking the same questions right now and throughout history. Resistance to hierarchy and the abuse that comes with it has a story as long and diverse as the story of humans themselves. Knowing the story is the only way to change the ending in a meaningful way, and I have a lot of work to do toward both those ends.
A specific analysis has lately been guiding my actions and explorations, called Deep Green Resistance. The book by that name was written by Lierre Keith, Aric McBay, and Derrick Jensen (authors whose work informed much of this article), and since its release last year, actions groups have sprung up across the country and internationally in accordance with the strategy the book lays out. A detailed description of the group’s basic premises, organization, and methods will have to be saved for a later article, but we are hardly the first to point out the depravity of the current arrangement of power. The soil, air, and water are running out, and so is our time. Whatever happens next, we cannot afford the luxury of relying on symbolic action alone. Whatever happens next, the death knell for real change is compromise with a system that “creates value” from death, destruction, and misery. Whatever happens next, I’m siding with the real world. How about you?
India is hungry for energy. Over 173 power plants, all of them coal-fired, will be built to power the nation’s high-tech industries and booming cities.
This is accelerating an ongoing “coal rush” which has put our dirtiest fossil fuel at the heart of India’s breakneck growth, and could soon make a single state, Andhra Pradesh, one of the world’s top 20 carbon emitters.
On 101 East, filmmaker Orlando de Guzman takes a dark journey through the coal belt of Jharkhand and West Bengal, to look at the winners and losers of this booming industry.
