The Past is Not Even Past

“Blood and Earth – Modern Slavery, Ecocide and the Secret to Saving the World,” by Kevin Bales, 2016

This is a journey into the origin of granite counter-tops and headstones, digital devices, fish and shrimp, beef and gold.  In a global economy, commodities are laundered from land and earth through labor to transport, production and sales, ending up in your living room or kitchen.  We aren’t supposed to know anything except they are the new things we just bought.  Yet some of that ‘stuff’ comes from the estimated 35M modern slaves in the world.

Bales has written a number of books on the topic of modern slavery, and here he ties it to environmental degradation.  Export economies based on illegal labor decimate the land, mangrove swamps, forests, jungles, water and animals because the slavers don’t give a damn.  While Bales himself doesn’t see the connection between our world capitalist commodity economy and slavery, like crime they seem peas in a pod.  His solutions are better government, better auditing of sub-contractors and better laws.  He thinks “heroes of the new economy” like Peter Thiel will save us, along with informed consumer choices.  Don't laugh.

Lessening consumption, including certain imported foods; reducing the production or purchase of “cool” throw-away electronics or even labor action are not on his radar, let alone anti-capitalism or class war.  He complains that slavery undercuts the capitalist ‘free market,’ but he ignores the fact that these products get sold in that very market.  Both methods revolve around earning profits after all. Indigenous slavery in the silver mines of Potosi, Bolivia was the foundation of many European banks.  Chattel slavery in Brazil, the Caribbean and the U.S. South was a great boon to the capitalists in the U.S. north and in Europe, something that Marx would call a form of ‘primitive accumulation.’  All this is still going on.  In a way his book contains its own contradiction.  It’s like discovering a massacre by two perpetrators, then recommending steps against only one of them.

THE SITES

Bales visits a granite mine in India producing headstones and countertops worked by families of debt slaves, including women and children.  He slips into the eastern Congo and spies on illegal cassiterite, coltan and tantalum mines worked by slaves, guarded by gangs of killers and rapists, some just children.  When the militias are not selling blood minerals they cut down mahogany trees for lumber and charcoal or they kill mountain gorillas and hippos in national parks for sellable meat.  He visits an island shrimp farm in a decimated mangrove in southern Bangladesh full of deceived and bullied children sometimes forced to work 24 hours a day in cold water.  These protective Bay of Bengal mangroves sequester four times the carbon of ordinary forests or jungles and they are being cleared for seafood farms.  He interviews a woman working in a shrimp processing factory in nearby Khulna city that is full of brutalized and irregularly paid women.  He studies the decimation of Brazil’s Matto Grosso and Amazonian frontier forests by slaves.  The jungles are being replace by eucalyptus trees for paper, cocoa trees for chocolate, soybeans for cattle feed, pastures for cattle ranges or raw wood for charcoal making.  He describes slaves hand-making bricks in primitive ovens in Pakistan using old tires and used motor oil as toxic fuels that spew ‘black carbon.’

Bales visits the debt-slaves working gold mines in Ashanti Ghana, mining gold laundered through the good capitalists of Dubai’s gold market.  The silicosis-laden quartzite where the gold specks hide will kill many of these slaves, while nearby streams are polluted with toxic mercury from washing out the gold, the air from toxic mercury vapors emitted from heating the gold. 1/3^rd of Ghana is now deforested due to gold mining.

I could go on, but you get the point.

Bales looks at the striking parallels between debts and fake fines that lead to debt bondage across the world now and those Jim Crow practices that led to spurious arrests and fines in the U.S. South.  Under Jim Crow arrested African-American men had to ‘work off’ their fines by slaving for private capitalists in iron ore mines, turpentine camps or cotton plantations.   One of the ‘crimes’ was loitering, which I might add is still heavily used in the U.S. South against African-American youth. 

Bonded Labor / Bonded Land

The Problem

Deforestation, especially in Latin America, Asia and Africa, is perilous to carbon capture, as forests and water bodies are the key natural ways to absorb carbon.  Whether deforestation is done by legitimate capitalists or illegal slavers it amounts to the same thing, though the worst deforestation comes from slavers according to Bales.  National parks and protected forests, treaties or laws mean nothing to them, so attempts to slow or reverse deforestation won’t work as long as illegality and slaveholders function.

Few of these governments care, as they back the local capitalists or slavers and state bureaucrats get a cut of the proceeds.  Corporate audit programs are frequently inadequate – taking the word of suppliers - or deceived.  In Khulna industrialists run small factories that serve as Potemkin villages for auditors, where the building is clean and the workers are told to lie to the auditors.

Bales saw hope in Brazil with the election of Lula and the Workers Party in 2006.  They put into place a working anti-slavery effort that began to free slaves and stop illegal deforestation.  But the large Brazilian landlords began to fight back with assassinations, the favorite tactic of the fascist right.  Bales also documents how local government and police did not back the effort.  Now the landlords have used corrupt legal processes to install Jasir Bolsonaro instead of Lula.  He is allowing the destruction of the Amazon as we speak. So ‘success’ within a capitalist, bourgeois-democratic context is actually inherently reversible.  That should lead us to another solution about how to solve slavery and the destruction of the environment.

This is an illuminating book about the impact of modern slavery on humans and nature, but its proposed solutions are almost purposely inadequate.  It brings home the fact that slavery is not something just in the past.  You might conclude that socialist ‘abolitionism’ is the order of the day.  And even that the only way to crush the slavers is with a new anti-slavery ‘blue-jacket’ army.

P.S. - The Conversation reports 2/14/20 that while chattel slavery may be illegal in every country, it has never been criminalized in half of the world (94 countries).  I.E. you cannot go to jail for keeping slaves in those countries.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Slavery by Another Name,” “Modern De Facto Slavery,” “Slave States – the Practice of Kafala” and the word “slavery” for reviews related to older versions of slavery in the U.S. and Caribbean.

And I got this at the Athens, Georgia library!

Red Frog

February 11, 2020