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NEWS & LETTERS,
August-September 2002
Black/Red View column by John Alan
New King Cotton
The United States of America is now the only economic
superpower in the world. It has unprecedented power to manipulate the
market-value of any commodity produced anywhere in the world. Recently,
President Bush, a passionate apostle of free trade, and Congress agreed on
legislation to give U.S. farmers a $180 billion subsidy. This amount of money
will lower the price of agricultural commodities on the world market. According
to James Wolfensohn, the World Bank president: “These subsidies are crippling
Africa’s chance to export its way out of poverty.” ‘FREE MARKETS’ VS. HUMAN BEINGS According to the United Nations Development Program that
gift of subsidies to U.S. farmers will result in poor countries losing $50
billion a year in agricultural exports, which is about equal to the aid they are
now receiving from all the rich nations combined. This drop in income means that
farmers in poor African nations, who are cultivating cotton for sale on the
world market and are now living in poverty, will soon be plunged into a
condition of absolute pauperism. The poor cotton farmer in West Africa and his
family will literally starve as a direct result of this bill. In Mississippi 1,700 mostly white cotton farmers sell
half their crop on the world market in competition with Chinese, African and
Pakistani growers. Now these already wealthy farmers will receive hundreds of
millions of dollars in subsidies from the federal government. One cotton farmer alone, Kenneth B. Hood, got $750,000
in subsidies. Hood, who shook Bush’s hand at the ceremony signing the farm
bill, had little sympathy for African cotton farmers. With the arrogance of a
true plutocrat he said, “Maybe the farmers in Africa should be the ones not
raising cotton.” The concentration of power in the hands of a few cotton
growers in the South has long shaped race relations which meant the persecution
of African Americans for several hundred years. Now the cotton farmers in the
Mississippi delta are playing the same card in the world market. COTTON AS A DETERMINANT American cotton farmers can produce much more cotton
than African or Asian farmers. They have both the science and the technology to
accomplish this and hence it will cost them next to nothing. Thus, the subsidies
given to wealthy American cotton farmers in Mississippi by the Bush
administration, are really the self expansion of U.S. capital through the
pauperization of the African and Asian cotton farmers. Cotton, as a world commodity, has a long history in
shaping economic, political and cultural life in America. Marx, in CAPITAL Vol.
I, pointed out that the development of cotton spinning machinery in England
undoubtedly caused “the growth of cotton in the United States and with it the
African slave trade, [and] also made the breeding of slaves the chief business
of the border slave states. When, in 1790, the first census of slaves was taken
in the United States, their number was 697,000; in 1861 it had nearly reached
four million.” (p. 485) The plantation system produced tremendous wealth and
concentrated political power in the hands of a small oligarchy in the southern
U.S. on the basis of a permanent terror against the slave population. Marx said
the foundation for the growth of industrial capitalism in the 19th century was
the extraction of surplus value from slaves. TOWARDS ABOLITIONISM, AGAIN Capital accumulated on the backs of slaves and today
that accumulated wealth is lording it over poor cotton farmers in Africa and
Asia. In this new reconstitution of the world market, capitalism is as brutal
and life threatening as ever. In this country so-called welfare reform has
pushed poor Black and white workers into poverty jobs while billions of dollars
are going to a handful of rich farmers. The opposition to “king cotton” by the slave revolts and the Abolitionist movement in the 19th century deepened the idea of freedom. Today’s new concentration of power will hopefully bring new forms of solidarity and new manifestations of the idea of freedom as the poor in this country and those fighting U.S. imperial dominance the world over discover ways to work together to overcome global capitalism. |
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