Neoliberal slavery and the imperial connection
Pedro Castellano-Masias
Paper presented to the International Critical Management Studies Conference
CMS6-2009
Abstract
Neoliberal economy has been developed under promises of grater freedom and progress, paradoxically the capacity for human degradation within the logic of neoliberal capitalism goes far beyond dominant criticism. It is not only that there is degradation of work life as a result of Taylorism and automation, not only greater ecological perils due to the greenhouse effects of industrial performance, and it is not the case just that international arrangements of the economic foster poverty and exclusion at the periphery of capitalist neo-liberalism. We are experiencing now a radicalization of human degradation in unexpected proportions to the point that slavery has come back to support economic growth and wealth accumulation, even though slavery is forbidden almost everywhere, reality is that in today’s world the economy is fed by slave work.
In this paper we study the ways neo-liberalism has allowed for the development of an enslaving economical system. First at all we shall review the main evidences of what I call the enslaving economy, second we shall move to discuss the Dynamics of Neoliberal Slavery differentiating the Micro-Dynamics, Macro-Dynamics, and the Meso-Dynamics of Neoliberal Slavery. Finally it is presented proposals to face the fast growing development of slavery including interventions in organizations, education, political action, etc.
Introduction
Neoliberal economy has been developed under promises of grater freedom and progress, paradoxically politics of deregulation were enforced through dictatorships in many countries, including Korea and Taiwan in the south east; Chile and Peru in Latin America, among other ones. However, the promises of wellbeing have not been accomplished and now we are experiencing the start of a major economic crisis that involves the whole world.
As a matter of fact, the capacity for human degradation within the logic of neoliberal capitalism goes far beyond dominant criticism. It is not only that there is degradation of work life as a result of Taylorism and automation, not only greater ecological perils due to the greenhouse effects of industrial performance, and it is not the case just that international arrangements of the economic foster poverty and exclusion at the periphery of capitalist neo-liberalism. We are experiencing now a radicalization of human degradation in unexpected proportions to the point that slavery has come back to support economic growth and wealth accumulation.
Even though slavery is forbidden almost everywhere, reality is that in today’s world the economy is fed by slave work. According to research, it is the moment in history where the greatest numbers of slave workers exist, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) figures there would be over twelve million workers subjected to forced labour around the world. Other researchers, such as the American Anti-slavery group, states that there are over twenty seven million slaves nowadays. As astonishing as it may appear, the greatest profits of slavery are generated and accumulated in the rich, highly technologically developed countries, with highly educated citizens who are surprised and scandalized about the use of veils, by women, in Islamic countries; while at their own territories people get enslaved, people get traded, “imported” from abroad to work at their farms, factories, and prostitution houses. It has been informed that the profits from slave work are about 32,6 billion American Dollars globally, and that in the industrialized countries the profits are around 15.5 billion American Dollars, around half of the total. In addition, we must bear in mind that a great part of slave workers in the called underdeveloped countries actually work for suppliers of rich countries corporations (ILO; 2005).
The Information Era witnesses the greatest human and ecological degeneration in history, without even realizing it. The revolutionary technologies for information management and communication have not allowed for greater awareness of social evolution; the great development of mass media has not allowed for citizens connection to the social reality beyond their immediate perception. The explosive development of education has not allowed for persons contact with their reality. The Information Era has allowed for a dormant population, full of consumerism and void of historical consciousness and responsibility.
In this paper we study the ways neo-liberalism has allowed for the development of an enslaving economical system. First at all we shall review the main evidences of what I call the enslaving economy, second we shall move to discuss the Dynamics of Neoliberal Slavery differentiating the Micro-Dynamics, Macro-Dynamics, and the Meso-Dynamics of Neoliberal Slavery. Finally it is presented proposals to face the fast growing development of slavery including interventions in organizations, education, political action, etc.
The Micro-Dynamics of Neo-liberal Slavery are related to the ways people get enslaved and the States complicity. Our discussion here includes firstly the processes of capturing citizens to be reduced as working slaves, secondly we move to analyze the strategies of slaves psychological submission, finally we shall discuss the State complicity that goes from blindness to the production of regulation that abandon the citizens to the will of the human traders.
The Macro-Dynamics of Neo-liberal Slavery are discussed as the strategies used by formal companies to get the benefits from the enslaved workers. It is understood that companies build a network of relations and technologies that provide them with the power to establish the enslaving system in the hands of third actors as far as they capture the main benefits from the system. The main practices that lead to slave work include the concentration of big purchasing power through oligopsony and monopsony, the concentration of vast selling power based on oligopoly and monopoly, the capture of third party surplus value by means of what I call squeeze management. Squeeze management involves a number of practices that allow powerful organizations to take the value created by workers and their organizations performance by closing options, corrupting negotiators, manipulating the possibilities of possible futures, etc.
Finally we shall study the Meso-Dynamics of Neo-liberal Slavery identifying the processes related to organizational cultures colonization, hidden cultural control, and hidden social hierarchical training (Bhabha, H., 1994; Cook, B. 2003; Loomba; Prasad, A.2003; Raza, Mir and Upadhyaya, 2003; Priyadharshini, E.; 1999). It includes also de development, delivery and enforcement of managerial culture as a source of mind setting and political control. The meso-dynamics suppose processes to install the ideology of neo-liberal truth as the basis to guide society and to render every proposal of deviation as impossible, un-natural, absurd, illogic or as a non-desirable involution (Hoogevelt, A., 1997).
The enslaving economy
As we have seen in the introduction, we are experiencing paradoxical times where technology is the hallmark of benefits for humans in the form of medicines, communications that shrink the world and get united families and friends, create opportunities for open education and learning, transportation that allow to be almost any where in the world without interrupting most of personal activities, etc. Nevertheless, within the plethora of contributions for human kind of the technological devices, processes, and services, we can find, if we look carefully, that technological development responds to the worst hungers, greet and necrophilia (Fromm, E.). Before this situation it would be useful to pay attention to thinkers such as Noam Chomsky who call for academics to take the responsibility of change. The responsibility of academics, states Chomsky, is “… to tell the truth and to expose the lies with which the system is recreated in the every day experience, it is time, says him, to call the people to get aware and take proper action.” At this moment we have passed, insists Chomsky, the point where silence is passive consent and complicity.
(http://www.greatdreams.com/chomsky/chomsky.htm).
Humanity has gone beyond the promotion of economic freedom and private independence, with reluctance for solidarity and social commitment. We have reached a point where destruction and domination are the main features of the every day experience; but we have developed a lack of awareness, and the social-political processes for that to be so, that impede us to take action. Within the Information Era we are incapable of informing what is going on in our lives.
Ecological destruction has been made obvious with the Oscar’s awarded film, Un Inconvenient Truth (Gore, A.; 2006), at least a particular ecological problem such as that of global warming. Amazingly, the impact of such award falls in a vacuum of interested power. Most people watch the movie or read the book (Gore, A.; 2006) and they say, that is terrible, there must be something to be done, the authorities should do something, and then, they turn to their next TV show or entertainment and never assume the role of taking action. People could take action at their own companies, work, houses, life styles, etc. People could send letters to the politicians, or to the media, or to their churches. Regretfully, there are a limited number of persons who dare to do so, and even lower is the number of people who keep trying to do something meaningful.
Moreover, ecological destruction is not just about global warming, it includes several ways of destroying the life balance for many species, and now even for humans. Some time ago I talked to a manager, he is a manager in a metallurgic company, and this company releases red smokes that get into the air, crosses the Panamerican highway, and fall over the fields where poor peasants work every day. There is no care of the people’s health, of the children who live there, neither of the consumers that eat the crops taken from those lands – which are part of a natural preservation park. So I told him, it is very sad that this huge company takes no care for that contamination, and he responded to me “ohhh yea … you are right … what happens is that … mmm … it is matter of money … you know … those fumes are full of iron, we need to make an investment to get that iron … we are loosing money there … the problem is that we need to make an investment in some technology but the top management has not decided to do this yet … however … that is nothing. Have you seen that white smoke coming out the chimney at the north of our plant? Well … that white smoke is full of cyanide …” Our economy shows a logic focused almost exclusively on generating short term profits, leaving little room for ecological and social awareness, following what Marcuse called the one dimensional man (Marcuse, H.; 1964). Ecological destruction includes natural structures degradation by air, lands and waters pollution, and species habitats deterioration, but it includes as well the harm of human life experience and survival.
Our economic history has been described in divergent ways, and the current status is expected to be the expression of development and progress. For many we are now at the best moment in history, we can enjoy technological goods that enhance human life, we can enjoy sophisticated services that make our lives more comfortable, there is an economic freedom upon which every body can make their best and succeed. So, why some of us bother? For Marxists, capitalism is the social-economic arrangement that would make the best of capital and that, in a determinist unavoidable way, would bring about change as a result of technological development and from its very contradictions. This change would be the advent of a utopia, communism, where every body would get what they need and where every body would give what they can (Marx). However, what we are observing is that capitalism is able to adapt very rapidly to regenerate the system maximizing always the surplus appropriation while disempowering society with modes of regulation that are kept under control (Samir Amin, Paul Baran, Andre Gunder Frank, Ankie Hoogvelt, Ernest Mandel, Harry Magdoff, Albert Szymansky).
The world division of labour, as we shall see deeply afterwards, has meant that some countries, or whole regions in the world have been kept performing businesses and economic activities that offer to the global market low value added products, generating poverty among the workers, and a growing inequality Chi Hung Kwan (2002). The difficulties to foster internationally workers awareness and social action have been based, to some extend, on the privileges that the populations of the rich countries, imperialistic states, receive from the power of their political class. Recently however, a change is being experienced. The growth of lean production within the economic globalization, it is the internationalization of production based on modularized processes and the intensive use of information and communication technology, has occasioned that powerful multinational companies achieve a monopolistic or oligopoly presence. Under economic globalization and lean production, corporations are able to modularize their production processes assigning the production of restricted parts of the products to smaller companies abroad, smaller companies that grow dependently.
Global lean production means that corporations enhance their power over States, worker’s unions, and even before their suppliers. The States are more and more dependents on multinational corporations’ decision to settle at their territories in order to ensure a tax flow. The home workers unions face the threat of closing down the plants they work at to be relocated in the Third World countries. The suppliers get a part of the business, from a monopolic or oligopolic power, and they will keep that business as far as they comply with the powerful will of the customer – that who always is right. What happens then is that the multinational demands lower prices from their suppliers, They demand as well lower taxes and regulations – relating to labour and ecology - from the States. And lower wages from their workers – who face the threat of their plants closure and the deregulation from the State that weakens their unions and arguments.
If this situation reduces the capacity of multinational home workers to demand for greater salaries and benefits, the problem increases for the worker of the foreign suppliers. The foreign suppliers, located in the Third World, ensure their profitability by demanding lower requirements from their own States, regarding both labour and environmental regulation. In this way the workers encounter a situation that is permanently deteriorating, and where global competition means that several alternative suppliers of the world powerful multinationals have to compete against each other to offer lower and lower prices, translating in lower and lower wages, in lower and lower benefits, and in lower and lower environmental standards. When the pressure from multinational corporations reaches certain limits, their suppliers face a growing critical situation; they can no longer manage the business under formal conditions. We are then before the emergence of neo-liberal slavery.
The Other Inconvenient Truth of Global Economy: Rising Neo-liberal slavery
As power is enhanced at multinational corporations, powerful people engage in the game of “getting the most” from workers, a game that starts with the discipline of efficiency and efficacy, and evolves to a discipline of submission and domination. Within the interviews conducted, workers stated that they were under repression and threat, incapable to do much for their more vulnerable colleagues. Personnel from the HRM unit of an energy multinational company said that “… those who come and inform us what is happening are terrified …”, workers are so afraid of telling their experiences because they do not want to fall on exclusion, they want to keep their jobs, but still feel the unfairness of the managerial practices. Another worker of this same multinational, an executive actually, informed me that there is an open violation of the workers rights and laws, she said “… the workers registered at the labor contractor do not get their wages paid on time, neither paid in full, they are paid lower wages and receive a bad treatment … their soup is sent on plastic bags …” (Castellano-Masias; P.; 2006a). Managerial practices in the face of almost absolute power become increasingly inhuman, releasing necrophilic tendencies, arriving ultimately to enslaving practices.
Different sectors of economy are being the realm of such emerging managerial behaviour, especially agriculture and mining, perhaps because of the remote condition of its location. We find in the reports of Yale Global On Line web page that “The agricultural sector keeps costs low by relying on immigrant labor to harvest fruits and vegetables quickly and efficiently. Employers confront rising energy costs and consumers balk at higher prices. With a political environment that encourages public resentment over illegal immigration, many employers take advantage of the vulnerable illegal workers, reducing pay and imposing brutal work conditions.” This report tells us about the politics of exclusion and maltreatment that workers have to endure, even within the lands of the most powerful country in the world. The report continues to tell that “Fruit-pickers, who typically earn about $200 (£100) a week, are part of an unregulated system designed to keep food prices low and the plates of America's overweight families piled high,” quoting Leonard Doyle from the Independent. Workers, concludes the Yale On Line author, accrue injuries and debt, and the conditions only encourage crime and health crises throughout farming communities. The economic culture devised is one of consumerism, exclusion and bullying.
Even when the executives get confronted to face the problem of pauperization and slavery they find arguments and excuses that some how portrait the powerlessness of individuals within the current social system. Even the powerful managers assume their powerlessness before the dominant rule, as Yale Global reports “… Activists target major corporations, such as Burger King, to pay more for produce like tomatoes, but executives question whether the money would really reach or help the workers. For now, consumers and companies find it easier to look the other way and not admit that every meal includes a hefty portion of human-rights abuses (YaleGlobal; 2008). Beyond a systemic powerlessness, we find in these words an incapacity to face reality, people, including the powerful managers, take recourse of psychological defense mechanisms to avoid the painful truth of organizational life experience, denial, rationalization, disavowal, etc. leaving the “system” steer the ways of reality.
Exclusion and exploitation exacerbated by the global lean production scheme have brought the cheaper labour of children to the panorama, Werner and Weiss (2005; pg.28) make us remember that “According to ILO estimates there are around 250 million children, considering only the developing countries, between the age of five to fourteen years old, forced to work. Of them, 153 millions live in Asia, 80 millions in Africa, and 17 millions in Latin America … many of them work under conditions that threatens their physical, mental and emotional development … the most terrible forms of child labour are sexual exploitation and slavery”
Defining and Understanding Neoliberal Slavery
For most people, slavery is a matter of the past, since it was formally abolished in the 20th century there is no more slaves in the world. Certainly, most people would think that if there are some cases of slavery, they must be happening in remote regions of the world, no way for the possibility of slavery in the civilized countries, not in the Western rich countries. However, for painful this may be, there are slaves all around the world, and they are working under cruel conditions, they are not free to leave work and take their lives back, they are under violent menace or under threat. Us John Bowe tells us “labor slavery … the enslaving of workers making ordinary goods intended for consumption of the general public” is a current phenomena.
Slavery is happening in the 21st century, and this is happening at the heart of the rich countries, and slaves are working for the biggest companies, for the biggest multinational companies. Certainly, contemporary slaves are working indirectly for the most powerful multinational companies, they are working under the rule of the labour contractors who make the dirty job of global lean production. “In the United States, most modern slavery involves the coercion of recent trafficked immigrants … all they require is some method of coercion: threats of beating, deportation, death, or, perhaps more effective, harm to the victim’s family back home” (Bowe, J.; 2007; pg. xvi - xvii). Migrants are certainly among the most vulnerable persons, but they are not the only ones, homeless persons are taken from the streets as well as children and common people, to work under slavery conditions. Every body is at risk, every business could be involved, indirectly, as responding to the pressures of the neoliberal globalization.
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) is promoting an alliance against forced labour, this alliance is delivering information regarding this problem and encouraging proper action. In order to identify the practices of contemporary forced labour ILO provides some tips, basically it has to be considered that forced labour is the practice of involuntary work that is forced within the consent of the worker. The worker is brought under forced labour by many alternative ways, including physical abduction or kidnapping, the sale of a person into ownership of another, birth into slavery or descend, physical confinement into the work location, whether in prison or in private detention, psychological compulsion as in the case of an order to perform a work under threat of a penalty in case the person does not comply with the requirement, debt-bondage achieved through the falsification of accounts, inflated prices, reduced value of goods or services produced, excessive interests charged, etcetera.
In addition to the lack of free consent from the workers, forced labour supposes the presence or threat of physical violence to the worker and his family or relatives, sexual violence, imprisonment or confinement, financial penalties, exclusion from work and social life, removal of rights and privileges, deprivation of food, shelter, and other basic needs, and denunciation to authorities in the case of “illegal” immigrants (ILO Alliance Against Forced Labour/Declaration; 2005).
In order to illustrate the wide presence of enslaving practices we can mention a few cases of Neoliberal slavery performed in different regions of the world. For instance, in “Los Angeles 1995 … seventy Thai women were found held in a squalid garment factory. Some had been enslaved for as long as seventeen years”, “In Oklahoma, the owner of a welding factory was recently accused of defrauding and abusing fifty-four East Indians, forcing them to live inside cavernous factory under threat”, “the agricultural cases [happens] not just in Florida but in Maine, New York, Washington, Georgia, North Carolina - virtually everywhere food is grown” (Bowe, J.; 2007; pg. xvii-xix).
Specific cases of slavery in the USA, for instance, are reported by journalist John Bowe who tells us that “In the fields of Immokalee, Florida, Underpaid (and often unpaid) illegal immigrants pick the produce all of us consume, connected by a chain of subcontractors and divisions to such companies as PepsiCo and Tropicana. At the top of the chain are stockholders and politicians; at the bottom is a father of six, one of whose children suffers from leukemia, who entered America only to become the unpaid employee of a labor contractor nicknamed El Diablo for his cruelty. “
It is not just happening in agriculture at remote areas, but also within industry, as Bowe reports “In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the John Pickle Company (JPC) reaped profits for years making pressure tanks used by oil refineries and power plants. Feeling squeezed by foreign competition and government regulations, JPC partnered with an Indian and Kuwaiti firm to import workers from India. Under the guise of a training program, fifty-three workers, including college-educated Uday Ludbe, came to the United States, only to have their documents confiscated and to find themselves confined to a factory building. Pickle laid off Americans and paid the Indians three dollars an hour.”
Also, at the textile industry and at the colonial lands of today America, as witnessed Bowe who informs in this vein: “Saipan, a U.S. commonwealth in the Western Pacific [where John Bowe lived for three years] has long been exempted from American immigration controls, tariffs, and federal income tax- a status quo assiduously protected by lobbyist[s] congressmen … There, garment magnates - selling to clothing giants like the Gap and Target — live in luxury while thousands of foreign factory workers, 90 percent of them female, work sixty-hour weeks for $3.05 an hour and spend weekends trying to trade sex for green cards. The garments they make are allowed to be labeled MADE IN AMERICA.”
Even the electronic industry is supported by the slaves work. Militia rebels and other formal armies fight in Congo to control the mines of tantalum (Ta2O5), a metal that has raised its price from 180 Euros to 950 Euros (between 2000 and 2001) due to its growing use in mobile phones, electronic games consoles, nuclear reaction plants, etc. Approximately 20 percent of the world production of tantalum is made in Congo, exported to the Western Countries, and used to finance the wars. It is the civil population who pays the consequences with forced labour (Werner & Weiss; 2005; pg. 69-97), forced labour that provide the west with electronic and high technology devices, and great profitability for its technological industry, and good wages for the knowledge workers.
In other places of Africa is happening similarly, especially at Ivory Coast, where child labour and slavery is used at the cacao plantations, the suppliers of the world chocolate industry. Nearly three million tons of cacao are consumed in the world, about 50 percent of this is produced in West Africa. The slaves that work at the cacao plantations at Ivory Coast are brought from different countries, bought at around 25 US Dollars according to Pierre Poupard, from Unicef, quoted by Werner & Weiss (2005; pg. 158). The chocolate industry is dominated by a little number of multinational companies such as Nestle, Mars, Phillip Morris, and Ferrero, and this little number means a very high power to be faced by the small farmers. Certainly, those very powerful multinationals can easily rule the market prices without a strong response from the farmers, the chain breaks at the weakest, the children being sold-bought to work for cheap at the cacao farms. This high power is feeding the western people with cheap supplies and providing the western consumers with cheap chocolates, and feeding the western states with good taxes. Every body is getting a good deal at the west; all of them do so upon the suffering of the slaves. Most responses include blame to the slave owners, and that is good; but the origin of every thing is the profits and revenues appropriated at the west. At that point most responses just vanish.
In Latin America we find several cases where people are taken as slaves to work in the mines of gold, the extraction of wood, and the agricultural fields of drug-dealers. Interviews with professionals working for oil exploitation firms confirmed me that several natives are captured and put to work on the camps of wood extraction at the Amazonia. Similarly, a Navy officer who was navigating at the Putumayo River, at the Amazonia too, near the frontier between Peru and Colombia, got reports of natives being exploited by the wood industry. Moreover, in the famous city of Cusco, at the Limacpampa Grande Plaza, a very well known square in the city, I saw a couple of trucks filled with peasants, at midnight. The next day, I was talking to a merchant to whom I commented of my last night experience, and he said to me “be very careful, those trucks take the peasants to work as slaves at the mines in the rainforest … they offer them a good work … once they are in the middle of the jungle, they are trapped and subjected to slavery.”
Regretfully, there is no doubt that the practices of slavery are present nowadays, the next question would be to know whether this is just a curiosity, just an exemption, or it is something that happens in a large scale. It has been estimated that all around the world there are at least 27 million slaves even though some other estimations speak of 100 million persons suffering this condition (Werner and Weiss; 2005; pg. 47).
The NGO iAbolish, the American anti-slavery group, speaks as well of a number of 27 million persons enslaved worldwide and cite the CIA estimating that over 14 thousand victims are trafficked into the USA every year. Internationally, the number of slaves trafficked around the world, every year, would be around 800 thousand people (www.iAbolish.org ). However, as it is understandable, due to the lack of official data and the immoral and criminal nature of the practice, there are differing figures informed. ILO reports speak of over 12 million people that are victims of forced labour worldwide. It is reported that 9.8 million are exploited by private agents and 2.5 million would be exploited by States or rebel military groups, and over one million are subjected to sexual exploitation (Global Alliance Against Forced Labour; ILO; pg. 10, 12). According to the ILO report, the distribution among the different regions of the world shows that Asia exploits around 9,940,000 persons as slaves, Latin America and Caribbean would have 1,340,000 slaves, Sub-Saharan Africa 660,000, while the Industrialized countries 360,000, Middle East countries 260,000, other countries count for 210,000 slaves, summing up a number of 12 million and 300 persons (pg. 13).
Regarding profitability, experts cited by iAbolish states that solely in the USA, the profits of slaves trafficking yields $9 billion American Dollars. Globally, the trafficking of women for commercial sex purposes nets about $6 billion American Dollars per year. The information produced by ILO found that the total illicit profits produced every year by trafficked forced labourers is estimated to be about $32 billion American Dollars, of which 50 percent is made in the industrialized countries (over $15 billion American Dollars) and nearly one third of that figure is generated in Asia (about $10 billion American Dollars).
The average unitary profitability would be around $1,100 American Dollars per forced labourer per month, and $13,000 American Dollars per forced labourer per year (pg. 55). In the industrialized countries the unitary profitability is around 43 thousand American Dollars per forced labourer, per year, compared to the general average we could say that it is over three times higher. There should be no doubt that slavery is a First World business, as we have seen, slavery in the rich countries take over 50 percent of all profits made “directly” by slavery in the world. We must bear in mind that most of other regions slavery is performed to supply the rich countries as well with minerals, crops, goods, wood, etc.
Furthermore, as Charles Jacobs, President of the American Anti-Slavery Group, refers, “… today's slaves are often no better off than their more familiar predecessors. Indeed, in many cases, their lives are more brutal and hazardous” (Jacobs, Ch.; 2008). Not only slavery is a rapidly growing problem, in addition we find that this is a situation that prompts more cruelty than ever before (Bales, K.; 2004; 2008) and that “…unlike the slaves of the past, the new slaves are not seen as long-term investments. Instead, slaveholders view them as cheap, requiring little care, and in the end, disposable. But one thing remains the same: violence. People are still taken by force and held against their will through fear.” Violence is a hallmark of slavery, in the past as well as now. Werner and Weiss talk about the experience of Neoliberal slavery in these words: “Being under surveillance by watchmen and dogs, threatened with whips and knives, the child slaves, bought at US$25.00 American Dollars, work in the fields of cacao at Ivory Coast to supply the biggest chocolate corporations in the world. The NGO Terre des Hommes have informed that around 20,000 children have been kidnapped in Mali to be put to work at the cacao plantations at Ivory Coast” (Werner and Weiss; 2005; pg. 158). The biggest chocolate corporations are not performing the enslaving duties, the violence, kidnapping, and human trafficking. They only create the conditions for this to happen, and make the profits out of it.
As we have seen before, managerial practices and global neoliberal conditions are so damaging, humanly and environmentally, that it is appropriate to speak of a necrophilous essence in the logic of today management and economy. Constructing on the ideas of Erich Fromm, we can relate management behaviour with the basic characteristics of necrophilia. Fromm understanding of necrophilia is based on the idea that some times humans develop a kind of love towards inanimate things. People in certain circumstances develop a caring and attentive attitude towards things, they can be seen preoccupied by material objects or even taking physical care of the objects that are the center of their “love”. Nevertheless, these persons are frequently incapable of relating in this caring mode towards other people, because they have incorporated in their behaviour the need to control. The necrophilous person love things because they respond to his/her desires without ever expressing an own need, without demanding or denying anything to the “lover”. If the thing fails to provide the expected satisfactions, then that thing results to be no longer loved and get discarded (Fromm, E.; 1992).
Today management resembles the necrophilous person as far as demanding compliance and submission from the organizational authority. Do so as far as prioritize revenues over life, as far as discard persons in order to maximize “efficiency”, as far as he/she denies responsibilities for the consequences of decisions made to maximize stockholder value and surplus. The necrophilous manager has no guilt neither for the pauperization of masses of human beings, the degradation of the work experience, nor for the destruction of the environment. The necrophilous manager assumes no responsibility for the enslaving of millions of persons (Castellano-Masias, P.; 2006a).
Denial of humanity, from the necrophilous manager, at the business organizations and the State, is now attacking any one who dares to unveil the current situation. James Hansen, researcher from Nasa, who was one of the first scientist that started to grow awareness about the global warming had suffered the persecution of those who see their interests in danger. Hansen even denounces that by now there is frequent governmental policy to reduce or even eliminate the funding of academics who dare to speak aloud that which is not welcomed from the powerful, this situation has been called the “John Mercer Effect”. Hansen says that “… it seems to me that scientist downplaying the dangers of climate change fare better when it comes to getting funding …” (Hansen, J.; 2007). In a similar fashion, managers at organizations tell their personnel “those who do not agree find the door open”; so workers at organisations are demanded to just comply and not to think freely, they are experiencing the authoritarian, necrophilous, demand of contemporary neo-liberal management. Organisational researchers experience the same kind of persecution from management and organizations. One researcher who dared to expose the conditions of exclusion and peasants land takeover in favour of multinational mining companies got himself attacked by mining companies executives and his university got threatened with the withdrawal of executives from masters degree programs. As the university did not expelled the researcher, some executives participating on masters programs withdrew. Persecution to free thinkers is another expression of Neo-liberal management.
Even though ILO has investigated the problem of forced labour, it has failed to call it by its real name, slavery, and it has assumed the problem as a result of common criminal behaviour without connecting the practice of enslaving as part of the whole economic system. Some ILO reports speak of the lack of economic resources, and the lack of opportunities as the reason why there is a population at risk, there is no connection made at the formal system that generates the social exclusion of millions of humans from opportunities. ILO has properly identified some of the personal consequences of experiencing slavery, such as the will destruction of the victims, the lost of hope and sense of personal worth, the individuals ignorance of their human rights and possibilities of State protection (ILO; 2008). However, there is no consideration to the connection to the business and management practices that allow for that to happen, nor to the connection to the education of the citizens and the managers who come to believe that they have the right to exclude and bully the worker.
Dynamics of Neoliberal Slavery
As we have seen, Neo-liberalism has allowed for the development of an enslaving economical system. First at all we had reviewed the main evidences of the contemporary enslaving economy and some of its general processes, now we shall move to discuss the Dynamics of Neoliberal Slavery differentiating the Micro-Dynamics, Macro-Dynamics, and the Meso-Dynamics of Neoliberal Slavery.
The Micro-Dynamics of Neo-liberal Slavery are related to the ways people get enslaved at work organizations, within the framework of global lean management and the States complicity, some of this have already been discussed in the previous section providing examples from USA, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Our discussion here includes firstly the processes of capturing citizens to be reduced as working slaves, secondly we move to analyze the strategies of slaves psychological submission, finally we shall discuss the State complicity that goes from blindness to the production of regulation that abandon the citizens to the will of the human traffickers.
The Macro-Dynamics of Neo-liberal Slavery are discussed as the strategies used by formal companies to get the benefits from the enslaved workers. It is understood that multinational companies build a network of relations and technologies that provide them with the power to establish the enslaving system in the hands of third actors, suppliers of goods and services, as far as the multinationals capture the main benefits from the system. The main practices that lead to slave work include the concentration of big purchasing power through oligopsony and monopsony, the concentration of vast selling power based on oligopoly and monopoly, and the capture of third party surplus value by means of what I call Squeeze Management. Squeeze Management involves a number of practices that allow powerful organizations to take the value created by workers and their organizations performance by closing options, corrupting negotiators, manipulating the possibilities of possible futures, etc.
Finally we shall study the Meso-Dynamics of Neo-liberal Slavery identifying the processes related to organizational cultures colonization, hidden cultural control, and hidden social hierarchical training (Bhabha, H., 1994; Cook, B. 2003; Loomba; Prasad, A.2003; Raza, Mir and Upadhyaya, 2003; Priyadharshini, E.; 1999). It includes also de development, delivery and enforcement of managerial culture as a source of mind setting and political control. The meso-dynamics suppose processes to install the ideology of neo-liberal truth as the basis to guide society and to render every proposal of deviation as impossible, un-natural, absurd, illogic or as a non-desirable involution (Hoogevelt, A., 1997). This section is large built upon the contributions of postcolonial theory that provides frameworks to understand the experience of those who were invaded and colonized by imperial States. It is now understood that imperialism, performed within global neo-liberalism is one of a different kind, not because of its processes but because of the imperial actors. The multinational corporations have replaced the States as the imperial power as they captured greater philosophical, psychological, and economic relevance for society as a whole.
Micro-Dynamics of Neoliberal-Slavery
We said that the Micro-Dynamics of Neo-liberal Slavery are related to the ways people get enslaved by organizations of work within the framework of global lean management as the emerging regime of surplus accumulation, it is discussed as well the States complicity in the process. Firstly we present the processes of capturing citizens to be reduced as working slaves, secondly we move to analyze the strategies of slaves psychological submission, finally we shall discuss the State complicity that goes from blindness to the production of a regulation system that abandon the citizens to the will of the human traffickers.
Capturing citizens to be reduced as slaves supposes diverse processes among which we find the most simple Sell-Buy process, we find too the inheritance of the enslaved condition, some people get hunted by traffickers while transiting through the streets, some others are victims of debt-bondage, and others get within the trafficking as a result of a job-talent-hunting. Immigrants from Latin America are said that the “labor contractor” that holds them under custody, have paid a large amount of money to the “coyote” who brought them to the labour contractor and the worker have to pay back if they want to leave. Usually the amounts involved can reach around $50,000 American Dollars (Bowe, J.; 2007).
Secondly there is a process of slave bondage where the slave gets to understand that he/she is subjected to a power he/she can not face or defeat. For many it is the acceptance of a real threat to their lives or the lives of those the captive care about. In many cases there is an economic dimension based on an assumed debt of which the enslaved person is responsible for. Presumably, once the debt is paid the person would recover their freedom; regretfully the process is designed to make the debt grow indefinitely. In the case of the immigrants, the labour contractor charge additional amounts to their “personal account” based on the services provided such as shelter, food, mail, transport to the filed work, protection, etc. As the debt is growing, the slave is loosing hope and weakens.
The third stage on the enslaving experience is the brain wash, through this brain wash the slave comes to the conviction that this is an unavoidable fate and that there is no way to get released from such condition. The person comes to the alienating conviction that the slave owners hold absolute control over their lives and possibilities. This third stage involves constant surveillance from the supervisors, their families’ use to be subjected to surveillance as well. The process of brain wash supposes too a constant threat that reinforces the need to stay passively submitted, slaves are told daily that “If you want to leave, go ahead. But I’ll call the bosses and they will feed you to the alligators”, this expression was taken from testimonies of slaves in Florida by Bowe. Additional reinforcement comes from supervisor’s patrol, beating, and even murders that confirm the validity of the menace. Finally, it is experienced a complete submission, “All of a sudden, you realize you’re completely in their pockets”, “If your comrade’s beard catches fire, put your own in water”, you learn that you should become a “Do-gooders” (Bowe, J.; 2007).
Fourthly it is found the State complicity through police lack of interest, police and other authority lack of training, population alien to the system, high rotation of police officers, prosecutors’ weakness, workers mistrust, years of investigation, workers travels among different fields and camps. Court of justice softness, absence of a proper legislation, coercion is nebulous and difficult to prove, citizens’ blindness, civil society lack of effectiveness (Bales, Bowe, ILO).
The responsibility and complicity of the State covers not only the direct intervention in cases of slavery but the compliance to the international structuring of society. As Dependency theorists have stated, that as a result of penetration by colonial capital a distorted structure of economy and society have been created in the colonial countries which would reproduce overall economic stagnation and extreme pauperization of the masses for all time, this has implied at least two consequences. On the one hand, the subordination of the economy to the structure of advanced capitalist countries producing primary goods, of low value added, for the industrial west, and the prevention under colonial history of local industrialization. On the other hand, there was an external orientation which meant an extreme dependency on overseas markets, both for capital and for technology for ever increasing the country dependency (Hoogvelt, A.; 1997; pg. 38).
Dependency theorists have also referred to “… other two main features of a distorted structure of society. First, there is a class alliance between capital and a small landed and mercantile elite, whose cultural life styles and tastes are a faithful imitation of the colonizing masters. Secondly, it is noticed the evolution of patterns that facilitates extreme social inequality, which in turn restricts and distorts the domestic markets generating an ever growing population at risk …” (Hoogvelt, Ankie; 1997; pg. 39).
Frequently transnational capital has preferred to deal with a strong, bureaucratically capable State apparatus, especially when transnational loan capital began to replace direct investment. Foreign loans, frequently underwritten by the state for the benefit of the private interests of a minority, substancially increase the power of the State vis-a-vis the local managerial and entrepreneurial elite. In this way “… imperialist profit had been maintained through direct exploitation of raw material resources by multinational capital …” (Hoogvelt, Ankie; 1997; pg. 47, 52). This kind of alliance between the State, the local elite, and the multinational corporation has taken the lands of the peasants, and natives through especial legislation to be put under the hands of capital. In Peru, this kind of natives and peasants stagnation have been experienced and justified through laws of investment promotion such as the law for the promotion of investment in mining that creates processes of land taking through the concept of “mining servitude.” By this process of “mining servitude” the peasants are forced to sell their lands, at the price defined by the mining company technicians that is to be restricted by the agricultural production, without any consideration to the will of the people or the possibilities of future development. After the land is taken, masses of formerly independent farmers are sent away to lives they do not know nor desire. And to places where their cultures are considered inferior, finally the peasants will get excluded and enrolling the populations at risk for debt bondage slavery.
The last discussion shows us the rise of a new global order, the alliance between the transnational capital, local elites, States, and some international institutions, is engineering “… postimperialism … a still nascent phase in the evolution of world capitalism in which relations of dominance and dependency between nations … are being relegated to secondary importance. Instead, relations of capitalist domination and exploitation are conceptualized in terms of global class relations which transcend national class structures … they create an international bourgeoisie alongside an exploited international proletariat …” (Hoogvelt, Ankie; 1997 pg. 58-59). The world is then fragmented, not by countries or nations, but by the belonging or exclusion from that international class division led by multinational corporations. With this, the dangers of falling into pauperization and population at risk, of enslaving, is starting to reach every country, and nation, in the world.
The worldwide corporate hegemonic role presented here reduces the nation-states to a degree of almost irrelevancy, leaving the managers of multinational corporations in a position to control the countries interests and legislation. Moreover, the managers get into a position that enables them to restructure the social classes, creating fractures and exclusion subordinated to the interests of big business, to the detriment of private and social life. This detriment has already achieved levels of pauperization and deprivation that have allowed for the emergence of a population at risk and the trade and exploitation of human beings as slaves. We will now turn to the strategic organizational practices that structure pauperization and slavery as almost unavoidable with the settlement of global neo-liberalism, the macro-dynamics of neo-liberal slavery.
Macro-Dynamics of Neoliberal-Slavery
The Macro-Dynamics of Neo-liberal Slavery are discussed as the strategies used by formal multinational companies to maximize the surplus accumulation, in the context of global lean production, the emergent regime of accumulation that is fragmenting society, developing a transnational class structure, squeezing society and nature in a unreflective, necrophilous logic that has made grown a pauperized and excluded population, which is at risk of falling into slavery (Hoogvelt, Thompson, Fromm, Freire). At the moment, multinationals are actually making profits from the enslaved workers exploited by their managers acting at labour contractors or under conditions of exploitation by militias and States. It is understood that multinational companies build a network of relations and technologies that provide them with the power to establish the enslaving system in the hands of third actors, suppliers of goods and services, as far as the multinationals capture the main benefits from the system.
The main practices that lead to pauperization, exclusion and finally to slave work include the concentration of big purchasing power through oligopsony and monopsony, the concentration of vast selling power based on oligopoly and monopoly, and the capture of third party surplus value by means of what I call squeeze management. Squeeze management involves a number of practices that allow powerful organizations to take the value created by workers and their organizations performance by closing options, corrupting negotiators, manipulating the possibilities of possible futures, etc. All this is possible under a political corruption masked under the veil of modernity and economic freedom.
World economic concentration: The politics of Neo-liberalism
To speak of world economic concentration we should have a look to some figures that show what it is going on in the free market. There are now “… 360 billionaires [that] are as rich as the 2,500 million poorest persons … the 500 major multinationals move about one quarter of the world GNP and control around 70 percent of the global trade. Nevertheless, they just employ 0.05 percent of the world population” (Werner and Weiss; 2005; pg. 19). From these figures it is clear that a system of exclusion evolved through out history has finally achieved to control the whole world, it is small number of persons that control the whole economy and owns the means of production.
And yet, among the 100 biggest economies in the world we can find 54 corporations and 46 countries, taking as reference the 1999 gross product, according to Fortune and the World Bank, quoted by Werner and Weiss; 2005; pg. 64-65). It is astonishing that there are now more private companies than countries among the biggest economies in the world. The problem being, the immense power held by multinationals to negotiate before weak suppliers, increasingly weaker countries, and even weaker workers. An additional reference to make clear the situation is posited by the fact that “Between 1983 and 1999, the profits of the 200 biggest corporations in the world grew 362.4 percent. During the same time, the number of employees grew only 14.4 percent” (Werner and Weiss; 2005; pg. 65).
The exclusion that we have been discussing has its correlate to the capital investment flows as well. “What is both a new and consistent feature of postwar foreign direct investment flows (FDI) is the geographic redirection of such flows away from the periphery and into the core of the system.” For instance, “… in the colonial period … the Third World had received half of total direct investment flows; this percentage had declined to one-third in 1966, and to one-quarter in 1974. By 1988-9 it had dropped still further to 16.9 percent.” In addition, the rich countries, only 28 per cent of the world’s population, receive 91.5 per cent of the FDI. This means that the rich get almost all the FDI and “… nearly two-thirds of the world population is virtually written off the map, as far as any benefits from this form of investment are concerned” (Hirst and Thompson).
Moreover, this FDI does not means that the rich countries get their own capital invested within their countries, but that the rich countries are getting as well the capital flows coming from the poor countries. It has been reported that “If we now look at the structural position of the Third World in the financial super-bowl we encounter a curious paradox. On the one hand, and in line with the periphery’s declining participation in the “fundamentals” of the world economy … its share of the total stock of international bank lending has declined to about 11 percent … On the other hand, we also find an increased participation of Third World elites in the international financial markets … between 1975 and 1985 an estimated $165-200 billion were placed by individual investors from the Third World in the international financial markets” (Hoogvelt, Ankie; 1997; pg. 83). The Third World elites are sending their investments to the rich countries, their associates in the global social fragmentation, this situation further shows the development of the global classes where the privileged in the Third World are more integrated to the Western colonial identity than to their own countrymen. From here it is easy to understand the issuing of laws such as the “mining servitude” that take the lands of the natives to be put under the control and exploitation of multinational corporations, with the benevolence of the poor country leaders.
Observing these situations we can arrive to a conclusion, there is a concentration of wealth based on the flow of surplus value towards the core of the capitalist empire. This process have been observed too by postcolonial theorists who state that “… imploding capitalism … an intensification of trade and capital linkages within the core of the capitalist system, and a relative, selective, withdrawal of such linkages from the periphery … the core being western Europe, North America and Japan and the periphery covering the entire regions of Africa, Latin America and Asia …” Building together, we should say that the concept of “imploding capitalism” represent at a national level what is going on within the world economic concentration that is one of my arguments here. An evidence of this would be that “… the proportionate share of populations in core and periphery has remained surprisingly constant from about 1880-1990 [and] the linkages between the two [core and periphery] in terms of the volume of both trade and capital flows between them … have diminished [for instance] in 1989, 22.9 per cent of the world population estimated to be living in “industrial” countries had 84.2 per cent of global GNP, compared with 77.1 per cent of the world population in the developing countries who make do with just 15.8 per cent of global GNP” (Hoogvelt, Ankie; 1997; pg. 85)
It could be said that such growth means as well an increase in the job opportunities and that even though this is not the fact within the rich countries, it must be so worldwide. Nevertheless, “… there is an historical trend towards forms of production organisation in which capital no longer needs to pay for the reproduction of labour power … Jobless growth is what the present phase of capitalism is all about … World-wide, the world’s largest firms have shed over 400,000 workers every year over the past decade notwithstanding the upsurge of their combined revenues” (Clairmont F.C. and Cavanagh J.; 1994).
Big purchaser and supplier power concentration: Oligopsony and Oligopoly
There is a large trend towards economic concentration in favour of the rich countries, understood as the core of the current capitalist empire, this concentration is performed at corporations as processes of big purchasing power concentration (oligopsony) and big supplier concentration (oligopoly). As the multinational corporations become bigger and stronger to the point of being bigger than most countries, and as mergers and acquisitions have reduced the number of competitors, the negotiating power of firms become huge.
As we observe different economic sectors we realize that most of them are controlled by a small number of multinational enterprises. Most sectors show that around four big players control over 60 percent of the market, imposing their conditions to clients and suppliers, or eliminating new and small competitors.
For instance, the different sections of the American Food Industry are dominated by three to four giants who control even 60% or 80% of the business (Bowe; p.46, 47). Correspondingly, at the American Citrus market we find that companies like Cargill (US$75 billion), Tropicana (Pepsico), and Minute Maid (Coca Cola) control the orange market. Food manufacturing is dominated by Altria Group, Nestle, and Unilever. The Fast Food business is under the lead of McDonald’s, Burger King and Yum! Brands, this last company includes among its brands Taco Bell, Ketucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, etc. Within the Chocolate industry we find a dominant bunch of companies formed by Nestle, Mars, Philip Morris, and the Italian Ferrero (Werner & Weiss; p. 160).
Similarly, the Bananas business is led by Chiquita (United Brands), Dole (Standard Fruit), and Del Monte, enterprises that control the business of bananas, since 100 years ago (Werner & Weiss; p. 164). Beyond food industry, Commodities trading have their own big players such as Cargill, ConAgra, and Archer Daniels Midland. Supermarket retailing does the same under Wal-Mart, Safeway, and Albertson’s Kroger. The automobile industry is much of the same, as well as the air transport, etcetera.
Additional evidence is found at the citrus market in Europe, where Eckes AG, Procter & Gamble, and Minute Maid (Coca Cola) control the market and where over 90 percent of the European consumption of orange juice is produced at Brasil. Here we see that while the European consumers pay one euro per litter of orange juice, the Brasilian workers get paid a quarter of a cent, it is less than four hundred times lower. This is an expression of concentrated purchasing power before the suppliers and of concentrated selling power before the consumers. As the European dominant companies buy Brasilean oranges, in Sao Paulo 5 families exert control over 150 million orange trees and over 70,000 workers, just 5 families over 70,000. This is another expression of hiring power (Werner & Weiss; pg. 166).
More evidence yet, within the Fast Food market is found in Mc Donald’s meat purchase. It is the biggest restaurant chain in the world, with more than thirty thousand branches, in more than 118 countries, it is the biggest buyer of meat in the United States, and the biggest buyer of cow meat in the world (Werner & Weiss; p. 168), which is its negotiating power before the farmers? It is just huge.
In addition, the farmers have to face not only a great power from their purchasers such as McDonalds, MinuteMaid, and Tropicana; the farmers have to face a great power as well from their suppliers of seeds, such as the three companies that lead the business Monsanto, Dow and Syngenta. Similarly occurs before their suppliers of fertilizers, Monsanto, Bayer and Syngenta again. More of the same happens with their suppliers of Pesticides, which are Monsanto, Dow and Syngenta, once more.
Globally speaking, the business of seeds is controlled by Syngenta at he top, after the fusion of Novartis and AstraZeneca, they are followed by Monsanto (USA), Aventis (France), BASF (Germany), and DuPont (USA). There are just five very powerful companies that control the world seeds market.
Furthermore, agricultural genetic technology is providing increased power to the owners of technology as far as these companies have been given the right to demand enslaving Contracts that force the farmers to buy their genetically modified seeds. There is a great danger of this big corporations to take control of the world food supply (Werner and Weiss; 2005; pg. 172).
Squeezing the producers in the middle: Work degradation and slavery
If we take the food industry as an example, we shall find that the low value added work of farmers takes a loosing position. The big powerful companies squeeze the farms. The suppliers of seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers, have the power to increase their prices without major resistance from the powerless farmers. The purchaser powers, such as the supermarket giants and the large food processing companies can reduce the buying price without the farmers having much to say. At the end, the farmers are not able to face the official minimum wages of the workers, their solution tend to be the hiring of labour contractors than know how to solve the problem with little money. The labour contractors solve the problem using slave labour. Some research made by the United States Department of Agriculture, USDA, show that if the farmers try to pay directly for the workers, they would not be able to pay more than the 25% of the official minimum wage. That is not possible for them, so they get a solution that places the problem in some one else, the labour contractor. According to USDA figures, the American Farmers earn in average 2% to 4%; while the dominant food firms get around 20%; some of them even more, General Mills makes up to 259%, and Quaker Oats makes 132.6% (Bowe; 2007).
For instance, the world chocolate industry processes around three million tons of cacao, the 50 percent of whish are produced in West Africa, including Ivory Coast, Ghana, Camerun, and Nigeria. Nevertheless, the farmers’ profits are extremely low due to the large power held by a bunch of multinational companies that buy their production. Speaking in numbers, the farmers’ profits are around 340 Euros per year due to the low prices paid by a little number of very profitable set of multinational companies. The dominant multinational companies are Nestle for its brands Baci, KitKat, Lion, Nesquik, Nuts, Smarties, etc. The American Mars with its brands Balisto, Banjo, Bounty, M&M, Mars, Milky Way, Snickers, Twix, etc. Philip Morris/Kraft Jacobs Suchard, with Finessa, Toblerone, etc. The Italian chocolate firm, Ferrero, with brands such as Duplo, Hanuta, Nutella, etc. This situation forces the farmers to reduce the costs to a minimum, for what the child slaves result perfect. (Werner and Weiss; 2005; pg. 159-160). All this is happening under the States knowledge and quiet consent.
Political corruption: Corporate donations and blindness
There are several expressions of State corruption, from the vague inefficiency, to the clear negligence. Besides, we find that, for example, the USA government, during the George Bush administration, has issued several norms that increase the vulnerability of the population at risk, and that increase the incapacity for proper action to be taken. Additionally, it is public that the agribusiness made millionaire donations for the political campaigns of federal candidates. The agribusiness donations for political campaigns during the last years have been as follows: in1998: US$43 Million Dollars, in 2000 it was US$60 Million Dollars, in 2002 the amount was US$54 Million Dollars, in 2004 it was US$53 Million Dollars, and in 2006 the donations were of US$44 Million Dollars. Regarding the State intervention we find that, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions against companies for employing illegal aliens were in 1999: 417 companies, in 2005 only 3 companies. This is an absolute decay on governmental control. The Department of Labor – Wage and Hour Division had in 1950 one inspector for every 46,000 workers, in 1990 they had only 1 inspector for every 150,000 workers. This is an abandonment of workers. Moreover, the Rural Legal Service has received restrictions on legal assistance to undocumented workers, leaving them in the hands of enslaving labour contractors. The Congress forbade, in 1996 the RLS, from representing undocumented workers (Bowe, 2007). Certainly, it is not the American State who is to take proper action against slavery globally. In addition, other States, within the trends towards labour de-regulation and State reduction, are performing equivalently. There is no surprise that the problem is rapidly growing as well as its profitability.
Beyond the economic and political structures of power, in order to achieve blindness, and public disregard, it is necessary to manage the minds. For that, a number of measures are performed that we call the meso-dynamics of neo-liberal slavery.
Meso-Dynamics of Neoliberal-Slavery
The Meso-Dynamics of Neo-liberal Slavery are processes related to organizational cultures colonization, hidden cultural control, and hidden social hierarchical training (Bhabha, H., 1994; Cook, B. 2003; Loomba; Prasad, A.2003; Raza, Mir and Upadhyaya, 2003; Priyadharshini, E.; 1999) that is intended to achieve social and political control. The social control goals and practices include all the stakeholders in order to ensure compliance and legitimacy. It supposes the development, delivery and enforcement of managerial culture as a source of mind setting and political control. The meso-dynamics suppose processes to install the ideology of neo-liberal truth as the basis to guide society and to render every proposal of deviation as impossible, un-natural, absurd, illogic or as a non-desirable involution (Hoogevelt, A., 1997).
The success of neo-liberal truth diffusion is evident from the studies of life goals. As it has been reported, “in 1970, 79 percent of American college freshmen said their primary goal in life was to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. In 2005, 75 percent said their primary objective was to be financially well off” (Bowe; pg. xxi). There is no doubt that the neo-liberal pretence to make people think of themselves as consumers and the one dimensional mind setting, that Marcuse warned as about, have succeeded. If human beings are restricted to be consumers, any other consideration of freedom and self-actualization is taken out of the social discourse and awareness. Nevertheless, the implosive nature of today’s capitalism, rises a hope for people to realize that their capacity to consume is being harmed and that there is something that is not working the way it was promised.
The consumer, when acting as just such, looses contact with her/his reality and enters to a world of fantasy and dependent identity. “Buying a brand takes the consumer into an imaginary world; they have the sensation of belonging to a community of persons who share their values and meanings, that are created by the designers … advertising has assumed the role of creating opinion, replacing the schools, churches, communities, and cultural institutions” (Jeremy Rifkin quoted by Werner and Weiss; 2005; pg. 50). The worker no longer recognizes herself/himself as such but as a consumer that has a relation of dependency towards the designer/creator of identities. The possibilities for the worker to make sense of the political implications of her/his life become blurred. In addition, the mass of workers looses awareness as a community and the solidarity and potential sinergy vanishes.
More over, the responsibility of citizens towards the politics of pauperization and slavery is contrasted with the privileges the person is acquiring from her/his consumer status. As Bowe put it, “free people benefit from slave labour. Not just big corporations, but “regular people” - like you and me” (Bowe; pg. xiv). As slave labour generates cheaper goods, and perhaps better jobs at home in the rich countries, the citizen self-identified as a consumer denies the problem and eliminate awareness.
The whole world social structure has been re-arranged by imploding capitalism. Global lean production, as we saw before has created new global social classes dependent on the core-periphery dynamic relations. Hoogvelt explains that “Globalisation has rearranged the architecture of world order. Economic, social and power relations have been recast to resemble not a pyramid but a three-tier structure of concentric circles. All three circles cut across national boundaries. In the core circle we find the elites of all continents and nations … we may count in this core some 20 per cent of the world population that are bankable. They are encircled by a fluid, larger social layer of between 20 to 30 per cent of the world population (workers and their families) who labour in insecure forms of employment, thrown into cut-throat competition in the global market, State-of-the-art technologies, frenzied capital mobility and neoliberal policies together ensure both a relentless elimination of jobs by machines, and a driving down of wages and social conditions to the lowest global denominator … The third and largest circle comprises those who are already effectively excluded from the global system. Performing neither a productive function, nor presenting a potential consumer market ...” (Hoogvelt, Ankie; 1997; pg. 239-40). Such massive exclusion generates a sense of urgency on the people to be accepted, to be considered loyal, and to have a future. The excluded are increasingly far as technology changes and identities are tight to enterprises performance and consumption.
As “… a global market principle (a dominant standard of price, quality and efficiency) begins to impose itself …” the persons with commodified identities are valued in a similar fashion, under strategies such as customer relationship management, CRM, persons get catalogued by her/him level of consumption, the more you consume, the higher your social status, and the lower your social awareness too. Similarly “… such structural integration [the market principle of standardization] is becoming internalized in the behaviour of economic agents [the market discipline] … it is the awareness of global competition which constrains individuals and groups, and even national governments, to conform to international standards … it is sufficient for a company to merely threaten to set up a plant abroad, for it to successfully drive down the wages to the globally competitive level …” (Hoogvelt, Ankie; 1997; pg. 124-5), furthering pauperization and vulnerability, and social compliance.
Besides all this exclusion and exploitation, we have seen that social awareness and commitment tends to be relegated, disappearing most solidarity from the social spectrum. John Bowe remarks this saying that “people have a marvelous facility for ignoring other peoples´ pain”, and by developing awareness of the needs of “survival”, “the simple desire to get ahead in life can become a monstrous impulse when fertilized by the right circumstances” (Bowe; pg. xv). People expecting to achieve a high status and power can become the toughest masters of slaves once they get the motivation and legitimacy to do so. Bowe goes on saying that “… our hunger for status overrides our concern for others’ dignity. The modern extension of this disregard is the willingness today of First World people to buy things from a global system of production that … is based on someone, somewhere, getting a raw deal” (Bowe; pg. 268). If we do not work hard on keeping our awareness, it results very easy to fall in blindness, and to comply with the system demands. People do not want to fall into the marginalization and exclusion of what Manuel Castells calls the “Fourth World”, that is, those areas in the Third, Second, and First World that are no longer relevant to the workings of the global informational economy. People are motivated to achieve a higher status, then, people are motivated too to take the farthest distance from getting excluded. This makes it very difficult for many people to recognize the conditions of contemporary history, and makes it extremely hard for people to question the official story.
It is in that way that the American citizens live in an awesome information vacuum, even though we are in the informational era. Bowe tells of a study from 2001 that parsed everything that was shown on ABC’s World News Tonight, CBS’s Evening News, and NBC’s Nightly News, and broke down sources into racial, gender, and political categories. What emerged from this study was that 95 percent of all “news sources” interviewed were white, 85 percent were male, and, where party affiliation was identifiable, 75 percent were Republican”. Of course, there is no awareness of those results, and if people get confronted, they just take a short concern only to “forget” about it soon enough to avoid any painful conscience.
Education in the new imperial global capitalism, is the task to convince every worker and every poor person that he or she is an “entrepreneur” that should take responsibility for her/his economic and professional development, acquiring a high employability. All the person has to do is to “buy in” the promises of neo-liberalism, “get skills” highly valued by the market, and become a productive member of a modern, global, capitalist society. Such citizens are expected to look forward to a future of political “freedom” in a world that just happens to have a tremendous disparity between rich and poor. As the new division of labour, within the three concentric circles, does not allow for full employment, the excluded persons should just recognize her/his failure and accept that the system has provided the opportunities, it just happened that the person was not talented enough, and the market has made its role providing for the successful (Hesketh, Hoogvelt, Prasad).
In a similar vein, Dipesh Chakrabarthy (1992); remind us that most expressions of European knowledge and social science have been based on the conviction that the world is knowable only through those categories of knowledge that have been developed in Europe. From this belief, the westerners assume that their neoliberal society is the right and modern way to live; and that they should evangelize the rest of the world with their wisdom. In this way, the Western Self and the Non-Western Other are delineated through series of hierarchical oppositional categories (Prasad, Pushkala; 2003) disempowering the Non-westerners. The cultural destructiveness of this perspective results highly difficult to be perceived by the Westerners and by the elites that depend on the powerful Westerners.
The alienated elites’ destructiveness is powered by the dependency on culture and the banality of evil. As Hannah Arendt explains, the banality of evil is a situation in which a normal person is capable of doing horrendous acts because his/her culture tells him/her that this is right (Knapp, 1998). This banality of evil, allows for slavery to spread as the contemporary organisations search for efficiency and profitability.
Colonial subjects are encouraged to know themselves as inferior to the subjects that represent the superiority of the core; those who tend to be white, males, and republicans or conservatives (Priyadharshini, E.; 1999 -. Bhabha, H.; 1994). Besides, they are encouraged to mimic the masters of the powerful companies and countries. In this vein, the periphery elites adopt the western life style, the political authorities justify compliance to the international institutions, and educators portrait the ideal profile of an educated person as one that resembles the westerner.
The spirit of superiority is very well expressed by Winston Churchill, as quoted by Anshuman Prasad and Pushkala Prasad, “… I do not admit … that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race … has come in and taken their place” (Prasad and Prasad; 2003; pg. 283). Similarly, today slavery is based upon images of superiority based on concepts such as “value added”, “business success”, and “modernity”.
Neo-liberalism has developed the belief that the international free market economy regulates social life better than a political structure democratically legitimated; however, what it is actually occurring is that the free market is subjected to the huge powers of multinationals, the strong tight of the State has been replaced by the even tougher hands of the new imperialist powers, the multinational corporations. Good examples are the fact that the American wages had declined since 1968, and that the bottom 40% of American households, have lost an astonishing 80% of their wealth.
Currently, Bowe states that the top one percent of American households has gathered more wealth than the entire bottom 95%, and the richest 300,000 Americans pulled in as much income as the poorest 150 million. These numbers have been taken from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau and reported by John Bowe. The concentration of wealth and the exclusion of the masses become even clearer with this data.
Taking proper action against Neo-liberal slavery
Bearing in mind Arundhati Roy words stating that “our freedom was not given by any government … we took it”, we could concentrate our efforts on conscience and capabilities building in order for the excluded to tale their own lead and proper action in the process of emancipation. Actually, the ILO recommendations at the A Global Alliance Against Forced Labour (pg. 69), includes as an integrative approach for combating forced labour the production of surveys and applied research to understand the nature and characteristics of vulnerable and victim populations. They suggest as well the sharing of knowledge, and advocacy to rise public awareness and political commitment. The ILO scheme includes as well the offering of advice on appropriate laws, legal processes and sanctions. The strengthening of governmental capacity to combat forced labour. Finally, it is recommended field-based projects of direct action for prevention, identification, release and rehabilitation of victims.
Even though the ILO proposal includes several valuable suggestions, no one of the directly confront the problem of the current systemic enslaving economy. Neither takes into account the problem of managerial education and social consent for corporations to act.
“[T]here are many groups dedicated to helping farmworkers … some of these groups have offices in Washington, D.C., devoted to lobbying politicians to make new and better laws. Others try to organize farmworkers or help them to find legal representation … others focus on basic needs such as health care. The coalition focus is on “educacion popular” … education for common people … a method of education and organization first theorized by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed conceived it as a means to bring complex political problems to the attention of impoverished … the basic idea … is to use group discussions of concrete details from workers’ experience to help them analyze the larger societal, economic, and political forces that shape their lives” (Bowe; pg. 25). The most important features of Paulo Freire’s pedagogy are the dialogical nature of the learning experience, a dialogue based on the learners own experiences, expectations, and creativity. The process is supposed to be enriched with the investigation performed by the teacher in order to work it out some of the main features of the community life and options. In this process the teacher becomes a teacher-student and the students are expected to assume a proactive role as a student-teacher. These ambiguities are expected to liberate the participants from stereotyping and dominant roles, while empowering and co-constructing meaningful knowledge (Paulo Freire; 1970).
The ethical demand for academics goes in line with our initial quote from Chomsky, “… to call the people to get aware and take proper action …” The spirit of critical research is an emancipatory one, just as “… the ethical nature of the postcolonial project, which sees the research act as an active intervention in our worlds, with a view to working toward a progressive agenda of global justice, compassion, and hope …” (Prasad and Prasad; 2003; pg. 292). As Lucas Benitez, a leader of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, said “If you want true change … it won’t come from Washington, or from the lawyers … if you change people’s consciousness … the people themselves take care of it” (Bowe). The main opportunity comes from consciousness development, within the whole society, and especially within the populations at risk and the actual victims. In order for this to happen, the role of academics would be about gathering all voices, promoting a new reality of inclusion, dialogue, and participation. The academic should be ambitious and assertive, cooperative and courageous. She/he should doubt traditional and dominant understandings, share the challenges, and trust the people, for the people are to free themselves.
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