I sit on a man's back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.
-- Leo Tolstoy
Any solution to the suffering in Honduras will have to involve stopping the injustice there - which means Dole and Chiquita will have to give up the notion of "basically-free labor".
You don't need to help the poor - just get off their backs.
So here is the question, do dole and chiquita get away with this because there is nothing else for these people to do? Or do they get away with it because they have created a system which effectively creates indentured servants? I am not familiar enough with Honduras to comment on that.
I noted in the article that the proposed city would have room for the entire population + 2 million. So if this city provides opportunities for the people who now labor in the fields, and they all migrate there, Dole and Chiquita would be out of workers would they not?
If this is how the Hondurans envision it working it seems that they are trying to 'get off the backs' of the labor pool.
Familiar with the term, but what I don't know is if a similar move on their part today would work, do you have any insights into that?
Argentina recently nationalized a lot of their energy infrastructure and its pissed off some big oil folks but while in the past they might start up a guerilla army to cause trouble I haven't seen that so far. And of course in terms of economies Argentina is way above Honduras so I get that it isn't a fair comparison. But without first hand knowledge our sources I struggle to reason about the success chances for Honduras' efforts beyond some basic human action / reaction models.
> You don't need to help the poor - just get off their backs.
That's a very naive and over-simplified point of view. During the 1980s' Perestroika, everyone in my country of origin (which was one of Moscow's Cold War satellites) assumed basically the same thing you're assuming: that as soon as those "russkies" got off their backs, they would become rich and prosperous. Well, 22 years had passed since the russkies left, and hopes for prosperity are few and between (some progress has been made but nowhere to the extent that was hoped). BTW, I'm in no way nostalgic for the USSR era; I just don't like when naive opinions like this that have nothing to do with reality propagate because they sound "just".
I now believe that the whole contemporary educational system which teaches students that colonialism was uniformly bad needs to be revised. I have yet to see something good come out of nationalism (with Israel a possible exception).
I might have rephrased, "It's very difficult to help the poor unless you also get off their backs".
Perhaps it's not helpful to think "everything will be better if those people get off our backs", as you mention.
But I'm a U.S. citizen, and I've only recently given up bananas for good. When we're the ones doing the oppressing, it's also not helpful for us to pretend it doesn't exist.
"Oppression" is dangerous terminology to use when no actual physical intimidation is taking place. When peacetime gets labeled "oppressive", people begin to see wartime with a different set of eyes, and the country gets thrown into a cycle of violence from which it is difficult to get out of.
That's a good point, which I'll have to think about. Clearly not all violence is physical violence. But it's also very easy to use that as a carte blanche for revenge - as in "you're oppressing me this much, so I can do this much violence to you in return".
I'm sorry, but I will have to again disagree with this, even more so than regarding oppression. I am entirely with the WHO definition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence). I believe this is very important. Otherwise peace gets labeled war, war gets labeled peace, free speech is deemed violence, and violence is deemed free speech.
Example. If you look at history, violence in the Balkans began with the spread of nationalism into the highly fragmented populations living under the Ottoman empire. While the Ottoman regime was quite far from what we know as a liberal democracy, certain power balance was maintained, and certain groups (Jews for example) enjoyed more freedom in the Ottoman empire than in the neighboring European countries. With the fall of the empire, the newly prominent ideologues of nationalism claimed that an ethnic (as opposed to administrative, economic, social, etc) group of individuals has a right to self-determination. They relabeled the lack of ethnic self-determination as a condition that could only arise under violence. By postulating this "ghost" of centuries-old violence, they justified violence on their part against all other ethnic groups that seemed to lie in the way to ethnic self-determination. Instead of learning how to live with each other (actually they already knew how to live with each other, before they unlearned it that is), various groups took up arms, and the region that could potentially be as prosperous as the Scandinavian countries remains to this day the poorest region of Europe.
What I meant to say with that long story was that as soon as we have a situation where there is no violence being done to individuals, yet a large group claims to be violated, there is a potentially explosive situation on our hands. When there is violence done to individuals already, then the situation is already bad of course, and not as likely to get worse.
> By postulating this "ghost" of centuries-old violence, they justified violence on their part against all other ethnic groups that seemed to lie in the way to ethnic self-determination.
Definitions aside, this seems to be where it all broke down. Using an oppressive situation to justify physical violence was clearly not helpful here.
Yes. That's because the concept of oppression as used by the nationalist ideologues in the early 20th century was largely an invention designed to serve the goals of populist propaganda; it continues to be used in a very similar way by Marxian post-colonialist thought (which is not very surprising given that both nationalism and Marxian thought, opposed as they are, can be traced back to the Romanticist ideals which were in large part an overly bitter critique of logic/reason that developed initially as a reaction to the Enlightenment ideas and was later distilled/intensified during Napoleon's occupation of German states). (Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hegel-and-Napoleon-in-Jena...).
Since most people agree that the only thing that can justify violence is initiation of violence on someone else's part (which turns violence into just self-defense and actually helps maintain peace), it is very important that people make it explicit what they consider as violence and how it is initiated.
> ... which means Dole and Chiquita will have to give up the notion of "basically-free labor".
If we can build a self-driving car good enough to carry the rich and famous, a self-picking banana cart is a no brainer. Then nobody will be on the poors' backs.
They had better have a service economy ready when it happens.
It's not like bananas are even one of those crops which requires cheap labour in order to be economical.
The Australian banana industry gets by somehow, paying sky-high Australian wages, and you can still buy Australian bananas for no more than you'd pay for an Ecuadorian banana. (At least, in those years when the Australian banana crop hasn't been wiped out by a cyclone.)
Robotic harvesting without damaging the plant is a hell of a lot more difficult than robot cars for highways. For these kind of problems you need walkers and climbers that can deal with a very wide variety of terrain.
Will happen eventually, but if you automate all labour I don't see why you should expect the poor to work any more than the rich. Already many of the jobs available in the richer countries are only there to make up the numbers and provide the illusion of employment.
Though - the banana-bots would get rid of the biggest problem in the equation: highway laws. Not sure that it'd be that hard technically, but almost certainly more expensive. Even at $50K a bot (that's probably way low) it'd need to be 20x more efficient to even breakeven with cheap labor...
Given that all bananas are sterile clones and banana trees can walk, perhaps they would be suitable for risk free genetic engineering so they got themselves to market without any machinery at all.
-- Leo Tolstoy
Any solution to the suffering in Honduras will have to involve stopping the injustice there - which means Dole and Chiquita will have to give up the notion of "basically-free labor".
You don't need to help the poor - just get off their backs.