I’m kinda sorry that Wilfred Espinet’s lawyers have prevented him from making any further public statements. Like Donald Trump, Wilfred Espinet is not the disease, he’s just a symptom. Espinet is just the latest face (yet again, after all he did the same to Trinidad Cement Limited what is now intended for Petrotrin) of the same callous, impersonal nature of the economic system we’ve held on to since superficially switching flags in 1962. His soulless utterances thus far and indeed many of the issues surrounding Petrotrin, have been very instructive for the few who care or have time to examine such issues beyond the superficial, surface level. It also highlights why in countries that have colonial legacies people must be minutely critical in deciding what economic models should be adopted.
To that end, this society‘s labouring underclasses need, as they did generations ago, to find ways to take charge of their own communities, education and self-awareness because once again we can see how they’re being used to serve other people’s agendas. The people we elect and those who run the industries cannot be trusted to do things in the wider interest. Espinet is the embodiment of the predominant value system that is the root of much deeper problems in our society. The constant exclusion of the union in various decision-making processes, for instance, connects to long-running antagonisms felt by the employers, bankers, and managers towards grassroots-based Labour organisations whose militancy threatened their interests.
As such, the Petrotrin affair provides a snapshot of how elites use PR to win over an already overly passive population immersed in a culture that prioritises the seeking of narrow self interest. Ancil Roget’s own shortcomings played into the hands of those elements who sought to paint all labour unions with the same broad brush of being overpaid, underproductive and lazy. This therefore eroded their legitimacy in the eyes of a population already struggling with money problems of their own.
But this outta-timing rant is not so much about whether the refinery should remain or not — I have very mixed thoughts about the whole fossil fuel industry. This is not about whether or not it is a net earner of foreign exchange — Keston Perry, Gerry Kangalee and Akins Vidale have done pretty much admirable jobs dealing with this question. This is not about the refinery at all or hasn’t anyone noticed that already TSTT is trending in the news for similar reasons. For me, all this Petrotrin episode has done is bring into focus just how disposable is the human element of this equation. If the education system had actually encouraged critical thinking and analysis, more people would by now have understood the nature of this society’s principal economic model, connected it to its major advocates in the global power structure, and so know what (not) to expect from it.
Let’s set aside for now the very critical question of scaling back on the fossil fuel industry in the face of global warming which, astonishingly, at least one billionaire, who I strongly believe is (in)directly connected to some of what is happening in this country, sees as a good thing that may be profitable (yeah, you read it right, he said it here). Let’s also set aside the equally important issue of energy security — which, just as bizarrely, the Attorney-General, who is part of the government overseeing the closure of the refinery, claims is a concern of his government. You are basically going back to Plantation Economy 101, in this instance closing down your ability to refine oil, relying instead on imports from a foreign country who will at any time (and who has done so from time to time), use their exports as weapons to force compliance with whatever their interest are, whether or not they conform to International law, Human Rights, environmental issues or just plain ethical behaviour…..and you’re concerned about energy security?!
Interesting.
Anyway, for now, let’s just look at how Espinet, in explaining the decision to shut down the refinery (or Petrotrin, we eh really sure which it is. So it is in a society where decisions involving public money and societal changes are made routinely disdainful of the general public. You’re only important around election time……maybe) did so through cold, callous, matter-of-fact reduction to pure economics. Let’s look at the way he spoke about thousands of workers as well as the people in the surrounding area as mere numbers.
This is pretty much in keeping with the low priority given to some lives in this society. The prevailing ethic of this society follows a simple economic formula. Proponents of it call it neoliberal capitalism today but the older term, “possessive individualism,” is much more apt: come (once you have the approved status), make money, as much as you can, then move on; the state must have next to no intervention; it’s an individualistic survival of the fittest. Morality and ethics are irrelevant; the only real importance is the bottom line. Oh yes, and those who actually labour are there at your disposal, to be dispensed with when they have no further usefulness. However they live, however they make out is their own affair. If the system impoverishes them, ghettoises their communities and violent crime is a by-product, then they are the ones at fault because they simply made bad choices.
With that kind of callous disregard for human life, it’s amazing how people who function in this manner and sit on major boards or the various Chambers of Commerce express shock and deep concern when criminalised gangs express their ethic through bullets. Who did you think the gang members were watching?
That flippant, unfeeling attitude is not a Trini thing (though many in the Public Service will have you wondering), it’s not even a Caribbean thing. The nature of globalised capitalism since the 16th century is one that devalues life; self-contempt was a feature of European philosophical mindset from early on in its history. Its debased, depersonalised nature saw Europeans frequently turning on each other, shipping Slavic people into Arab bondage (hence the term “slave”), then sending Irish and English peasants (after seizing and enclosing the lands they lived and farmed on) who could not find work to North America and the Caribbean. Informatively, much of the same vocabulary we hear; words like “laziness,” “civilising,” “efficiency,” were used then and constantly employed right up to the time the word “slave” became exclusively applied to “African.” Dennison Moore in “The Origin and Development of Racial Ideology in Trinidad” reminds us that the racist element was never absent throughout this country’s economic and political evolution. He tells us that “political liberties which were gradually extended to the metropole could hardly be given to their counterparts in Trinidad.” What Professors Robin D G Kelley and Nancy MacLean would call “racial capitalism” was in place in this society almost since Crown Colony rule. Africans and Indians were at best “savage or half-civilised,” fit only for manual labour. Indeed, it was a Governor, Lord Harris —who is often praised for the “great” things he did to open up education for the underclasses — who explicitly said that:
“I have… great doubts whether the Cooly and the African are morally or mentally capable of being acted upon by the same motives in this island on their first arrival as labourers are in more civilized countries……
They are not, neither Coolies or Africans, fit to be placed in a position which the labourers of civilized countries may at once occupy; they must be treated like children, and wayward ones too; the former from their habits and their religion, the latter from the utterly savage state in which they arrive.”
Clearly, even Espinet and some of the callers to i95.5 and Power 102 stand on the shoulders of someone who went before.
If it’s any consolation, despite what the words of Lord Harris imply, white British labourers didn’t fare all that much better. The slum conditions, wage slavery and violent hostility towards organised labour experienced in the Caribbean have their genesis in “Great” Britain and Europe. William Wilberforce, the alleged abolitionist, was very hostile towards and fearful of peasant agitation for social and political equity. He supported the killings that took place at the Peterloo Massacre when peasants, staging a peaceful gathering for greater representation in Parliament, were cut down by cavalry troops in 1819.
Anyway, returning to the words of Lord Harris, which were pretty much the sentiments of most of the “respectable” in Trinidad at the time and for decades afterward, does one not see these racist ideas manifested in the way today’s political elites deal with the general population? Forget skin colour for a minute, it’s irrelevant here; as I wrote before, people of colour can have white supremacist beliefs just as firmly as any card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan or John Birch Society (see Thomas Sowell, Dool Hanoomansingh, Stacey Dash, Sally Radford, Charles Barkley or Ben Carson).
The issue here are the ideas behind a racist reduction of human life once you’re the wrong status, colour or birthright. A very interesting book to read is “Modernity and the Holocaust” by Zygmunt Bauman. He argues that the Jewish Holocaust (and I will include the Holocausts of the Congo under Leopold II, the concentration camps of Africans in Namibia under the Germans and the countless enslaved Africans who were worked to death in plantations all across the Americas) could only have occurred in an environment created by capitalist-inspired notions of efficiency, market and linear progress. It was not an aberration or a departure from the ideals of Western civilisation but a logical product of it. Bauman writes:
“The truth is that every ingredient of the Holocaust — all those many things that rendered it possible — was normal; ‘normal’ not in the sense of the familiar…but in the sense of being fully in keeping with everything we know about our civilisation, its guiding spirit, its priorities…and of the proper ways to pursue human happiness together with a society”
He goes on to quote two other scholars who wrote:
“There is more than a wholly fortuitous connection between the applied technology of the mass production line, with its vision of universal abundance, and the applied technology of the concentration camp, with its vision of a profession of death”
Bauman goes even further and, citing theologian Richard Rubenstein, assert that the lesson of the Jewish Holocaust bears witness to the advance of (Western ideas of) civilisation.
This central point he made in the book can be seen all around; that in an environment of impersonal mathematical efficiency, automation, notions of linear progress with an assembly/factory line mentality and compartmentalisation, there develops a disregard for the human and social element. The traditionalism of the Jews in societies that fetishised modernity was not only considered backward and outdated, but also deeply subversive and threatening. Thus there was a “moral” imperative that they be eliminated.
If we widen our gaze and add to that perverted reasoning an elitist sense of entitlement based on class, race, birth, geography, etc., it’s not that difficult to make connections to the genocide of Native Peoples (and the intellectual justification posited by Juan de Sepulveda in 1550-1), the “civilising” mission of enslaving Africans, the ending of enslavement (primarily for economic reasons, not so much humanitarianism), colonisation (the Anti-Slavery Society had a very active hand in that), the conditions that led to the labour struggles in the US (such as the Ludlow Massacre and the Battle of Blair Mountain) and the Caribbean rebellions.
We can further connect it, albeit in a different context, to the events before, during and after the closure of McDonalds (which, after suddenly throwing hundreds of employees out of work, reopened a few years later and, amazingly, Trinidadians flocked straight back into it), Arcelor Mittal Steel plant and now the impending closure of the refinery/Petrotrin. It’s packaged and sold to us as purely economical and many who hold that view honestly see that and that alone — which is what makes this, and them, all the more dangerous
I don’t know if Espinet ever read anything written by Lord Harris, Thomas Carlyle, J A Froude, David Hume, Voltaire or Immanuel Kant and other racist philosophers. But then he doesn’t need to. The racist, exploitative ideas of John Locke and the others I mentioned have a continuity that is constantly being built upon. For the last three weeks I have been listening and reading almost everything I can find about the figures behind the huge oil, arms and pharmaceutical industries. This included Charles Koch, James M Buchanan —the economist who influenced him — and the earlier leading lights of free-market capitalism such as Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. The composite picture painted by such researchers as Nancy MacLean, author of “Democracy in Chains,” Jean Mayer, author of “Dark Money” as well as Naomi Klein who wrote “The Shock Doctrine” is nothing short of chilling especially when matched with our local business elites.
I say this because it’s crucial that we make certain connections even if it’s only through the ideas. From the ideas come the actions. Listening to the talk shows that cater to the more mature listener and hearing how some callers and hosts, many of whom “wash their mouths” all over trade unionism, throw around words like ‘democracy,’ I wonder how many of them have actually read the ideas and philosophies of the major figures behind corporate capitalism? How many of them truly understand that for free market fundamentalists, democracy and the common good are NOT compatible with corporate capitalism? How many who call into i95.5 to rubbish the OWTU (and Venezuela if they could stick it in) ever read where James Buchanan advised Charles Koch that “for capitalism to thrive, democracy must be enchained.”
Enchained.
In other words, for neoliberal free market capitalism to grow and prosper, democracy, the will of the people must be ignored. If that sounds sensationalist to you then reflect on the words of the former German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble who said to former Greek finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, “elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy”
Let that sink in.
There needs to be a total re-examination of what is power, how it is acquired and retained through hierarchies of race, sex and class. Nonsensical, naive ideas about meritocracy and objectivity is partly how some people ended up being shocked when they got Trump, Brexit and the rise of far right groups in Europe. The plutocrats and thinkers I named were and are highly influential theorists and powerful magnates with very clear ideas as to what was the ideal economic system and who should benefit from it (hint, not you).
Piecing together the research of MacLean, Klein and Mayer, the picture that emerges is a perverse Venn Diagram fusing together tax cuts for the rich, deregulation of environmental and safety standards, cuts to welfare and social support programs, retirement benefits, health care, public schooling, unionised labour and removal of already cosmetic “treaties” with indigenous peoples.
Underpinning all of this is a crude Eurocentric nationalism rooted in German herrenvolk (‘Master Race’). The injection of race and racism into this topic is not approved of in polite conversation and it is often criticised as being a convenient crutch or excuse — with some justification. But any discussion of this topic that leaves out the notion of racial hierarchy and “purity” — the belief in who is “pure” vs who is “impure,” “inferior,” “polluted” and “polluting” — is fatally flawed. Whether you want to live in denial or not, the core issue here is continuity through racist ideas connecting those whose wealth is amassed through exploiting labour and traditional communities today and those who did so hundreds of years ago. This is the hidden side of “economic growth;” and as we’re using such terms, let’s note that journalist George Monbiot warns us frequently to regard with suspicion the ambiguous, seductive-sounding terms used by free-market fundamentalists. In fact, almost every single term used by proponents of free-market capitalism amount to Orwellian double-speak. Whenever they talk about “freedom” for instance, ask the questions “freedom for whom” and “freedom from what?”
Friedman, Buchanan and other libertarians were/are deeply opposed to the notion of the common good. They considered any attempt or law to correct these socio-economic imbalances as encroachments on their rights. This can be traced back to 15th, 16th and 17th centuries’ ideas of the “right” of free people to enslave others; it was an important component of the emerging sense of British identity 500 years ago. In marked contrast to the collective, humanistic cultures of precolonised Africa and the Americas, and even certain parts of Europe before the spread of the imperialist and capitalist ethics, there is almost no question of being one’s “brother’s keeper.” Buchanan, in fact wrote dismissively of this in “The Samaritan’s Dilemma.” Further, in the Orwellian sense again, he describes as “predators” advocates of social reform, wealth distribution, public schooling and housing, etc, who “preyed” upon, astonishingly, the millionaires and plutocrats who got their wealth off of other people’s labour. This is the side of that “taking personal responsibility” trope that is not explained to most people; it’s almost always about poor personal choices, making excuses, being lazy and being responsible for one’s own poor, depressed conditions.
Some scholars argued that Heidegger, Hayek and von Mises were well-meaning (aren’t they all?), that what they did was with the best of intentions (a worrying prospect if you read many of von Mises’ quotes and the fact that Martin Heidegger used to begin his lectures in Germany with the Nazi salute). But Buchanan, who later won the Nobel Prize, was very much immersed in US elitist white nationalism. He emerged out of the moves made by outraged Virginia officials to close dozens of public schools in response to Brown vs Board of Education, the Federal ruling to desegregate public schools. All-white private schools were set up, assisted by state-subsidised, tax-funded tuition grants and one of the early supporters of this move was Milton Friedman of the Chicago School of Economics. This is the same Friedman, who also would later win the Nobel Prize, who with a completely straight face argued that Britain did not have slavery; the same Friedman who assisted in remodeling the economy of Chile for the junta that came to power in a violent coup that was engineered by the CIA in 1973. The free market system that was put in place — after murdering and disappearing thousand of union leaders and dissidents — was later reinforced by James Buchanan and so firmly entrenched constitutionally that Michele Bachelet, who was president of Chile from 2014-2018, found it was almost impossible to make the progressive reforms she had intended.
We in Trinidad can point to our own historical figures who thought along similar lines. After all, the racist, exploitative ideas that were “legitimised” in such academic journals as the “Scientific American” have been criss-crossing the Atlantic since the 19th century, feeding the thinking of elites and aspiring elites here and in the US. Through, the works of PET O’Connor, David V Trotman, Arthur Calder-Marshall and Arthur Lewis in his preamble to the 1938 Moyne Commission, we can piece together our own picture about Trinidad’s predatory capitalists of the early 20th century. Interestingly, many of these early business elites belonged to Masonic orders. But even though these lodges advocated a sense of collectivism, as Raymond Ramcharitar pointed out in his dissertation:
“[T]hese values were not meant to be available to the whole society, and there seems to be a marked ambivalence on the part of the educated black and Coloured advocates for reform and self-government to include the masses in any capacity except as leverage…the reformers’ desires in Trinidad were not so much for a change of system, rather to create an oligarchy which included them as beneficiaries and hierarchs rather than supplicants and sufferers.”
Equally important is this point Ramcharitar makes on page 190:
“[W]hile some attitudes and practices associated with industrialism took root in Trinidad – the attitudes to labour, the desire for profit at the expense of humanity, the “mechanised” structures of feeling (which looked at the body and its constitution as an inorganic, unfeeling unit of production), all of which would emerge by the second decade of the 20th C – the counterpoint ideas of humanism were entirely absent.”
This cultural mindset, fomented by an elite class with surnames like DeVerteuil, Huggins, Mavrogordato, Stollmeyer, de Boissiere gave us the cultural mindset from which Espinet drew. Even his open disdain for the Industrial Court has a precedent. David Trotman’s book “Crime in Trinidad: Conflict and Control in a Plantation Society 1838-1900” shows us how the then business elites removed governors and judges they felt were too supportive of the working class. Anyone who studies the Butler Rebellion of 1937 would know that Howard Nankivell, the Colonial Secretary, was recalled to England when he expressed his sympathy with the labourers given the horrific conditions in which they lived and worked. It would an interesting exercise for someone to look at our local companies today and see which ones are connected to the Koch brothers or any other major multinational corporation. In any event, I am sure that he or some member of that board read, attended a seminar funded by Koch Industries. Millions of dollars are spent by Charles Koch alone each year funding seminars, internment courses and camps pushing the neoliberal agenda as aggressively as is possible.
So for those who maintain this is only about economics, I suggest you look at this panel discussion — of economists —aptly entitled “Too Much Maths, Too Little History,” that should be required viewing for many of our politicians, economists and pretend economists who do freelance writing in newspapers. A rising tide does lift all boats as many free-market advocates love to say. But as an old sailor, I know that when the tide rises, if the lines aren’t adjusted, the boats will end up swamped under the jetty. The economic system we fiercely hold on to here was created and maintained by people who clearly know nothing about sailing and want the lines kept taut.
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