THE CARIBBEAN BETWEEN ENVELOPMENT AND DEVELOPMENT
Glenn Sankatsing
Caribbean Reality Studies Center
At this meeting of Caribbean researchers we are united
by common concerns, held on this momentous occasion. Crossing linguistic,
geographical and cultural barriers we gathered to discuss the current reality
and future perspectives for the peoples of the Caribbean. Today, our region and
societies find themselves in times of concern over their future. The diagnosis
is extremely alarming, given the absence of a viable response for survival as a
society in the Caribbean Basin.
We are being globalised into extinction, economically,
culturally and socially. Apparently, there is no means of escape for our
countries and the scholars of the society are yet to provide an answer. The key
question is whether we will become the dinosaurs of tomorrow or whether a
project of society is still viable for the countries of the Caribbean.
In this
disturbing reality, contemporary social sciences have retreated into an
embarrassing silence, with no new project to announce to the peoples living in
desperation in three continents, and without any message to deliver to
societies of misery, with disconcerted people living in anguish without escape
route.
All development theories and paradigms of the social
sciences of the last fifty years have failed, without exception. All paths to
progress and to the future have been blocked. While the fate of our peoples
continues to deteriorate, there is not one development paradigm left and not
one single social science theory capable of providing a viable perspective for
the future of our societies.
As Martin Luther King once said, “There comes a time
when silence is betrayal”. This opportunity that brings together so many
Caribbean scholars can serve to break the silence and bring about a fundamental
reflection, not to satisfy supreme academic interests, but to ensure the very
survival of our societies and cultures in the Caribbean Basin; a crucial
reflection to provide us with a viable plan for the society in an encounter of
our present and future, starting with the genesis of the countries of the
Caribbean.
Our part of the world has been the outcome
of the remarkable circumstance that, during half a millennium, the fate of our
societies has not been shaped by our own evolution, development and internal
dynamism, in response to the challenges posed by nature, environment and
habitat, or in fulfilment of our own desires, aspirations and social goals.
Caribbean societies emerged as the scar of
oppression, and were shaped from outside as an artefact of a foreign venture.
The basic principle of continuity and internal dynamism, underlying all processes
of evolution and development, in nature as well as history, was absent in the
genesis of our societies that was the product of structural discontinuity
rather than self‑realisation. But our region was only part of a larger
global enterprise. The history of the last five hundred years of humanity can
be summarised in one single phrase as the globalisation of the local experience
in the West that turned all other human settings into ‘trailer societies’,
towed not toward their own destiny but toward the destiny and teleology of the
West, whose global mission was not to impart, but to collect. Colonialism,
therefore, was not a regrettable accident, but a requirement.
Achievements
of the West, separated from their specific historicity, were transferred to
other latitudes, as universal, context‑free yardsticks for the future of
all geographic destinies and landscapes. Three continents, including ours, were
reduced to “trailer societies”, without the engine and heartbeat to shape their
own history, and were subjected to the commands of the internal project of the
West, and to the exclusive logic of its globalisation. Five discursive
abolitions have formed the cornerstones of this globalisation process.
Firstly, the abolition of context was based on the universality
claim, inherent in the transfer of context‑free devices, deemed insensitive
to the specificities of the environment, geography, culture and history of
other latitudes. In trailer societies, not the model is adapted to suit
reality, but reality is modified to accommodate the model. Cynically, models
were imposed on us, the success of which required our own slavery, servitude
and domestication.
Secondly, the abolition
of culture was based on the tenet that the only beneficial course open for
the future of all destinies is to adopt the Western culture. The indigenous
society was civilised to the extent that it abandoned the culture of its
ancestors, in order to imitate Western achievements through a process of
modernisation that banished its own patrimony to the margins of social life.
Thirdly, the abolition of evolution was based on the
claim that Western civilisation, as the spear point of human evolution,
constituted an achievement that all others were destined to reach some day,
either by their own efforts or by imitation. It was therefore in their own
interest to give up their indigenous projects and discontinue their own
genesis, in order to accommodate imitation, mimicry and transfer of Western
guidelines as the prime agents for development and progress. The variegated tree of human
evolution was thus pruned into the monotony of a single branch.
In fourth
place, the abolition of internal social
dynamism undermined the indigenous command over the engine of development and
creation. Internal social dynamism measures the degree to which social forces
endogenously operate as the engine of development and creation. "No sugar
but coffee", was the message that turned numerous sugarcane fields into
coffee plantations, not because of strikes, or because we no longer had a
liking for sugar, or due to any other internal factor, but simply because of
imperial command. Far from nativist or xenophobic notions of rejecting all
things external, internal social dynamism is the capacity for self‑realisation.
In social processes, the external cannot be opposed to the internal, because
the moment an external element is incorporated, it has already become an
internal factor. It is a law of evolution that life always sprouts from
interaction between the internal and external.
Internal
social dynamism is a variable that measures the degree to which the future,
development and evolution of a social unit are the products of the operation
and use of endogenous mechanisms or inputs. It is the extent to which a social
unit has it own life, internal logic and continuity created by social phenomena
and forces existing within the society. For centuries in Caribbean history, the
growth of the population was not even the product of sexual reproduction, since
the cost and difficulties of ‘breeding’ slaves by far
exceeded the cost of importing adult slaves from Africa.
Finally,
the abolition of history was based on
the axiom that universal history coincides with the genealogy of the West.
Experiences not directly connected to the project of the West were
contemptuously deemed void of substance, culminating in bizarre statements such
as "people without history" and "the end of history". To
their advocates we can respond that people without history were born in the
future. The common origin of humanity endows all peoples around the world with
exactly the same length of history. This Eurocentric proposal regarding history
culminated in the documentalist bias that privileges written sources to the
detriment of other cultural expressions. More crystallised history can be found
in music, customs, oral tradition, rites and dance, in societies such as ours,
structured under dominance, where the hands that wrote were the hands that
tortured.
Culture is not simply some archaic ornament
of society, nor is it a creative decoration of social life. Culture is the
materialisation of the yearning to survive in interactive response to forces of
nature and the institutionalisation of coexistence through rules and shared
institutions in pursuit of order, stability and peace in a project of
self-realisation. A critical reading of the document should therefore be
coupled with the creative reading of the cultural crystallisation of history
and the imaginative reading of the scars of oppression and the monuments of
destruction erected in the social landscape.
These five
discursive abolitions suppressed our essential internal life processes and
shaped our condition of trailer society, truncating our own evolution,
interrupting our history, alienating us from our environment, overwriting our
culture, and undermining the creative force of internal social dynamism.
However – and
this is the cornerstone of our project for the future – unless a society is
completely eradicated, its own project cannot be extinguished. In nature, as
well as in history, there is a cosmic desire to survive, grow, flourish, bear
fruit and defeat death by reproduction. The history of the Caribbean should
therefore be understood as the clash between two opposing processes:
envelopment, a modelling from outside and development, commanded by the inner
clock; in other words, a clash between forces of imitation versus forces of
creation. Internal social dynamism and evolution can be devitalised to
extremes, but can never be extinguished. The ‘limbo’ dance, with its tight
movement notwithstanding the lowering pole, did not come from Africa, nor did
it emerge in the Caribbean. The limbo was born on slave ships, where space was
small and chains were short. Under the cruellest and most dehumanising of lived
experiences, the joy of limbo was created by people on their way to centuries
of slavery. This is the most tangible proof that people can be oppressed to the
extreme of enslavement, but culture and development will always find their way;
not the caricature of development dominant since the fifties that is measured
by the degree of successful imitation of the external experience and
modernisation. Such travesty of development has been amply falsified by decades
of persistent instability, political and socio‑economic crises, critical
poverty and famine on three continents.
You can
provide the mango seed with water, protection and fertilisers for it to grow
into a strong mango tree, but it will never become an apple tree. Development,
therefore, cannot be transferred or donated; it can only be encouraged,
stimulated and maintained. The right definition of development is the
mobilisation of the own potentialities and social forces in a project of
self-realisation, in interactive response to nature, habitat, resources and
history. This presents us with a far reaching conclusion that takes us to a new
paradigm. What was referred to as
‘development’ for fifty years was not development but envelopment, a
disrespectful process of insertion, annexation and incorporation into an
external project, a process of envelopment, of wrapping in both senses. The legitimating development discourse that prevailed
during half a century, represents the antithesis of development based on imitation,
the denial of the principles of creation, evolution and progress and the
destruction of real options for our societies to grow in a natural way.
The most
powerful example is Africa, underdeveloped by Europe by means of envelopment,
being denied the potential to develop out of its own origin. Envelopment is the
reason why the cradle of humanity, Africa, today looks like its graveyard.
We never had
development theories, but envelopment theories, based on the false
development/underdevelopment dichotomy, a legitimating
discourse to impose an alien genesis and foreign destiny on us. The failure of
all development theories that were periodically dished out on a different tray,
stands as the convincing proof. Our response
is the new ‘development/envelopment paradigm’. It conceives development not as
the incorporation in an external destiny, but instead, as a project to rescue
the internal social dynamism, context, culture, evolution and history, by
mobilising the own potentialities and social forces for a project of
self-realisation, instead of reducing us to remote controlled societies.
The
development/envelopment paradigm is a powerful tool to reinterpret history, to
overcome the stasis of half a century, to redefine our reality and to design
the strategy for our own project of self-realisation that gives us back our
destiny. A few areas in which this new paradigm has already served us in
practical terms can illustrate that.
Firstly, the
development/envelopment paradigm allowed the rereading and reinterpretation of
our history. It revealed that a process of envelopment, imposed through the
five abolitions, was responsible for the lack of development in our societies.
The condemnation to grow not from one’s own genes, but from another’s genetic
codes, mathematically resulted in a chain of discontinuity, maladjustment,
instability, crisis and civil war on three continents. Envelopment suppressed
our most essential internal life processes and shaped our present condition of
trailer society, by truncating our evolution, interrupting our history,
alienating us from our environment, overwriting our culture, and undermining
the sources of our creative forces.
Secondly, the
new paradigm served to dismantle the ambiguous term of ‘globalisation’.
Globalisation is not a recent phenomenon appearing over the last few decades.
Long before Columbus’ first voyage, its origin can be traced back to the moment
when the earth ceased to be flat and became a globe with limits, inciting
megalomaniac dreams on the division of a planet, whose space is exhausted
today.
Globalisation
is not a concerted, democratic or pluralist process, that fuses the best social
developments of each corner of the world to serve the cause of humanity. Globalisation
did not produce the global village, rather one single village went global
through a process of envelopment, to the detriment of other social experiences
and evolutions.
The concept
of globalisation is ambiguous, since it can be a blessing and a curse.
Globalisation, through increased communication, exchange and interaction
around the world, which after all is one single race, promotes the development
of a species anxious for solidarity, peace and global harmony. Neo-liberal
globalisation, however, imposes one single economy and global culture,
orchestrated as part of the envelopment process that infringes on the right to
cultural expression and destroys any option for development.
Neoliberal
globalisation is the new face of colonialism, imperialism and neo-colonialism.
How can we imagine fair competition in free markets, if the obsolete machinery
dumped in Germany is still precious technology desperately begged for in
Ethiopia? Neoliberalism is not an ideology of the free market, but rather of free
marketing. The belief that the ‘free market’ is crucial for democracy is a
crude invention. Traditional capitalism opened markets through colonialism,
modern capitalism through neoliberal globalisation, which brings about
clashes, not of civilisations, but clashes of barbarities in ecology, religion,
co-existence and development.
The
planet has become far too small to accommodate more than one empire.
Previously, at least the option for war did not exist between the Roman and
Chinese empires, but today, in a single imperial
centre the national design is made of the global economy. Sovereignty,
self-determination, independence, non-intervention and non-interference, which
always constituted annoying obstacles for the imperial megalomania, now belong
to the past. The global state that imposes one single jurisdiction has brought
an end to the external war, to the war for national liberation and to
separatism. External factors ceased to exist and all spaces and shelters on the
planet have been exhausted. The neoliberal globalization logic can only offer
the scary option of civil war from within the empire, with state terrorism or
terrorism of the subdued. In light of such dangerous trends involving the
usurpation of geographic, social, cultural and economic space, the only way out
is to establish new codes of co-existence based on development, which takes
growth in diversity as a critical pre-condition for any global harmony.
The third
application of the paradigm refers to the concept of ‘developing countries’.
Never did they perceive us as developing countries, but rather as countries of
defective envelopment and inadequate incorporation. It is a suicidal act for
capitalist logic to develop the main consumer market into a powerful competitor
with bountiful natural and human resources. The ‘development aid’ that was
granted, therefore, never really addressed our development but was envelopment
aid that primarily focussed on the optimisation of the neoliberal incorporation
into the global capitalist market.
A fourth use
of the paradigm refers to the sustainable development model, which is quite
fashionable these days. According to the development/envelopment paradigm,
development is sustainable by definition, otherwise it is not development. The
concept of ‘sustainable development’ is therefore a sheer pleonasm. Unless the
asymmetric relations that prevail around the world are eliminated, ‘sustainable
development’ is the equivalent of ‘sustainable envelopment’, and therefore a
negation of development. Sustainable development under conditions of domination
will only sustain inequality and injustice, failing to open up any options for
the development of our societies.
Sustainable
development has served as a cunning discourse for achieving a suspicious global
consensus among the opposing poles of an asymmetrical relationship, without any
substantial material or structural change in the status quo, whose strategic
goal is sustainable envelopment. The ambiguity of the concept of sustainable
development explains why, despite the great jubilation at international summits
of Heads of State with ample space for NGO’s, as in Rio de Janeiro and
Johannesburg, no substantial progress has been made to prevent imminent
disasters.
Similarly,
structural adjustment programmes are not part of the development process, but
only constitute a powerful agent of envelopment and incorporation into an alien
project. The trailer society is maladjusted by definition, and that turns
structural adjustment into perpetual adjustment, part of which has already been
completed in half a millennium.
Finally, with
respect to power and democracy, what prevails from the top is envelopment, due
to the dominant political system that is not based on representation, but on
the delegation of power. Elections do not capitalize the development process of
social forces and the materialisation of their real interests, but are based on
envelopment through the usurpation of power by a handful of individuals,
self-appointed for autonomous governance. In Caribbean and Latin American
political processes, suffrage has legitimised the periodic hijacking of the
people and the country for periods of 4 or 5 years as an ambulant monarchy, to
the extreme that corruption is not an aberration of democracy, but the premium
of democracy.
The greatest
structural defect of parliamentary democracy is the preponderance of atomistic
individualism and the absence of a protagonist role played by the social forces
that constitute the driving force of development. Development translated into
representation is a glimpse at a democratic alternative to parliamentary
democracy, by presenting the option of democratically mobilising social forces
from below, to the verge of the traditional political arena and by allowing the
emergence of a different brand of political leadership from within the social
forces. The new paradigm provides an explanation as to why two current
processes in Latin America seemingly similar in their discourse, are achieving
completely different results: Brazil’s hope with a leading role of social
forces that closely resemble development and the trauma being suffered in
Venezuela as a result of a process of envelopment, which pretends to serve the
‘aspirations of the people’ from an isolated vanguard.
These
promising options of the development/envelopment paradigm for our society’s
future once again pose our initial question on the embarrassing silence of
social science that failed so miserably in their development paradigms and
theories, with such a high social cost in three continents during half a
century. As researchers of our societies we are required to find the answers in
order to draw lessons for the future. The main reason is that social science as
a victim of its own disciplines became an accomplice of envelopment.
The
early fragmentation of social science into autonomous disciplines introduced
insoluble epistemological problems. For systematic research purposes, the
complexity of social reality demands the temporary isolation of social
phenomena in the form of specialisations, but it is a scientific crime to
disassemble for purposes of study, and then forget to reassemble before making
final statements. A child playing with ‘Lego’ toys will understand this. That
is exactly what social sciences have been doing for two centuries now, each one
claiming a slice of the society as its exclusive field of competence, unable
even to understand the language of the other disciplines.
The trouble with social science disciplines is even
more complex. Social sciences were not discovered, they were created in
specific socio-historical processes of the West, in response to the
Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, rise of capitalism and the
French Revolution. Had social sciences been developed in the Caribbean, instead
of being unquestioningly copied, their disciplines would certainly have not
been the same; surely, without the process that gave rise to anthropology,
since we are not that exotic to ourselves. Moreover, societies based on
community life with an organic link between production and family relations
would not call for a dichotomy between sociology and economy. The system of
social disciplines is therefore not universal, but rather an artefact of
Western socio-economic and political history.
Sociology was born not as a scientific
discipline, but as a device for the salvation of France, in the midst of
chaotic events, to be later crystallised into the study of processes associated
with the modern nation state. Non-western peoples were left to the care of anthropology,
born out of colonialism, in the voice of Levi Strauss.
Economics was
the direct response to the industrial revolution and the growth of capitalism.
The market, as the tabernacle of capitalism, became the central point of economics
that was not concerned with needs, not even of millions of human beings dying
of hunger, but which focused exclusively on the demand of those who appeared on
the market with purchasing power. Economics became progressively concerned with
the optimisation of the system that was being globalised, until our modern
neoliberal era, where economics is not a scientific discipline but the doctrine
of capitalism.
For these reasons, contemporary social science disciplines that were
transferred to all destinies lack universality and instead became systems of
knowledge that accompanied and steered the social evolution of the West and its
project of global expansion. Tradition
was adopted, not science.
This
complicity of social sciences as active agents of the envelopment of other
destinies into trailer societies can be historically corroborated. Sociology
was concerned with justifying and accompanying the process of Westernisation
and modernisation, overwriting other cultures on a global scale by providing solutions
for maladjustments to the modernisation process. Economics accompanied the
globalisation of Western capitalism, using deceitful terms such as
international, transnational and interdependent capitalism, so that no one
could be held accountable for extra-territorial economic injustice. All
societies around the world were portrayed as victims of some ungraspable
transnational monster.
It should be
reminded that capitalism was only endogenous in the West, where it was
historically created. International capitalism is globalised Western
capitalism, not the outcome of industrial revolutions in India or Indonesia,
nor the result of rationalisation processes in Brazil, much less the product of
class struggle in Nigeria. International capitalism has no heart, but it does
have an operating base, definitely not to be sought in Latin America or Africa,
but rather in Europe and its reincarnation, the United States.
The rejection
of social science disciplines carries with it severe implications, for the
multi, inter and transdisciplinary approaches should be rejected as well, since
they too take disciplines that lack validity as their axiomatic premise.
However, the valuable social science contributions accumulated over the course
of time cannot be simply discarded, for they still may provide useful tools in
the study of society. This raises serious epistemological problems.
In seeking to
square the vicious circle, we had to abandon the entire logic of the structure
of contemporary social sciences, opting for the extradisciplinary approach. Its
basic premise is that social phenomena and processes are mutually interrelated
and united, and can be isolated only temporarily for purposes of study, but
with the compelling obligation to reassemble before drawing final conclusions.
The extradisciplinary approach puts an end to the inverted logic of current
social sciences that the anatomy of academia determines the anatomy of society.
The instrument was transformed into the tyrant, demanding that social problems
and phenomena be adjusted to the dividing lines of academia, instead of
designating social reality and social forces as the agents of development and
the architects of history.
Development
stems from a combination and interaction of three crucial factors in the historical
process: social forces as the main actors, survival as the driving force and
awareness as a guide and motivating factor. An
awareness and strategy on the part of the social forces of viable channels for
collective survival forms the base, starting with the pursuit of interests and
objectives perceived as critical for the own group. In an ongoing process of
concerted action, the specific goals of each group are formulated
simultaneously, while negotiations and joint action at the collective level should
pursue the harmonisation of divergent, even contrary interests among social
forces, in order to reach a viable project for the self-realisation of the
society as a whole.
Given
the inherent desire for survival and self-realisation on the part of the social forces, awareness is the
most outstanding factor in generating development. Operating within the ambit
of awareness are factors capable of creating or hindering solidarity and
concerted action such as ideas, discourse and interaction, but also the manifestation
of the unifying factor of culture, through literature, poetry, music, dance and
other expressions.
In light of
the categorical failure of their theories and paradigms, in addition to their
inability to present methods or devices for the self-realisation of society,
social sciences contemptuously distanced themselves from the quest for coherent
explanations for our condition. Postmodernism and postmodernist tenets provided
a comfortable refuge for their frustration by proposing the suspension of the
‘grand theories’ and the end of the search for general explanations for the
human and social condition, at the same time condemning the dispossessed of the
earth to life imprisonment and their native lands to perpetual trailer
societies. The outcome was the rise of conjunctural social sciences, victims of
blind empiricism, to the extreme of relegating the study of the society to
scientific journalism. Obsessed with empirical data and conjunctural movements,
they were so busy explaining the mere facts, that they lost sight of the
underlying forces accountable for the genesis of the facts. A new class of
social scientists emerged, as neurotically up‑to‑date people who
follow what is going on but do not know what is happening. The historical
insertion of social sciences into the envelopment process explains why, despite
their best efforts, they were unable to address such a vital survival issue as
development.
The
development/envelopment paradigm opens up promising avenues. The history of the
Caribbean should be understood as the clash between two opposing processes:
envelopment, a modelling from outside and development, commanded by the inner
clock; in other words, the forces of imitation versus the forces of creation.
The merging of the development/envelopment paradigm and the extradisciplinary
method leads the way to joint action for a promising project for the future
that can mobilise one’s own social forces and potentialities in a conscious
process of self-realisation.
Social
reality is the point of departure for a theorisation
that can only be understood as an intermediate phase of analysis that should
culminate in development operating at the practical level. Only this de-academisation of the social sciences can overcome the
dilemma of the academic tradition of addressing reality starting from theory
only to arrive at yet another theoretical academic explanation that continues
detached from practice. The extradisciplinary method eliminates the dichotomy
between theory and praxis through social reality based research that is immune
to the tyranny of academia or ideology. Development as a theoretical and
practical paradigm is therefore based on the self-mobilisation of one’s own
capabilities in all spheres of social life, such as education, culture, economics,
politics and democracy, in pursuit of one’s own project to rescue the internal
social dynamism.
The present should never
be opposed to the past, because the contemporary is a special case of history
that links our lived genesis and our present into future-oriented action. In looking toward the future,
development is the only means of overcoming our condition of trailer society in
the Caribbean, not as victims of a crystallised past, but as the protagonists
of a future history. Nowhere else than in the future will be found the solidarity and identity of our peoples, since there is no way back
to Africa, Europe or Asia, nor to indigenous peoples or maroons in the Amazon
forest. There is never a way back for a people, since
nostalgia always takes the opposite road to history, evolution, progress and
self‑realisation.
Development conceived from the new paradigm is a glimpse of the
promising project of joint action, not to rescue origins, but to rescue the
future, as an alternative to a globalisation that is driving us to extinction.
These are the precious lessons of our genesis, always with our eyes fixed on
our future project of development and self-realisation, instead of
apathetically vacillating among the horrors of our genesis. Ruins are not to be
mourned on, but to be built upon.
Free distribution with reference to source.
Source: www.crscenter.com