A Fifth Future
The endgame of colonialism is the future we should all fear.
Imagine this future:
We are all alive. Perhaps we do not live for as long as we used to; perhaps there are fewer of us. Certainly, our quality of life has degraded tremendously. But there has been no holocaust, no extinction-level-event, no apocalypse after which there has been a horrific and barely successful struggle simply to keep the human race alive.
Conversely, though, things are bad. Civilization, as we once knew it, has not vanished, but it has deserted us. It still survives, and possibly even thrives, but far away, in places we cannot visit, across borders we are not allowed to cross. We are largely left to our own devices; what little food and water exists is either difficultly sourced from the meager local resources that remain, or brought in occasionally by charities, NGOs, or other institutions of a humanitarian bent.
Shops are almost non-existent, and largely deal in resale trade of used goods. People wear the same clothes for as long as they are able. There is no new construction of homes; people live where they can and stay until they can’t. Hygiene is poor and health is weak. Most of what happens in the community to support itself is done for free, less out of a commitment to communal living than out of bare necessity, with families sharing what the can until they themselves need to borrow the means of living.
Travel is basically non-existent. Broken-down bikes and boats are the main forms of transportation other than walking; burned and junked-out cars with no fuel litter the roadsides, and there is nowhere for them to go anyway. Education is largely done in the home or in churches; it barely exists as an institutional. Health care is the same, and the doctor-to-patient ratio is egregiously imbalanced. Sometimes a bus will come by to provide transportation, and sometimes a teacher or a doctor will come and donate services, but these events are like summer rains: they are rare and cannot be depended upon.
And yet, evidence is everywhere of the resources that were once available to us. Great buildings dot our cities, abandoned now and stripped of everything of value; they are empty, or provide mean shelter for squatters. There are planes that don’t work, cars emptied of their engines, warehouses depleted of goods, schools bare of children, markets bare of food, and broken trains that no one knows how to repair.
In a few institutions, the staff – old men and women, mostly, people who can remember the old days and who have a modicum of education and technical skills – keep things moving; there is perhaps one working railway, a college with stockpiles of books that are rotting because the climate control systems no longer function, or a small-scale factory that manages to crank out a necessity or two out of whatever raw materials they can scrape together. But soon, the people keeping them going will die off, and we will lose even those vestiges of the time before.
Law is nebulous and enforcement is almost invisible, but, while there is occasional violence, the community largely takes care of itself. A vague commitment to human rights keeps you and your loved ones from being wiped out by a genocide, but those people in the far-away, who have the money and the power and the technology, think it wasteful to spend further resources on what is clearly a dying community.
You have been abandoned. Austerity has given way to malign neglect. You are alone. There is no help on the way from anywhere. You have been left to die.
This is not a future of fantasy. It is a reality. Not for you reading this, but for others both abroad and in your country: It is the present in the Congo, in the Central African Republic, in Mozambique, and in nearly all of the former colonial holdings of Africa. It is the present in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and Palestine. It is the present in Flint, in Detroit, on the south side of Chicago. It is the future that capitalism, in its imperialist form, holds for all of us.
We are taught – if we are taught about these places at all – that the sad lot in life of these, the poorest countries and the poorest regions of the richest countries, are all their fault. Their political leadership is corrupt or oppressive, or non-existent; they are wracked with violence, crime, instability, and debt. Their people war over religion and tribal differences. They have not been failed; they have failed.
But, of course, this is a lie. It is largely a lie of omission, to but to be specific, it is a lie of imperialism and capitalism. It begins the history of these ruined places and desperate people at the very moment of their independence, with the not-so-subtle implication that it was their desire to be free of the yoke of empire that destroyed them. Occasionally, this will be made explicit by some overeducated hireling of capital, who will patiently explain for the hundredth time how imperialism was a good thing, overall, for the colonized as well as the colonizer.
All that needs happen to make this out as the vile and murderous lie it has always been is to go back a little further, to where capitalism and imperialism begin rather than end. For it is the same in every time and every place: In come the big companies, with their vast wealth, personnel, and resources; their play is backed by the enormous violent power of the state that sponsors them. They cut inside deals with collaborators who do not answer to the people, if they bother making deals at all; often, they simply take over and trample all resistance.
Soon, they claim every resource, every feature, everything of value for their own. They either enslave the locals to provide hard labor, or they pay so little they have a captive workforce just the same; and they limit mobility and enact laws that prevent workers from organizing and refugees from fleeing. They build factories, shops, schools, and hospitals; but these are for their own use. They educate, equip, and train the locals just enough to allow them to keep the machines going and the managers comfortable.
And one day, for any number of reasons, they leave. They take everything with them. The money they made from stealing the region’s resources is taken back home; the schools and housing they built for themselves are abandoned, and the factories they used to strip the land of its value are gutted and wrecked. They take everything of value they can with them, and what they must leave behind, they dismantle, disable, or stripped for parts. They take everything worth anything, and leave behind only squalor, misery, and a complete – and deliberate – inability on behalf of the locals to make any kind of recovery from this endlessly repeating cycle of seizure and abandonment.
With no resources, no infrastructure, and no institutions left, and with whatever culture and traditions they might have had fully disrupted or destroyed, the people are still left alive to cope. If they somehow manage to recover and start producing something of value out of the scraps they are left or the natural resources that remain, you can rest assured that the capitalist will return to seize it or swindle them out of it (particularly if they organize along Marxist lines or otherwise declare their wealth to be their own and no one else’s). If they do not, they will simply be left, hoping for something, anything, that might help them live. It will probably never come. They may fall prey to fascism or civil war or border conflict, or strongmen may emerge to take control of whatever is left behind – and, most likely, to sell it back to the people who left it in the first place. No matter what happens, the papers back home, in the wealthy outposts of capital who created these conditions to begin with, will strongly imply that it is the fault of the colonized that they had trouble making a go of it.
Again, this is no fantasy, no dark vision of an imagined future. It is the living, breathing, currently existing legacy of colonialist capitalism. If it seems strange or foreign, it is only because it has largely happened far away, in places America doesn’t have much interest in, or within our borders in places too unfashionable for us to visit.
But it is coming. It is coming to your home and mine. If we cannot sustain the costs of a cyberpunk dystopia and find the taste of a totalitarian eco-fascism not to our liking, it is inevitable. Once global resources start to dry up (particularly oil, water, and arable land), and the cost of forever dithering about capitalism’s impact on the environment becomes too high to ignore, the masks, already slipping, will come off. The enclaves of the rich will get smaller and farther away, and the price of maintaining empire will get too high. And so, we will not be extinguished or oppressed; we will simply be abandoned. We will be left behind, wandering the ruins of a world we made but that was not meant for us to use, waiting for help that will never arrive.
This is our fifth and final future. This, I think, is the barbarism that awaits if we do not embrace socialism. It has already come for many of us. And if we do not apprehend what we must do, it will be the only future we ever have.
Today’s links: The Library of Congress’ collection of John Margolies’ Roadside America photos; an abandoned Soviet industrial city near the Arctic Circle; a random internet nerd decides he can beat the best chess player on Earth with only a month’s training; Ash Sarkar takes a look at the confusion around ‘identity politics’ and the working class; and Hussein Kesvani discusses mallwave and its fans’ nostalgia for an age they never experienced.