Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet

5. Jesus, Marx, and the Future of the Planet

Jesus, Marx, and the Future of the Planet Women’s studies conferences and panels in the United States have taught me many things about literature, history, societal norms, economicdisparities ,healthissues,reproductiverights,sexualitystruggles, political hurdles, and the fight to end racism. But not until I attended theInternationalWomen’sStudiesConferenceinKampala,Uganda,in 2002 had I seen a program with multiple sessions on water. The Uganda conference, organized and attended almost entirely by African women, opened my eyes. A two-week-long economics seminar in Ghana a few years earlier had shown me how the World Bank and five All living things now stand on the brink of oblivion and extinction. —Vine Deloria, Jr., “Vision and Community” The choice we make will decide whether or not we survive as a species. —Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil 140 je sus, m a r x, a n d th e fu t u r e the International Monetary Fund operate, I believed. But I was wrong. Only when I listened to women in Uganda describe the privatization and sale of water in South African townships did the human reality emerge. Speakers explained how multinational corporations have been replacingcommunalspigotswithcoin-operatedmeters.Forthewomen who gather to draw water for their family’s needs and who have little or no money, this means that a life necessity has become unavailable or so very scarce as to be health endangering, all for the purpose of turning a profit halfway around the world in some rich cosmopolitan capital. There, corporate officers—aptly named, for it is a war—never see the dehydration, disease, infant mortality, and increasingly lethal poverty that their bright new idea of selling water produces. Indeed, the idea is such a clever one that, incredibly, multinational soft drink companies havesuccessfullyconvincedprivilegedpeopleintheNorthnottodrink perfectly safe, free, publicly provided water. Instead, they now buy it in millions of plastic bottles, big and small, the production, transportation , and disposal of which consume incalculable amounts of nonrenewablefossilfuelsandthepoliticalpriceofwhichisawholegeneration of people not committed to safe water for all as a basic human right. Globalization does connect us. It means poor people in the South areforcedintobuyingwatertheycannotaffordwhilerichpeopleinthe North are brainwashed into buying water they do not need. It means all of us are manipulated to fill the coffers of multinational corporations . The major difference is that the people in the South know this is insane—and wrong. Water, like the other gifts of the earth, should not be for sale. j e sus, m a r x, a n d th e fu t u r e 141 Looking South This is the face of globalization, with capital racing across the planet and sucking nature and humanity into its maw.—Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature Globalcapitalusesdebtasaweapon.WhenOPECmoneyfloodedinto Western banks in the middle of the twentieth century, banks used it to earn interest and therefore make a profit by issuing huge loans to developing nations under conditions laid down by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Designed to advantage the rich lending countries in the North not only by providing interest but also, and much more important, by dictating trade, manufacturing , labor, and environmental policies that benefit the North and especially the United States, these “structural adjustment loans” constitute what many environmental justice scholars and activists such as Robert Weissman, Walden Bello, Vandana Shiva, and Joel Kovel, to name just a few, identify as a global economic war targeting the earth’s majority, which is to say, poor people of color. Between the end of World War Two and the conservative Reagan era of the 1980s, many nations in the Southern Hemisphere began to developeconomichealthandautonomyasthey claimedindependence from centuries of Western colonial dominance. The World Bank and IMF loans, however, quickly reversed that process. The huge debt they impose recolonizes developing nations because most cannot meet the interest payments. They therefore fall farther and farther behind even as the World Bank and IMF continue to exert socioeconomic control by means of disadvantageous policies. Those include, typically, mandates to lower tariffs on goods from the lending countries, which then inundate and skew local markets and production; requirements to in- 142 je sus, m a r x, a n d th e fu t u r e crease certain exports and prohibit others, which distorts local economiesanddestroyseconomicdiversityandthereforesustainability ;and provisions to allow in multinational corporations without the kinds of controlsonfairwages,workplacesafety,childlabor,andenvironmental standards required in the developed world. All of this depends on the creation of corrupt...