Decolonization and recent independence movements
hold the constitution of nation-states as a high point, perhaps definitive, for
the beatitude of peoples, replicating the construction of nation-states in Europe,
where they were the object of a slow process, dating to several centuries ago.
Nowadays, globalization develops processes
to make the nation-states subalterns, with the creation of norms and
institutions of many-nations or of international scope, implicitly assuming
that the nation-states’ scope is too narrow.
Between the nation-state of the past and the
unification and uniformity of the planet carried out by the multinationals and
the financial capital, where do the roles and status of the peoples and individual persons lie? And, from an active and prospective point of
view, what attitudes and choices should the peoples assume?
Summary
A - Notes on the birth of the nation-state
1 -
Colonial expansion led to the construction of the modern state
2 - The State, an essential element for accumulation
3 - Nations
and nation-states
4 - The
aggrandizement of a state apparatus always involves violence
5 - L'Etat, c'est moi!
6 - The importance of patriotism
7 - The
beginning of industrial capitalism
========== ||||| ==========
A - Notes on the birth of the nation-state
1 - Colonial
expansion led to the construction of the modern state
Nation-states emerged in the XVII/XVIII centuries. In Europe, until then
and since the dismemberment of the Roman Empire, there were territories under
the tutelage of a king, accepted as an aggregator and arbiter by a nobility of
landowners, to whom a multitude of poor peasants were
bound in a vassal relationship. For this multitude, the relationship with the king was very distant and occasional, while attachment to the land, to the nearby community where they were inserted, was the only relationship of belonging and of solidarity felt, although shaped by the demands of the lords.
bound in a vassal relationship. For this multitude, the relationship with the king was very distant and occasional, while attachment to the land, to the nearby community where they were inserted, was the only relationship of belonging and of solidarity felt, although shaped by the demands of the lords.
The dynastic disputes between royal houses, the unions and partitions of
lordships would only affect the greater part of the population if there were
any increases to the already heavy rents, censuses, fines, rights and special
contributions demanded by the landlord; or if in these disputes military
operations would lead to the destruction of crops, looting and rape, which
would cause famine.
The assumption of belonging to a broad-scoped and abstract entity – the nation-state
– as happens today, did not exist, because neither did there exist a state as
an administrative, coercive and tax structure that embodied it or gave it
visibility, and pressed that presence in opposition to others. There was no
nation-state. There were only subjects of the king and of the lords, concrete
individuals, who demanded personal obedience; but they were not emitters of a citizen's
card, passport or taxpayer number, among other modes of bond binding to a
nation-state.
The dialectic between the peasants and the feudal lords oscillated between
the tolerance of the former and the greediness of the latter which, in case of
disagreement, regularly provoked great and bloody peasant revolts. For example,
in France, there were successive revolts in the X to XV centuries, with
emphasis on the Grande Jacquerie, almost simultaneously with similar actions of
the English peasants under the impulse of Wat Tyler and John Ball. In Aragon,
at the end of the fifteenth century, the struggle of the remensas for
the right not to pay a tribute to their master in order to be able to leave the
land to which they were attached, lasted more than ten years. In Germany, the
peasants tried to take advantage of the movements resulting from the Lutheran
secession to free themselves from the masters, but Luther preferred to help the
German nobility in their purpose of abandoning the papal suzerainty. In these
struggles, the rebels were not opposing a distant king, whose intervention they
asked for, but against their masters, their direct oppressors.
The predominance of a local-based agrarian economy did not generate a large
volume of exchanges with regions far away, resulting in the abandonment, poor
quality and safety of roads and paths, frequented by bands of robbers. In
Europe, things were far from the network of roads that linked the various
regions of the Roman Empire and where goods and soldiers circulated. The center
of a royal domain was the place of residence of the king and the court which,
with its purchasing power, attracted the commerce of luxury goods and supplies
for the soldiery; the place where the king lived was what today would be called
the administrative capital of the kingdom.
Cities where the wealth generated in distant commerce and finance was
concentrated were the disturbing element of this order, as in Italy or Flanders
whose moguls also constituted themselves as landlords, helping nobles and
troubled kings with loans. Trade, craft production, shipbuilding, shipping, and
universities created cosmopolitan societies that demanded more labor power,
attracting people from the countryside, looking for a better life, running away
from food crises, wars, or the landlords’ cupidity.
It was under royal tutelage that the maritime path from Europe to the East was
opened and America was discovered; the fact that these events were originated by
the Iberian crowns is explained by particular circumstances. Firstly, the
well-established expansionist tradition in Castile, at the expense of the
Muslim kingdoms, after similar expansion possibilities were barred to both
Portugal and Aragon; that motivated the first Portuguese incursions in Ceuta and
Tangier, still with a character typical of the aristocratic rituals, of the chivalry.
Secondly, because the secular struggle of the northern Christian kingdoms of
the peninsula against the southern, Muslim, ones created a frequent state of
war that facilitated the concentration of kings’ power in Portugal and
Castile-Leon, to the detriment of the genesis of feudal nobility typical of the
lands beyond the Pyrenees. And, thirdly, since the peninsular countries are before
an open sea, the costs of its exploitation would always be high and profits
unsure, appropriate, therefore, to be carried out by the royal houses or by a
potentate called Order of Christ, directed by Infante D. Henrique, called The
Navigator.
It were the Crowns that set up the ships and when colonial exploitation, in
the Americas, demanded capital beyond the royal capability, resorted to the
nomination (in Spain) of encomenderos with rights to lands and its
inhabitants on the new continent, who were charged with assembling ships and
mobilize money for the purpose, with the Crown collecting part of the wealth
obtained from the loot. And there were also contracts (capitulaciones)
between the king and adventurers such as Cortez and Pizarro, for the search of
gold and silver, in which the crown would get a cut. In Portugal, the king
instituted Letters of Donation to grantees from the lower nobility, with
hereditary rights over the territory of Brazil and who were responsible for
giving the king 20% of the gold or precious stones found or 10%, in the case
of agricultural products. Also in Portugal, strategic shipbuilding was
installed near the royal palace so that the Crown could more easily control its
development and would charge the subsequent trade of slaves, gold, or spices.
In this logic, still with medieval traits, all the land belonged to the king
who would cede his rights under contracts and concessions.
In this context, the origin, the "nationality" was irrelevant;
the Catholic Kings had no problem in hiring the Genoese Columbus or the Portuguese
Magellan, just as England hired the Venetian Cabot and Infante D. Henrique
hired a Venetian slave trader, Cadamosto. Today the same situation, with the
erosion of the relevance of nation-states and the domination of the
globalization logic, has, again, become banal, with the slow formation of vast
globalized elites working for transnational corporations, global banks,
international bodies, beyond, in the European case, of the relations created
through the Erasmus program.
This enormous expansion of the action space, of colonial plundering and of
great diversification of transacted goods, including the voluminous and
profitable slave trade, constituted the beginning of globalization and gave a decisive impetus to commercial
capitalism, which was not yet dominant in Europe. And, hence, the birth of intense competition
between the Atlantic facing European crowns, all looking for territories in
America, often in the mercantilist perspective of finding gold; all seeking to
settle themselves on the spices’ islands, driving away competition; all sowing
the coasts with forts to dominate the sea lanes; all setting up their own
corsairs or fighting piracy; finally, establishing bases in Africa, bribing
local heads (sobas) with weapons and alcohol, for the delivery of slaves as
return. All of this fueled an
accumulation of capital that was to be linked to plantation-type agriculture,
mining, and plunder which, as far as capitalism was concerned, was a primitive
accumulation. Capitalism asserted itself
through violence and robbery; a trademark it never abandoned.
This intercontinental and global dimension required a great concentration
of means – more robust ships that could
hold large batches of merchandise and cannons, garrisons scattered over a vast area,
and armament to fuel a continued war effort for the control of trade and
colonized lands, in addition to dynastic and influence disputes amongst the
various European royal houses; disputes that came to articulate, in the XVI century,
with swords and cannons, those essential arguments to define who held the
religious purity.
In the defense area, the needs of the royalty increased substantially with
the establishment of permanent armies and the navy, where it was frequent to
enlist mercenaries, paid with gold or silver from the Americas and the Gulf of
Guinea, spread throughout Europe as payment means for commercial transactions. Indebtedness to Italian or Flemish bankers, or
in the form of bills of exchange, grew substantially; it was no longer enough
to devalue the coins’ value by reducing its silver content, which meanwhile had
been shriveled by the large scale extraction in American mines, such as those
in Potosi. Thus, the tax burden, in the form of taxes and duties in the
colonial trade, had to grow substantially, by creating customs, tithe and
customs taxes; and this implied having clerks, technicians, ministers,
accounting and budget, standardization of weights and measures, inspectors, and
an inventory of chapels, hostels, houses, and inhabitants, as happened with Numeramento
(enumeration) in 1527/32, in Portugal, in order to apply an ancestor of the IMI[1]. The State apparatus was born and the relation,
typical of medieval times, between the fiscal punch and the expenses with the
court and the defense, was ended.
2 - The
State, an essential element for the accumulation
The disaster of the Invincible Armada irreversibly weakened the power of
the Spanish and Portuguese navies, gave supremacy of the seas to England, and,
indirectly, also to The Netherlands. Taking into account the distances, storms,
and risks of intrusion in the Indian Ocean, then assumed as an area of
Portuguese jurisdiction (as far as Europeans were concerned), the English and
the Dutch created their respective East India Companies in the early
seventeenth century as a form of unification of efforts between the merchants,
with a distanced supervision by their respective States. In both cases, the
initial idea was about commerce and not the occupation of the territory. On the
other hand, there was a geographical partitioning, with the English Company
concentrating its business in India and China, involving tea, silk, cotton,
salt and opium; while the Dutch company focused on the area that is now
Indonesia, to trade on pepper, sandalwood, nutmeg and cloves, within a rational
involving plantations, controlling long distance trade with Europe and,
particularly, between islands of the Sunda archipelago.
The English Company was created with capital from noblemen and bourgeois,
under the royal concession, with a monopoly regime and with penalty of
confiscation for the transgressors. The Company’s aim was, initially, to do commerce,
but in the mid-eighteenth century rivalries among the fragile Indian states led
it to arm troops (primarily Indian soldiers) and take over the direct
administration of the occupied territory. It was not until 1858 that the
English state directly took over, until the independence processes, the
government of India, the Raj.
Indian Colonial administration by English and Dutch, sought to be discreet
and non-interventional, given that the large population of the territories
would be disastrous for Europeans in the event of a large-scale revolt, given
the limitations of the colonial powers in deploying substantial military means
in such extensive and populous areas. Even if the English still managed to leave
their language in India, the Dutch never sought to transmit theirs to the
subjugated peoples, maintaining a very distant domination, and Malay as the region’s
lingua franca.
During a more recent phase, the India Company's colonial power, in
interaction with assumed capitalists, led to the ruin of the Indian textile
industry and to the dramatic impoverishment of the people for the benefit of
the Manchester factories where industrial capitalism was taking its first
steps, introducing new ways of exploiting the work of others.
Still in seventeenth-century England, King Charles I presumed he had every
right to raise taxes and punish opponents as was, at that time, the rule of
absolute feudal monarchies. The existence of a Parliament, despite being
composed of the clergy and the nobility, made things difficult for him, and later
he was tried and condemned to death, giving rise to the establishment of a
republic, where Cromwell emerged as the strong man, especially after having
tamed the Parliament itself.
Cromwell created a professional army and, supported by the bourgeoisie and
peasants, overturned the feudal rights over the latter and confiscated the
lands of the Anglican Church to ensure a better yield from the land; and, we
emphasize, promulgated the Act of Navigation (1651). The latter established the
monopoly of the maritime trade between England and its colonies for English
ships, and only allowed ships of its own or the other party to perform exports
or imports, excluding third parties, to the detriment of the Netherlands. This
reserved traffic[2] met
the interests of the commercial bourgeoisie, eager to develop the maritime
trade and the possession of colonial lands without external competition. The absence
of domination of lands propitious to the extraction of gold and silver (which
did not exist in the British colonies) led to the promotion of settlement
colonies in North America. Later, manufacturing production, protected from
competition, would foster capitalist accumulation associated with a unified and
well-defined territory, with the increasing dominance of the oceans.
3 - Nations
and nation-states
The above mentioned examples show how the European human communities have moved
from vassalage to feudal lords who had a suzerain, distanced from the people,
to direct vassals of this suzerain (king), with the fading or disappearance of
feudal ties.
A nation corresponds to a people, originally linked to a common place of
birth (natio), whose lasting coexistence has generated its own culture;
and that may or may not lead to the building up of a nation-state, without any
cause-effect arising therefrom. Today, in this 21st century of neoliberalism
and climate change, there are many more Stateless nations than nation-states;
and in the bosom of many of these, various nations coexist peacefully or in a
conflictual way. On the other hand, nation-states are giving up their
suzerainty to global institutions, in a process of interconnection, a network,
carried out by multinational companies and by the financial system which make
clerks of, and domesticate for their service, the national political classes.
In the genesis of the European nation-states, in general, the territories
were based on the areas corresponding to the suzerainty of a royal house, with
more or less changes, resulting mainly from numerous wars. But in this process
many of these sovereignties, some with smaller territories or population,
others with more, disappeared, diluted in one or more nation-states, like the
kingdom of the Two Sicilies; others, even having an average size, took over
much larger territories and populations, eliminating by the way side many
landlords, as was the case with Prussia.
Within the same seigneurial logic, in the former colonized territories, the
resulting nation-states inherited the frontiers established with ruler and
squadron by the occupying powers, without any concerns about whether or not
political separation of a nation, a tribe, or a culture resulting from
ancestral coexistence would ensue; or even if the dividing line would separate
parts of the same village. Technological and warfare advantages induced a
superiority of the "whites", and were accompanied by a mixture of
contempt and punishment for "the inferior races" which did not
correspond to the virtues of the civilization of Europeans or their
descendants, made in the USA. From the nineteenth century, these
attitudes would also mark the spirit of the Japanese in their expansionism in
Asia regarding others – even if of the "yellow race" – in particular
in their relation with the Chinese...
In the context of this so-called civilizing superiority, the colonial
powers have left behind, especially in Africa, nation-states where they never
existed, because people have for centuries traded their ideas, bodies, and
conflicts, essentially valuing networks, itineraries, and local languages such
as the lingua franca; and paying
little to no attention to anything resembling borders. The construction of
nation-states, some fifty years after decolonization, revealed numerous civil
wars, imposed limitations on the traditional commercial corridors, and created
others for the trafficking of arms, drugs, and candidates for entry into
Europe; fostered genocides, massive displacement of refugees, and the deployment
of corrupt groups protected by the global capital or by the former colonial
power; originated national or private armies specializing in predation and
massacre; engendered child-soldiers, compulsive emigration, external military
interventions (now monitored by the Pentagon, via Africom), refugees,
and in immigration countries, exclusion, exploitation, racism,
"non-existent" people called "undocumented".
The distinction between human beings based on race, which is basically
characterized by the color of the skin, has been an instrument of social
hierarchy and discrimination, which has arisen as a result of the colonial
rule; however, in countries such as the USA, people are still faced with a
racial self-qualification, resulting in cases of impossible qualification
within the "catalog", such as those people refusing any qualification
other than human being.
These arbitrary divisions, however, are not exclusive of the formerly colonized
territories. In Portugal, in the Alto Trás-os-Montes province we know of a
village divided by the border – Rio de Onor in the Portuguese side and Río de Onor
in the Leonese side (with an acute accent in the í, as it is the rule in
Castilian); Rio de Onor reports to Bragança, county seat, and Río de Onor
reports to Puebla de Sanábria, Zamora province, community of León and Castile.
In other situations, the frontier was completely ignored by the people, who
moved to the other side with cattle and implements, depending on the charges of
the fiscal puncture or the prospect of being drafted into the army.
Nation-states, in their early stages, began to incorporate one or more
nations embracing people of various cultures, languages, and traditions, as in
seventeenth century England or Spain, from the earliest days of their
constitution. As a rule, nation-states tend to generate a unifying totalitarianism,
a leveler destroying or hindering the expression of the encompassed nations, to
the detriment of the one, claimed to be hegemonic, whether or not it has the majority;
this drive can manifest itself either through centrifugal fears (separatism or
inclination for incorporation into another nation-state, neighbor) or
centripetal (expansionist claims, of incorporating parts of other neighboring
nation-states). This expansionist territorial impulse corresponded to the
inclusion of more labor power, natural resources, subjugation of other owner classes;
a wider market, as they say today. As a rule, any nation-state assumes itself
as a miserly caretaker of its territory and the destiny of its
"subjects"; as well as a greedy candidate to the control of foreign
lands, to the capture of new subjects, at any pretext, to enrich the rich and
increase the ration and prestige of their political class. Globalization,
however, tends to dynamite this construction – the nation-state – and to
demonstrate its vulnerability or even inconvenience or worthlessness, not only
for the peoples – for whom it has always been a prison – but also for today's
globalized capitalism, as we will point out within the context of this writing.
Thus, in present-day United Kingdom, Scots, Welsh and Irish (from the north), live
together with their languages[3] and
cultures; but political, economic, and cultural domination emanated from
England and, most importantly, from the iconic and gigantic London. In France,
the monarchs and later the Republicans, settled in Paris, found it convenient
to destroy in the south the Provençal culture, the langue d'oc, to
squeeze the Britons into a corner, to forget the German culture of Alsace or
the Basques in the southwest, and prevent any sovereign reverie of the
Corsicans; referring their respective languages to the neglect of
"non-recognition". For its part, in Spain, the dominant political
class based in Madrid has always dreamed of an impossible homogeneity, even
though it had used brutal means in the time of fascism, such as the prohibition
of teaching and public use of the languages of the nations integrated under
guardianship of a monarchy without a king; an integration that Rajoy and his
entrenched nationalism, typical of fascism, tries to maintain, with more than
doubtful success, unless he places Franco's tricorn on his head and restores
the firing squads, as suggested by his confrère Casado. In Brazil as in the USA,
Indian nations try to survive, in the first case, to the charges of the agro-business
that destroys their habitat and, in the second, in zoos or reservations.
4 - The
aggrandizement of a state apparatus always involves violence
The competition for territories, in particular colonial ones, transformed
the management of the king and court’s expenses into a bureaucratic and financially
complex structure, with high military and administrative expenses, demanding an
income collection machine, adapted to the means of the time but very zealous to
obtain the adequate amounts for the enormous expenses demanded by the
circumstances. As mentioned above (point 1), the tax burden and its collection apparatus,
restricted to the original territory even though it had grown considerably, was
not sufficient for the needs of royal finances.
An essential source of financial resources in which the States relied
heavily was the slave trade. According to Philip D. Curtin in his work The
Atlantic Slave Trade, between the 16th and 19th centuries, 1.6 M African
slaves were dumped on the Spanish colonies of America, 3.6 M on the Portuguese
colonies, 2 M on the English ones, on the French 1.6 M, on the Dutch 0.5 M,
with a grand total of 9.2 million people. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that 20%
to 40% of those boarded in Africa died in the 30/50 days trip during which they
lay chained in the hold. From Liverpool alone, in the twelve years ending in
1707, 5300 slave ships sailed to Africa.
The European states charged, for centuries, the slave traders with large
sums as licenses. The Spanish Exchequer, in addition to charging a tax of 100
pesos per “piece” (a standard for a healthy 15/30 years old male slave) also
received a tax between 2.5% and 5% on the sales and transaction (the VAT of
those times...) at the boarding time, and from 5% to 7.5% at the destination,
in the Americas. The receipt for the tax payment consisted of... a mark made on
the slave's skin with a hot iron. Taking into consideration that upon arrival at
Cartagena de las Índias a "piece" was traded for 300 pesos, that it
reached 600 in Chile and in the mines of Potosi the price reached 900 pesos,
one can imagine the enormous profit margin of the slave traders and the state
revenues that this business afforded.
The question of slavery, as well as the land occupation of the native
communities of the Americas, reveals that capitalist accumulation had a
primordial beginning in the midst of the greatest violence and robbery;
followed by some "democratic" redistribution with the pirate assaults
on silver galleons coming from America and the result of the payments in gold of
the commercial activities’ deficits. As the Iberian powers had imported, from
the Muslim world – and before that from the typically feudal Northern Europe – the
boullionism logic, the extraction of precious metals and the high profits of
the spice and slave trades allowed them to neglect manufacturing and
protectionist measures on importing finished goods, something that England did
not. In the two Iberian countries, the erosion of military power or control of
the seas, continuity of colonial exploitation, lack of interest in land reform,
an on-going conservative royal power, meanwhile enslaved to the persecution of
wealthier and entrepreneurial elites, and in the name of a religious
proselytism, sealed their decadence and their later – and subordinate - arrival at capitalism.
5 - L'Etat, c'est moi
The building up of nation-states in Europe and the accumulation of capital
generated around the slave trade and in the aftermath of slave labor are
essential pieces for the future development of capitalism. Even today, despite
high technologies, the crime economy accounts for about 15% of the world’s GDP,
and capitalism does not dispense with the "pieces" of the 21st
century, the refugees, immigrants from Africa or the Middle East who try to
reach Europe; nor the Latin Americans who try their luck in the United States;
not forgetting to mention the trafficking of prostitutes, body organs, children,
and other "niche markets". The financial system, today, does not pass
without the leading role in the integration (laundering) of such a large volume
of capital; and the political classes of the nation-states do not impose taxes
on the drug cartels, but they know that the money involved is
laundered in the offshore branches of their banks and that many entrepreneurs will gain
competitiveness through the recruitment or even enslavement of the "pieces",
which is fundamental to growing the sacrosanct GDP.
In order to maintain a surplus in foreign trade with a corresponding entry
of gold, imports of raw materials would have to be the object of monopolies and
subsidies granted by the State, while at the same time fighting the import of
manufactured goods through customs duties. The concentration of money on trade
would gradually allow a new model of material production with the commoditization
of the land and the transfer of agricultural work hands, unnecessary in the
field, to industrial production; this new model added to the powers of the
absolutist, all-powerful State, the instruments for labor regulation; and this,
despite and against the arts and crafts guilds that, in general, languished
until they disappeared, although recently they were more or less recovered in
the professional orders, as a means of controlling the access to the work of
its (obliged) members. To these roles as regulator, financier, protagonist in
what can be called industrial policy and in the financial balance with the
outside, were joined to other, ancient, powers in the areas of border control,
law enforcement, courts, and war. Together, they substantiated the basis of
protectionism and the affirmation of the nation-state, vis-a-vis its
competitors; they marked the absolutist power, well expressed by Louis XIV, in
the second half of the 17th century, when he supposedly said "L'Etat
c'est moi ".
In Portugal, one can follow the performance of a country and an economy
that engendered the peculiar situation of colonizer and colonized. The Methwen's
treaty, in 1703, clearly embodies the application of the (uneven) international
division of labor, in which the manufacture of textiles would be an English
specialization while Portugal would engage in the production of wines, which
pleased the Douro landlords. A few years before (1690) the Earl of Ericeira, a great
promoter of industry in Portugal, unable to overcome the English influence and the
destabilization sponsored by the opponents of textile manufacture on the Serra
da Estrela, who managed to obtain the support of the Inquisition, since some
industrialists were... new-christians (people with jew or moorish ancestors or
“impure blood”), had committed suicide.
The society’s inability to impose a capitalist development path dovetails
with the ease with which the flow of Brazilian gold allowed it to resort to
importation and fill the deficits resulting from unequal exchanges with
England. On the other hand, Brazilian gold allowed large construction
expenditures that did not generate industrial development in Portugal but
produced macaws such as the Mafra Convent; likewise, the flow of gold did not
prevent the Lisbon inhabitants, in order to have an aqueduct that supplied them
with abundant water, from having to pay for it with specific taxes on food,
during many years. Later, in the mid-nineteenth century, the construction of
railroad lines linking rural areas – rather than industrialized (non-existent)
urban centers – proved to be inadequate when abandonment of the fields, flight
to the coastal areas, or emigration phenomena happened.
The poor devils who say "the State is all of us" do not think
they’re Louis XIV, nor do they mask themselves for the carnival. But they impute
to the State a vigilant, equalitarian and protective spirit of all its subjects
that, they believe, would be represented and protected by the State. Even those
state functions in favor of the population, particularly the working one, in
the areas of education, health, or social action, never fail to be integrated
into the more general interests of capitalist accumulation. The state has
always been oligarchic and executor of the measures that interest capitalism,
through the elements of the political class that hold it, in the sense of
keeping tamed the masses, between the stick and the carrot. Those poor devils,
many of whom self-called "leftists", are like the slaves, grateful
for the bowl offered by their owner, whose legitimacy for being in its
possession they do not dispute.
6 - The importance of patriotism
The connection between royal power, the
commercial bourgeoisie, and, later, the industrial and financial bourgeoisie,
demanded a state that was powerful in face of external entities and able to
dispute markets, colonies, and even the European physical space, with rivals,
within the framework of successive royal succession crises, promoters of
antagonistic alliances. Every nation-state was born and affirmed itself in an
environment of distrust and antagonism with its rivals, creating an increasingly
powerful apparatus, invasive and demanding regarding the encompassed population;
but the relative unity of the various factions of the bourgeoisie and the
aristocracy around the omnipotent king, was not enough against external
threats, or to monitor their own ambitions vis-a-vis the outside world. It was
necessary to involve, to engage, the great mass of the population from the
fields and the cities in this "national" design so that they would
accept, without protest or revolt, the tax burden, the military enlistment, and
the domination by the owning classes; and to that effect it become necessary to instill a new element
in the minds of peoples – that ingrained and irrational feeling of belonging,
patriotism; and through it the subordination to the ruling strata and to the
king, in particular, as the living incarnation of the fatherland. It was meant
that people imbued with patriotism would respect boundaries, accept the loss of
autonomy in their lives, the category of subjects of the State, members of a
nation-state[4] within
which scope they are fragmented into several categories - consumer, taxpayer,
spectator, voter, debtor, collaborator, waste (see Man, Social Being and
Fragmented).
As subjects, they would have to be willing to antagonize themselves with
unknown people who had sucked the same patriotic elixir, but from a different bottle,
with the label of another nation-state in conflict with their "homeland[5]". From a narrower point of view and of ideological
capture, patriotism is no different, nor smarter than belonging to some fan
club; although the political classes exalt the former and appear more
restrained in regard to the latter, while accepting as useful the discharges of
tensions of the most fervent adherents. The adoption of a nationality is like
"race", in which it divides the human species, constricts
solidarities and shatters Humanity.
In inventing patriotism, the European bourgeoisies also created a way of making
less expensive the wars they were often involved in – the mandatory military
service – invented by France in modern times, in the follow-up of the French
Revolution. With the new technologies of the time, the war required many
soldiers, artillery generated many casualties and made it impossible to recruit
tens or hundreds of thousands of mercenaries, because there were not enough
candidates; and, since the risk was high, wages would have to be high, according
to the well-known law of supply and demand.
The capitalists, who were never clumsy in what regards accounting, saw that
it would be cheaper to persuade or compel a population to defend the
"common" homeland, instilling in them the said feeling of belonging,
so that they would accept the sacrifice and the idea that the king and the lord-owners
were engaged in the defense of the people when in reality, they were the ones
with assets and interests at stake, rather than the vast majority of the
people.
Later, schools were an essential instrument for instilling such vile
concepts as race and patriotism, within a vicious context of exaltation of the
historical achievements of the homeland; a homeland in which "our"
soldiers shone, were heroes, and the opponents were defeated, even when in the
majority, by the valor and spirit of sacrifice of our people, bla bla. And when
defeat was unavoidable and followed by secular subjugation, comes the recourse to
nostalgia, lamentation, as transposed into the metaphor of "arriving on a
foggy morning" concerning a desired return of King Sebastian, defeated in
Morocco and whose return would withdraw legitimacy to the investiture of Felipe
II of Spain as king of Portugal. Defeats can also underpin xenophobia, such as
occurred centuries after the Serbian defeat by the Ottomans in the Battle of
Kosovo Polje. In the following, those who became members of the Ottoman
administration eventually adopting Islam, recently ascended, in Bosnia, to the category of Muslims, to differentiate
themselves from the Bosnian Serbs and the Croats, in an imbecile mixture of
distinctions, where ethnic or religious criteria are used in order to maintain
divisions and hatreds.
The stressing of patriotism, the exacerbation of belonging to a
nation-state, corresponds to the overestimation of borders, distrust, and
animosity towards the Other, who lives on the other side. In Portugal it is
said "from Spain, [comes] neither good wind nor good marriage"
although the family connections between the two sides of the said border having
been common for centuries and the immense linguistic and cultural affinities.
Politically, the separation between the two nation-states has been stable for
centuries, being essentially an abstraction since nothing distinguishes one
side from the other (the so-called dry border); or, when defined by a river,
although it helps the demarcation it is, as a rule, a link between the two
banks and a weak obstacle, except in the case of the International Douro that,
by excavating steep banks, makes it impossible to cross easily. If the frontier
was already in the past a true sieve, as evidenced by formal commerce,
smuggling and, above all, the crossing of armies, borders are, today, markers
of the past, with their castles and fortresses as tourist attractions, and are only
closed in exceptional situations, as we report below, where the entire
political class emerged unified.
In Portugal, after its simultaneous integration with Spain in the EEC, we
can remember only two frontier related moments when admissions were controlled
by the police. The first was when pope Wojtyla visited and more recently during
the 2010 NATO Summit in
Lisbon, when pacifist
and anti-militarist groups were prevented from entering Portugal. We recall a
bus with Finnish people, who were prevented from entering through the northern
border, a group of Andalusians barred in Vila Verde de Ficalho and other cases
that encompassed about 150 people, without the parliamentary "left"
having spent a neuron regarding this trampling with the freedom of movement at
borders. The Socrates government, the NATO host, sent 42 activists to jail so
they would not disturb the ritual procession convened by the CGTP/PCP and
supported by the "left"; in this context, the government ordered the
isolation and encirclement of the anti-militarist demonstrators, branded as
potential terrorists during the previous days, in order to create an
environment conducive to brutal repression.
7 - The
beginning of industrial capitalism
Mercantilism gave way to industrial dominance capitalism that integrated into
the productive process the land, commercial activities, technology, and labor, the
latter becoming autonomous by means of a salary. The technology was based on
mechanization, on the use of new materials, on coal, on steam, and was
integrated into the manufacturing system; meaning, the acceptance by the
workers, without discussion, of a working schedule of thirteen hours during
which accidents could happen, and absolute obedience to the instructions
emanating from the boss, supreme entity within the factory.
In slavery, subsistence was provided for by the owner and productivity
tended to be low; it was increased only by the whip on the back, which required
a prolonged vigilance, with the related costs. In the new paradigm, in
capitalism, wage earners – men, women, and children – were no longer part of an
owner's inventory and could be trained in technical routines. They received a
salary that they could formally negotiate, they could also change their
employer or location, and they could also be dismissed; in this context, a
performance considered to be insufficient was tantamount to dismissal and
hunger... in freedom.
The salaried workers, whose initial stage salary was at the subsistence
level, had no other resources to meet all their needs; and this penury played to
the capitalist’s hand who pressed for the workers’ performance overachievement,
leading to productivity increase; their productivity would, of course, be
higher than that of a slave.
As for the routine imposed by the factory system, each employee had, as
only alternatives, submission or starvation and death. Thus, a collective will
for change, for the improvement of the working and living conditions that could
lead to the abolition of capitalism, was generated. To this end, it would be
necessary to destroy the state machine that works for the defense of the
capitalists.
This economic reality was in line with the humanitarian spirit which, in
the higher social strata of England, was fighting slavery and led to the
abolition of trafficking in 1807 and slavery in England and its colonies in
1833. The same anti-slavery strata, however, forgot humanitarianism at their
factories’ doors, where enormously hard work prevailed along with the low wages
earned, especially by women and children.
There are those who proudly claim that the first anti-slavery legislation
in the world was proclaimed in Portugal by the Marquis of Pombal, in 1761, legislation
which, already at the time, highlighted the very current practice of a
truncated or unfulfilled application. It should be noted that it only had legal
application within the European and so-called Portuguese India territories,
since slavery continued to be strong in Brazil, where it was abolished only in
1888, after trafficking was banned in 1850. Thus, the Marquis later reinforced this
legal provision with the of the free womb law, under which a child from a slave
mother was born free.
As a matter of fact, in Portugal, slavery ended only in 1854 (long after
England and due to British pressure) when a decree freed the state-owned slaves,
however the pious Catholic Church continued to own slaves until 1856; the last of
the old slaves died in the twentieth century thirties[6]. By
decree, slavery was abolished in the colonies in 25/2/1869 but, in practice, it
lasted until 1876, having been quickly replaced by forced labor, a form of
"civilizing" the Africans (Regulation of Indigenous Labor, 1899[7]). The factual duration of slavery in Portugal is, of
course, linked to the backwardness of the economic and social structures which
allowed a degree of "profitability" for slavery, since these were
mainly servile, and thus disconnected from economic activity. As in many parts of the
world , slavery continues to
exist in Portugal.
(to be
continued)
This and other
texts at:
[1] IMI is the Portuguese
municipal tax on buildings and fields.
[2] In
Portugal, the monopoly of maritime traffic with the colonies lasted until their
independence. It was assigned to two shipping companies which shortly
thereafter were declared bankrupt - the CTM and the CNN; those had been
nationalized in 1975... made "ours", as inheritors of the losses
inherent in decolonization, thus sparing fascism’s economic groups the
assumption of those losses.
[4] Indeed, desertions in the face of wars between nation-states demonstrate
that there are many people unwilling to give their lives for an abstraction
that serves as coverage for the very interests of a privileged minority which
finds it has the right to engage, for the sake of those interests, people who
have nothing to do with them or their fortunes. Deserters and refractories are
treated by political regimes as cowardly and unpatriotic, a superlative of
ignominy for political regimes, the worst of anathemas; or, in the most
benevolent hypothesis, they are ignored even though History has justified their
refusal to participate in the service of oppressors, as in the case of the
colonial war that Portugal carried out in the colonies between 1961 and 1974.
In Portugal, the regime introduced in 1974 has been discreet regarding refractories,
deserters and political prisoners of the fascist regime, as well as the agents
of PIDE (the secret police), the military who committed atrocities and war
crimes, or the members of fascism’s political oligarchy. On this subject, we
have noted these testimonies:
[5] The very name of fatherland reveals the
prevalence of machismo, undervaluation of women, of being female, that has not
yet been despoiled in designations such as mother-nature or motherland
"Slaves in Portugal - From Origins to the
19th Century" by Arlindo Manuel Caldeira
[7] Margarida
Seixas "Slave labor and forced labor in the nineteenth-century Portuguese
colonization: a historical-legal analysis", 2015
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