Continued from last week.

Our Strategy for Survival

The dialectical opposite of that process would be the rekindling on a planetary basis of locally based culture. Prior to the advent of colonialism, culture was defined as the way of life by which people survived within their own environment, and their own environment was defined as the area in which they lived. Thus, the process of survival involved the use of locally developed technologies which met the specific needs of the area. It was mentioned earlier that technologies have political cousins, and locally developed technologies have cousins, too. Decentralized technologies which meet the needs of the people which those technologies serve will necessarily give life to a different kind of political structure and it is safe to predict that the political structure which results will be anti-colonial in nature.

Colonialism is at the heart of the impending world crisis. The development of liberation technologies, many of which already exist but have been largely ignored by the political movements (even the anti-colonial political movements) are a necessary part of the decolonization process. Liberation technologies are those technologies which can be implemented by a specific people in a specifically locality and which free those people from dependency upon multinational corporations control. Liberation technologies are those which meet people’s needs within the parameters defined by the cultures which they themselves created (or create), and which have no dependency upon the world marketplace. Windmills can be a form of liberation technology, as can water wheels, solar collectors, bio-mass plants, woodlots, underground home construction – the list is very long.

Colonialism, as we know it, was the product of centuries of social, economic and political development in the West. For hundreds of years, what have been euphemistically called “folk cultures” have been under pressure from a variety of sources, including warlords, kings, popes, and large landowners who found it in their interest to exploit the labor and lands of the poor and the dispossessed. That process is still taking place today, although it has been refined to the point where the exploitation is in the hands of huge multinational corporations which continue to reap profits at the expense of the world’s poor.

It is possible to make a strong argument that food shortages are almost entirely the product of colonial interests. Areas of land in the Third World, usually the most productive farming areas, today produce exclusively export crops while the indigenous people, and even the descendants of the colonizers, go hungry laboring in the coffee, banana and other plantations of the multinationals. Political movements which have sought to correct those wrongs have generally attempted to overthrow the state because they correctly saw the state as the tool of oppression and as the repository of excess wealth for the interests of the exploiters.

Most of the past “liberation movements” have not been successful in correcting the most horrendous wrongs of colonialism, however, because they assumed that the problem lies solely in the fact that private interests controlled the state for their own benefit. The error of most such movements lies in the fact that they sought to liberate the country from living human beings, much as history assumes that Julius Caesar was somehow significant to the history of the West.

They failed to understand that it did not matter whether Del Monte grew sugar or a liberated government grew sugar cane. That the problem was that export crops do not meet the needs of indigenous peoples. Most liberation efforts, therefore, recreate in some form the dependency which they sought to replace. They do not attempt to develop even the concept of liberation technologies, and they do not understand the need to become independent of the world market economy because the world market economy is ultimately controlled by interests which seek power or profit and which do not respond to the need of the world’s peoples.