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The following is the transcript of a speech delivered by Sri Lankan priest Paul Caspersz at the Stockholm Congress of the ILRS in October of 1989.
MARGINALISATION: INJUSTICE AT WORK
THE ASIAN EXPERIENCE
Paul Caspersz, S J
(based on notes made for an oral presentation)
The subject for this presentation, suggested to me three weeks ago when I was still in Sri Lanka, seemed unusual. So did it seem also to a few friends to whom I immediately appealed for possible enlightenment. We had met in groups like this one before - groups of Christians and sometimes other religious persons, concerned about society and social change - but then the topics had been, so it appeared, more straightforward. Poverty Alleviation and our Religious Responsibility; Justice and Faith; Economics and Theology; Asia’s Struggle for Full Humanity. But, Marginalisation and injustice - what did each word mean and what was intended by bringing them together?
I was too far away to seek clarification from the organizers of the conference in Stockholm and so was left to my own devices. Gradually, as I began to think the words out in the interstices of much social activism in my own country, I found the title suggested to be both inspired and inspiring. The effect of injustice, wherever it occurs, at whatever level, is marginalisation. Injustice is the cause, marginalisation the effect. We are familiar with the concept of the margin.
Someone else writes the text; all we are allowed is a marginal comment or two, which the text writer is at liberty completely to disregard. All the best land in the village has already been appropriated by the rich and the influential; the poor may be accommodated, if at all, only on the margins of other people’s fields. In economics we know the concept of the margin, where the returns are never exciting and merely cover costs. Injustice pushes nations and pushes people to such a margin.
Marginalisation follows injustice as surely as the night follows day. The joining together of the two concepts was thus entirely propitious for the purposes of a conference of socialists. It directly focuses attention on what cannot but be the principal concern of all socialists, that is, injustice and its ineluctable outflow, marginalisation. But socialists are not merely social analysts, not even socialist social analysts. Our task, Marx reminded us, is not only to interpret the world, but to change it. It is a task which religious socialists have a double reason to undertake. If they do not undertake it, not only is their socialism ‘drawing-room’, but their religion also spurious. Hence our agenda is clear from a clear understanding of the marginalisation which is the effect of injustice to arrive at a strong determination to end both.
Injustice occurs wherever there is a denial of rights. The person or the group whose rights are denied is pushed to the margin. Marginalisation is comprehensively defined and described by Marx’s concept of alienation, alienation from the product of one’s own hands, from one’s own productive activity, from one’s own humanity, from one’s fellow human beings.
I took a long time fully to understand alienation from one’s own humanity. Marx called it, if I remember rightly, alienation from one’s species life. Then, around 1973, 1 began seriously to be concerned about the tea estate workers in Sri Lanka. I was visiting a tea estate where the Superintendent was a church-going man of religion. He invited me to be present with him on a Monday morning when the workers could have direct access to him. We were both seated at a table before a large window which was open but barred. The workers came up to him in a single file. The first wanted to know whether he might be given a weeding contract in order to earn some little extra income: the Superintendent took note and the man passed on. The second wanted to know whether he could ask at the office for some old tin sheets for the roof of his line-room which was leaking. The third was a woman and she had come to ask him when her daughter could begin her maternity leave. The fourth was a young man of about twenty-four. He stood outside the window with his hands folded on his chest. “Put your bloody hands down,” bawled the Superintendent. “That is not the way you should speak to your Master.” The young man, surprised and ashamed, but meek as a lamb, put his hands down and sobbed, “Why are you scolding me, Master? I have only come to ask you about the pension of my father who is dying.”
Not only had the Superintendent been unjust, but the man had accepted the indignity, and did not protest. If it had been an urban Sinhalese industrial worker, he would in a matter of minutes have taken the entire work-force out with him in protest at the manager’s unwarranted insult and intimidation. But there was the young Tamil estate worker, not only marginalized but accepting the marginalisation. I recalled the words of Psalm 21: “But I am a worm and no man, scorned by men, despised by people. All who see me deride me. They curl their lips, they toss their heads.” I finally understood what Marx had meant. Nearly all of us here are Christians. In the Eucharist we pray:
Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given and human hands have made.
And again:
Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this wine to offer, fruit of the vine and the work of human hands.
But what if the hands that grew the paddy or the wheat and made the rice or the bread, or the hands that plucked the tea leaves or the grapes and made the tea or the wine are not our own hands but the alienated hands of workers and peasants around the world. Should not our prayer then be a prayer for the liberation of all those who are alienated and marginalized in human society?
I am aware of the special problem in prosperous, Western industrial societies of identifying the working class, and the even more intriguing problem of identifying a working class conscious of its alienation. But the problem does not exist for the great majority of the people who are poor in the world today even though in some places they may yet only be a class in itself, and not yet a class for itself.
Indeed, alienation is the objective condition not only of the objectively alienated, but also of those classes and groups which cause the alienation. One cannot alienate, marginalize, oppress or dehumanise without oneself being alienated, marginalized, oppressed, and dehumanised. Hence the struggle to liberate the objectively marginalized is also the struggle to liberate those who objectively or subjectively cause the marginalisation.
Injustice and marginalisation have to be considered at two levels: (i) at the level of international society, and (ii) at the level of national society.
(i) At the level of international society
The phenomenon of the Third World is none other than the marginalisation of the vast continents, nations and peoples of Asia, Africa, South and Central America in world society. The marginalisation first took place by means of colonialism and equi-colonialism; today it takes place less obviously perhaps but at least as effectively through neo-colonialism. The injustice and the marginalisation are political and economic, but also cultural. Historically there has been a change in the processes of injustice and marginalisation in the period of colonialism, first by naked plunder and then by dominance of foreign capital and the repatriation of profits and then by multinational capital, centered in Western Europe or the United States, supported by, and supporting, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Many other reasons are adduced by the marginalisers of the First World for the marginalisation of the Third: little accumulation of productive capital, the persisting predominance of agriculture, the under-development of industry, over-population, low productivity, the absence of the acquisitive ethos. All these reasons are not so much reasons as descriptions of the phenomenon of marginalisation; they are more or less imaginary and reside mainly in the closed minds of the marginalisers. In any ease, they do not point to the over-riding and principal reason, which is colonialism.
India was not always poor. Let us quote Percival Spear:
The question has been much canvassed as to the relative prosperity of the Indian under the Mughals and the British. It would be better to consider the Indian with the contemporary European. There seems to be good ground for thinking that the average peasant had more to eat than his European counterpart, and suffered no more oppression from the lords. It is possible that the strength of custom and the intricacies of the caste system gave him greater protection. ... Taking it all in all, Mughal India, with an estimated hundred million inhabitants, had for about a century and a half a standard of life roughly comparable with that of contemporary Europe, though arranged on a different social and economic pattern. The peasant had a little more to eat, the merchant less opportunity of spending. Most European travellers commented on the dire poverty of the countryside but we must remember that before the agricultural revolution there was also dire poverty in the European countryside.
(Percival Spear, A History of India, Vol. 2, Penguin Books 1965, pp 4748)
If India did not maintain and increase her lead after the British conquest and was instead
pushed further and further behind in the race for economic progress, it was mainly because her feet were tied and her hands manacled by external political and economic imperialism. The same holds good for many other parts of Asia which came under the hegemony of European powers.
As is to be expected, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — the twin Western capitalist marginalisers of the Third World — have diametrically opposed these perceptions of the marginalisation process and these prescriptions to end it.
What they perceive is too many children and too many Third World mothers and so prescribe birth control (a serious foreign invasion this on the privacy and self-determination of the Third World family); they perceive a lack of access to production inputs and a lack of stimulation of local production because of the absence of competitive foreign goods and so prescribe a liberalization of imports; they perceive an insufficiency of exports and so prescribe further and further devaluation (regardless of the evidence that devaluation often does not help to increase total export value and that it sends up the cost of living of the already impoverished masses); they perceive a distortion of the free market which is their god and hence pressurize Third World governments to withdraw subsidies; they perceive a lack of local expertise and so prescribe invitations to scandalously highly paid foreign ‘experts’; finally, they perceive a lack of physical capital and so prescribe opening up to foreign investment and the multinationals. The perceptions and prescriptions of religious socialists have to be different.
(ii) At the level of national society
However, the injustice and the marginalisation which plague the Third World today cannot be laid solely at the door of the First World. Within our nations in the Third World, our own elites are unjust to, and therefore marginalize, our people who are the overwhelming majority. (The elites, in this reading, are not the People.) The words of the Algerian, Frantz Fanon, are bitter, but true:
‘Because it is bereft of ideas, because it lives to itself and cuts itself off from the people, undermined by its hereditary incapacity to think in terms of all the problems of the nation, as seen from the point of view of the whole nation, the national middle class will have nothing better to do than to take on the role of manager for western enterprise, and it will in practise set up its country as the brothel of Europe.’
(Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Penguin Books 1967, 1985 reprint, p. 32)
In order to achieve economic development, the countries of contemporary Asia appear to be following one of five economic models. At the risk of over-simplification, and not unaware of the overlapping, we may identify these as follows: the export- oriented free enterprise, western style model in vogue in Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, sometimes called “the four dragons of Southeast Asia”; the strong-state statist model set up in China, Vietnam and North Korea; the Japanese model, unique and irreplicable in so many of its features; the OPEC model of the 1960’s and thereafter; finally the South Asian model (followed also by Thailand) which, because of the special crisscross of factors - political, economic, religious, ideological - is best described as a search model.
Injustice and, as a consequence, marginalisation of large sections of the people by small coteries of political and economic elites are inherent in all five of the models. But elite failure and proven incompetence have been the most tragic in South Asia. What hopes - or illusions(?) - were there in the early postwar years when the countries of South Asia achieved their independence? Forty years have passed since Gandhi died and twenty-five since Nehru. But the problems of chronic poverty of the masses, caste, and ethnic divisions, the urban-rural divide still remain. It sometimes seems that we now have only many more people to share our sufferings with.
Within South Asia, Sri Lanka is a near-perfect case study of both levels of injustice and marginalisation. The country suffers from exploitation by the West while its peasants and workers are shamelessly exploited and misguided by national elites, often in willing alliance with foreign capitalists.
The result has been a most grave crisis in the country: the crisis of the failure to build a unified, just and free nation-state. The crisis is a single one with two manifestations: the inter-ethnic crisis of the North and the East, giving rise to Tamil adolescent and young adult militancy, and the socio-economic crisis of the whole country, giving rise to Sinhalese adolescent and young adult militancy. The present elites are not willing to give way. And so the crisis stands unresolved.
Our Task
Our task as Christians and Socialists is to take up an unambiguous stand against injustice and its child, marginalisation, both at the level of international society and within our own national societies, and for justice and a society where each will give according to ability and receive according to need.
This is the socialist society.
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