Distractions by Martin Royackers SJ, Volume 14 #2

Confessions of an Agent of Capitalism

Somewhat to my astonishment, I have become an agent of global capitalism. I used to be opposed to the extension of market rationality to every facet of human life and forced reliance on the workings of the market for the fulfilment of all human needs. I resisted the creation of homo economicus, whose every decision aims to maximize profit and pleasure.

But my vaguely socialist past is now buried. I worry about profit margins. I suggest to rural Jamaicans crops that will yield higher financial rewards. I administer schools so as to increase human capital potential. I have become a member of the worldwide team of development workers, seeking to extend the manners and mores of capitalism to every corner of the earth so that no one will be left out of the New and Improved Economic Order that is upon us.

Development is a bit of a messy process. The first step is to tell people that they are poor and ignorant. Even in my new role as an agent of capitalism I might have some qualms about this step, but fortunately it no longer has to be done. People have been told for a long time that they are underdeveloped and don't have proper work habits or entrepreneurial skills. Their media and government have fed them on the comfort and luxury of the industrialized countries, which could be theirs if only they would change their ways.

Of course, people don't sacrifice their dignity without some ill effects. Once a mentality of scarcity develops, actual scarcity is not far behind. City ghettos burgeon with people looking for the cars and TVs that subsistence farming won't provide. Hustling and crime can meet some of the targets for increased consumption. After all, neighbourliness is not really a value in the new, improved world order. And as the final tradeoff of dignity for consumption, there is always begging, ubiquitous in Jamaica as elsewhere in the Third World.

Once their dignity is gone and they are rendered poor and ignorant, people are primed for development. This is where I come in, with training schemes, educational supplies, hybrid seeds and various appropriate technologies, ready to lift people out of the misery that the first stages of development have cast them into.

But true as this picture may be, one should not blame the development workers too much. The global marketplace is going to engulf these Jamaican rural communities come development or not. It is already at the shores, with free trade agreements that open the country to cheap food imports, conditions on foreign loans that enforce free-market policies, and a media-fed tide of rising consumer expectations before which one stands as powerless as Canute. If I promote free enterprise, it's because capitalism will come with or without my help.

I suppose that once people's lives are subsumed into the global market and we development workers have made them like us, then I can resume my anticapitalist stance. I'll feel more comfortable on the losing side anyway: it's better to serve the truth than the victor. In the meantime, I still hope that something might be salvaged out of the destruction of social equality, cultural identity, personal integrity and environmental quality wrought by organizing all of life around the marketplace.

For there are still some people in the Jamaican hills who do a little farming and don't have a lot. They have not yet been changed into the species homo economicus and I have not told them their days are numbered. Although their physical circumstances are uncomfortable, they have dignity and are content with who they are. Their lives have shape and colour. And they are hospitable, even to an agent of global capitalism who comes to sit in their yard and refresh his spirit.

Martin Royackers SJ works in a rural development project in Annotto Bay, Jamaica. He was Compass's managing editor from 1990 to 1994 and is now its Jamaica correspondent.