The Need for English People to Be Liberated
I have been thinking about the liberation of the people of England. Following up a hunch has led me to some insights I didn't expect. I believe these are relevant to us as owning-class people.
English liberation has been slow to get moving. Despite a committed group of varied people who have much counseling experience and a grounded understanding of liberation theory, we have not been able to sustain a steady movement. I speculated about a parallel between England and Germany. German liberation cannot move forward, it has been stated, until Germans have faced, taken responsibility for, and discharged about the Holocaust. I wondered what hidden holocaust the English have to face. The answer came like a bell: the slave trade.
Bristol is one of our major cities. It is large and beautiful. Its wealth and growth stemmed entirely from the slave trade, but when I visited there and asked the Tourist Information for directions to a museum dealing with this part of our history, I was told there was no such thing. 'We're not very proud of that part of our past!' I discovered there is only one such museum in the entire country-in Liverpool, another major shipping port-and so I duly went there.
The museum was extremely well set up with masses of information and excellent displays, videos, music, mock-ups, etc. It described how English ships bearing goods for sale in Africa picked up their human cargo and travelled the hideous 'middle passage' to the Caribbean islands, South America, and what later became the United States. There they sold slaves and bought sugar, cotton, tobacco, mahogany, silver, etc., to sell in England. I had underestimated the wealth created by this trade, and its ramifications for the capitalism of the past four hundred years. I now see that without this trade England would have had no industrial revolution and could never have become the great imperial power that she did. Nor could have France, The Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, or the United States.
As I listened and learned at the Women's Conference in Beijing, I came to understand how Western capitalism controls the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and thereby the economies of Third World countries. None of this control could have emerged to the extent it did without the injection of the vast, free wealth that came from the African continent-the slave labour of her people. I had thought ten or perhaps twenty million people had been taken. I discovered it could have been a hundred million.
As the empires of Spain and England 'used up' the slave labour of the indigenous Americans, they had to look elsewhere, and thus the demand for the African slave trade arose. As the contrived demand for sugar, tobacco, etc., grew in Europe, still more slaves were needed. The black holocaust steadily escalated.
The museum display on 'charities' disclosed how the great philanthropists in England used their excess wealth to found some of England's best known schools, hospitals, and other institutions, and to make some of our better social changes, build almshouses and orphanages, and the like. Guess where that wealth came from?
I think it likely that any inherited wealth that has been in an English family for any length of time can be traced to the slave trade (just as any wealth that is steadily increasing in the present can be tracked to the arms trade).
I want to challenge us owning-class people to look at this and discharge whatever surfaces. Western capitalism stands on the enslavement of the African people. I am ashamed, as I write, that this is fresh understanding for me.
I think we need to claim something here in order to clean it up. We have to look at the fact that 'indigenous peoples' has meant 'people targeted for destruction by the forces of capitalism,' which in turn has meant 'by owning-class patterns.'
I challenge owning-class people to face and discharge this honestly, without wallowing in guilt, knowing our own goodness and staying clear that it is only by facing this that we can move into being effective allies for all peoples. We should not assume the liberal, unprincipled position of our forebears with their 'charity.'
It is, of course, not just our forebears who have played this role. Diana, Princess of Wales, typifies the present owning-class response to the discomfort of recognizing that we hold an untenable position. She works hard at trying to feel better about herself by heading up many charities. Recently, while working with the Red Cross, she visited Angola and was photographed at the bedside of men, women, and children who had lost limbs as a result of land mines, even though the war is over. She made a shocked public statement urging international arms trade to cease and was 'saddened and confused' by the ambiguous response of governments, notably her own. Yet she returned from such an experience to her own personal fortune and the seventeen million pounds she received as a divorce settlement, oblivious to the fact that the gilt-edged securities or 'respectable' investments that money is deposited in finance those self-same mines.
Once the owning class shipped millions of people across the Atlantic, and the death toll was enormous. Now people are blown up and mangled in war, and the death toll is still enormous. And, as always, the work force of the world has to risk life, quality of life, and limb in the creation of the world's wealth. Nothing much has changed.
It is safe to face these facts. Owning-class people are not bad people. As children we were primed by being hurt to collude with and facilitate capitalism. Now we have the information we were never given. We have a lot to discharge and much fresh thinking to do, but we are good, dear, intelligent people, we have each other, and we can achieve this.
We can relearn how to act in a principled way. That is our only security. Together we can figure out how to implement the words of the owning-class commitment, to 'set the world completely to rights.'
FOOTNOTE
I suspect that the liberation of nations which have a history of gross imperialism, such as the U.S. and England, has taken so long to implement because we have not yet faced what it means for working-class people to discharge 'oppressor' material. Jews, people of colour, the Irish, or any other group within the owning class have had to first discharge what it has meant to be used as agents of the Gentile, white, or imperial owning class. Only after this have they been able to face and discharge their own oppressor distress. The English and U.S. working class were viciously mistreated and manipulated to enforce imperial power. Those who manned those terrible slave ships, who were the overseers of the plantations, who were the soldiers of the colonial armies, had first themselves been put under the threat of violent physical mistreatment and death. The owning class, on the other hand, has had to face our oppressor material from the outset, so what we have to face as English people or USers is part of the same process. Is this another place where we could be allies to the working class?
Jo Saunders
Alresford, Hants,
England