[wsfii-discuss] olpc presentation

Wed Jan 11 12:05:00 UTC 2006

miluz wrote:

>
>It usual to say that rich are rich because they have stolen the others.
>The poverty is deeply felt like a rob, even if there is several
>generations between to make the facts fall into oblivion. Justice had
>failed anyway.
>  
>
I agree, but as you point out later, poverty is not only a result of
recent colonial occupations overseas - there are plenty of poor people
in the West and not all of them are black. The British colonial process
began not only with expropriation in Ireland but also expropriation of
common land and even land owned in common law by small farmers. The only
point at which this is forgotten is when the expropriated become rich.
But as industrialisation proceeded, the issue became less about
expropriation of land and more about long hours, dangerous conditions,
low wages and union-busting - we would have forgotten the land
expropriation by then if we had been comfortable in the present.

>In your sentence: "It might works OK in a village, if properly
>supervised by local community groups", you imply that "underdeveloped"
>local community groups are sometime working very well, but you're not sure.
>  
>
It's not that I'm not sure whether local communities *can* monitor this
kind of scheme of course they can, why not? - it's whether they will
actually agree that this is the best way to go and agree with the aims
of Western agencies. That seems far less likely to me. However, you
don't know until you ask them . . . and even then, they may say "yes"
cos it's better than nothing and then reappropriate the stuff to more
sensible aims (such as selling them and investing in what they actually
needed instead). Which is up to them, of course, but maybe it would be
more efficent if you actually consulted beforehand and provided what was
really required in the first place.

>To "shovel the shit" is the job of some individuals who have realized
>that the shit was created by "civilized" countries in most cases. And
>it's not really old. Those who are doing something, trying to fix
>problems on site, are aware of what's happened. It's not too difficult
>to make people talk and remain. Dramas leave local vibes, marks that you
>can forget only by leaving.
>
>Those who are giving money feel guilty somewhere. But guilty is deeply
>unbearable. You can drop out of it by facing the truth. And discover
>that your "civilisation" is to question. And the feeling to be
>oppressed/unfree comes. The "reduction of resistance" disapears. So
>"naturally" is not the term I would have used.
>  
>
I'm aware of that. However, deciding that you're opposed to "Westrern
Civilisation" and adopting some sort of "alternative" existence doesn't
seem to imbue the children of the rich with the same sense of struggle
and difficulty experienced by poor people - in my experience, anyway. In
my opinion, that sense of oppression, burden, difficulty, resistance, is
about lack of resources, lack off a sense of "entitlement", lack of
legitimacy, lack of networks offering good opportunities, etc etc. You
can get access to education, you can "free your mind", but this doesn't
change history, and it doesn't change the realities of poverty within
the West or elsewhere. More than mere property is handed down to their
children by the rich.

>People who don't care are richer than the others under noeliberalism and
>it's far to be the majority.
>  
>
Again, I agree.

>> politics will change Jessie Jackson". This is inevitably true, 

>> He's already changed, fashioned by our Western civilization now. He's
>> the result of slavery and destructions of villages in Africa but he  >> had
>> actually forgotten his roots. He become integrated even if he bears
>> racism. And his black skin won't change anything if he doesn't come in
>> Africa to recover them. Whom american black leader have ever tried?  >> That would be interesting.

Actually, in the 60s, quite a few politicised African Americans went to Africa and often found themselves rejected as cultural aliens and as having the stigma of being former slaves - and, from hearing their accounts, it was a difficult and confusing experience. Nevertheless, throughout the 60s and 70s African American movements in the USA constantly expressed solidarity with Africa and identified closely with their historical origin there. It's only during the 1980s when African Americans achieved significant entry to the middle-class and the aspiration of the poor was realigned to "bling" that this sense of African solidarity seemed to reduce. As I think we both know, becoming wealthy usually makes you forget, or deny. 

>> but I'd still rather Jessie Jackson's ilk was in power than the current crew.
>  
>
>His failures prove that you're right. But he's talking with the voice of
>"real" oblivion, facing the denial of a lot of black people today that
>can be worse than a feeling of guilty.
>  
>
Again, I agree, but it's not his personal failure but the failure of
"the age of revolutions".

>  
>
>>It's very hard to get a real sense of what's
>>practicable or desirable through the lense of one's own desires and
>>disappointments from my own relation to a different cultural context.
>>    
>>
>There is villages in the hillside of Atlas were women and men are
>equals. They are still living in harmony into nature. You "would not be
>at all charmed by thrashing your laundry in a river" but who's charmed
>by a washing machine of a launderette in the center of a pollued town?
>  
>
I certainly don't want to sit about in an inner-city launderette either
- people should have a washing machine in their homes and control the
urban environment with the power to make it comfortable for themselves.
I agree that people would prefer to preserve their lifestyle and culture
but nobody wants to do uncongenial hard labour in uncomfortable
conditions.  Having the resources available, I did not wash my clothes
in a river in Morocco, I used the launderette in noisy, polluted Rabat.
In smaller towns which had no launderettes, I used my relative wealth to
pay someone to do it. Most of the women in my family have taken in
laundry or worked as cleaners at some point and she will rightfully
charge me 10x the local rate and I will happily pay it - still, I'd
rather there was a launderette and better opportunities for the woman
who did my laundry. I really don't think either of us wants to do it.
There's no reason why we shouldn't develop sustainable power for the
washing machines and build them sustainably. We don't because the rich,
who now regard the British countryside as their very own national park,
won't have windfarms spoiling their romanticised vision that the British
countryside - every inch of which has been managed for a few thousand
years - is some kind of sylvan wilderness and because the rich make more
money if we trash our washing machines regularly and buy another one.

I know my family would rather have remained in villages where the whole
family lived closeby and took responsibility for one-another and the
community as a whole. But there's no way I want my son free-falling
almost a mile underground every day to do hard labour for 16 hours a
day, 6 days a week in an uncomfortable dangerous environment at 11 years
old as my grandfather did (knowing that *his* father, one of his uncles
and two of his brothers had already been killed in mining accidents) -
for barely enough money to live. I'm bloody glad my grandmother voted
with her feet and spent her time agitating within the Labour party for
universal education (whilst everyone talked behind her back that her
laundry should be cleaner . . . ).

There's too much romanticisation, frankly. Certainly women have a great
deal of independence in "Berber" communities - but I don't see why that
precludes them using machinery to do heavy work - you'd think it would
motivate them. My grandmother certainly would have preferred to work in
a factory on a 40-hour week to getting up at 5am and scrubbing
*something* or other for 16 hours until fallilng into bed in a freezing
attic exhausted - a job she started at 14. But there was no work at all
for women in the rural area she came from. Of course, she was working as
a maidservant and perhaps you'd feel she'd have been better off working
at home in the valleys  - she didn't agree, she left because she didn't
want her mother's life. Turning a mangle to do laundry for 10 people and
lifting a boiling copper is bloody hard hellish work whether you're paid
to do it or not. I find it really hard to believe that thrashing it on a
chilly rock is any more fun than sweating over coppering and mangling
it. We'd all rather finish school and access a cushtier life. I don't
feel the least guilt for having escaped - that I have got an education
and the chance to work with my head. I just want sustainable technology,
a lighter load and self-determination for all women - and men. Viva la
washing machine!!!

When I lived in North Eastern Iran, I went to stay with someone's family
during the summer holiday in their traditional farmhouse in the
mountains. I was absolutely charmed - life was easy, calm, people
treated each other with respect. Yes, the women in the house wore veils
but they had independent income from processing agricultural produce and
selling it in the local market and weren't the least cowed. Fresh water
from a nearby spring, fresh food from the home farrm, big skies, moral
confidence. If your house needed fixing, you could do it yourself, etc
etc. No one was isolated, if you were sick someone else would look after
you and your kids etc etc. I was very ready to see this as far better
than the life we have in the West - and it is. Until I visited some of
the villages nearby where the poor lived. Same old, same old. Overloaded
women working till their backs break, old before they're 29, everything
run down, aggressive kids just looking for a way out and hoping the city
will be better, endless hanging around hoping for a bit of work from
somewhere, chlorinated water from a government standpipe half a mile
away - but better than the infected jubes - and most of the boys in the
army. The usual stuff.

It's resources which make the difference. What's wrong with the current
mode of development is its capitalist mode - where resources are
appropriated and leased back for "good" behaviour - working much longer
than you need to and collaborating with the isolation, fear and
insecurity which motors hypercapitalism for Western populations and more
naked and extreme forms of expropriation in the developing world. The
answer is not to abandon development but to re-envision it sustainably
insist on redistribution and fair trade over aid.

It's true that there are plenty of people in Africa, South America and
Asia who would prefer to retain a totally independent way of life and
that is their business - their choice should be respected. Most of them
are living in isolated conditions unchanged for generations - the rest
of us, more globally, don't have the possibility to "go back to nature".
I don't know because too many generations have passed, but my family
name makes it clear that they didn't originate in Wales where they were
mining - they were probably English hill-farmers displaced by the
Enclosures Act. So what would you suggest? That we go back and mow down
the council estates (and their occupants) so we can subsistence
sheep-farm in the hills again?

I didn't speak to a single person in Morocco ("Berber" or not) who
didn't want some kind of economic development and a reduction in poverty
and to move beyond subsistence. I think it worth bearing in mind that
the Rif (which is where I was) is supported largely by cannabis
cultivation which is causing all kinds of problems which the "Berbers"
don't want - they'd rather be able to grow and market food crops or
develop sustainable industries but they can't because of protectionism
of agriculture in the West. The West will only offer resources to
develop tourism which they see as demeaning and destructive to the
envrionment and to their cultture. If they wanted to keep to a
subsistence economy there's nothing to stop them - but it seems they
don't. I don't blame them, cos I wouldn't either. They grow cannabis
because, at the moment, it's the best way to improve living conditions
with minimal sacrifice of independence - they'd rather continue to do
that, however unsatisfactory, than have development for tourism. What
they want is sustainable agricultural and technical development. I
sensed an enormous amount of confusion about the best way forward, but
everyone seemed pretty unequivocal that forward was the way to go.

>By a flat on the 17th floor? By a fast-living which gives you the
>impression that live is too short? Forgetting your children, eating alone.
>  
>
>Do you know this sentence of St Exupery? The Little Prince had in his
>hand a pill of water that prevents you to lose 10 minutes per day in
>drinking, and he said: "If I had 10 minutes to lose, I would walk slowly
>towards a fountain". In a near future, the one who will have the chance
>to drink in a fountain will be rare (and rich? quite possible). Because
>we are destroying the Earth.
>  
>
I don't see it in this stark, polar way. That people must choose between
development and "quality of life". I agree that development has hitherto
been destructive and well as productive and the destruction is becoming
increasingly cataclysmic. The answer is not to arrest development -
which has already gone too far in most places for a reversal to be
practicable - but to develop sustainable industrial practice.

>By wanting to save time, taking it as money.
>Most of our medicine isn't as efficient as natural's one. And the power
>of mind - if you've learnt to use it - is quite like aspirin. But some
>of our knowledges are good to be shared. 
>
Both are effective, both worth developing. Again, the problem with
Western medicine is not that it's ineffective but that it's controlled
by profit motive and so destructive as well as positive. I agree that we
need a fundamental shift in how medicine is perceived but, again,
disagree that this involves looking backwards.

>The first question we have to
>ask ourself before reaching those countries with laptops is why.
>  
>
Yes.

>I agree that
>  
>
>>involving kids in engineering tasks which will immediately benefit their
>>communities will often be the best way to provide effective training as
>>well as localised solutions to well-understood problems.
>>    
>>
>
>
>The boys would, of course, figure out some new narrative
>  
>
>>which makes it seem OK to exclude girls from resources on grounds of
>>propriety -- cos that's what ideology is.
>>    
>>
>Our ideology is.. the same patriarchy which maintains noeliberalism
>which forsees 12 milliards of people on our (more than tired) Earth to
>make their industry growing at short term because they age. Women have
>to wake up right now. And men have to share the knowledge that they were
>entrusted in our "civilized" countries before giving laptops to children
>outside. We're not ready, I'm agree.
>  
>
I pretty much agree with this paragraph.

>  
>
>>Power and resources are not divided along a smooth horizontal and nor is
>>morality or practical hope. Solutions need to be flexible, locally
>>determined and practicable to local needs.
>>    
>>
>The succes - for exemple - of the tanzanian prostitute in programing,
>her "Hello World" and the free software she will chose to develop could
>learn us a lot about local needs. I can make the film.
>  
>

I look forward to seeing it, love to see a woman getting better
opportunities to move beyond cleaning and sexual services!

Paula