As if the price the country paid for its ridiculous colonial efforts on North Africa weren’t high enough, Spain stubbornly holds on to Ceuta and Melilla, its last two enclaves in North Africa.
Something very disturbing took place in the poorest neighborhoods of Melilla the other day. The unemployment rate in these barrios stands somewhere between 47%-50%. Every year, the authorities publish a list of people who are given 6-month-long jobs by the government. These jobs pay €1,000 and require no qualifications. The lucky few whose names get on to the list get to clean public areas, tend the gardens belonging to the municipality, and so on.
After it was announced that new regulations had been passed and now only those who had resided in the city for at least 2 years would get a chance to appear on the list, the neighborhoods inhabited by many recent and illegal immigrants erupted in violence. A group of about 60 unemployed barricaded one of the streets and violently resisted attempts by the police to remove the barricade.
The official name of the barrio where the disturbances took place is La Cañada de Hidum. It has long been known, however, as La Cañada de la Muerte (the Valley of Death.) The people populating the neighborhood are illiterate and lack any kind of job skills. This makes their employment opportunities limited to the menial, low-paid, scarce jobs that only allow to keep surviving in the barrio without any hopes of leaving it. Aside from the 6-month jobs offered by the municipal authorities once a year, people in the Valley of Death manage to scrape by selling drugs, exploiting the even more marginalized and dispossessed immigrants from the Sahara, and engaging in petty crime.
It is easy to overlook what is happening in faraway Melilla, a place that is marginal both to Spain and North Africa. I believe, however, that we need to be paying attention to the events in Melilla. The chasm between the educated who have the whole world open to them and the illiterate who are forever stuck in the barrio is growing. The reality where one could carve out a decent living with a low-skill blue-collar job does not exist any longer.
We live in the world where there is a soaring number of people whose skills and time are so precious that they hire career management services, employ life coaches, attend networking events, participate in mentorship programs, download endless productivity apps, and schedule their lives in 10-minute increments. At the same time, the gulf between such people and the functionally illiterate / unskilled is widening. There used to be a middle-ground between these two classes but it is disappearing.
This is a major societal transformation that we are witnessing. La Cañada de Hidum, a miserable, hopeless slum, filled with confused, angry people, is coming to your town soon, too. Something really major needs to be done to make sure that the majority of the population doesn’t end up in this dead-end barrio. In order to do that, we need to stop looking backwards and sighing for how things used to be 20, 30, 50 years ago. That time is gone, and there is no going back. The technological revolution(s) of the second half of the XXth century are leaving many people behind. Remember what happened during the Industrial Revolution of the XIXth century when the agricultural societies were destroyed? What is happening today is very similar.
Nobody made any efforts to soften the blow of the inevitable (and ultimately wonderful and absolutely necessary) Industrial Revolution for those whom it was hurting the most. As a result, we all ended up with two world wars and several bloody totalitarian regimes on our hands.
Isn’t it time to learn from the past and ensure that the Technological Revolution costs the humanity less than the Industrial Revolution did?
Clarissa's Blog 
Elaborate on this paragraph, because I’m not getting it:
“Nobody made any efforts to soften the blow of the inevitable (and ultimately wonderful and absolutely necessary) Industrial Revolution for those whom it was hurting the most. As a result, we all ended up with two world wars and several bloody totalitarian regimes on our hands.”
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The passage to modernity was very traumatic for huge masses of population. The old world was crumbling down and they had no idea how to live in the new reality. Take the Russian Empire. An unwieldy, backwards, agrarian, mostly illiterate country. It took WWI to break down this society. Then it took a revolution to transform the deeply patriarchal, retrograde form of thinking. Then Stalin’s totalitiarian regime modernized industrially. All of this had to happen but the price paid for it in human lives was horrifying.
Or let’s take Spain. Also agrarian, patriarchal, fanatically religious, backwards, illiterate, etc. The country tried to modernize but the process was so painful that the country erupted in a civil war that still rankles.
Modernization was a historic necessity, and we are all happy it took place. It cost a lot, though.
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So, did WW1 come about as a result of social unrest, or was it incidental to the social unrest, but nonetheless resolved some backward-looking tensions?
Did you ever read DH Lawrence’s KANGAROO?
I am waking up here today, after a few days of heatwave, so my thinking may be slower than usual, although I am not sure.
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“So, did WW1 come about as a result of social unrest, or was it incidental to the social unrest, but nonetheless resolved some backward-looking tensions?”
– There are different approaches, of course, but I subscribe to the belief that WWI came about as a result of the unwieldy crumbling empires of the Romanovs, the Habsburgs, and the Hohenzollerns needing to make a qualitative jump into modernity.
This point of view doesn’t privilege the Anglo-Saxons, which is why British and American historians detest it. 🙂 For them, history has to be about English-speakers 100% of the time. 🙂 🙂
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“Did you ever read DH Lawrence’s KANGAROO?”
– No, I struggled with DH Lawrence a lot in grad school. He was bane of my existence.
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yes, I think the view that it was fought over colonial territories is more common, although I do not yet have a view. I do think technological changes enabled it though. I suspect there was a lot of temptation to try out new systems of technology, including those relating to logistics in the process of expansionism.
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I’m not a Marxist and Marxist explanations don’t speak to me.
WWI as the result of Germany’s need for colonial markets and Britain’s desire to lock it out of such markets is the explanation we were given in the USSR. I’m sure that was part of it, but this is a world war we are talking about, there’s got to be something bigger.
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I thought I was speaking as a Nietzschean, in terms of will to power, but perhaps you detect a certain Marxist strain in Nietzsche after all?
I’m not denying your theory, I just don’t know enough about it. I haven’t studied very much that part of history.
I believe that nonetheless there may be a certain push in Australia, by our rightwing government, to enshrine WW1 as the crucible for the making of the white Australian identity.
Here is something unrelated:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt6zloYUDH4
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I’m not good with Nietzsche but “economic motivations are at the root of everything” is hard-core Marxism.
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I’m still not sure if you were attributing that view to me, or not. My original statements implied will to power. Expansionism IS will to power in a fundamental sense. Nietzsche was in principle opposed to Marxist materialism because he focussed on “excess” rather than “deficiency”. So whereas the Marxist would say it is necessary to expand our empire to cope with our deficiencies in terms of material wealth, a place to store our population, and so on, Nietzsche would say expansion happens when a certain power is busting at its seams and just has to expand to express that power.
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“So whereas the Marxist would say it is necessary to expand our empire to cope with our deficiencies in terms of material wealth, a place to store our population, and so on, Nietzsche would say expansion happens when a certain power is busting at its seams and just has to expand to express that power.”
– To me, both of these explanations fail if we are talking about WWI. The Russian Empire immolated itself in this war. Yet it entered it with no hope for getting colonies and in an extremely weak and flailing state.
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The Russian empire sounds a lot like me.
I think what I don’t get about your explanation — which is a question of my undestanding of it, and not an objection — is that what was sought through entering the war. I am going to assume that it is okay to talk about agency a little, even though agency rightly only applies to human individuals. But was there anything in the loss of life and military engagement that would have been anticipated to have caused a restructuring of society?
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“The Russian empire sounds a lot like me.”
– Then why don’t I hate you? 🙂 🙂
“I think what I don’t get about your explanation — which is a question of my undestanding of it, and not an objection — is that what was sought through entering the war.”
– Speaking, once again, about the Russian Empire (because this is what I know), a weak tsar, completely in thrall to his wife and her lover / shaman, was pressured by a bunch of relatives into entering the war from which the country was never even remotely likely to benefit. This tsar was way too stupid to seek anything other than placating the wife and the relatives at any given moment. This was a royal family that was completely degraded, filled with complete degenerates. Brrr…
So now, they do not remind me of you. 🙂
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That Rasputin guy was really hard to kill, unlike the American hypnotist who fell from a Sydney balcony recently.
So the inbred insanity of a group of aristocrats caused the Russian participation in the war?
Me, I enter wars because I don’t have anything better to do. But I never really am very strong. I have to lean heavily back on myself and use various tactics and strategies for prolonging my energy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNYYawm_x9k
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“That Rasputin guy was really hard to kill, unlike the American hypnotist who fell from a Sydney balcony recently.”
– Yes. 🙂 Of course, the whole story of his murder shows what incredible losers those Russian aristocrats were. They just couldn’t deal with this single, illiterate guy.
This was very symbolic of what would happen just a few years later when the same kind of illiterate peasants gave a grand old whooping to the aristocrats in our civil war.
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“So the inbred insanity of a group of aristocrats caused the Russian participation in the war?”
– I think the empire would have self-destructed in some way or another. Every peaceful attempt to self-modernize failed pathetically. Something needed to happen.
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If there is something I don’t have respect for, it is people in power who do not govern properly — particularly those who squander their power by governing stupidly. They do deserve what is coming to them, I think.
Anyway, right now I have to go and do some sparring with Mike and get my own arse beaten. I have opted to do a martial arts exam in March and really need to get my mental and physical conditioning to a much higher level.
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Have fun! Thanks for a great discussion!
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“I believe that nonetheless there may be a certain push in Australia, by our rightwing government, to enshrine WW1 as the crucible for the making of the white Australian identity.”
I am strongly starting to suspect that Australia’s new Prime Minister is literally a laboratory-grown clone of Stephen Harper.
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He is a zombie of some sort. My father said he reminds him of Ian Smith.
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And when the unemployed intellectuals will rise up, here comes the revolution!
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I’ve been reading a lot about the parallels between the time before WWI and now and I find this analogy interesting, but also very confusing. Back then, there was a clearly defined ruling class which probably sensed their time was ending, and as you say masses of uneducated poor people who wanted something to happen. in this analogy, who is the ruling class today? Is it all the employed and relatively rich people in the West? Is it the big corporations? The democratically elected politicians?
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” Back then, there was a clearly defined ruling class which probably sensed their time was ending, and as you say masses of uneducated poor people who wanted something to happen”
– My feeling is that the belief that something had to happen was more widely spread among the intellectuals and the bourgeoisie.
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Just like it is today, I think.
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