this week

Economic survival, part I

Three travesties about survival in a world where economic greed is legitimate. The first of two parts, the record will appear next week. By Victor Paul Borg

Entrepreneurs on the block

When I saw him round the corner on the way to the green grocer, the teenage black boy’s limp body was surrounded by a handful of police and hushed passers-by; he had been gunned down by the fearful Yardie gangs in their elimination of competition in crack and heroin dealing. That was one year ago. One month ago, I was mugged for the first time. While he held a knife close to my nostrils, the Jamaican twenty-something emptied my pockets, running off with my mobile phone, £30, bank card, even my business cards.

Where I live – Brixton, London – these incidents are neither freaky nor isolated. Brixton has the highest rate of crime (along with parts of the east) in London, and everyday, I run the gauntlet as I walk down Coldharbour Lane, the precinct notorious for its clubs and street-drugs. Two weeks ago, someone knocked on my door at 3am and, pretending to be a neighbour with a tall story and convincing theatrics, conned me out of £10. Last week, another Jamaican asked me if I had a £2 coin in exchange for four 50p coins, but when I handed over my coin, he pocketed it and strode away. When I chased him, raising my voice, he whirled around and said, ‘Do you want your big f**king mouth kicked in?’ That same night, as I walked to a local club, I saw a black man swagger out of a house. His clothes were tousled, his gait reckless with an air of invincibility, his eyes glazed and wild (probably high on crack), so when I eyed him warily, he threw up his hands, shouting, ‘What the f**k do you want?’ I managed to calm him down. Then there is the barrage of beggars and drug touts, relentlessly nagging; some become belligerent if you don’t give them a pound or a cigarette.

Call it poetic irony: I chose to live in Brixton for its immigrant community and others on the fringe who, on the upside, make the area good for nightlife, and a street carnival of music, food and multi-culture. Of course, the crime means you can sniff the menace in the air. The Brixton police respond by behaving like a part-time occupying force. Every few nights, they come out in force, perhaps four vans bristling with police lurking through the streets, and you instantly realise they are on patrol when Coldharbour Lane looks surreally deserted. After three hours, the police get bored and pack back into their stations, and within half an hour, Coldharbour Lane is repopulated by drug dealers, junkies and petty criminals.

There is little the police can do to bust street-crime. This brand of street criminals, sometimes spurred by addictions to heroin or crack, are foolhardy (they also face violent turns of luck). If they have no respect for their victims, that ethos is not any different from the strategy of survival in a big Capitalist city, where you are an individual jostling for a slice of the cake. Capitalism has legitimised greed, and as the uneducated and social rejects whose future has been short-changed by rejected promises, these criminals are entrepreneurs in the only way they know. As they snatch pieces of the cake from others, they may be in fact playing by the rules.

Masks of autism
My friend was telling me about the 27-year-old work colleague who had slaved with the same routine of work for seven years. Working in the finance department of a large company, his job is to issue invoices and payments to private contractors, and all day he stares at a computer screen dizzy with numbers. My friend, who recently joined the company, recounted how she noticed that every three hours or so he would disappear down the fire escape for fifteen minutes. One day, she gave him five minutes, then surprised in the shaft of the building. He was smoking a joint. He looked at her sheepishly, and nodded towards the smouldering reefer, explaining, ‘Getting stoned is the only way I can cope with the boredom of my job.’

He might be fudging any vestiges of ambitions he may have left. But the point, his immediate dilemma, is the need to numb himself from boredom. I know others who seem intent in blotting the monotony of their long days by being stoned in a semi-conscious state of sloth. You could say that they are almost autistic, but that fits well with the average state of mind that the self-absorbed scramble for economic survival has unwittingly created. Recently, a psychiatrist told me that autism is increasing at high rates, which she ascribes to the insensitivity of the competitive world. She has no proof of this, but her hunch is plausible. Think of the insularity of modern lives, the rejections at work and in personal relationships, the way we are treated anonymously as numbers or statistics, our dispensability, and the way we tie our happiness with money.

Capitalism may have created a servile workforce, but an uninterested one. The humdrum routine of work is itself a parallel symptom of autism, and since most people despise their jobs, the only way many cope is by becoming more autistic – withdrawn, emotionally indifferent, uncommunicative, unenthusiastic, faithless, and prone to fits of rage.

The privatisation of war
In its secret war in South America, with its epicentre in Colombia, the US (plus the EU, who also contributed some funds) uses the war on drugs to tighten its grip on the region and squash dissenting political forces. It’s a war that is mostly ravaging the lives of already poor peasants, both those who grow coca (from which cocaine is derived) and those whose other agricultural crops are killed with herbicide carried downwind by the proximity to coca plantations, or their villages bombed. I’m talking about Plan Columbia, the US$1.3 billion American war effort in the region.

Plan Columbia has all the starting sparks of Vietnam II, but this time the US Congress put a limit of US military personnel involvement to a maximum of 500 trainers and advisers. Since there is allocated money to be spent, the cap on US military involvement has left a gap that is now being filled by private US companies such as DynCorp, AirScan, Military Professional Resources Inc, and Aviation Development Corporation. These companies’ names sound boringly innocuous, and they have a hazy and loosely defined role, primarily under the umbrella of advisers, trainers, surveillance operatives, pilots, and ‘security’ personnel – in other words, behind-the-scenes strategists. Mostly, they train national armies, carry out surveillance on behalf of state bodies, probably engage in some spying for the CIA, carry out fumigation missions on coca plantations, and sometimes dabble into armed conflict when wings of national armies are under hostile fire.

There are two problems with these private companies. First, while acting on payroll from the American and other governments, they are hidden, private forces that provide America with distance in the event of fiascos like last month’s bombing over Peru of a plane carrying missionaries. When The Guardian contacted them to raise issues of responsibility and their role in Colombia’s nasty war, all the companies refused to comment on account of client confidentiality. Second, they are not accountable to democratic institutions. Their bottom-line is profit, and that means they are only in business for as long as there is armed conflict. Indeed, as entities that profit directly from the war they strategically fiddle with, these companies will be better off if the war is prolonged and intensified.

Victor Paul Borg is a freelance writer based in London and can be contacted at victor@borg.tf. His column appears here weekly.