ATDTDA (5): 147 The American Corporation

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

           "There's never a question. The machines, 
       the buildings, all the industrial structures 
       we've put in out there. They see these 
       things, they learn to operate them, they 
       come to understand how powerful they 
       are. How deadly. How deadly we are. 
       Machinery can crush them. Trains can 
       run them over. In the Rand some of the 
       shafts go down four thousand feet."
           "I say, 'Wood, isn't there a story about 
       you out there, dispatching a coolie or 
       something with a Borchardt?"
           "He was looking at me strangely," I said. 
       It is as far as I have ever gone with that story.
           "How's that, "Wood? 'Strangely'? What's that?"
           "Well I didn't exactly ask him what it meant, 
       did I? He was Chinese." AtD 147

http://ludb.clui.org/ex/i/CA4948/

When speaking to friends and comrades in England I find that but little is known 
of the actual conditions under which gold is obtained in South Africa, or of how 
labour is recruited, treated and rewarded by the close confederation of mine 
magnates, who extract such enormous profits from the exploitation, disease 
and death of millions of their fellow-men.

It may be, therefore, of interest to English Socialists to set down some of the 
facts of gold mining in South Africa, drawing constantly, in support of my 
assertions, from the actual reports of the exploiters.

It will be within the memory of my readers that Chinese coolies were at first 
used by the mineowners to do the unskilled work of drilling and shifting the 
gold-bearing rock. It will also be remembered how the lies of Liberal hypocrites 
replaced these Chinese coolies (who were represented as working in chains) by 
native Kaffirs and Zulus, who are at the present day cunningly enslaved and 
chained to their jobs by the fetters of economic compulsion. The native of South 
Africa, being able to extract from the soil, and from his flocks and herds, 
sufficient for his simple demands on life – food, clothing and shelter in 
abundance – has the good sense not to love work for work’s sake; but enjoys 
basking in the sun, and taking life easily, when once his personal and communal 
needs have been satisfied. The problem, therefore, for the exploiting white race 
was, “How to make the nigger work?” and a temporary solution was found in 
the hut tax, under which tax every native had to pay a certain sum annually 
to the Government for the privilege of being allowed to live in his 
own hut. This tax has to be paid in gold, therefore the native cannot offer oxen 
or mealies in barter, but has to leave his kraal for some months and work in the 
service of the white man to earn the yellow gold which the Union Government 
demands. But even then, so loth is the physically healthy and splendidly 
developed native to exchange his agricultural life for the charms of our 
so-called civilisation, that there is much difficulty in recruiting the 200,000 
native boys necessary for carrying on the work of the Rand mines alone, not to 
mention the many thousands more required for diamond mining, unskilled labour in 
connection with other industries, and house-boys, farm-boys, ricksha boys, & c. 
The following quotation from the chairman’s speech at the annual meeting of 
the Chamber of Mines in 1911 will show how the exploiters intend to set about 
the work of divorcing the able-bodied natives from the soil and forcing them 
into wage-slavery; and will interpret the psychology of the mine magnates 
and their shareholder friends much more picturesquely and vividly than any 
words of mine could hope to do: –

“Some say it is no part of a Government’s duty to find labour. Quite so; but 
they can at least view with disquietude their country suffering from grave 
financial loss through industry being stifled in consequence of the absence of a 
complete and firm native policy. What is wanted is surely a policy that would 
establish once for all that, outside special reserves, the ownership of land 
must be in the hands of white races, and that the surplus of young men, instead 
of squatting on the land in idleness, and spreading out over unlimited areas, 
must earn their living by working for a wage, as every white man who is not a 
landowner has to do.”

http://www.marxists.org/archive/montefiore/1912/south-africa.htm


Under PSAs, a country retains legal ownership of its oil but gives a share of 
profits to the international companies that invest in infrastructure and 
operation of the wells, pipelines and refineries, the newspaper said.

Critics say the agreements will be bad news for Iraq because they guarantee 
profits to the companies while giving little to the country. With 112 billion 
barrels, Iraq has the second largest reserves in the world, the U.S. government 
says.

Platform, a London-based pressure group that seeks to minimize the impact of oil 
companies, says on its website that Iraq endorsed production-sharing agreements 
last fall, just as Russia sought to undo a similar deal it signed in the period 
of turmoil after the Communist regime collapsed.

Citing published Russian reports, Platform said Russia has realized it signed 
a bad deal to develop a gas project, which allocated the risk to the government 
and the profit to the private sector.

"Russia realized the mistakes it made by signing PSA contracts only when it was 
too late. It remains to be seen whether Iraq follows the same course," the group 
said in October.

Attack on Iraq motivated by oil?

Platform's Greg Muttitt said the U.S. government, international oil companies 
and the International Monetary Fund had been asked to comment on the draft Iraqi 
legislation, but many members of the Iraqi parliament have not seen it. 

The Independent said Iraq may adopt PSA contracts because it is in a weak 
bargaining position.

The legislation, if passed as in the draft the Independent was given, would 
stoke claims that the U.S.-led attack on Iraq was motivated by oil.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2007/01/08/iraq-oil.html

 "'Ev'rywhere they've sent us,-- the Cape, St.
Helena, America,-- what's the Element common to all?'
   "'Long Voyages by Sea,' replies Mason, blinking in
Exhaustion by now chronick.  'Was there anything
else?'
   "'Slaves.  Ev'ry day at the Cape, we lived with
Slavery in our faces,-- more of it at St. Helena,--
and now here we are again, in another Colony, this
time having drawn them a Line bewteen their
Slave-Keepers, and their Wage-Payers, as if doom'd to
re-encounter thro' the World this Public Secret, this
shameful Core....  Pretending it to be ever somewhere
else, with the Turks, the Russians, the Companies,
[...] they're murdering and dispossessing thousands
untallied, the innocent of the World, passing daily
into the Hands of Slaveowners and Torturers, but oh,
never in Holland, nor in England, that Garden of
Fools...?  Christ, Mason.'
   "'Christ, what?  What did I do?'
   "'Huz.  Didn't we take the King's money, as here
we'retaking it again? whilst Slaves waited upon us,
and we neither one objected, as little a we have here,
in certain houses south of the Line,--  Where does it
end?  No matter where in it we go, shall we find all
teh World Tyrants and Slaves?  America was the one
place we shoud not have found them.'"  (M&D, Ch. 71,
pp. 692-3)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0208&msg=69706