Can you easily speak with neighbors or co-workers about what President Bush did at the recent world conference on financial aid to so-called “developing” nations?

What makes such everyday talk difficult? One factor, in part, is the lack of historical context.

Absent this, foreign policy can exist in a vacuum. It is sustained by U.S. elites to increase their power and wealth.

Control of the past, Orwell wrote, shapes control of the present.

Independent news and views play catch-up here, due in part to a lack of resources for distribution. This can change, and is.

Still, what is publicly assumed about democracy and development under today’s so-called free market needs more explanation.

We turn to America’s former mother country, where the agricultural population was separated from the soil and became wage-laborers. Below is a brief look at this story, relevant to current events.

Years ago in England, elites forced peasants off the land and into factories. These rural people were made “free” with the guiding hand of government that enforced such changes.

They included the lawful elimination of peasants’ access to lands held in common. Enlarging private property ensured that there were more people with no property.

As a result, men, women and children went to work in factories. They worked very long hours making things with cotton picked by enslaved Africans in America.

On one hand, chattel slavery has ended in the U.S. On the other hand, sweatshop factories are now operating in Burma, China, Guatemala, Thailand—a limited list of nations.

Contrary to some who currently cite political economist Adam Smith, former English peasants met buyers of their labor-power on unequal playing fields in a society marked by major government interference in the market. The same basic pattern of market compulsion holds true for Burmese, Chinese, Guatemalan and Thai peasants turned factory laborers in 2002.

They are the sweatshop workers compelled by force and law to make the cheap commodities on sale now at U.S. stores. These cheap commodities serve many purposes.

One is that corporations reap super-profits from sweatshop labor. Another is that cheap commodities also reduce the cost of living for American workers, allowing buyers of their labor-power to keep more of the value their labor creates.

In addition, former peasants in industrializing nations such as Mexico are being driven to the wall by U.S.-taxpayer subsidized industrial agriculture flooding the country under the NAFTA. This is forcing many Mexicans from rural to urban areas to be industrial wage workers.

Unlike subsistence farming, industrialization—in Mexico now or England then—creates unemployment. Thus the industrial jobless force down the wages of those with jobs.

Some Mexicans who can’t find factory work migrate north. In the U.S., they are economically desperate and politically powerless.

As agricultural laborers in the U.S., their low wages help to keep down the cost of food. This helps U.S. employers to pay all workers lower wages relative to the cost of living.

Mexican immigrants also serve another domestic use. They are scapegoats for some racist U.S. workers, themselves victims of markets for labor-power who tragically continue racialized relations within the working-class.

In all, the free-market can strengthen elites’ drive to control and contain workers. Division is the name, domination is the game.

Freedom ends where market coercion begins.

The Bush-Cheney White House, like its predecessors, seeks to expand the domination of workers at home and abroad by U.S. elites. The Bush administration may call this process democracy and development, but that can only come from what workers create.

Seth Sandronsky is an editor with Because People Matter, Sacramento’s progressive newspaper ssandron@hotmail.com

###