Thailand has been a relative economic success story in recent years, increasing its GDP per capita well above the global average. Historically, it’s had a large offshore fishing fleet, but with the country’s economic success it’s become hard to recruit Thais into the industry. Fishing is hard and dangerous work — who’d do it when there are better options in a growing economy?
Often, the answer is people from poorer nearby countries like Myanmar and Cambodia. Often, too, these workers toil in conditions of near or actual slavery. Slavery has been defined as a state of social death, and social death is easy to arrange on a boat in the ocean run by people from a different country and community.
When accounting the benefits of economic growth to Thais, it’s necessary also to account the price that’s paid by others from surrounding countries. The story of money as a power of oligarchic community and money as usurious increase is a book of violence and social death written on a global canvas, with people enslaved on Thai fishing boats one footnote among many.
Among the most contested terms in the Western lexicon, “development” cannot be understood adequately unless one accepts that it is a violent, coercive process. … It involves the coerced reorganization of societies, peoples, lands, and practices. Sometimes that coercion is obvious, in the form of soldiers or police or private violence that pushes people off their land, prohibits them access to needed sources of food and materials, or kills people who disagree with the ends and means of actors who drive the development process. In other times and places, the coercion takes less easily perceived forms, from changes in tax structures designed to push people from self-provisioning activities, to those dependent on wage markets, to legal processes that replace traditional land tenure systems with those that benefit the favored agents and outcomes of development processes. Moreover, this violence is not an originating practice that, once its grim work is accomplished, can be replaced by a more civilized sort of cooperative or voluntary set of interactions … but is a necessary and ongoing function throughout.
Development has and continues to be an unrelenting war on the ability of peoples to provide for their most basic needs—food, water, shelter, and more. It has been called the war on subsistence, and this five-hundred-year battle continues to push people further into depending for their survival on labor markets they do not control, investment policies they do not control, and ideological systems they do not control—all of which presuppose the intrinsic inferiority of subsistence activities relative to modern market relations in terms of efficiency, productivity, and freedom. However much they disagreed on other things, the need to destroy subsistence systems made allies of liberal capitalists and authoritarian state socialists, investment bankers, and most well-intentioned nonprofit organizations throughout most of the modern era. As Adam Smith knew but refused to say—it was left to his contemporary, Sir James Steuart, to say it explicitly—people first had to be made desperate by the destruction of subsistence activities before they would “voluntarily” agree to sell their labor power to the wealthy on whatever terms they could manage.
