Re. LAWG’s Perpetuating Poverty (Between the Lines, 1981)

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The book examined the various ways that Canadian aid was being used to power the expansion of transnational business and was helping to integrate people into a global system of transnational capitalism – but the book’s argument was that that kind of integration was not the way to go. I think that the analysis in the book was consistent with Andre Gunder Frank’s argument that people on the periphery and not so tightly linked to the demands of global capitalism were going to do the best because they would develop some ways to control their own production and in that way become self-reliant.

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The development of agriculture was a fairly important part of the self-reliance argument. I think that the whole idea was to try to support small farmers so that they would be able to operate without conforming to the demands of transnational corporations. Then later, in Mexico, with Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas in Chiapas, wasn’t that what the struggle was all about? It was about fighting NAFTA and saying: “No, we want to control our own lands and our production.”

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I can’t remember how Gunder Frank or how LAWG and others finally dealt with this question. The whole project of doing development in the first place is related to primitive accumulation, the accumulation of resources that you can then use to develop yourself.  This issue still hasn’t been resolved. How to you get resources in the first place? By the middle of the 20th century, a lot of these resources had already been sucked up by the most advanced countries, so there wasn’t much left for anyone else.

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So that’s what Perpetuating Poverty was all about. Unfortunately, in Canada, the whole self-reliance argument and the idea of having our own national capitalism – it seems that we have to forget those ideas! There were discussions and questions about whether Canadian corporations would be better for Canadians than other corporations.  INCO, for instance, is now owned by a Brazilian entity.

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Good Memories of Working with Bob

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When I began working at LAWG, I started writing some articles for LAWG’s publications. It was Bob who noticed that I was a good writer. I had been working as a journalist previously, although, at the time I was hired, I wasn’t. When I started writing things for LAWG, Bob said, “Hey, that’s good!” and he sent one article  to the Last Post. In other words, he wasn’t trying to say, “Oh well, I’m a better writer than you are.” He was trying to make my writing better known. The article of mine that Bob sent was published in the Last Post.

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I can at times be  a very practical person. I think Bob was taking an approach to the book something like this: “Wow, it’s growing. It’s developing leaves and flowers and everything else.” Yet maybe someone who was focused on moving along quickly and also had some writing skills wouldn’t be a bad person to have around. So I was hired on staff at LAWG in 1976 and left in 1980, but I still remained a member.  When I left in 1980, the book was inching along, not really getting into a publishable condition. Then Bob called me, and we talked about the book over lunch. Well, you know, Bob was always able to talk with different people, and usually he was able to convince them to do something – so he got together some resources in order to finish the book. That was very practical. We put on a blitz, and we finished the book early in 1981. And, for me personally, I remember that going to his house every day and focusing on getting the book done was also a very positive influence in my life.