One Hundred Years Of Proliferation

There is also an element of betrayal with the enslavement of the people that the Arabs initially struggle to grasp. Miteb cannot believe the government has sold their land and displaced them, and he states, “the government knows better than anyone that Wadi al-Uyoun belongs to its people” (Munif 40). With the betrayal of the people by the emir for the wealth and status promised by the Americans, the people begin to realize he is no longer “their emir, there to defend and protect them” but the Americans’ emir” (Munif 595). Ibn Rashed too aligns himself with foreigners and changes entirely as he “believed that there was great gain to be had from these men” (Munif 32). The Emir and Ibn Rashed both sell themselves and their people for the status …show more content…
When the banana company is first taken to court regarding the mistreatment of their workers, they are able to avoid their worker’s basic rights by proving that “the workers did not exist”, and the “demands lacked all validity for the simple reason that the banana company did not have, never had had, and never would have any workers” (Márquez 307). While this erasure of the workers seems like another magical episode in the book, it is based on a true historical account of the United Fruit Company. Like the United Fruit Company, the banana company hires workers on part-time or limited contracts so they will not have the benefits of full-workers, and any complaints they make will be considered invalid as despite doing work, they do not possess even the title of a worker. Once more, by not classifying the workers as such, they become invisible slaves on which the commodity chain relies. In One Hundred Years of Solitude the erasure of the worker continues, following the labor striker and subsequent massacre. Although over 3000 workers and their families are killed by government troops, the government denies the slaughter and tells the public that the workers left peacefully of their own accord. There is a sole witness to the slaughter, José Arcadio Segundo, who wakes up on a …show more content…
With an inherent link between the labor of production and the labor of nature, a strike is both an economic and a natural event arising from inequality. The strike in a commodity frontier is “not artificially ‘made,’ or ‘decided’ at random, or ‘propagated,’” but a “historical phenomenon which, at a given moment, results from social conditions with historical inevitability” (Luxemburg). As the physical world constantly moves towards homeostasis, or stability, a strike in a deeply unsettled society is a natural to restore balance. Due to the division of society under capitalism, strikes become the “natural empirical tendency” of capitalist economies (Godard 163). In Cities of Salt, the extreme individualistic disconnect within the work force is created by the manner in which the workers are constantly “divided into small groups” and isolated from each other, moving through spaces “independently of each other” (Munif 207). This description of free-floating workers dedicated to duty without a sense of community in Harran is a sharp contrast to the time before capitalism in Wadi al-Uyoun. Here, there was such a deep loyalty and sense of community that “the people of the Wadi wouldn’t let a man fight by himself, they’d fight with him