Before I start, let me clarify something: there is no specific economic concept that I wholeheartedly support and I don’t consider myself a communist. On the other hand, capitalism has proved to be less than perfect, to put it mildly. Truth is probably elsewhere or in between.
Let’s start with my brand new axiom (it means I don’t care to try proving it): to prosper, an elitist capitalist system needs either very cheap labor or very cheap resources. Having both is a dream come true.
Therefore, all those speculations about slavery, piracy, robbery, etc. not being economically efficient are feel-good gibberish repeated to lull public conscience and potential victims. These..ehm.. forms of economic activity in fact underlie all capitalist economies of the world. They are an underwater part of the iceberg no one dares to mention, that’s it.
So, one of the continuous problems of a mature yet rigid capitalist system is finding cheap (better yet: free) labor and/or resources. Of course, this problem is aggravated by those pesky moral norms and social standards. You cannot have slaves. At least, you cannot have them officially. People say that exploiting your own kind is bad. The Bible teaches to love your neighbors.
And here we come to the origin of racism, nazism and all similar concepts. To keep relying on slavery, piracy and robbery, it is necessary to persuade yourself that you live in an ideal “garden” while the rest of the world is a “jungle”. The next step is logical: people live in gardens while jungles are inhabited by wild animals or Russians untermenschen. It’s ok to take their resources from them: they are not smart enough to manage them properly, it’s ok to relocate their cultural heritage to your museums: they cannot take good care of it or appreciate it, it’s ok to install biolabs near their settlements and experiment on them, it’s totally fine to use them as cheap labor, organ donors, sex slaves, etc. Everything is fine as long as the garden is safe and well fertilized.
We have see this model recreate itself multiple times. And it has nothing to do with white people, I don’t think white people invented it, they just formalized the approach. And, of course, racism/nazism appeared in societies that faced the lack of one of the elements of prosperity I mentioned: labor and resources. And probably resources are even more important: humans can revise their moral standards and exploit their neighbors (rebranding third class to economy is enough to avoid feeling guilty), but if best timber for your navy can only be found in Russia or oil comes from the Gulf, it cannot be changed.
The 19th century Britain didn’t care too much about rights of the working class people at home, their health, living conditions, etc. While free de jure, they were hardly better than slaves de facto. But Britain is not very rich in resources, so it needed those vast colonies to get the other part of the equation for successful capitalism and happy elites. Same is true for other European countries. That’s what was the original driver behind conquering the New World, by the way. And speaking of a perceived value of human life, it was not particularly high in those societies where people sometimes had to eat frogs to survive and enjoyed numerous public executions till very recently. Note that in “barbaric” Russia the last public execution happened in 1881, while capital punishment itself was used extremely rare after Elizabeth.
But I’m digressing. Let’s get back to track.
Interestingly, economies that performed best before WWI were France, Germany, USA, UK and the Russian Empire. The latter, by the way, was developing in leaps and bounds. This list has four Empires in it and one country that had just given up slavery, yet, was very attractive for young ambitious immigrants and had plenty of resources. Out of the four Empires three built their wealth from colonies, the Russian Empire had its own unlimited resources. After serfdom was abolished (around the same time as in Germanic states; nasty thing but not the same as slavery), labor costs probably increased, I never looked into details, but cheap resources were there. Some historians actually argue that living standards of the Russian working class then were better than in Europe. Probably, but I don’t think they were ideal. At that point capitalism worked in Russia more or less naturally and maybe even harmlessly. But you cannot say the same about Europe.
So, as much as I would like to believe that Russians are God-chosen exceptional people with superior moral standards, I think that’s why racism/nazism never became a state-supported concept in Russia, there were no prerequisites for it. The then USA, in turn, seems to have inherited those ideas from the UK, though probably it was needless at that point even from purely pragmatic elitist perspective.
The idea that Western Europe got rich and powerful in the 18th and 19th centuries because it “plundered” its colonies is a myth. The West always paid for its imports of raw materials wherever they came from. Besides that the colonies, and in particular Africa, saw massive investment in infrastructure, from rail to harbors to schools, dams, power stations and much more.
The worst tragedy that happened to Africa was the so-called independences. Then and only then African countries started to be plundered with the connivance of corrupt and murderous indigenous elites.
Oh, and 19th century Britain was as much about bettering working people’s lives as it was about industrial development, in fact both things went hand in hand, as in France or Germany.
Socialism, as it came out of Karl Marx’s head, is the origin of so many lies and distorted views about the Industrial Revolution; in fact, those 150 years (up to WWI) benefited the common men as no other period before or after.
I’m going to pay you 10$ for your whole family.
I’ll even build infrastructure to move them to my factory.
You don’t get to say no or I’ll shoot you.
Read British classics, they give a nice coverage of ppls lives… it was worse than that of slaves, speaking of slaves.. don’t tell me it was not profitable. Also gold.. yeah.
I wouldn’t take the likes of Dickens as an unbiased observer. He was, first and foremost, a polemicist.
Sorry but this is so wrong, especially in light of the current conflict. Europeans built just enough infrastructure to loot their colonies and little else.
Anyway, if Marx was wrong, why is the West losing?
I agree ! When the white man first encountered native americans, the native americans were tall, beautiful, and self-sufficient!- but they lacked beads, gunpowder, small pox, horses, christianity! So the white man graciously traded beads for land. Then, americans became tall, beautiful, and self-sufficient as compared to the europeans. Such progress !
The west always paid for trade ! Yes ! Indians lacked such things as a viable opium crop, centralized salt and textile manufacturing! China lacked the import of opium to trade for silk and tea. So the british, ever the helpful problem solvers, made sure to fix this situation once all the gold and silver from american lands ran out!
Yes, when a native american visited london excited to see how wonderful a city built on christian beliefs must be, those tears must have been of overwhelming awe and envy !
It’s all stories – and economics is little more than a story with numbers thrown about based on what to include. Capitalism is a story that does not include externalities (nor the unquantifiable). Man, in his natural state, is made in the image of god or a monkey ? The popular myths of the hardships of man in re nature are just that … and meant to keep man in a state of scared helplessness. Malthusian thinking is so helpful !
I really liked David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5000 years in how it weaved debt with religion; if people understood how banking works, there would be a revolution by the morrow … or perhaps the Heart of Darkness ?
Let the world not forget how amazing that garden has been; so amazing that europe sent her religious fanatics and criminals to america and australia ! those lucky haitians – the most gracious french allowed them independence on quite the long-term lay-away plan ! only 122 years to pay the french back for all the glorious infrastructure they built without even having to be asked !
That said, I view thee ukraine as a case of bankruptcy reorganization / eminent domain ; no more pay day loans available (IMF, WB) and the place became way too inefficient (organized crime / corruption) so how to reorganize on mass scale – thee ukraine is not Poletown in Detroit now ! plus, those shamed germans and uncouth russkies not letting thee ukraine subsidize the war in the donbass on gas transit fees ! wait, what was that bit about infrastructure ?
You do realise that’s why they’re obsessed with AI.
I know you were born near the end of the USSR, but if you haven’t, you should read Marx’s “Capital, Vol. 1”. Marx saw a lot of these things very clearly as they were happening: the end of slavery, the transition from rural peasants/serfs to urban industrial labor, etc.
And I always urge people to read Marx directly and from the source, not some other author’s summary or interpretation, because they often inject their own sectarian biases into it, whether they’re a Trotskyist, Stalinist, Maoist, or even anti-communist. It’s also important to read Marx on his own terms and not conflate him with all the 20th century baggage and people who claim to be taking up his mantle.
My point is that slavery/loot has never disappeared. You can call it whatever you want, but it’s still there, and in modern societies it requires dehumanization.
Exploitation.
That is the key word in this whole discussion.
When I was young, everybody told me there was no exploitation, because you were not being forced to work.
Modern libertarians also deny even the possibility of exploitation, since in their society there are only voluntary interrelationships.
In fact, many people who became slaves were in fact either in debt, or captured in war. War captives would often be given weapons, and offered the choice between suicide and swearing allegiance. After that, any objections to their slavery were considered treason, punishable by death. So you see, the rationalizations for how it’s not exploitation but free acts of will that bind people have an ancient pedigree.
It is interesting that people do not dispute whether some arrangement is exploitative, but that they focus their efforts on the theoretical impossibility of it. And capitalism, whatever it is, is generally confused with economic freedom or free markets, as though your ancient Egyptian farmer’s market was populated by proto-capitalists; in a similar vein people confuse property with private property, pretending it is a self-evident notion, when in fact property relationships belong to the most complex and nuanced material of any civilization. What is more, almost every chain of property titles starts somewhere with conquest. And to become a capitalist, you don’t need to believe anything, you just need a lot of capital, and without it, you are not a capitalist no matter what you may believe.
Regardless what one thinks of Marx, it is indisputable that he was the first thinker to describe economic relationships not in terms of some theoretical system of deductive or inductive truths and morals, but to describe economic systems empirically in terms of their actual history, and the evolution of one system into the next.
In nomadic society you don’t have poverty in a recognizable manner. Poverty is a man-made problem, not a lack of resources, and it is maintained by human society. And the chief means of doing so is … Exploitation.
Life has existed on Earth for about a billion years, Homo sapiens for about a few hundred thousand years. The common denominator across this entire era is evolution, which is responsible for the diversity of physical and behavioral traits both among and within species. And in every case, local environments produced the modus operandi driving these differences via adaption, which always resulted in attributes that “worked in the local environment” and hence persisted. This is why there is no “one size fits all” for any subspecies on our planet. Diversity of environment will always result in a diversity of successful behaviors.
And this principle also applies to macro-economic patterns in macro-settings and macro population groupings. Stated simply, what “works” in Scandinavia is not the same as what works in sub Saharan Africa. And, of course, adaption changes over time, so what worked in the 1800s is not necessarily what will work in the 2000s.
For 99.9999% of life history on Earth, environments changed relatively slowly and adaptation had plenty of time to catch up. Then the modern era occurred and change is now in hyperdrive. We are outrunning our adaption cycle and trying to force man-made artificial adaption into our species development. The Soviet Communist economic paradigm was an example of this, as is the USA’s capitalism model. Both were/are forced fits based upon an ideological invention and experimental imposition. Ultimately, environmental adaption will lead to persistence of what works in that locale. There is no universal King of the Hill system.
The Soviet Communist economic paradigm was an example of this, as is the USA’s capitalism model. Both were/are forced fits based upon an ideological invention and experimental imposition
Very well said.