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Thanks to Nittany for posting the Jason Hickel article. I’m about 150 pages into the book (2017), and it’s really, really good. Direct, to the point, he has a talent for summing things up, presenting the evidence, and letting the reader draw conclusions not mentioned explicitly on the page.
Boiled down, he takes us from Columbus to the present day, busting a thousand and one myths in the process, and does so concisely.
Two main myths act as a kind of dual starting point for the book: That capitalism has successfully reduced poverty around the world, and that things are getting better all the time; that capitalism has done more than any other system to spread prosperity and freedom, historically. Hickel demonstrates that capitalism actually created poverty where it did not exist previously, and maintained it for centuries, showing implicitly that forced poverty is actually necessary for its “success” — something I’ve been saying for quite some time.
Beginning with the conquistadors, who violently ransacked Latin America and stole literally trillions of dollars worth of gold, silver and other valuable resources, while slaughtering millions of human beings . . . providing Europe with the necessary capital for the “primitive accumulation” necessary to launch the capitalist era. Hickel shows that this process of stripping untold wealth from the global South escalated from there and is still ongoing, making the point that it wasn’t the West that “developed” the “third world,” it was the reverse.
There are sections on 20th century coups and covert ops in general as well, which I’d bet would interest everyone here, perhaps WV especially. I didn’t know previously, for instance, that European nations were often involved in their own ultra-violent shenanigans, not always in conjunction with the US. I had thought their heyday was in the 17th, 18th, 19th and early 20th century instead, during the colonial period, etc.
Hickel makes an important point. Prior to 1500, Europe actually lagged behind nations like China and India on most metrics, as well as the global South. It was the rise of capitalism that created the divide, and nothing about it was “natural” or due to local geography or culture, as western triumphalists would have us believe.
Again, it’s excellent so far. Glad our local library had it.
“…All the bragging about the supposed reduction of poverty is based primarily on manipulation of statistics by western institutions at oh so convenient times. They’re jiggered to show improvements when, in actuality, poverty levels have increased, and the floor is set far too low to begin with…”
—————————-Yeah. Just pause and think about how hard it really is to get something approaching ‘unbiased’ information in a Corporotacracy. In ANY field.
There’s a reason Westerners keep repeating the same myths and keep voting for the same assholes every election.
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“A hierarchal society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance…” -George OrwellAgreed. And the tragic thing is, books like this one will largely be ignored. Same with Grandin’s and Immerwahr’s. But every American should know this history. Perhaps if we all did we’d stop believing in the myths that are literally killing us.
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My own starting place, as you know, is the total acceptance of capitalism as the one true god. That there can be no other alternatives. That it represents “freedom and liberty” and came into the world to provide all of that, without any costs of any kind, naturally. Supposedly, it was all good, from Day One.
In reality, it could not have happened without mass violence, coercion, plunder, genocide, slavery and the total destruction of formerly independent, sustainable ways of life. Enclosure, for example, one of the earliest forms of privatization, killed subsistence farming as a way of life, and came directly from “the State.” In Britain, it was primarily Parliament that enacted these laws, dominated as it was by landowners who wanted even more control. So small farmers were forced into the factories for slave-wages, and little by little, people stopped making their own clothes, housing, etc. etc . . . and lost their independence on all fronts.
“Freedom and liberty” for whom? No system in world history has ever been so (perversely) successful in its total domination of life. It’s literally totalitarian, and all too few people see this.
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