> Simply stating the facts that Europe’s wealth is because of world looting
I'd like to see some sources for those "facts". What exactly happened? Europeans came into Africa and Asia and stole all the factories, leaving Africans and Asians to revert back to agricultural societies?
Or Europeans went to Africa, Asia, and the Americas and extracted as much of the natural resources as possible at the expense of the indigenous populations and without a thought to the future sustainability of the lands. Some examples that spring to mind:
* Spanish silver mining in the Americas. 150,000 tonnes of silver were extracted between 1500-1800 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_silver_trade_from_the_1...). It isn't hard to understand who benefited from that silver, Spain or the South American colonies.
* African slave trade which exported 10-15 million people from Africa. In 1850, Africa had about 50 million people when it should have had closer to 100 million, when accounting for lack of reproduction, if it weren't for the slave trade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_Africa#Atl...)
> Europeans came into Africa and Asia and stole all the factories, leaving Africans and Asians to revert back to agricultural societies?
How about actively passing laws to make sure that the colonies could not survive without the mother country by restricting trade. Maybe start reading about these colonial times a bit more. What you find may surprise you
How do you explain the fact that many European countries who had marginal or no colonial empires are among the richest countries in the world today? (Germany, Sweden, etc.)
That's easy. Concentration of looted wealth in a region and regional internal trade with barriers for external entities. Why do you think there are so many voices against WTO? It challenges the status quo built by force.
Most wealth in most European nations depends on local production and expertise.
Why is e.g. the Norwegian fisherman richer than the Bangladeshi fisherman? It is not because he gets more money for each fish he sells.
It is because the usage of modern fishing vessels and technology allows him to fish a lot more fish. In Norway we tried to give Bangladeshi fishermen modern Norwegian fishing vessels in the 70s. If failed because they do not have the skill and infrastructure to maintain and support a modern fishing fleet.
Value lies in better both superior equipment and the knowledge of how to use it effectively. That advantage exists in Europe regardless of whether Europe gets to exploit other nations or not.
Even in colonial times, most economic activity happened locally. Tobacco, sugar and spice does not grow the core of the economy. What mattered most was intensified farming locally. The usage inanimate power, labor specialization and cheaper transport to increase production of food, clothes, tools, furniture, housing etc.
Even without actually exploiting the colonies Europeans would have benefited hugely from the maritime explorations. New crops such as potatoes benefited European agriculture greatly.
This line of reasoning is silly. I suppose all technology comes from Homo Australopithecus since they were the first to bang two rocks together, and they were the true origin of the Renaissance?
I'm all for acknowledging eurocentrism, but this euro-bashing is ridiculous. If these "prerequisites" were all that were needed to kickstart the Renaissance, why did it not occur in the middle east, for instance, where all of these elements were also present?
Because the Mongols destroyed them after they refused to pay tribute.
Knowledge is passed generation to generation, and if you interrupt that, it's hard to recover from. Mongols destroyed everything, including libraries and killed most scholars.
That void was filled with tribes that were not secular.
I think that's wholly simplistic. What about regions who beat off the Mongols, such as the Mameluks? Or people who weren't that affected, like the Ottomans.
For that matter, I'd be interested in your theory as to why the Ottoman empire failed to develop any intellectual tradition of note, while Europe was soaring.
Russians greatly suffered under the mongols but eventually became a superpower. China lost half its population but rebounded pretty quickly.
Edit: "Mongols destroyed libraries" afaik, they destroyed the library of Baghdad but that's about it.
Also, the Mongols were not the only ones to destroy libraries. Iirc the library of Cordoba, the biggest and most advanced of its time, was burned down by the Caliph because it was deemed too un-islamic.
I am talking about the Siege of Baghdad (1258). You are talking about a period of time after the death of Kublai Khan (1294) where the Mongols were already divided into smaller regions.
Anyways, if you want to be a eurocentric revisionist, continue doing so. I don't care.
If you study the Latin translations of the 12th century you will see how significant part of the Reinassance could be attributed to previous civilizations.
Yeah, I understood you were talking about the Siege of Baghdad. If you think that the destruction of a single city is the reason for the middle east lagging behind the west over several centuries, then I reiterate what I said before, you have an extremely simplistic view of history. I don't consider myself particularly eurocentric, but you seem to be a middle eastern chauvinist. Projection, maybe?
Where did I deny that Europeans built on previous advances by other people? It's obvious they didn't exist in a vacuum. But europeans were the first to systematize the production and diffusion of knowledge. In a sense they invented what you could call the mass intellectual tradition.
You're correct that farming is likely better than factory work. It might even be more rewarding writing code 9-5. The problem with subsistence farming is that you might starve to death if a drought, flood, or disease kills half your crops.
And in the modern U.S., the very same can happen to the working poor if they loose their job, or an unforeseen expense comes up to make paying for life's necessities suddenly impossible. Perhaps even at the same rate that a natural famine once every decade or so has killed off the poor; last season at least 80,000 people died in the U.S. from the flu [1], a disease that disproportionately affects the working poor and homeless due to poorer overall health. Not much has changed for the poor in this modern world even if they aren't subsistence farmers.
But evidently flu deaths are not so rare. Just as starving to death is a consequence of economics for the farmer, dying of the flu is a consequence of economics for the poor in the United States. One cannot pay for food during a famine, and the other cannot pay for health services during the yearly epidemic.
What is your point exactly? That industrialized civilization isn’t actually better than abject rural poverty, because a tiny minority of people still die of poverty-related causes? How do the numbers stack up on each side?
80,000 people is less than 1 in 3750 Americans — I’ll take my chances with those odds over living somewhere with regular famines.
> I doubt doing farmwork 12 hours a day is worse than doing the same mundane repetitive action 16 hours a day.
Then why do Chinese farmers line up outside the gates of factories hundreds of miles from home in the hope of getting a job? If farming gave them an equivalent or better quality of life, they would just stay at home and keep farming.
Because their cousin is sick. Because they want their daughter to go to school in the city and move up the socioeconomic ladder. Because their parents are injured and can no longer work. These jobs require sacrificing all of your personal freedom to support others. They require enduring human rights abuses themselves to so others don't have to work this very job. The reasons why farmers are leaving their fields isn't for their personal well being at all, it is altruism.
The intensity of farm work isn't even comparable. You aren't toiling in the fields doing the same exact thing for hours every day, every month, every year like you do in a factory. Most labor happens during harvest and planting seasons, maintenance labor throughout the year is focused on improving your living conditions or other local projects, something you can't do if you are working for the factory. Unfortunately, things come up that can only be fixed with immediate or continued access to capital, so you have to send one of your family members hundreds of miles away to work in a factory to fuel an emergency fund. The problem with farm work isn't the work, it's the lack of enough pay to deal with disaster.
Then why do Chinese farmers line up outside the gates of factories hundreds of miles from home in the hope of getting a job?
Because they've been forced to relocate from their farms to manufactured cities by the government which then bulldozed their villages.
Then once they're in the city, their choice is to work in the greenhouses of a big government-backed company, or work in the factory of a big government-backed company.
> We hope that in the future, workers in Foxconn and elsewhere manage to find ways around such companies' military-style discipline and surveillance, come together, and forge collective paths out of this capitalist world of death, into a world worth living in.
technically it's a socialist economy with mostly state capitalism. The party is communist but the idea in theory is they're in charge of transitioning towards communism as a vanguard party, just like the soviets.
nonetheless, military-style discipline and surveillance have been very prominent in communist-led countries to date so I'm not sure why the author thinks that would change. Maoism and Stalinism aren't known for being cuddly and humanistic.
From the orthodox Marxian perspective, it doesn't make sense to think of a "socialist economy", since the idea of economy is rooted in the law of value in the first place, and Socialism is supposed to abolish the value form. A "socialist economy" is an idea that has its roots in Lenin and only came to fruition with Stalin.
>I'm not sure why the author thinks that would change
The author, posting on libcom, is probably not a Stalinist or a Maoist, but rather an orthodox Marxist or left-Communist. Libcom is a website very much oriented away from Stalinist Communism.
It's state capitalism without the socialism: very little worker protection or freedom, no social safety nets, powerful large corporations and banks, military-style discipline and surveillance.
Although discussing this distinction is off-topic (I didn't downvote you), I'd like to point out that the demand for places like Foxconn comes from capitalist businesses in capitalist countries (one in particular).
Unfortunately my sense is that even Foxconn pay and conditions are far superior to anything available for these workers in their usually rural home towns.
Take it another step. Dreadful conditions are allowed to fester due to a lack of human rights in China, which is maintained as a status quo solely because shareholders in western companies demand infinite growth and profit. These companies came to Chinese factory owners with a price for labor already in mind; they would have payed to move production to anywhere in the world with the lowest costs for labor and material acquisition.
Better labor conditions in China starts with western companies requiring better labor conditions to do business, and western companies accepting the resulting higher costs. Until shareholders accept smaller profits, this won't change no matter where in the world it occurs.
Slavery has and continues to exist in countries all over the world, including America. The 13th ammendment explicitly exempts prisoners.
I don’t want to get into an argument defending China but pointing out this “irony” isn’t a meaningful criticism. Foxconn clearly exists because of capitalism. Unless you want to argue that Apple is a socialist project somehow. What kind of countries are the majority of handsets manufactured in? China could ban all smartphones from capitalist counties but then they would face other tariffs. Their economy is dependent upon exporting goods. Does the Chinese government bear some responsibility for these working conditions? Yes. But clearly the answers to how do you build communism under capitalist hegemony are complicated.
Being a Communist website does not mean they support the practices of these corporations, nor the practices of the Chinese Communist Party - you'll find, if you look closer, that the website is a place for Marxists and anarcho-Communists in general, much more so than Maoists (who are heavily suspicious of the pro-capital Dengist reforms) or Stalinists.
It's not ironic at all; it is only ironic when you conflate the CCP with what Badiou describes as the Communist hypothesis.
That's certainly true (and I hadn't noticed the website is communist, that's funny). I think we can agree that both capitalist and communist countries have blood on their hands here. Also worth pointing out that Foxconn is in a Free-trade Zone which tend to play by their own (lack of) rules.
I think this is not the appropriate place for such a discussion, but c'mon, the ADL is not exactly unbiased on the topic.
Also I don't think the term "apartheid state" is to be interpreted literally. Of course Israel doesn't have a South African style apartheid system. But it still treats Palestinians as second-class citizens.
