Today is the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Stop rolling your eyes, this isn't a patriotic post! You know me better than that.
This is about spilling the tea... about the British East India Company's spilled tea, and what that had to do with Bengal, textile workers, and famine.
See, BEIC was using its private armies to open markets around the world to their trading policies, and to install local rulers who would keep the goods and money flowing. They did this in Bengal, one of the world's biggest producers of textiles in the mid-1700s.
Then, in 1768, drought hit Bengal and crops failed. People began to go hungry, but the BEIC's puppet rulers and agents just continued to collect taxes--and, in some cases, to profiteer off the sale of food. Over the next two years, these practices exacerbated the food shortages, leading to the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, in which 7 - 10 million people are estimated to have starved to death. That's at least 25% of the entire Bengali population of the time.
This put a big dent in the profits of the BEIC (oopsie, who knew famine profiteering could have negative economic impacts?), leading to a financial crisis in England. This is also why BEIC was unloading tea for cheap in the American colonies, to get some of those revenues back.
So yeah, "no taxation without representation" was the rallying cry, but isn't it interesting that we (USians, I mean) were never taught that the REASON colonists were worried about this is because they felt they had something in common with starving Bengalis: namely, the vulnerability to a multinational corporation which clearly demonstrated its depraved indifference to human suffering in pursuit of profit.
Couple of little nuggets I left out because I'm trying to be concise (ha), but they're so interesting:
The BEIC was able to unload tea in the American colonies because the English parliament, rather than let the company fail, bailed it out. Part of the bailout conditions were that they got a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. Same as it ever was, eh?
BEIC agents who wrote letters and contacted the media (such as it was) to spread the word, and the outrage, about the completely unnecessary famine, were possibly the world's first whistleblowers.
Description: Spain's new colonial empire endowed Europe's rising monarchy with an unprecedented economic windfall. In this episode, we find out how silver and other goods extracted from the Americas made the first truly worldwide economy possible at the cost of Spain's prosperity and long-term stability. #podcast #history #economics #colonialism #capitalism @histodons@econhist
Allegories of the End of Capitalism: Six Films on the Revolutions of Our Times
In Allegories of the End of Capitalism , Milo Sweedler examines how filmmakers from six different countries, across four continents, give narrative and audio-visual form to the frustration and anger that burst into public view in 2011, the ongoing class war between the super-rich and the rest of the world's population, and the insurrection that it yet to come.
Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development
During the nineteenth century, the United States entered the ranks of the world's most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human bondage. This was no mere coincidence. Slavery's Capitalism argues for slavery's centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War.
Is this the future of social media? It certainly is better than Silicon Valley/commercial-surveillance disinformation platforms by orders of magnitude, yes...
...but personally, I have a different view.
I recommend reading the "Public Service Internet" manifesto. It was a privilege to read it. This is one of my greater research interests as well.
Tl;dr: an internet infrastructure of the people, by the people, and for the people — including democratic governance, user representation (suffrage), and citizen co-ownership of resources. NOT government-owned.
Of course there are some bits I disagree with too.
One could argue Mastodon/Fediverse is like that... but not truly (I like the place though). Here's why →
Oh great someone posted a thing about how “ADHD and autism are only disorders in a capitalist society” again.
Speaking as a person with #ADHD I say unto you all that this take needs to die. I can’t speak for #actuallyautistic people but ADHD is difficult in a lot of ways that would still be difficult in, like, a post-scarcity space socialist paradise or whatever!
I find #Capitalism is used as a catch-all phrase for so many unrelated things.
Examples:#Anthropocentrism and #Androcentrism are generally part of European and Abrahamic worldviews, and still present if peoples with those worldviews base their economies on other European theories (Socialism, Marxism, Communism, etc).
I still strongly believe what disables #ADHD and #ActuallyAutistic people environmental (systems in society) and not built into the individual.
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
The most important book yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core “free market” ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems.
If you work for an outlet or publication that’s pulling together an end-of-year book list, I’d love to get you a review copy of #OilBeach for consideration. Let me know! 🛢️ 🏖️ 📙
Check out the DH project on the economic, social and political history of the banana industry in Latin America from my colleague Kevin Coleman. @histodons
Next time someone trys to blame #capitalism on the cost of cars or a home now compared to in the 50's or at the the turn of the century just remind them we dont have a capitalism problem, we have a population problem. For most people in their 40's the population of the planet has virtually doubled since were kids, there isnt as much to go around as there used to be (and since the turn of the century the population has increased 5x).
A Thanksgiving Tale: Altruistically Giving SAMs WE ARE
There once were two Sams (A & BF), into Effective Altruism (EA), a eugenics-rooted cult only altruistic to the chosen few. SBF's in jail on fraud, Sam A runs nonprofit, OpenAI, that is for profit, not open & makes tech that isn't artificial or intelligent. Sam A was fired for not being full on EA enough, but rehired--capitalism wins!
From the author of The Shifts and the Shocks , and one of the most influential writers on economics, a reckoning with how and why the relationship between democracy and capitalism is coming undone.
Scarcity: A History From the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis
A sweeping intellectual history of the concept of economic scarcity—its development across five hundred years of European thought and its decisive role in fostering the climate crisis.
"Meanwhile, Philadelphia has started a program where teenagers are teaching high school. Yep, high schoolers are teaching now. The local news station says it's how they're dealing with their teacher shortage.
They're hoping it goes nationwide.
That's life now. Teenagers are working in meat packing plants and construction sites. They're waiting tables and serving beer. They're working the fast food jobs nobody else wants."
When corporations talk about #sustainability what they talk about is how they plan to make their company grow faster to survive against other corporations.
Under capitalism, corporations are in competitions. They have to grow constantly and acquire other companies in order to not be acquired themselves by other corporations.
A corporation talking about sustainability is only a mean to defend themselves against acquisition.
Yet we all know that infinite growth isn't sustainable!
As if children's books aren't already losing visibility due to censorship now this...
This year Goodreads has removed all children's books categories from their Goodreads Choice Awards, meaning no more #MG or #PB categories. Worse, Graphic Novel & Poetry, have also been eliminated.
Here you can vote to ask them to bring those categories back:
@raymccarthy@beecycling@franciscawrites@bookstodon It is NOT a flaw.
It is a built-in mechanism by which those with power and wealth build and horde their wealth, wielding it against the rest of us like the weapon #capitalism is. #KillCapitalism because it is already killing us, and the rate of death is accelerating.
📖 Ricardo Noronha published a paper on the political economy of the Portuguese Revolution, where he analyses “the plans and strategies devised to ensure a socialist transition in the semiperiphery of the capitalist world-system during the 1970s.”
🗣 We have an open call for communications for the workshop "The gains of their sorrow: Slavery, the slave trade, and the rise of capitalism in the other South", which seeks to open a debate on bridges connecting research focused on the Middle Passage and the one focused on mines, plantations, urban jobs, etc.
How Will Capitalism End?
Essays on a Failing System
A major collection of essays that questions whether contemporary capitalism will end with a bang or a whimper—from a leading political economist and the author of Buying Time.
A progressive takedown of the uber-capitalist status quo that has enriched millionaires and billionaires at the expense of the working class, and a blueprint for what transformational change would actually look like
that's a shame. After all, capitalism is just a tool for accumulating wealth, so like all tools it is amoral, and whether it accomplishes good or evil lies entirely on the body wielding it.
Eg. When Norway uses capitalism to run an industry to fund a sovereign wealth fund that pays for public services available to all Norwegians capitalism serves a social democracy. #capitalism#norway#SWF