Comment 27279

By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted November 11, 2008 at 17:27:42

"In the bare bones version of capitalism we came from, countries amassed their wealth by leveraging their unique resources. Brazil shipped bananas, India made tea, but we seem to have drifted away from that."

Absolutely untrue.

First off, Brazil was into sugar, not bananas.

Secondly, neither of those nations got very rich at the dawn of capitalism, though the nations who conquered them - Britian and Portugal - did. Britain made a heap of cash off its colonial posessions, it's manufacturing base grew by leaps and bounds by producing the war machine needed to maintain it and the trade goods needed to maintain its commercial aspects (ie: guns, booze and cloth to trade for slaves). The growth of capitalism absolutely cannot be seen without that context. Living in one of those colonial possessions, one which still exists in large part for its raw material exports (timber, fish, oil etc).

Globalization is not simply an evolution of trade and markets, it is a set of policies consciously put forth by government and corporate elites, much like the imperial Europe - a process which, by the way, was also portrayed as a universally beneficial evolution of natural institutions. This is exactly the same kind of historic/economic determinism that Marxism was based on.

Ideologies are like religions - at most, one can be right.

"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century." — Lewis Mumford

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