A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore
- Nature—Turned into private property by theft from the commons, from land and minerals to patented DNA
- Money—Cheap gold and silver from Africa and South America, then the US; and by numerous forms of paper money and financial instruments, all leading to financial catastrophes
- Work—Forcing people off the land to become slaves or wage slaves
- Care—Setting a value of 0 on women’s work
- Food—A succession of revolutions stealing from poor farmers and enriching huge landholders and Big Ag
- Energy—Most notably fossil fuels, and more recently nuclear power, up to the point where renewables are starting to take over
- Lives—Of serfs and slaves and cannon fodder and those defined not to be real humans. Hence the fury over DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion).
These are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated Earth. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analyzing today’s planetary emergencies. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history, crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism. At a time of crisis in all seven cheap things, innovative and systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding—and reclaiming—the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.
Everything for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.
Adam Smith
The ideology of Mercantilism (that the proper purpose of all economic activity is to enrich corporations and their owners, and the governments that charter them) did not go away when Smith dismantled its theory, nor when Marx pronounced that it would lead to its own doom.
The standard technique used in all of these transformations, since feudalism gave way to capitalism, was official redefinition of reality. Is gold and silver money? Only if the financial typhoons say so. Who owns the land and the minerals under it? We do. Workers are proletarianized. They cannot have their natural relations with nature, which is redefined as property of the rich, and of newly defined nation states. Humans can be redefined as property, or as savages to be tamed by military force. And so on.
Drapetomania
Drapetomania was a supposed mental illness that, in 1851, American physician Samuel A. Cartwright hypothesized as the cause of enslaved Africans fleeing captivity.[1]: 41 [2] This hypothesis was based on the belief that slavery was such an improvement upon the lives of slaves that only those suffering from some form of mental illness would wish to escape.[3][4]
Cartwright specifically cited the tendency of slaves to flee the plantations that held them. Since slaves happy with their condition would not want to leave, he inferred that such people had to be sick, impervious to the natural order of things. He published an article about black slaves' illnesses and idiosyncrasies in De Bow's Review.[5][6] Contemporarily reprinted in the South, Cartwright's article was widely mocked and satirized in the northern United States. The concept has since been debunked as pseudoscience[7]: 2 and shown to be part of the edifice of scientific racism. A slave's desire for freedom is not pathological.[8]
See the novel, movie, and miniseries Catch-22.
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22.
At one point, victims of harassment by military police quote the MPs' explanation of one of Catch-22's provisions: "Catch-22 states that agents enforcing Catch-22 need not prove that Catch-22 actually contains whatever provision the accused violator is accused of violating." Another character explains: "Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing."
Yossarian comes to realize that Catch-22 does not actually exist, but because the powers that be claim it does, and the world believes it does, it nevertheless has potent effects. Indeed, because it does not exist, there is no way it can be repealed, undone, overthrown, or denounced. The combination of force with specious and spurious legalistic justification is one of the book's primary motifs.
See my post The Constitution as Catch-22.
Remedies
Much of what the authors recommend is already part of Bidenomics: tax the rich, re-regulate, redefine everything, build the economy from the bottom up and the middle out, fix the Supreme Court, and much more in that vein. Elizabeth Warren has plans for that, to be implemented in 2025 when we have control of government again.
My principle is
Whatever they scream about loudest, do more of.
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