by
Jason Hickel
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[...] The sugar and cotton plantations of the New World supplied Europe with another ecological windfall, much as silver did. For example, sugar came to account for up to 22 per cent of the calories Britain consumed, which reduced the need for domestic agricultural production and freed up labour power for industrial pursuits. Cotton provided a key raw material for Europe's Industrial Revolution, and without diverting from food production or straining labour and land capacities. [...]
[...] What made this famine so appalling was that it was completely avoidable; it would never have happened if peasants had retained full rights to their ancestral land, where they would have had plenty of space to produce a diversity of crops. In other words, the scarcity that led to the famine was artificially created. But even with the new agrarian system in place, Ireland was still producing plenty of food, in aggregate; the problem was that it was all being siphoned away by the British. Ireland was exporting thirty to fifty shiploads of food to England and Scotland each day during the famine, while the local population starved to death.
- enclosure of Irish common land by English colonisers
- many had to flee to England/Scotland to work as wage labourers
- those that remained had to plant only potatoes on the small amount of marginal land they had left (for its calorie-to-land-use ratio)
- thus when the blight occurred, they were fucked
The Indian famines of the late 19th century were not a natural disaster, as the British insisted at the time. They were the predictable consequence of imposing a foreign market logic that saw fit to eliminate basic human food security and sacrifice tens of millions of people in the service of profit. The famines had nothing to do with endogenous economic problems; rather, they were caused by India's incorporation into the emerging capitalist world system. As the historian Mike Davis puts it:
We are not dealing, in other words, with 'lands of famine' becalmed in stagnant backwaters of world history, but with the fate of tropical humanity at the precise moment (1870-1914) when its labour and products were being dynamically conscripted into a London-centred world economy. Millions died, not outside the 'modern world system', but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism.
wonderful quote
It is tempting to see this as just a list of crimes, but it is much more than that. These snippets of history hint at the contours of a world economic system that was designed over hundreds of years to enrich a small portion of humanity at the expense of the vast majority. By the early part of the 20th century, this new order was complete, designed so that the core of the system--Europe and the United States--could siphon cheap raw materials from the periphery and then sell manufactured products back to them while protecting themselves from competition by erecting disproportionately high tariffs.
I really like the framing of the world economic system here ("contours" is a great way of thinking about it)
[...] The democratic state should regulate the market and harness its powers towards desired social ends, securing economic stability and improving living standards. The market should be made to serve society, not the other way round. This new system relied on a class compromise between capital and labour: the state would guarantee strong rights and good wages in exchange for a docile, productive workforce that would have sufficient money to consume mass-produced goods, thereby keeping the economy stable and growing.
I love the subtle critique of Keynesian embodied in the language used ("docile"--definitely subtler than "bovine", but not that far off)
he explicitly criticises Keynesianism on the next page: it leaves out middle-class women (excluded from workforce and thus dependent on men) and minorities of all sorts
[...] It is 'neo' in the sense that it revived classical market liberalism from the death it had suffered after the Great Depression, but it also added a few new elements. The notion that market freedom is tantamount to individual liberty was a new and distinctive feature of the ideology--and became central to its political success in the West. And neoliberalism abandoned any pretence to neutrality in favour of a more politically charged agenda: it was against subsidies and protections for the working class and regulations that supported unions, but was quite comfortable with subsidies and protections for the rich and regulations that supported large corporations.
[...] Nixon was engaged in expansionary monetary policy--in other words, he was effectively printing money. On top of this, government spending on the Vietnam War at the time was spiralling out of control. As international markets worried that the US would not be able to make good on its debts, the dollar began to plummet in value and contributed further to inflation. And while all of this trouble was unfolding, another crisis hit. In 1973, OPEC decided to drive up the price of oil. The price of consumer goods suddenly shot up too, because the energy required to produce and transport them was more expensive. And because production became more expensive, economic growth slowed down and unemployment began to rise. It was a perfect storm.
this is probably the best summary I've seen yet. he goes into the reasons behind the OPEC price hike later on: it was a response to the US (among other nations) supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War
to consider: what role did the impending collapse of Bretton Woods play in this (or is it more of a consequence than a factor)? what about the geopolitical impact of the rise of manufacturing powerhouses in Germany and Japan
In short, the fight against poverty and underdevelopment during this period was understood as a political battle. It sought to challenge the prevailing distribution of power and resources around the world.
on the rise of developmentalist policies in developing countries pre-1980 (more protectionist/redistributionist) which ofc concerned the West, because their economies depended on the existence of an underclass of pliant developing nations ... their response was to demonise these policies as "Communist" and use that as a cloak to justify economic (or physical) warfare against them
[...] OPEC states suddenly found themselves awash with excess cash worth more than $450 billion. The only problem was that they didn't know what to do with all that money. Because there was nowhere to invest it internally, Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations decided to circulate or 'recycle' the money through Wall Street banks, probably to some extent under the pressure of US compulsion, as part of the negotiated settlement.
this money was recycled in the form of loans to the global South, who needed the money to build up industries (esp for import substitution purposes) AND, depressingly enough, to cover the higher costs of oil
ofc the banks were more than happy to facilitate this, esp since they got a cut--created a "global sub-prime market" (p151)
[...] in 1981, when US Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker jacked interest rates up as high as 21 per cent. Poor countries found that they simply could not repay their loans at such high rates. In 1982, Mexico took the inevitable step and defaulted on part of its $80 billion debt. This move spurred other heavily indebted countries--such as Brazil and Argentina--to do the same, and set off what became known as the Third World Debt Crisis.
Geoff Mann goes into this more in Disassembly Required: the reason Volcker had to resort to this came down to an inability to find a resolution for the labour-capital distributional conflict that both sides were satisfied with