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[ESC]DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICTED] ECONOMICS HOT THOUGHT
Marx and the Death of the Author VII: And How Does One Primitively Accumulate?
My PhD says it is in 'development economics', and the focus of my professional work to date has been on 'developing' countries, namely Nigeria, Mozambique, Kenya, South Africa, India, and Sri Lanka. Having spend over a decade in 'development economics' one begins to question some of the core tenements of the discipline. For example, what constitutes a 'developing' country versus a 'developed' one? Is it really a binary variable? Is there even a such thing as a 'developed' country? If there is a scale, how does a country move up the scale? What even is development, really? And on, and on. This gets worse when you're teaching and students ask questions that inadvertently trigger varying levels of existential angst and even crisis.
If I had one critique of Jeremy Corbyn, other staying in politics well past his sell-by date and not giving the 'up and coming' generations (including us millennials who are well and truly into our thirties and forties now), it is that his focus is exceedingly domestic. Of course, in order to sell the British voter on anything you do need to make them truly believe something is in their best interest, even if it demonstrably isn't, and in the present era bigotry and fear of 'Johnny Foreigner' does seem to do the trick, but I do believe that socialism without internationalism is lame.
Clement Attlee is the closest thing to a good Prime Minister the UK ever had. Mr Attlee was good friends with Keynes, and was the closest thing to a proper socialist to ever have power in the UK. He gave us the NHS, social housing, free university, universal education, employment as a human right, nationalised and sensible trains, (including the British Rail Class 53, a personal favourite, why yes I am autistic why do you ask?) And so many other things that dramatically improved the British standard of living, lulling at least four generations ('Greatest Generation', Silent Generation, Baby-Boomers, Gen Xers, and maybe Millennials for the first chunk of our lives) into thinking the party would never stop, science would always have popular support, people were only going to get more educated, the life expectancy was always going to increase, and humans will evolve to be telepaths! (That was a popular belief in the 1960s, held by, amongst others, Gene Roddenberry who envisioned the Vulcans to be the next logical evolution of homo sapiens, 'logic' pun not intended).
Of course, we live in an age instead where we once again routinely have to provide evidence the Earth is, indeed, round, vaccines work and do not cause autism (mine is naturally occurring, thank you), computers do not think, but are rather machines, healing crystals are just rocks, and spraying vinegar on your lawn will not protect you from non-existent chemtrails, but will in fact kill your lawn. Life expectancy in the US and UK has stagnated, in the US even diminished, education is increasingly unaffordable, unreliable, and unavailable to the masses, and if someone claims to be a telepath all you can do is be upset that neo-liberal logic has stripped publicly available mental health services down to their breaking point. And this is in the 'developed' countries, if Britain and America are falling apart like this, what right have we to tell other countries how to develop? What right have we to call ourselves 'developed' and countries like Nigeria that they are not? Why have Britain and America fallen so far? Why has the progress that has been made in place like India become undone?
Attlee's blind spot was the same as Corbyn's, the world outside Britain. I was working for the Commonwealth when Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party, and I remember centre-left coworkers being uncomfortable with his grasp of the world outside Britain, let alone Europe. This was a failing with Attlee too, both Corbyn and Attlee's world was dominated by the 'Atlantic World', that is Western Europe, the US, and Canada. In their defence, the 'Atlantic World' dominates the thoughts of most British people, and indeed most Americans, Canadians, and Europeans to this day.
There's a couple reasons Attlee style socialism failed in Britain, one of them was the Bourgeois class was still enabled to dominate our press and when the first large economic challenge to the system came quickly used their press to say, 'well we tried socialism but it failed! Utterly failed! Back to 19th century capitalism! The good ol' days! Thatcher! Thatcher! Major'! But of course, for the bourgeois press to have such an impact encouraging the average Briton to vote so explicitly against their best interest, something had to happen to the economy to scare them into doing so. There are two 'that things' that happened, first was the OPEC oil crisis and second was the increase in Commonwealth migration post-war. Britain's piss-poor reaction to both can be attributed to the lack of time spent addressing, through culture, the academy, or politically, Britain's racist and imperialist history.
As I've written about previously, and as Ignatiev, Lipsitz, Carby, Russell, and countless others have written, both race and 'whiteness' are political constructs, built to create an 'in-group' to justify violence against and exploitation of the 'out-group'. Much of the justification of the British Empire was around the inherent supremacy of the British race, history, and culture over the races and cultures we were displacing, destroying, commodifying, exploiting, and/or enslaving. This narrative began in earnest in the 17th century and became commonly accepted 'fact' by the 19th, shaping the way that even certain sciences were done, starting with an assumption of 'Anglo' supremacy. As scholars, activists, and reasonable people pushed back against it (and people have since the very beginning, as I will cover in a later post) reaching a critical mass by the mid-20th century, the bigotry it inspired lingered. Racism, like nationalism, is a bit like pandora's box, once it's released into the proverbial 'wild', it will never actually go back into the box, it will always linger out there for bad actors to utilise it. And utilise it, the capitalist class did and does.
Britain's primitive accumulation came at the expense of her colonial empire, and in the days before the First World War, one Winston Churchill, of whom many things can be written about, decided the future of the Royal Navy rested not in coal powered battleships, but oil powered ones. On its face, this is a reasonable assertion, as oil-based engines are more efficient, oil is easier to store and transport than coal, and the need for Irish and Cockney firemen would diminish, further lifting the living standards for the posh officers onboard these symbols of British military might. The problem was that deep sea oil extraction hadn't been perfected yet, oil hadn't been discovered in Nigeria yet, and not a drop was to found in Canada, India, or Australia yet. Somehow, Britain needed to get oil, and oil had been found in 'Persia'.
Churchill's friend, William Knox D'Arcy, whose very name screams for a milkshake to be thrown at it, was on it, and founded the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which would later become the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and finally British Petroleum. APOC took advantage of the British-friendly royals in Persia and quickly ensured that the oil of Persia would be forever in the hands of Britain and her allies. Or at least until a revolution happens, but that's for MI-6 to worry about. APOC's acquisition of Persian Oil would be the final victory in the 'great game' between Britain and [Tsarist] Russia before the 1917 revolution spelt out clearly just how big of a loser Nicholas II really was. It would also establish an understanding in Persia and in the newly created Saudi Arabian kingdom, and the broader middle east, the best way to get rich was to sell oil to the West, particularly the oil hungry British and Americans.
Europe has viewed the 'Muslim world' in a dim light since the middle ages when we were busy convicting pigs of crimes and they were busy inventing modern mathematics, all because we had a different entry-mechanism to the broadly same Abrahamic faith. As such, when 'racial science' was added into the mix in the 19th century, it is little surprise that British and American negotiators had no problem robbing the largely Muslim states blind in the name of profit as BP, Shell, Standard Oil, et al descended on these places in great numbers and with little concern for the well being of the locals. As labour rights expanded in Britain and America, it was a (somewhat) quiet understanding that white voters had 'earned' such rights whilst their somewhat browner and more Muslim counterparts in the Middle East hadn't, as they were culturally backwards compared to their enlightened white counterparts, this was a sentiment that religious and irreligious white people could agree on!
Suffice to say, the locals would eventually take issue with that assertion, and would also notice that Western economies had become entirely reliant on the notion of cheap oil from their oil fields. As such, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was established to renegotiate these unequal trading deals. Historically, if a single country tried to do it by themselves they'd get sanctioned or the MI-6/CIA et al would come in and encourage 'friendlier regimes' to take over to keep the flow of oil going to the West. If they banded together, however, it was thought that the West would have to listen, it'd be harder for the public to write off multiple simultaneous regime changes in short order. In 1973, OPEC cut off the West's oil supply to force renegotiation, and yes, recognition of the Palestinian state.
This left Britain and America in an awkward place, they could acknowledge the OPEC nations as equals, apologise for centuries of exploitation, and work to build an more equitable arrangement to bring economic development to OPEC member-states outside of pure oil extraction, or they could destroy their domestic welfare systems to make up the lack of profit made by capital during the OPEC embargo, destroy the power of unions domestically, engage in increasingly unsound domestic oil production at severe environmental cost, and ultimately engage in a series of neocolonial wars to bring OPEC oil production back into 'friendly' hands. Guess which one it was easier to rally the public behind, by painting the OPEC member-states as culturally [and racially] backwards.
Further, to get people to turn against the very welfare systems that had benefited them and raised the standard of living since the Second World War, in Britain and America alike, the capitalist class began a campaign to associate poverty and welfare with Black and brown migrants. In both countries, great care was taken to establish the 'welfare queen' and the 'benefits cheat' as a dubious character from an African or South Asian background, and over report the rates at which benefits fraud was being committed, pinning the ongoing economic crises brought about by the 1973 oil embargo on migrants rather than a response to capitalist exploitation. It worked, in the UK and in the US, it brought a swift end to the post-war Keynesian consensus and brought in Thatcher, Reagan, and the resultant neo-liberal era.
Having painted domestic Black and brown people as thieves and benefit cheats, the US and UK sought to do it on a global scale, through the Washington Consensus saying the reason that so much of Africa and Asia had failed to develop was local corruption, not global exploitation, and used this as a means to push austerity and regressive loans on African and Asian governments. 'The Free Market' was now to be the only tool for economic development, as it had been in the late 19th century.
The version of what has often been called 'soft socialism' that existed in the UK and US as well as in most of continental Europe was built on racial hypocrisy, and therefore was damned to fail before it even began. In the US, famously, Black families were red-lined out of the benefits of post-World War II rebuilding projects in the US sponsored by the GI Bill, in the UK, the Windrush generation were never formally given full citizenship, nor were countless other Black and Asian soldiers that had fought for the British Empire and Commonwealth during the conflict. And of course, as the OPEC embargo shows us, the biggest bit of racial hypocrisy on display was the maintenance of colonial imperialism, with a very clear line of thought in not only Britain's empire but all the rest of the developing world, 'socialism for us, pure unbridled capitalism for you, to appease our capitalist class at home'. But since colonial violence always returns home, this 'socialism for us, capitalism for you' mentality would come home to Britain, the US, and Europe in the current form of corporate welfare employed by our states for the benefit of corporations at the increasing expense of the citizenry. The maintenance of the capitalist class, the 'compromise' that Attlee and Roosevelt reached with them in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, was always going to come undone, as capitalism by its very nature will always take a mile wherever it is given an inch in order to expand profit. From the moment the Keynesian system was established, capital was already working to undo it, as we see in the establishment of the Mont Pelerin Society and the Business Plot in the US.
Socialism can only succeed if the historical atrocities that created British, European, and American wealth are understood, acknowledged, and addressed, there can be no 'socialism for me but not for thee' for the long term success of the socialist experiment. Further as the recent trend towards fascism in China shows us, we also have to reassess the original Eurocentricity of Marxism itself, and using knowledge that simply wasn't available to Marx himself acknowledge that 'primitive accumulation' as it occurred in Britain and Germany is, frankly, an undesirable process to repeat anywhere else, we must find alternatives, and we can only do this by understanding the past without glorifying it, romanticising it, or in otherwords without giving into the infernal curse of toxic nostalgia. (He says, whilst writing this on a typewriter to post on a website with a decidedly 'retro' aesthetic. To be clear, that's not the toxic nostalgia, toxic nostalgia is "RETVRN" type nonsense posts and tradwife, tradCath tradXYZ nonsense).
Socialism can only succeed after we stop giving bigotry power and do away with all the racist propaganda of the last five centuries. No one said it'd be easy, but it is necessary if we want to survive as a species because I don't know if you've noticed, but unrepentant, unrestrained petroleum powered capitalism is going to extinct us.
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