Madeira, and the Birth of the Invisible Doctrine

Excerpts:

...if ever the issue of Capitalism is raised, you hear people discussing it and come to the clear conclusion that they don't know what Capitalism is. You have fierce defenders of Capitalism and fierce opponents of Capitalism, but actually no clear definition of what they're talking about. And, a lot of people confuse it with Commerce, with buying and selling things. Commerce has been happening for thousands of years, and Commerce and Capitalism are absolutely not the same thing. In fact, in some respects Commerce and Capitalism are opposites.

Now, with my wonderful co-author, Peter Hutcherson, we trace the origins of Capitalism following the great geographer Jason Moore to the island of Madeira in about 1450, and we say this is really when the thing we call Capitalism kicks off. Now, one of the best definitions of Capitalism, or partial definitions of Capitalism, was provided by the great social anthropologist Carl Palani, who said that these three conditions need to be met for Capitalism to occur: the commodification of land, and we can see that as meaning natural wealth in general; of Labor; and of money. And all those three things need to happen simultaneously for us to be able to say this is a Capitalist System. And there's pretty strong evidence that the first place where they happened, where they all came together, was Madeira in 1450 or thereabouts.

The Portuguese had come across the island of Madeira in 1420. It was a genuinely uninhabited Island. There weren't many, but this was one. And they named it after the resource which they rather fancied ,which covered the island Madeira, or wood, Timber. They were very short of Timber, they couldn't build the battleships they wanted because they didn't have enough of it, so they were delighted to find this. And so to begin with, they just did what they had been doing on the mainland, they cleared some forests, they ran a few pigs and cattle in it, they shipped out the Timber. And then someone realized that this was a great place for growing sugar, perfect climate, perfect soil, Etc.. And sugar did very well there. And then they realized, well, we're in an unusual position here because there's no constraints on how we use the land. There's no church here, there's no land owners, there's no custom, there's no culture, there's no Society. We can just do exactly what we want on this land!

So, they could fully commoditize the land, just turn it into an object for making money! And then they thought, "well, where are we going to find the labor? Oh, we can just bring people in to work." And who are the cheapest people to bring in? Slaves. So they started importing slaves, first from the Canary Islands, then from Africa. And of course, slaves are fully commoditized labor. You've stripped away everything that gives them their Humanity, stripped away their social context, their cultural context, their religious context (a whole lot of it). And it's pure 100% commoditized. Labor is what slavery is. Then, they needed money to finance the operation. Previously on the mainland, you would have gone to the landowner or someone, and being charged extortion at rates of Interest. But no, they could shop around, and they could just say, "We just want money. We don't want any attachments to that money. We'll just pay the lowest rates of Interest we can get. And so, they went to Flanders and Genoa to get their money. So they'd commoditize the money as well.

And what happened was a very rapid rise in sugar production. I mean this, you know if you're trying to make a lot of money, this system works very well. But alongside it was a remarkably rapid rise in ecological destruction. And the reason for that was that this great sugar industry, which had created so quickly, absolutely devoured Madeira. You need 60 kilograms of wood to refine a kilogram of sugar. And what that meant was that as the slaves used up the timber in in the surrounding areas, they had to go further and further to get it. And suddenly, productivity fell off. By about 1470, Madeira was the top producer of sugar on Earth. The sugar industry on this tiny Island, by 1500, had collapsed by 80%. It was a very sudden boom, and a very sudden bust. And then, and this is an absolutely crucial component of it, they did what Capital has gone on to do all over the world. They left. Boom - bust quick.

Those are the three components of capital; that is what capitalism does. And then they move the operation to another Island that recently stumbled across, did exactly the same... even quicker destroyed it, used it up with extraordinary speed. Boom-bust-quit. Moved across the Atlantic to the coast of Brazil, moved up the coast of Brazil, bang, bang, bang! Just taking out ecosystems, one after another. Moved into the Caribbean, by which time they've been joined joined by the Spanish, the English. And the model started to proliferate all over the world. Very profitable, but fantastically destructive. And what capitalism is, is a system of colonial looting which creates and destroys its' own Frontiers. It creates these highly lucrative Frontiers. It burns through them, literally or metaphorically, with extraordinary speed. And then, it has to move on to find the next one. And that's the product of bringing together these three Commodities at one and the same time.

And it's moved on to destroy Frontier, after Frontier, after Frontier. Ecologically, socially, culturally. It's a planet trashing machine.

Technofeuadliam's twist?   Just throw in the Commodification of Information.  Big Data

More excerpts from the above video (but very confused and illogocal v. Neoliberalism):

...You've created a commoditized money supply through your capitalist Enterprise too, so it's a sort of self-perpetuating machine until the point at which it crashes and burns. And so, for several hundred years they had pretty well a clear run. But then, it ran into a problem, a problem called Democracy. Because, when adults began to have the vote, they started to use that vote in ways that Capitalists don't like very much, like saying, "Well, perhaps we should have a bigger share of the money which is being produced through our labor. In fact, perhaps our labor should not be commoditized to the extent that it is, and we should reclaim some of our Humanity. Perhaps we shouldn't allow Machinery to rip our arms off. Perhaps we shouldn't live in places which are so choked with pollution, that we die by the time we're 40. Perhaps we want a better world for everyone, not just for Capitalists. Perhaps we want outrageous things like weekends off!"

And this was a huge problem, because it greatly limited the ability of Capitalists to make money to extract from this system, and it is an extractive system. That's what it is. And suddenly you have this limitation put in front of your extraction. And Neoliberalism is one of the two most effective means of solving Capitalism's biggest problem, which is democracy. The other one, incidentally, is Fascism, which is always backed by Big Money wherever it arises, but we're talking about neoliberalism today.

So Neoliberalism is a full-on assault on political choice that, that's its fundamental characteristic. And what it says is, we should not seek to resolve our problems and our questions in the political sphere, in other words, through democracy. We should seek to resolve them in the economic sphere. We should seek to resolve them through this thing it calls "the Market." Which, like almost all the terms involved in Neoliberalism, is the opposite of what it says it is. You know, you think about a market, what are you thinking about? You think about little little stalls with stripy awnings, and more or less an egalitarian sphere. Of

course Capitalism is the exact opposite of that, arguably the very opposite of markets. It's a sphere in which some people exploit, and other people are exploited. And so these these confusions are baked in from the very beginning. And you know, one of the primary purposes of our book is to try to resolve these confusions and explain what the terms really mean.

So but the market, in the hands of Neoliberals, means the power of money. And so, we move this away from the sphere where we don't have control , where Capital does not have control (politics), into the sphere where Capital does have control, which is the economic sphere. And of course, some people have far more power in the economic sphere than other people have. It's not one person, one vote. It can be one person's millions of votes... millions of dollars, and other person's far fewer dollars. And so they tell you, if you can shift the decision making into that sphere, you've got us where you want us.

So the the term "Neoliberalism" was developed in 1938 at a at a colloquium, a meeting in Paris. But it didn't really take off, and it wasn't really formalized, until the publication of two books in 1944, which was Friedrick Hayek's book "The Road to Serfdom", and Ludvig Von Mises's book "Bureaucracy". And they had an almost identical theme. They claim that any attempt to interfere in the workings of this thing they call "the Market", to interfere with the power of money in other words, would lead inevitably to totalitarianism.

It might look like something benign, the incipient welfare state and economic safety net, public funded services, but that would inevitably lead to Hitler or to Stalin. It was a classic slippery slope fallacy. And it was, you know, put forward with some Force by them. They're quite readable books. I mean they're absolutely chock full of holes, but you know you can sort of see there's there's a thread that you can follow, an argument that is more or less coherent, but very easy to tear apart.

And they were saying that "such impediments to Capital as high taxes, as regulation, as trade unions, as protest, should be stripped away in order to enable a kind of "natural order" to be discovered of winners and losers. There are the those who have the grace of money, and those who do not have the grace of money. And you can see from who has money, who is deserving, and who is not deserving. And if you try to alter that natural order of the righteous and the unrighteous (it's a very Calvinist approach), if you try to interfere with that, then you will sap Humanity of its Vitality. You will strip away the Spirit of Enterprise and make everyone poorer. Because if you allow the rich to get richer, they will through the "Invisible Hand" generate the money that will shower down upon the rest of us.

And you say, "Well hang on moment I thought the rest of us weren't meant to get richer. I thought we were meant to stay poor because we're unworthy!" So, straight away we start to see these enormous contradictions in it. And many peoplereacted with absolute horror and disgust towards these ideas. At the time, the dominant form of political economic thought was Keynesianism, Keynesian social democracy, which was very much distributive within the rich Nations. It was still highly exploitative between rich and poor. It was obviously a form of Capitalism. But it was far more distributive within the rich Nations tham we've ever seen before, and was about building up Public Services, was about ensuring that everybody had a decent standard of life so they could spend into the economy, and that generates economic growth. And so, this Neoliberalism was at the time very much out of tune with the times.