Big Cotton Got Us Started, Big Oil Keeps Us Going...(until it kills us) A long thread of tragedy is woven through the story of the puffy white substance that clothes us all. Every stage of the industrialization of cotton rested on violence. Today North Atlantic capital, managed by giant and powerful retailers like Walmart or Carrefour, exploits the workers of Asia and the Global South. It sets the terms of production and price, encouraging brutal exploitation of labor that amounts to a brutal race to the bottom. In global cities bidding on commodity exchanges, trade in derivatives and bets on price movements transform labor and cotton into an abstraction. At a time when many believe in unregulated capitalism, this history may suggest reconsidering that faith. Empire was the foundation of cotton capitalism, with warfare being one of its instruments. Today, in Uzbekistan, up to two million children under 15 are put to work harvesting cotton each year. Alexis de Tocqueville...was shocked on a visit to Manchester: “Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilization works its miracles, and civilized man is turned back almost into a savage.” Contrary to the myth of untrammeled free enterprise, this expanding industry was fueled at every stage by government intervention. From Denmark to Mexico to Russia, states lent large sums to early clothing manufacturers. Whether it was canals and railways in Europe or levees on the Mississippi, governments jumped in to build or finance the infrastructure that big cotton growers and mills demanded. Everywhere the state favored capital at the expense of labor, notably vagrancy laws and crop lien protocols. Large landowners and merchants dominated. Without slavery, there would have been no Industrial Revolution. Northerners provided the insurance, brokerage, financing and shipping, making New York the financial capital of the Americas. nytimes/2015/01/04/books/review/empire-of-cotton-by-sven-beckert.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar%2C%7B%221%22%3A%22RI%3A11%22%7D nytimes/2014/12/30/books/empire-of-cotton-by-sven-beckert.html?ref=books
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 18:06:00 +0000
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