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by einhverfr
3607 days ago
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Looks fascinating. The abstract dovetails on Hilaire Belloc's "The Servile State" in interesting ways. Belloc argued that the key to the success of the industrial revolution in the UK was the confiscation of Catholic church lands under Henry VIII because this created destitute masses that could be exploited in the factories. So to Belloc, Protestantism as a political system was the key to understanding the economic problems of Capitalism. Thinking about Belloc's thesis a bit more, you have a parallel to the Confiscation of the monasteries in the US, and that was the liberation of the slaves. One can think about slave-based agriculture in the Antebellum South as increasingly industrialized (and even increasingly exploitative as a result). And the civil war not only empowered corporations with large military contracts but also in its resolution provided them with destitute masses pushed into the wage labor system. As I usually say, all racial oppression in the US has been economic in both ends and means. But in both cases, the religious landscape evolved to match the economic landscape. And the ideological landscape quickly followed. In some rural parts of the US it is still possible to have a discussion about common good, even with people one politically disagrees with. But in the cities, it is all about individualism and rights and any questioning of the in-group orthodoxy gets one labeled as "the enemy." It took me actually living in Indonesia for a number of years to grasp the depth of difference there. And one of the things that is worth repeating often is that when third worlders speak of first world problems, they don't regard these as trivialities. Indonesians and Malaysians don't want to become like Americans and grow old alone. To those in the third world[1], they have already rejected what Americans and British hold to be (paraphrasing Thatcher) without alternative. I now count myself in the same category. [1] using the term in the original sense, namely countries which reject both Anglo-American capitalism and Soviet/Chinese Communism. I sometimes refer to Sweden as third world for this reason also, though it is far more Capitalist than others. |
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