Anyone who lives a comfortable life directly profits off of the exploitation and suffering of others. Same thing for Europeans and their imperialism of Africa and Asia.
How are people okay with it.
This is why social democracy without addressing imperialism is social fascism. It’s a rather harsh term, but there’s no way to get around it.
In Eastern Europe one of the favorite liberal anecdotes about the socialist times is that “you had to stand in long queues just so you can buy a damn banana! How absurd! In the west you just walk in the store and buy as many as you want! Clearly the better system!”
They always seem to forget that banana companies payrolled literal fascist death squads in Latin America…
You know what’s the worst part? Knowing that you don’t even get to live that better. I mean, sure some greasy monster bathes in blood in a golden jacuzzi, but your average life standard wouldn’t be worse if imperialism didn’t exist.
I mean, all this much suffering and underdevelopment in the world only for some few mfers jerk off with caviar, which they could even still do without regularly destroying so many people’s futures.
Also, you don’t even do cool things anymore, like “damn being an egyptian slave in the 3k BC sucks but that’s some dope ass pyramids” versus “damn having our recently built infraestructure bombed/privatized-and-dismantled sucks but that’s some dope gold leaf on a poorly cooked steak in a sweetsixteen party in the Hamptons”
If a billionaire were left with only 25 million dollars they would be “ruined”. If they had to sell of fleets of cars, mansions, fire staff to maintain idle mansions, special infrastructure returned to nature, etc. they would have to subsist in only one mansion and would have to text GrubHub and Uber themselves every time they wanted something. It would be horrifying.
Can you imagine only having one luxury refrigerator! Where would people put their ice cream?
Akshually the pyramids were built by farmers in the off season, and there’s records both of their pay and of them going on strike.
I wish more people would think about this when talking about imperialism. Somehow as soon as we start talking about how the West benefits from imperialism we start swallowing the capitalist propaganda about how it’s for our benefit, as if capitalists have ever done things for our benefit.
A big part of imperialism is destroying industries thousand of km abroad (dooming the futures of the locals) for the imperial merchants to make 5% more money every year; so you know, looks like we could all be averagely better if we didn’t spend lot of time destroying each others infraestructure.
I wouldn’t agree that the industries were destroyed, but they were constructed by westerners, and the resources and profits from the industries are sent abroad without any input from local citizens.
Things are going to get pretty rough in the coming years as the American empire gets chipped away at (collapse is probably a bit too strong of a word, but you never know), and [many] American citizens panic as their living standards drop from incredibly high to average or a bit above average. Unless things change significantly the future living standard probably looks a little bit more like Brazil than Germany.
There is literally no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism. Everything you have is built on the backs of exploited workers. Anything short of complete personal autarchy (like, grow your own food, make your own tools out of iron ore you dig out of the ground) will involve horrific abuses because that’s fundamentally how capitalism works.
I tend to go through cycles of depressed doomerism and raw rage, I don’t know which feels worse.
You can still make sure how something is produced, make sure to buy things that last. The most ethical way to live is by consuming little.
You can try to do better (be more ethical rather than less) but completely ethical consumption is impossible. If you buy fair trade coffee in a recyclable glass jar there’s a non-zero chance that the glass in it was processed by slave labour. If you buy so much as a pen, the metal in it was probably mined under horrific conditions.
Every item in a supermarket is stained with tiny amounts of blood.
You can try to do better (be more ethical rather than less) but completely ethical consumption is impossible.
Of course, unless you know the whole chain, including how the machines used were produced, you are potentially profiting from exploitation. That doesn’t change that you can still make sure to avoid exploitation as much as possible. In a capitalist world pretty much every product is created through exploitation, but I prefer people being paid less than the value they create (for their employer) over ruthless exploitation and disregard for human life or even actual slavery. I don’t like when people try to paint any consumption as equal in order to justify not having to care about their consumption.
In a similar vein, I feel crazy when I think that Americans genocided a huge indigenous population and stole a continent’s worth of land… and no one cares or really thinks we did a bad thing! I mean, I guess we really don’t reflect on what we did because that would require us admitting we did a really bad thing and the people who founded this country were bad. It would also require us to admit all this doesn’t really belong to us. But even slavery, Americans can at least very superficially admit it was bad. No one ever talks about the genocide of native Americans and the theft of their land.
I brought this point up to a friend of mine and he said “We made their lives better, unfortunately at the cost of lives.” I absolutely cannot understand how he thinks lives were made better.
