4 ms·
The industrial revolution needs to be understood in the context of land enclosure laws. Workers had no choice. That is what allows employer exploitation: work
by branchless 11y ago
The industrial revolution needs to be understood in the context of land enclosure laws.
Workers had no choice. That is what allows employer exploitation: work for me or starve.
This is why the USA had slavery - there was abundant land. In the UK the UK was the plantation with land enclosure.
This is why now we feel exploited by "capitalism". Banks are flooding the world with fiat money as private debt primarily against land. Don't want to work for the man? You have no choice. Take out your banker debt for education and land and then pay them part of your salary as tribute.
This isn't capitalism.
http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/enclosure-acts-industrial-revolution/ http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/enclosure-acts-indust...
When we have access to land we have a choice. Presently we must all toil away to maintain access to living space via a death pledge (mort-gage).
In a capitalist world money is the medium for the message. If we aren't financially free we aren't free.
- ArkyBeagle 11y agoThe US inherited an existing slave regime from the Caribbean. It entailed exactly the same cognitive dissonance required of soldiers in the British Empire as described by Orwell in "Burmese Days". So it looks Mercantilist to me. I don't hold that debt is inherent to what we consider capitalism. I run the risk of a "no true Scotsman" fallacy with this, but debt is something we have because of path dependence, not because it's shown to be inevitable or optimal. The fact that debt cannot be easily retired indicates that we haven't finished this as an institution. At the level of a debt holder, of course you can't do this. At the level of a general person living in society, the un-retire-ability of debt creates a common, sort-of pubic goods problem because it slows growth. Classical and pre-Classical societies held debt jubilees. Could we? I don't know.
- dragonwriter 11y agoDebt jubilees would be directly contrary to the capitalist conception of property; insofar as it features them, a society has broken with capitalism.
- ArkyBeagle 11y agoDebt is an artifact of finance, not of capitalism. If some genius tomorrow announced a way to have money creation without the attendant debt overhang, we'd do that instead. Capitalism would still be exactly the same. Debt precedes capitalism by... the entirety of human history. The map is not the territory and accounting and finance are technologies that attend to productive enterprise, not the enterprises themselves.