George Monbiot: Trashing the planet and hiding the money isn’t a perversion of capitalism. It is capitalism
Whenever there’s a leak of documents from the remote islands and obscure jurisdictions where rich people hide their money, such as this week’s release of the Pandora papers, we ask ourselves how such things could happen. How did we end up with a global system that enables great wealth to be transferred offshore, untaxed and hidden from public view? Politicians condemn it as “the unacceptable face of capitalism”. But it’s not. It is the face of capitalism.
Capitalism was
arguably born on a remote island. A few decades after the Portuguese colonised
Madeira in 1420, they developed a system that differed in some respects from
anything that had gone before. By felling the forests after which they named
the island (madeira is Portuguese for wood), they created, in this
uninhabited sphere, a blank slate – a terra nullius – in which
a new economy could be built. Financed by bankers in Genoa and Flanders, they
transported enslaved people from Africa to plant and process sugar. They
developed an economy in which land, labour and money lost their previous social
meaning and became tradable commodities.
As the geographer Jason Moore points out in the journal Review, a small amount of capital could be used, in these circumstances, to grab a vast amount of natural wealth. On Madeira’s rich soil, using the abundant wood as fuel, slave labour achieved a previously unimaginable productivity. In the 1470s, this tiny island became the world’s biggest producer of sugar. Madeira’s economy also had another characteristic that distinguished it from what had gone before: the astonishing speed at which it worked through the island’s natural wealth. Sugar production peaked in 1506. By 1525 it had fallen by almost 80%. The major reason, Moore believes, was the exhaustion of accessible supplies of wood: Madeira ran out of madeira.
It took 60kg of wood
to refine 1kg of sugar. As wood had to be cut from ever steeper and more remote
parts of the island, more slave labour was needed to produce the same amount of
sugar. In other words, the productivity of labour collapsed, falling roughly
fourfold in 20 years. At about the same time, the forest clearing drove several
endemic species to extinction…
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/06/offshoring-wealth-capitalism-pandora-papers
Walter Benjamin: Capitalism as Religion (1921)
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