5/27/2023 0 Comments Giant Days, Vol. 2 by John AllisonToday’s planetary ecological crisis is a direct result of this plundering and pollution of the earth. The world has become a sink in which to pour industrial wastes using the cheapest form of disposal. The Industrial Revolution, as Karl Marx indicated in the nineteenth century, was made possible by means of the brutal enclosure of the commons in England together with the even more barbaric colonization abroad carried out by the European powers, encompassing “the discovery of gold and silver in the Americas, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of those continents, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins.” Taken together, these forms of “original expropriation” formed the historical basis for the “genesis of the industrial capitalist.” 2įrom the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the present day, capitalism has plundered natural as well as human resources with abandon, squandering fresh water, soil, forests, fisheries, and mineral deposits. Capitalism has always been based on the expropriation of land, resources, and human lives in order to create the conditions for the exploitation of labor.
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