User:FormalDude/Capitalism and genocide

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1911 political cartoon from The Masses depicting hunger and capitalism.

Some academics have argued that there is a connection between capitalism and genocide.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] These academics argue that capitalism is the cause of several genocides throughout history, including the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]

Academic views[edit]

According to sociologist James V. Fenelon, "Genocide accompanied every phase of world capitalism, including twentieth century forms that arose in Europe."[1] Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro et al. list the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy as "liberal or free-market democracies" that genocide has occurred under.[3]

According to anthropologist Jason Hickel, capitalism requires the accumulation of excess wealth in the hands of economic elites for the purpose of large scale investment, continuous growth and expansion, and enormous amounts of cheap labor. As such, there was never and could never have been a gradual or peaceful transition to capitalism, and that "organized violence, mass impoverishment, and the destruction of self-sufficient subsistence economies" ushered in the capitalist era. Its emergence was fueled by immiseration and extreme violence, including indigenous genocide, artificial scarcity and famines, and mass slavery, that accompanied enclosure and colonization, with colonized peoples becoming enslaved workers producing products that were then processed by European peasants, dispossessed by enclosure, who filled the factories in desperation as exploited cheap labor. Hickel adds "the first few hundred years of capitalism generated misery to a degree unknown in the pre-capitalist era."[7][8]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c Fenelon, James V. (2016-03-22). "Genocide, Race, Capitalism: Synopsis of Formation within the Modern World-system". Journal of World-Systems Research. 22 (1): 23–30. doi:10.5195/jwsr.2016.607. ISSN 1076-156X.
  2. ^ a b Crook, Martin; Short, Damien; South, Nigel (2018-08-30). "Ecocide, genocide, capitalism and colonialism: Consequences for indigenous peoples and glocal ecosystems environments". Theoretical Criminology. 22 (3): 298–317. doi:10.1177/1362480618787176. ISSN 1362-4806. S2CID 150239863 – via SAGE Journals.
  3. ^ a b c Engel-Di Mauro, Salvatore (2021-01-02). "Anti-Communism and the Hundreds of Millions of Victims of Capitalism". Capitalism Nature Socialism. 32 (1): 1–17. doi:10.1080/10455752.2021.1875603. ISSN 1045-5752. S2CID 233745505 – via Taylor & Francis Online.
  4. ^ a b Ghodsee, Kristen R.; Sehon, Scott (2018-03-22). "The merits of taking an anti-anti-communism stance". Aeon. Retrieved 2022-02-07.
  5. ^ a b Sagall, Sabby (2013-10-20). Final Solutions: Human Nature, Capitalism and Genocide. Pluto Press. ISBN 978-0-7453-2653-5.
  6. ^ a b Maslin, Mark; Lewis, Simon (25 June 2020). "Why the Anthropocene began with European colonisation, mass slavery and the 'great dying' of the 16th century". The Conversation. Retrieved 9 February 2022.
  7. ^ a b c Hickel, Jason (2021). "Capitalism: A Creation Story". Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. Windmill Books. pp. 39–80. ISBN 978-1786091215.
  8. ^ a b c Hickel, Jason (2018). The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets. W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 69–70. ISBN 978-0393651362.
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