And in the past, India had severe famines, though like China, there was never a famine that wasn’t compensated in a sense by good crops from another part of the country. The British claimed that because of the railroads, it would be impossible to have famines in India anymore. They’d also pioneered large-scale irrigation to raise cotton, something that became urgent during the US Civil War and its resulting cotton famine.
India is the most dramatic example, in part because it occurred on the watch of British liberalism.īy the 1870s, the British had sponsored a great deal of development in India of canals and railroads designed to move export products from interior agricultural regions to the coast. The story differed from place to place, but the final death toll was enormous. The incorporation of the great subsistence peasantries of South and East Asia was absolutely cataclysmic. Jacobin’s Meagan Day talked with Davis about how the historical crimes of capitalism differ from those of socialism, and how to talk about the differences between them in an era of ever-more savage capitalism - as well as new openings for the socialist left. If famines are the yardstick we’re using to measure the suitability of a global economic system, then capitalists have a lot to answer for.
Capitalism has an enormous death toll of its own. Mike Davis’s book Late Victorian Holocausts complicates that story significantly. Horrifying episodes like the Great Chinese Famine and the Soviet famine under Stalin are brandished as proof that socialism can never work and is too dangerous to attempt, so we’re better off with capitalism. For decades, one of the most popular methods of undermining socialists has been an appeal to the atrocities that occurred in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. Not only did we gain an extraordinarily wide hearing for our political ideas, but we also spooked our ideological opponents, and as a result got a good look at their rhetorical arsenal. This summer’s electoral wave gave the US socialist left a much larger audience than we’re used to.
0 kommentar(er)
