Inspired by reading King Leopold's Ghost, which compares the Belgian genocide in late 1800's-early 1900's Congo to the Soviet Gulags, and then reading Imperial Reckoning, which compares the British torture camps in 1950's Kenya to the Soviet Gulags, and also by reading Golden Gulag, which compares mass incarceration in California to, you guessed it...
Westerners incapable of criticizing the west without invoking racist and tired tropes about the second world
Parenti gets it right in Blackshirts & Reds:
For decades, many left-leaning writers and speakers in the United States have felt obliged to establish their credibility by indulging in anticommunist and anti-Soviet genuflection, seemingly unable to give a talk or write an article or book review on whatever political subject without injecting some anti-Red sideswipe. The intent was, and still is, to distance themselves from the Marxist-Leninist Left.
Adam Hochschild, a liberal writer and publisher, warned those on the Left who might be lackadaisical about condemning existing communist societies that they “weaken their credibility” {Guardian, 5/23/84). In other words, to be credible opponents of the cold war, we first had to join in cold war condemnations of communist societies.
Was pretty funny reading King Leopold's Ghost and noticing all the anti-Soviet shit and then reading Blackshirts & Reds and seeing Hochschild get called out by name
Liberals barely even acknowledge that class interests exist. A lot of the things that Marxists consider to be the most basic and elemental foundations of the world are like alien concepts to libs, who might as well be the politics version of geocentrists.
Real Communism is arguing with your college friends about politics in a Prussian cafe, but not too loudly because you don't want the King's secret police to snatch you up and throw you in prison.
All the Mass Line and the Vanguard Party and Internationalism came later, when Radical Anarcho-Fascists like Lenin and Mao and Castro actually got off their asses and did shit.
Tbh that's the least egregious of the three, iirc the comparison isn't really brought up outside of the title. And yeah, overall it is a good, informative read.
The word "gulag" wasn't added for the sake of alliteration, as Gilmore said the working title of the book was "Sunshine Gulag"
...God dammit I forgot that King Leopold's Ghost did a Communism Bad.
...I'll bet our rubber is still gained via exploitation and we just stopped caring because it doesn't DIRECTLY involve slavery.
Iirc the book said that the Rubber Terror was particularly intense because the invention of rubber tires caused demand for rubber to surge, and it would be several years until new rubber plantations could mature to meet that demand, so the colonizers had a brief period to capitalize on the high prices by forcing slaves to collect wild rubber.
Today rubber comes from rubber farms throughout the tropical world, with 35% of it coming from Thailand. So it's probably about as exploitative as any other export crop farmed in the global South.
Yeah, something like 40% of Thai farmers are below the poverty line.
Although actually I'm looking at statistics now and abt 60% of rubber is now synthetic rubber made from petroleum (which is its own whole bag of worms) with China being the largest producer. So probably not as bad.
So probably not as bad.
Hmm... Maybe for the workers in the synthetic rubber factories. But unless an equivalency in the productivity of plantation-grown rubber, IDK about that.
Remember that an increase in the average productivity of a sector is a decline in it's average demand for labor-hours; that is, the proportion of the labor-value that gets paid to the worker for the same hour of work is reduced. If you are using a non-standard process that takes more labor-hours to create the same amount of product then you going to be operating at a relative loss to your competitors even if you're paying them at the new proportional wage-rate. That means in order to be competitive, you have to pay them an even lower portion of the total product of the process than what the new, more-"efficient" method of production provides the worker. That or you need to intensify the pace of the labor significantly.
Source for this: Marx' bit about the introduction of the Spinning Jenny to England in Capital Vol. 1
So in other words, natural rubber farmers get fucked even worse because they have to compete with cheaper synthetic rubber?
Capitalists doing capitalist things, capitalistically: What are we a bunch of commies?!
