Marx and the Dutch East India Capitalism

georgephillip

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Dec 27, 2009
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Any economic system dependent upon unpaid labor (slavery) for its first century of "success" in the US should settle the question of profits over people, but obviously ignorance is bliss for many 21st Century consumers

MR Online | Marx and the Dutch East India Company

"In the final part of Capital, Volume I on 'the so-called original accumulation', Marx gives a dazzling overview of the often violent historical phenomena that contributed to the birth of the capitalist system, 'dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt...'"

"Marx mentions Dutch colonialism in Indonesia several times in the first volume of Capital, and elsewhere in his work.

"But the most significant passage comes early in the chapter on the 'Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist'.

"Its subject is colonial slavery, and the brutal depopulation of conquered areas that accompanied it.

"After citing the British colonial administrator Thomas Stamford Raffles’s judgement that the history of Dutch rule in Asia was “one of the most extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, massacre, and meanness...'"
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https://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Years-Later-Capitalism-Antislavery/dp/9067180963&tag=ff0d01-20
 
MR Online | Marx and the Dutch East India Company

"Nothing is more characteristic than their system of stealing men, to get slaves for Java.

"The men stealers were trained for this purpose.

"The thief, the interpreter, and the seller, were the chief agents in this trade, native princes the chief sellers.

"The young people stolen, were thrown into the secret dungeons of Celebes, until they were ready for sending to the slave-ships. An official report says:

"'This one town of Macassar, e.g., is full of secret prisons, one more horrible than the other, crammed with unfortunates, victims of greed and tyranny fettered in chains, forcibly torn from their families.'"

"… Wherever [the Dutch] set foot, devastation and depopulation followed. Banjuwangi, a province of Java, in 1750 numbered over 80,000 inhabitants, in 1811 only 18,000. Sweet commerce!"
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Karl Marx (1818-1883)
 

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