Connecting Capitalism to Colonialism

“Colonialism has never ended. Slavery has never ended. Feudalism has never ended. The power elite just find more and more inventive ways to exploit the majority.”

When we think of colonialism, slavery, and feudalism, we perhaps envisage these subjects as elements of our history: abhorrent, destructive, and with lasting repercussions - but essentially something in our past which we must recognise, address and account. What we perhaps don’t think of is the food on our plates, the clothes we’re wearing, or even the phone in our hands.

In our global economy, however, supply chains hide a magnitude of human rights abuses and environmental destruction, including child labour, slave labour, resource depletion, toxic dumping, illegal deforestation, corporate threats, the murder of land defenders… amongst many other social and ecological atrocities.

But what does this have to do with colonialism? When it comes to consumption and the material objects which occupy our daily lives, people are increasingly talking about the hidden cost, or the true cost of things. We often see that it is communities and peoples in the so-called Global South who are bearing that true cost. It is not by coincidence that economic globalisation, the inevitable consequence of capitalism, leads to more destruction in nations which have historically been colonised, marginalised, and labelled as ‘developing’ countries. This is because the ostensible ‘success’ of both capitalism and colonialism hinges upon exploitation.

In an interview with Alnoor Ladha, he discussed with us the origins of this relationship between colonial and capitalist destruction, and how the two relate to each other, both historically and also now in the present...

The long and the short of it is that, we lived [hunter-gatherer lifestyles] for 99% of human history, where we were in small bands, living in highly egalitarian societies, and this is what Marshall Sahlins calls the original affluent societies. There’s a lot of work in revolutionary and cultural anthropology and archaeology that shows this to be true: bone samples and teeth samples show that we were roughly having 2000 calories a day (which is more than 80-90% of humanity is having now), working 10 hours a week in highly cooperative, safe environments within tribes. Of course, between tribes there was conflict, but to say this sort of modern, Western, capitalist, materialist, rationalist ideology that human beings are somehow selfish and violent – it’s fundamentally untrue.

What social science is showing us is that we are highly contextual beings: so, if we create the right context, anything is possible. So then, to your question: what is the context that we have created?

We went from being in trust to the mother and having our daily sustenance come from gathering and being in that deep resonance, to then creating city states where as soon as there is surplus, that surplus is guarded by a militia or a paramilitary. [They] are then governed by a priest-class or an emperor or whatever, and the sort of ziggurats of Uruk and Babylon demonstrate this hierarchy: there are these pyramids where grain are stored at the bottom, and then there’s the protector class, then the priest class, then the monarchy at the top of the pyramid. We actually haven’t strayed that far from that model: London and New York aren’t that different from ancient Babylon in that sense.

Our police are essentially guardians of capital and private property. Laws are built around the protection of private property. We have a system that essentially exploits the poor and allows the rich through this invention of compound interest to accumulate large amounts of wealth. And that wealth largely came from the Global South - from a historical, colonial perspective.

What happened in a place like England for example: you had the enclosure movement. Near the end of feudalism, what they realised was that if people are self-sufficient we won’t be able to extract wealth from them. After the sort of pushback and the rebellions around feudalism, they just found a way to create a new feudal system which was to enclose the commons, turn it into private property, and turn people into wage slaves. And as soon as that sort of hit its peak of payback essentially, the colonialist, extraction venture of the 1400s to – well, arguably now, but let’s say - the late 1800s happened.

For example, 30% of Britain’s wealth came from India. That’s how the streets are paved the way they are and there are marble buildings. It was through the pillage of South East Asia, the African continent, and for Spain and Portugal: Latin America. Of course, all the European countries took their piece of the pie.

So, if you extract all the minerals and all the resources, then you set up a system where the only way you can acquire goods and services is through a debt-based currency (that’s either the Euro or the US dollar) essentially what you’ve done is impose a system of tyranny and colonialism that essentially now just exists through the modern banking system.

You can look at something like, the fossil fuels system:

What happened in the 1950s and 1960s was that UK economists would go to Africa through all of these post-Bretton Woods bodies that came out of the United Nations, and say that the only way you are going to be part of the ‘progress’ of the future will be to have road-based, sub-urban, industrial capitalism. They pushed modern automobiles, and the Ford factories came, etc… Then the 1972 OPEC oil crisis hits, and to this day about 30-40% of the African continent’s debt has come from that moment of 1972.

OPEC Oil Crisis 1973

There’s this huge amount of accumulated debt which is just made up. It’s come from the imposition of the West on the Global South. And then you look at something like tax… Everybody loves to talk about the UK’s charity, or the U.S.’s charity to the global south, but all of global aid from the north to the Global south through ODA (Overseas Development Assistance) [amounts to] about 160-180 billion dollars.

[In comparison,] just in tax evasion by multinational corporations that are almost exclusively based in Western Europe and the U.S. and Canada, the Global South is losing something like 1.3 trillion dollars a year. Around ten times [the amount] of all aid is lost through tax evasion.

Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Nestlé… these corporations have never paid tax on the African continent. And the way they do this is through the tax haven system and through transfer pricing. The average multinational has 5000 subsidiaries, they’ll sell say a million staplers at a loss to their UK branch - which would have to pay tax in a country where they have to respect the tax system - then they will claim their revenue in a place like the Cayman Islands where they don’t have to pay tax.

Their effective tax rate ends up becoming 5% or something crazy like that and nobody can compete with them: this is a form of colonialism.

Colonialism has never ended. Slavery has never ended. Feudalism has never ended. The power elite just find more and more inventive ways to exploit the majority.

What’s so messy about modernity is that in some ways they have our complicit willingness to do it. Because we want the latest clothes from H&M, we want the music they tell us that we should be listening to and the automobiles that they design. It’s actually the complex of desire, that is then perpetuated by the advertising industrial complex, and the values and the sort of shaming complex, that then put us into this system. Now, people are happy to work minimum wage in their b******t jobs.

The complexity of colonialism has now been internalised in all of our minds. I think it was Steve Biko who said: The most useful tool of the coloniser is the mind of the colonised. In some sense, we are all that.”

*Biko was a leader of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) and he was also very instrumental in freeing black students from the chains of mental oppression.*

You can find the full interview with Alnoor Ladha here, where we explore the responsibility of multinational corporations in maintaining colonial structures through current neoliberal systems, tax evasion, monoculture and our individual internalisation of these systems, as well as the abundant possibilities to be born from localisation and de-growth.

Find out more about consumption through our Waste and Consumerism topic , explore more about capitalism through our New Economies topic, or explore how we can transform into more equitable and healthier societies through our Just Transition topic.

Alnoor’s work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, systems thinking, structural change and narrative work. He was the co-founder and Executive Director of The Rules, a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others focused on changing the rules that create inequality, poverty and climate change. TR started in 2012 as a time-bound project and an experiment in temporary organizational design, exploring new ways of how to work, play, and make trouble together. Alnoor comes from a Sufi lineage and writes about the crossroads of politics and spirituality in troubled times. His work has been published in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Truthout, Fast Company, Kosmos Journal, New Internationalist, and the Huffington Post among others. He is a board member of Culture Hack Labs, a co-operatively run advisory for social movements and progressive organizations. He holds an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics.

Twitter: Alnoor.ladha

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