Saturday, April 10, 2010

This can't have been the original intention, but I think all patriotic songs could use some words that the patriotic song "Dixie" has. "Look away, look away." To get that rah-rah patriotic feeling about a country, it helps to look away from many things.

Frederick Braudel, and others, have said large scale capitalism and large scale slavery came in at the same time, and that is no coincidence. Braudel says for large scale capitalism to work, there has to be on the planet a large group of people working as slaves, or close to slavery.

The middle people for whom large scale capitalism works well are, by this theory, floating atop people with no choice working for nothing, or people with very little choice working for little. The mid-capitalism experience feels better if one finds ways to look away from that.