re: #356 The Ghost of a Flea

To paraphrase my uncle, who was born in the Raj and became a Marxist-Leninist:

…and a lot of people in the developing world were colonized by a nation that practiced capitalism and had no issue with treading them into the ground to make a profit. Indeed, if you were in a British colony, you’d be told that it was all for your own good. Capitalism wasn’t incidental to the subjugation of those people, it was front-and-center. They were a captive labor force, a captive consumer audience, and were explicitly being told by their European rulers that this is the only way things can work.

And if they were fluent in international politics, they could even look at countries that were no longer colonies, but still had the massive wealth division, injustice, and cultural segregation…like most of South America…and want something different.

The appeal of socialism and communism on paper was that it refuted what the colonized were being told by their colonizers, root and branch. Given self-determination, not a lot of folks wanted to recapitulate the system they’d already experienced.

So tea has caused more shit than booze?