Tag: Capitalism

The world after the Second World War was essentially a bipolar one with the USA and other recognised capitalist countries in bitter opposition to the Soviet Union and other countries within her orbit. It was Winston Churchill, the wartime British Prime Minister who coined the phrase, ‘iron curtain’ which showed quite graphically the steely or even bloody divide between the capitalist west and the communist East in European affairs. That division was quite clear in Europe but far from being explicit in other parts of the world. By 1949 the Chinese Communist Party had fought her way to power in Beijing but apart from their shared ideology, China was not a true satellite of the Soviet Union as there were areas of contention between the two communist giants. The two antagonistic ideological groups were soon at each other’s throat over Korea.

At the end of WW II, the Korean peninsular was boiling over with tension. For the previous thirty-five years, Korea had been a much abused Japanese colony, part which had been liberated by Russian troops at the tail end of the war. Indeed it was the entry of the Soviets in the war against Japan that finally and quite definitely convinced the Japanese to furl their fighting standards and surrender to the Americans. At the time of the surrender, the Russians occupied the area north of the thirty-eighth parallel thus creating two Koreas, North and South. Each side was determined to claim the whole peninsular for itself but in the end, this only created a stalemate between a communist North and a capitalist South, a division that still exists after all the time that has elapsed and all the lives that have been wasted. The problem in Korea led to a nasty little war with the United States fighting to establish a capitalist state in the South and the communists backing the forces from the North.

With material and diplomatic support from the Soviet Union,  the Chinese on the northern border, sent troops into the peninsular to help the communist forces, led by Kim Il Sung, to capture Seoul and establish communist rule throughout Korea. Seoul was on the verge of falling to the communists when the USA, in the absence of the Soviet Union at the Security Council managed to engineer a United Nation resolution to intervene in the conflict on the side of the beleaguered south. The US at the head of a coalition of more than twenty nations under the blue UN flag but, contributing about 90% of men and materials, entered the war on the side of South Korea. At the end of three years of blood letting however, each side was still left with what they had at the beginning. The newly elected President of the USA, Dwight Eisenhower, was fully committed to ending what was turning out to be sterile engagement and signed an armistice which brought an end to the fighting. More than seventy years later no peace treaty has been signed and Korea remains bitterly divided between communism and capitalism with the most heavily militarized border the world has ever seen between them.

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Korea became a symbol of the Cold War which raged between the USA and her allies on one side and the Soviet block on the other until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992. It started because the incumbent American President, Harry Truman was determined not to yield an inch of ground to any communist advance anywhere in the world. All throughout that period, the two sides glared at each other with murderous intent from the top of huge piles of nuclear weapons. Each side was fully conscious of mutual assured destruction (MAD) which guaranteed that no side was mad enough to provoke the launch of any of those terrible weapons.

At the end of the Second World War, the only industrialised country of note was the USA. All the countries in Europe had their industrial capacity reduced to virtually nothing. The Germans had bombed British industry to rubble and had done the same to France whilst the allies had pounded German industry to dust and the Russians had lost whatever they had before to Operation Barbarossa. And the USA did not waste any moment or opportunity to consolidate her position as the leading, or rather, the only industrial country standing. The USA was now in a position to rule the world and her businessmen took full advantage of the situation. The largest American companies; her oil giants, Coca cola, Pepsi, Kodak, Xerox,  Ford, General Motors, United Fruit, Boeing, to mention only a few in no particular order became what came to be known as multinational companies with business interests in all parts of the world outside the communist block. The war was hardly over when USA instigated the formation of the United Nations Organisation which within the first few years of its existence had been used as cover for American interests in Korean. Naturally, it had its headquarters in New York. Even before the war ended, the Allied powers had met to set up what the world has come to be known as the Bretton Woods institutions; the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank which have since then held a tight, some would say, a choking grip on the administration of what passed for the global economy. As if that was not bad enough, the USA had a finger in practically every political pie that was named in any part of the world.

Perhaps no part of the world suffered from the fall outs of American dominance more than the countries of Latin America, her close neighbours in the Western Hemisphere. The USA by way of the Monroe doctrine as far back as 1823 had declared hegemony over all of the countries in the Western Hemisphere. It was not until the closing years of the nineteenth century that she was able to lay claim to her promise of dominance in that region. This was when she deprived Spain of her colonies in Cuba and Puetro Rico. Since that time, the USA has treated the countries around her with something close to disdain. The quality of the association of these countries to the USA has led to the coinage of the term banana republic to the countries in that region. This is because they were ruled at the behest of US corporations who ran large fruit farms at great profit, a situation which even charitable analysts would  describe as exploitation. As part of this situation, governments which were not compliant to the wishes of Uncle Sam were soon kicked out of office through the machinations of the almighty CIA, the enforcer arm of the USA government. For many years virtually all the governments of the countries of Central and South America existed at the behest of the US government. The most egregious example of this concerned Chile. In 1973, the people elected the avowedly socialist  Salvador Allende as the President of Chile. The government of the USA reacted as if it had been stung by a particularly vicious wasp. In next to no time, the CIA had engineered a bloody coup during which Allende was assassinated to kick off a very bloody episode in Chilean history and gave the sobriquet of Butcher to Augusto Pinochet, the perpetrator of that outrage. Another example of US pestilence is when Reagan invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada ostensibly because the legitimate socialist leaning government was building an airport with runways long enough to be used by military air craft. The real reason why the marines were sent into Grenada with a population short of two hundred thousand souls was the political colouration of the Grenadian government. The American government was and even now is determined to keep any form of socialism out of the Western Hemisphere. It is a case of protecting the sanctity of the two century old Monroe doctrine by any means necessary.

As for the rest of the world, the USA was determined to keep the communists at bay. This was the reason why Truman involved the US military in Korea so many thousand miles away. Before her involvement in the Second World War, the US had kept herself strictly in isolation from the rest of the world. After it and in the face of competition with communism, the US suddenly discovered her new mission which was to save the world from the perils of communism and become the leader of the so called free world. She began to demonstrate what she advertised as American exceptionalism and began to bumble her way around the world displaying traits of what Graham Green described as the ugly American in his novel of that title. In one word, America, in her thoughtless effort to defend the rise and rise of capitalism became a danger to herself and the rest of the world. It was in doing this that she stumbled into the war in Vietnam and became bogged down in what has turned out to be a political, diplomatic and military quagmire which on the long run has erased what she has described as her manifest destiny, a belief which like the faith based on the unsinkable quality of the Titanic drove that magnificent ship straight down to the bottom of the freezing Atlantic.

All throughout this period, the factories in America were working full blast to create impressive wealth for her people, to the envy of people in other countries. To live in America was to fulfil the dream of life written in large letters. Capable people found their way stateside to be part of this dream  which appeared to be unending in a stream of self fulfilling prophecies. And throughout the US, the people descended into a frenzy of consumption which guaranteed that a country which contained just 4% of the global population had the capacity to consume 25% of global goods production. The dizzy rise of capitalism could not be sweeter.

Even before the end of WWII, it had become apparent that all was not well within the group of Allied powers locked in combat with the Axis powers. After all, both the British and French had their respective empires to defend and the Americans had to look after the continuing rise of capitalism all around the world. On the other hand, there was the Soviet Union which was pushing the cause of communism. And like oil and water, it is impossible for capitalism and communism to coexist or to mix within any one vessel without doing violence to their respective nature.

Even before that consideration, It would have been impossible for the Soviets to forget that back in the mucky depths of WWI, the Allies (Britain, France, the USA, Japan and other sundry nations) had supported the White Russians who were trying to reverse the Bolshevik revolution which had brought the communists to power in Russia in 1917. With WW2 coming to an end, the situation which had bound the Allied powers together was on the verge of being resolved and the probability of an overriding ideological struggle was once more on the cards and could no longer be ignored.

Although several new countries emerged from the debris of the First World War, the Imperial powers especially France and Britain, not only retained their colonies but increased their holdings quite considerably. By the end of the war in 1945 however, it was clear that a massive, new world order was in the offing.

The first sign of this was that the attainment of Indian independence could no longer be postponed for any reason. Two short years later, India had gained independence and had been partitioned into two countries, Pakistan and India. The process had been incredibly messy with more than a million people killed in religious clashes and millions of others displaced all across the vast subcontinent. This was an indication that the process of decolonisation was not going to be achieved easily or without bloodshed in a world which had become inured to blood letting on a massive scale. In response to the almost universal agitation for independence, the French and the British were quite determined to hold on to their colonies all around the world and the Dutch were vigorously facing down an armed rebellion in Indonesia and their other colonies in the Dutch East Indies. Over in Africa, the Portuguese had not evolved to a level of common sense which would have allowed them to think of independence for their colonies. The only anti-colonial power outside the Communist block was the United States, at least in theory. In practice however, it was soon apparent that the United States looked on the rest of the world as her collective sphere of influence with only the Communist nations standing in the way of her global hegemony.

Although the Soviet Union was seen as the main antagonists to American ambitions, China could not be taken out of the equation. To add more pep to the  fantastic stew boiling in the global pot, the Chinese Communist Party had, by October 1949 won a decisive victory against the Western backed Nationalists who had to flee across the sea to Taiwan and in doing so, created two Chinas. Close to eighty years later, that issue is still hanging fire but with the rapidly increasing military might of Mainland China, it is looking as if it will be resolved in no distant future. The situation in the immediate period after the war was that a bipolar world was emerging from the ashes of the old world order.

Over in Africa new political  movements were being formed with the sole purpose of fighting for independence from their European colonial overlords. The leaders of some of these movements notably Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta, Obafemi Awolowo and others had met in Manchester, England with their fellow Pan-Africanists from the Caribbean region. The one item agenda of the meeting was to explore the ways and means of achieving independence for their respective countries in the shortest time possible. The war had changed the world so profoundly that the fallacies on which colonialism was based had become patently untenable. It had proved that there was no basis for the assumption that there was a master race which could by right, lord it over any other race of people anywhere in the world. This message was also taken on board by African Americans.

The new world which had emerged after the war did not seem to include African Americans. Nearly a hundred years after the Emancipation proclamation, they were still everywhere in chains in the land of their birth  and the passage of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments which were supposed to guarantee their freedom and civil rights were more prominent in their breach than in their acknowledgement. The situation of black Americans living in the former states of the Confederacy was in part worse off than it was under slavery. They were emancipated but not liberated from hunger, nakedness or exposure to the vagaries of the weather. The constitution declared in ringing tones that they were less than human and were treated worse than animals. At least at the very worst animals, working or domestic, were provided with food and some form of shelter. The newly freed Americans were not guaranteed either. In respect to the state, they existed in an orphan condition, not knowing what was in store for them from one day to the next. At the same time, ships were streaming steadily into the US bringing the wretched of Europe seeking their fortune in spaces which were  violently and spitefully denied to African Americans in the land of their birth. They were not accepted as citizens of the country which capitalism  was building on land expropriated from the indigenous peoples of the New World.

The issue of the integration of Africans into the larger American society was shouting out for redress but it was not until the sixties that the Civil rights movement in the USA began to build up a head of steam. It is also quite possible that without the impetus provided by WWII, there would not have been grounds for integration of Blacks into the larger society. More than a million black men and women enlisted in the US armed forces in order to fight for freedom in Europe and also back home in the United States. The fight for freedom in Europe turned out to be resolved easier than civil rights for black people in the USA. Their country was by far the richest country in the world. And much of that prosperity was squeezed out of African Americans who were not allowed to enjoy the taste of the fruit of their labour. The tragic irony of this situation was not lost on African Americans. They were recruited to go and fight for the freedom of some white people who were being oppressed by other white people whilst they were being oppressed by yet another group of white people. All public facilities were segregated and any black persons or group who had managed to rise in spite of the gross injustices against them were ruthlessly cut down to size or simply destroyed. One egregious example of this is provided by what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. The blacks of Tulsa had created a prosperous district which was called the Black Wall Street. This made their white neighbours not just jealous but furious. Their response was to provoke a riot during which the Black Wall Street was burnt down, dozens of black people killed and hundreds injured. The survivors of this racially activated mayhem had no choice but to flee for dear life. All because a white woman claimed that a  black man had assaulted her in a lift. Thirty-three years later in Mississippi state a fourteen year old boy, Emmet Till who was visiting from Chicago was accused of whistling at a twenty-one year old white woman. A few days later, the boy was abducted by two men, one of them the husband of the accuser, severely beaten and shot. His battered body was further mutilated, weighted down and thrown into the river. His mutilated and grotesquely swollen body was repatriated to Chicago where his mother insisted on an open casket funeral. Thousands of mourners filed past the casket and photographs appeared in newspapers all over the country. This aroused a great deal of emotions which sparked the civil rights movement to life. Four months later in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the bus to a white man as she was required to do by Jim Crow laws and set off the now famous Montgomery bus boycot which went on for more than a year until the law was changed to remove the grievance which caused the bus boycott. This protest was led by the aptly named Dr. Margin Luther King who perhaps, more than anyone of his generation has been associated with the passage of the Civil Rights Act during the Johnson presidency in 1964

 Although this act has given some guarantee of civil rights to black people in the USA, it certainly did not take them to the promised land of genuine equality and freedom which Margin Luther King and others fought for. It is however interesting to note that as long as Martin Luther King confined himself to civil rights matters, he was allowed to make his characteristic soaring speeches. Unfortunately, he turned his oratory to the exposition of economic subjects and was promptly assassinated. He had begun to point out the connection between racism and the rise and rise of capitalism. This was seen as a capital offence for which he was promptly executed.

So much noise has been made about the Second World War in Europe that one can be forgiven for not taking much notice about the war in the Far East. There, the Japanese Empire was pitted against the might of both the USA and the ubiquitous British Empire. This war did not end until more than three months after the end of the war in Europe.  And people remember it mostly because hostilities here ended with the big bangs caused by the detonation of atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Virtually everybody knows that. But not many know that before the atomic bombs were dropped, some Japanese cities; mainly Tokyo, Nagoya and Kobe had been subjected to a ferocious attack using incendiary bombs which virtually erased them. Shortly after midnight on the night of 9 -10 March 1944, Tokyo was attacked by close to 300 B 29 flying fortress bombers each of them carrying four tons of incendiary bombs made of a mixture of napalm and oil. They started uncontrollable fires, a conflagration so fierce that its oxygen demand caused it to suck out oxygen from the lungs of people, killing them by asphyxiation. The death toll on the ground in Tokyo has never been accurately determined but the figure of 100,000 dead has been more or less agreed upon. However, there are many who think that the real figure is considerably higher.

As with the use of the atomic bomb, the fire bombing of Japanese cities has been suggested to be related to racism. After all, German cities were not nuked neither were they subjected to the level of  fire bombing directed at civilians, old people as well as children as was the case in Tokyo and other Japanese cities. In any case, in the struggle between capitalists, racism is always a factor and it was a cogent factor in the war between Japan and the Allied forces. For example, the Overall commander of the Allied forces in Europe, Dwight Eisenhower was ethnically German. That did not stop him from getting the top job in the United States army during the war against Germany. On the other hand, all Japanese Americans in the USA were simply rounded up and locked away in internment camps throughout the duration of the war. The loyalty of Japanese Americans was forcefully denied whereas the most prominent American soldier was an ethnic German.

Back to those terrible fires. They were supposed to break the fighting spirit of the Japanese, to take them out of the war as quickly as possible. In doing so, it was said that this would help save the lives of American soldiers by shortening the period of the war. But the tactic employed was so cold blooded and inhuman that had the Americans lost the war, LeMay, the author of the fire bombing strategy would most certainly have been put on trial for war crimes, convicted and executed. Fortunately for him, his side won the war and he came out of that mess smelling of roses.

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There is something deeply ironical about Japan and the USA being at war. One hundred years before those flying fortress bombers were dropping their incendiary bombs over Tokyo, the Americans were squeezing the Japanese out of a self imposed isolationism which had lasted two hundred and twenty years. That period known as the Sakoku began in 1624 and was one in which the Japanese allowed partial contact with China, the Netherlands and Korea. All other nations were shut out completely. The initial reason for this isolation was to keep out what the Japanese regarded as the pernicious influence of Christian missionaries particularly those of Roman Catholic persuasion. The rulers were determined to protect their indigenous culture and religion from outside influence and were well aware of the disgraceful antics of both Spanish and Portuguese missionaries in the Philippines close to them and in faraway South America where the indigenous peoples were decimated. The Japanese methods of exclusion were as brutal as they were effective. Christian priests and their converts were summarily executed and all Japanese were required by law to be registered in a Buddhist temple. This is why today only 1% of Japanese are Christian. Even in isolation however Chinese, Korean and Dutch influences in terms of trade and education were allowed to filter in.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century however, the Industrial revolution was in full swing and the relentless search for raw materials and markets had begun. This made the maintenance of Japanese isolation increasingly difficult and ultimately untenable. This became clear when in 1842, a coalition of western powers forced the Chinese to accept opium as an article of trade. If that happened in the Celestial empire of China, it was clear that nowhere else on earth could remain uncontaminated with capitalist contagion. This was the situation when Commodore Perry of the US Navy appeared off the coast at Nagasaki with four ships, all of them bristling with powerful guns. He had come with a proposal for the establishment of trade relations with Japan. That was in 1853 at a time when gunboat diplomacy was in fashion. And Perry showed that he was not afraid to use his guns to get what he wanted. No agreement was reached on that occasion for all the sabre rattling. Undeterred, he was back the following year, this time with eleven ships of the line. In the face of this magnitude of force, a trade agreement was signed and Japan was dragged into the capitalist orbit.

Even during Sakoku, the Japanese were not completely isolated as they continued to study medicine, military science, diplomacy and other aspects of societal development. In the same vein, they did not fling their doors open to all sorts of foreign influences at the end of Sakoku. Perhaps the most important development in this period was the amalgamation of the ruling Shogunates of the time into one Japanese empire under the rule of a divine emperor at the beginning of the Meiji dynasty. Being divine, the emperor became a powerful rallying force to whom all Japanese owed an allegiance. Under the emperor, Japan entered a period of modernisation now referred to as the period of Meiji Restoration. The changes which took place at this time made it possible for her to take her rightful place among the comity of nations. Her race to industrialisation was on.

The first movement towards industrialisation was to change from a feudal society ruled by warlords to one monolithic democratic polity governed by the rule of law emanating from the divine emperor. This was followed by the building of industrial infrastructure; roads, bridges, railroads, power installations and educational institutions with the capacity to produce the intellectual and technical muscle to drive the process of industrialisation. A modern and well equipped was added to this heady mix and Japan was ready to step out into the world of imperial adventures.

With modern and well equipped armed forces, Japan developed a taste for imperial conquests. She cast her eyes over territories within China and the Korean peninsular into which she sent her nascent armed forces with the intention of carving out an empire as all the great powers were doing at the time. This brought her into conflict with the Russian  empire which had the same ambition within the same region. Given that situation, a clash between these super powers in the Far East became inevitable and quite predictably, a war broke out between Japan and Russia. Much to the surprise of other countries, the winner of this contest was Japan. When the Russian Baltic sea navy arrived in the Far East to engage the Japanese Navy, it proved to be a bridge too far for the Russians and the Japanese inflicted a crushing defeat on them. For the first time in the modern era, an Asian army imposed her will on a European country on the battle ground. Some saw this as the world tilting on its axis and needing a redress. Fifty years later, Europe came roaring back in those B29 bombers and burnt Tokyo to the ground. The world was put back on track.

A hundred years after the end of Sakoku, Japan had become an imperial power, a roaring lion seeking who to devour. She had gobbled up large areas of China and had annexed much of the Korean peninsular where she ruled with an uncommonly heavy hand. Such was her appetite for further conquests that she turned her eyes on parts of the British empire in the Far East with her ultimate destination being India, the jewel in the British crown. Japan was not able to bring the British to their knees but her success against them in Singapore, Malaya, Hong Kong, Borneo and Burma showed the rest of the world that the emperor was actually naked. The British empire did not survive that exposure.

It is now difficult to imagine that the United States of America and the Soviet Union were allies during the Second World War. Even if  we view that alliance from the point of view of the enemy of my enemy being my friend. But, the truth is that without that alliance, it would have been extremely difficult if not impossible to contain the Germans on their rampage through Europe. The seeds of the victory of the Allied Powers were planted in the fertile soil of Europe, especially in Mother Russia. Had the Germans taken the trouble to learn from history, they would have found that Russia was a graveyard for ambitious would be conquerors and would have been a lot less cavalier in their attitudes towards coveting the Russian land mass.

Just over two hundred years before Hitler unilaterally broke his infamous non-aggression pact, the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact to give it its correct diplomatic title, Carl Gustav of Sweden had invaded Russia. He had attacked Russia with the intention of incorporating her vast lands into the Swedish empire. Instead, he came up against the pitiless Russian weather and the remnants of his army was finished off at the battle of Poltava in present day Ukraine in 1709. That marked the end of the Swedish empire which was once dominant in the area around the Baltic sea. Today, Sweden is no more or less than a middle level power which was famous for car building (Volvo), her home-grown socialism, which is fading rather badly as well as the faded ABBA pop group. She is still paying for that blunder at Poltava.

One hundred years on from the battle of Poltava, in 1812, Napoleon, emperor of the French and dictator of the rest of Europe, mobilised the largest army that Europe had ever seen. It was made up in total of 600,000 troops or more and matched them into Russia. There, the Russians making skilful use of the vagaries of the brutal Russian weather completely destroyed Napoleon’s Grand Amée almost without firing any shots in anger and in doing so, brought his up till then glittering military career to an abrupt end. He never won any battle worth talking about after his Russian debacle and by 1815, all his ambitions were buried and sealed in the little Belgian village of Waterloo, now a byword for terminal failure. A little over a hundred years later, another ambitious fool was digging his grave on Russian soil.

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On June 21 1941, Adolf Hitler ordered the German army to attack Russia. The attack had been meticulously planned in such secrecy over several months that when it came, it took the Soviets completely by surprise. So much so that the Red army was caught on its haunches, unable to make any effective response to what by that time was a typical German blietzegrieg; a massive and rapid coordinated attack with tanks, motorised infantry and a large number of aircraft, all acting in concert to cause terror and utter confusion in enemy ranks. The nature of the attack on Russia was in tune with the principle of total war, designed to obliterate an entire civilisation in the shortest time possible. Hitler’s orders were for total war. A war that went far beyond the limits of imperial ambition. It was a war which was designed to clear the land of its indigenous population in preparation for its occupation by Germans. In other words, it was genocide on steroids. No prisoners were to be taken as SS troopers followed in the wake of the regular army to execute all survivors, military and civilian of any attack. The victims of these mop-up operations were men, women and children of all ages. In addition, millions were quite deliberately starved to death. This was not war but genocide to be committed by any means necessary. Moreover, it was all out war against communism, the competing ideology with capitalism. In time honoured tradition Hitler was trying to use the medium of war to extend the reach of the German brand of capitalism. Like any European colonialist in the heart of Africa, Hitler wanted very much to claim all the natural resources found in Russia for himself.

The codename of this operation, Barbarossa was deliberately chosen to send a message. Frederick known as Barbarossa for his red beard was the leader of the third crusade who incidentally did not make it on his second visit to Palestine to fight the Muslims occupying Jerusalem but drowned on the way. It should not be forgotten that the Crusaders went to Palestine with nothing but murder in their heart. What is often forgotten was that each crusade started with pogroms committed against Jews in Europe before those so called soldiers of Christ went on their murderous journey to Palestine. Ironically, Barbarossa protected the Jews against the customary violence which was their usual lot at the beginning of any crusade. This irony was however lost on Hitler as he unleashed his forces against Russia. As with the crusades, Jews in Eastern Europe bore the brunt of Hitler’s crusade to Russia. The extermination camps which the Germans built and operated in Poland are some of the bloody footprints left behind by Operation Barbarossa.

Operation Barbarossa deserves a separate treatment but this is beyond the scope of the present discussion of the rise and rise of capitalism. The Soviet response to Operation Barbarossa may have been slower than expected but when it came, it was extremely vigorous and uncompromising even if it was not as effective as it could have been. It however slowed the German advance long enough to keep the armies in the field as winter arrived. The Germans had given a great deal of consideration to the approach of winter. After all, they had the example of Napoleon to guide them. The reality of it however was still as unexpected as it was devastating as their awesome machine failed to cope with the demand imposed on it by sub-zero temperatures, broken roads, virtually non-existent modern infrastructure as well as the lack of human comfort. The Russians had retreated to the east at the approach of Napoleon and Hitler thought that history was going to be repeated. Surprisingly, the Soviets were resolved to dispute every inch of their territory with the invaders. After all, they had the capacity to send millions of men into the field. In addition to their capacity to produce the armaments required for the fight, the Americans set up a steady stream of the supply of tanks, aircraft, tractors, food and clothing to their unlikely allies who were fighting for their very existence.

Determined to make history, the Germans had committed vast resources to Operation Barbarossa. They sent in no less than three million men, armed to the teeth into the fight. By that time, the Western front had been stabilised, France had been knocked out of the fight and the British were fighting desperately to prevent an invasion across the English Channel. All the Germans needed to do was to subdue the East but it was easier said than done. Twenty seven million men, women and children were wasted on the Eastern front but the survivors held firm. In the end, the Soviets pushed the Germans back all the way to Berlin and forced Hitler down into his bunker where he dosed both himself and new bride with cyanide before putting a bullet into his own brain to make doubly sure that he was not captured by vengeful soldiers of the Red Army.

The Allies had a tolerably good working relationship even though the Soviets did what could be considered as a disproportionate amount of the heavy lifting. The Germans had sent their best, most experienced troops into the eastern front and those troops were supported with the most effective equipment. For much of the war Stalin made repeated calls on Britain and the USA to open another front in the West but for a long time, his pleas fell on deaf ears as their allies preferred the southern route through North Africa and Italy. It was not until June 1944 that the allies made a frontal attack on German occupied Europe. By this time the Germans were barely hanging on in the East as they tried desperately to stem the Soviet advance on the eastern front. The reality on ground at the time was that the Allied forces who came ashore on the beaches of Normandy were being opposed by a virtually ragtag German army armed partly with refurbished equipment. The flower of German power was at the time being decimated in the East by an energised Red army bristling with confidence as they marched resolutely towards Berlin.

Every year since the end of the war, veterans (there are virtually none left now) and government delegations from all over the western world gather on the beaches of  Normandy to commemorate the D-day landings. They give the impression that they won the war on their own. Poppycock! Since then Hollywood has glorified those landings and celebrated them with made up stories of super human heroism. Look closely and below all the smoke, you will find evidence of naked propaganda. The decisive battles which led to the liberation of Europe from German occupation were fought thousands of miles from the beaches of Normandy.

For the first time in the history of capitalism, in the wake of the Great Depression, government became involved in capitalism, not just to regulate it but to steer it into a new path and to change the character of the beast, profoundly and forever. At least that would have been the hope of the American government led by President Roosevelt. The mechanism for doing this was the New Deal which as it went along was given a theoretical foundation by John Maynard Keynes who has turned out to be the most influential economist of the twentieth century. And that has turned out to be for good as far as his admirers are concerned and as an anathema from the point of view of those who are opposed to his economic theory. Either way he cannot be ignored. Some eighty years after his death, he is still the elephant in every economics chatroom. Not bad for a mathematician/philosopher who took formal lessons in economics for all of eight weeks.

One of the immediate effects of the Great Depression was a massive increase in unemployment. Without a salary, the unemployed can no longer make a contribution to the amount of money in circulation. This almost inevitably leads to the fall in the amount of money in the economy. It allows it to fall to catastrophic levels as indeed it did in the period following the Great Depression. Keynes argued that the only way to reverse this undesirable situation was to use government funds to create jobs and in doing so, regulate the economy and restore it to good health. This was so important that in his opinion, the government could resort to deficit spending, at least until the situation improved to such an extent that government spending could be brought back to a balanced budget. Without the exegesis created by the Great Depression, Keynesian economics as it came to be known could not have stood any chance of implementation. This is because for the first time, Keynes brought workers into the economics equation in a positive way. After that, they were then recognised  as having a  voice and a role to play in bringing a modicum of order to the market place. Up till then, the bosses, the owners of capital had shown a stern determination to keep wages low because in their warped imagination, they were sure that the lower the wages they paid to their workers, the greater the profits that accrued to them. Not for one moment did they think that better paid workers could become genuine and reliable consumers of the products of capitalist exploitation. True, Henry Ford had seen the light in this direction long before, but even he was vehemently opposed to trade unions and did all he could to keep them out of his factories. Without unions however, there was no way for the workers to even breathe, talk less of being part of any economic decision making process.

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Keynes may have been the brains behind the New Deal but without the muscle provided by Roosevelt, it would have been dead on arrival. Desperate as the situation was, the forces of conservatism were still quite active and without Democratic party control of Congress and Senate, Roosevelt would have found it impossible to make the New Deal workable. And in the wake of the reduction in   the control of both houses in the 1938 midterm elections to the Republicans he found the going very difficult, verging dangerously on the impossible.  However, he was saved by the bell, to use a boxing term, when the USA was dragged into the maelstrom created by WWII in December 1941.

The entry of the United States into the war was heaven sent for the New Deal as the ensuing war economy led to full employment and factories began to function at optimal capacity. The farmers were not left out of the effect of this wave of prosperity. Armies had to be fed and so the farmers were kept hard at work to keep the fighting men adequately provided with food. No army in the history of warfare had been better fed than members of the US armed forces through their engagement in WWII. This boosted the economy to such an extent that the economy of the USA was ticking along merrily until the end of the war. The capitalists rubbed their hands in glee as their profits mounted. At the same time the Democrats built up such a healthy head of political steam that the Republicans were locked out of the White House for twenty straight years. During this period, Roosevelt won four presidential elections on the trot and in 1948 his less flamboyant but phlegmatic, successor, Harry Truman won the presidential elections against all odds. It is interesting to note also that General Eisenhower who won the White House for the Republicans in the 1952 election and kept it in 1956 continued on the same economic trajectory as the Democrats. There was no need to change course  because the American economy was booming as never before. It has to be said that the economic dominance of the USA was predicated on her unique position as the only major power standing at the end of WWII.

In the period immediately after WWI, the USA went back into isolationism in a bid to protect herself from the economic vagaries that afflicted the leading economies of the world. In spite of this precaution however, she was still dragged into the pits of the Great Depression. This more than ever encouraged the US to develop strict isolationism from the rest of the world. The USA, separated from the conflict in Europe by the width of the Atlantic ocean which raised a bulwark behind which it could shelter whilst maintaining her neutrality. To make her stand unmistakably clear, Congress passed Neutrality Acts through to 1938. But by 1939, it had become obvious that a war in Europe was inevitable. And reading the situation on ground, Roosevelt assured Americans that their sons were not going to participate in any European adventures.  But, it was also clear after a little while that American sentiments were on the side of the Allied Powers and her continued neutrality favoured the Axis. Besides, the Americans saw a way to make some money. They came up with what they called the Lend Lease Act which allowed them to sell any material to any country which could pay cash for their orders which were evacuated in their own ships. As far as any transaction did not put the USA at any risk. The major beneficiaries at the start were Britain and France. Both countries had been bruised and battered by their encounter with German forces and desperately needed ammunition for the fight and food for their armies and civilian populations. The Lend Lease Act served to preserve American neutrality even as they prepare to enter the fray and to make some money on the side. Eventually, the veil of neutrality was broken in December 1941 when Japan attacked US naval installations on Pearl Harbour in Hawaii in her desperate attempt to break the stranglehold to which her economy was subjected to through the imposition of American sanctions. In the wake of Japanese bombing of Pearl harbour, Germany her ally declared war on the USA and WWII became a global conflagration.

Like WWI, this rematch was caused by a clash of imperialist ambitions. The British and French were in it to defend their respective empires. Germany attacked Poland and the Soviet Union in an attempt to create what Hitler described as space for German expansion. Japan was determined to create her own empire in the far East; in China, Korea and parts of the British empire including India. Given the scenario, the USA, the leading global capitalist nation had to be in it to protect the overall interest of capitalism. Early in 1942, the USA was engaged in war across the Atlantic in Europe and in the Pacific coast to the east.

Combatants were bogged down in trenches for most of WWI, fighting what they came to describe as a war of attrition in which virtually defenceless men were exposed to pitiless war machines dispensing death and serious injury with awesome efficiency. This time around, the fronts were broad with tanks and all sorts of warplanes being involved in the fighting. This brought virtually the whole of Europe within harm’s way so that cities, manufacturing plants, communications installations and just about any built up areas were targets for destruction from land, sea and air. In an attempt at imperial domination, mankind had reached a state of total war. This was to have a critical effect on the rise and rise of capitalism.

The Americans had entered the war on the side of the Allied forces made up principally of the British empire, the French Empire and the Soviet Union following the collapse of the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviets. Ranged against them were the Axis powers; Germany, Japan and Italy under Benito Mussolini who was hell bent on expanding the Italian empire in Africa. The immediate impact of this war was the total destruction of industrial infrastructure in all major industrial countries with the exception of the USA which came out of the war with her industrial infrastructure not only intact but enhanced. There was no stopping her from that point on especially after her paralysing display of the power of her atomic bombs unleashed on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing stages of the war.

All in all, the USA had a very good war not just because she drove the Allies to victory but because she was given the authority to bring forth a new world economic and diplomatic order. At the end of the First World War, the Americans, bent on isolationism as a form of defence refused to enforce the formation of the League of Nations. This time around they were the proponents of the United Nations Organisations, the successor to the League of Nations. In addition, they were able to foist on a bemused world, the twin financial institutions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The age of American global economic domination had arrived.

Apart from a brief period called the Panic in 1907, the American capitalist machine hummed along like a fully functional dynamo throughout the period of its Gilded Age. The acknowledged robber barons at this time were fully in control of the economy. This is why J.P. Morgan was able to rally his fellow bankers to bail out the government Treasury when it encountered a little problem which caused a panic. The intervention was swift. It had to be, otherwise it would have  escalated into a full blown crisis with the capacity to cause extensive damage to the economy. Instead, the effects of the Panic were restricted to what could be regarded as a storm in a teacup. Nevertheless the lesson learnt from this episode was that no economy however buoyant can be taken for granted.

By the turn of the twentieth century the USA had acquired the muscle to enforce the Monroe doctrine. This was clearly shown in 1898 when she went to war against Spain in an encounter that not only secured the independence of Cuba but had led to the acquisition of overseas territories in Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The message that was sent out was that the USA was now ready and capable of dictating terms to any European country that appeared not to acknowledge her hegemony within the Western hemisphere, following the dictates of the Monroe doctrine. It may have taken seventy years to become fully operational but it had arrived at last.

 True to her anti-colonial principles however, America showed off her anti-imperialist credentials such as it was at the time.  This, she did by her refusal to be drawn into the colonisation of any parts of Africa. She had been invited to participate in the Berlin conference but had walked away from the table without joining the bandwagon of the colonial powers which had carved up Africa between them like the proverbial stuffed turkey. America was present but was not tempted to partake of the fare on offer.

This is however not to say that all was well within the Republic. As a group, the robber barons were swimming in great wealth but this was at the expense of those from whose blood, sweat and tears all that stupendous wealth was being mined. The robber barons played hardball with their competitors but were even more ruthless with their employees who lived in the richest country in the world but saw very little of those riches. Still, the little they had was a small fortune compared with what the wage slaves were earning in Europe and so, the USA, seen from across the Atlantic was a magnet, a bright light which attracted all the moths. They sailed across the sea, arriving on Ellis island under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty in New York from where they swarmed all over their new country. Many of them were skilled workers who had come to embellish the skill pool in America but skilled or not, they were all victims, to be maximally exploited by the robber barons and their accomplices. The physical conditions under which they lived were as atrocious as any that existed  in Britain a hundred years before and their employers devised ever growing diabolic ways of fleecing them. Apart from low wages, some employers paid their workers in scrips, currencies whose value was recognised only in shops owned by the employers. Since the wages they were paid were grossly insufficient for their needs, they were forcibly tied to their employers to whom they were chronically indebted. The ground was therefore ripe for union activities which over time led to an amelioration of the conditions of service within places of work within which the workers toiled.

Apart from the labour unions, there were political organisations; the socialists, communists and even anarchists who took  very strong interest in the welfare of the workers. It is a matter of interest that it was an anarchist that was responsible for the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, at a time when the American economy was booming. Despite the boom, the majority were still struggling very hard to make a bare living. The anarchists placed the blame for this at the feet of the president so, he had to die. There are works of fiction which tried to paint a vivid picture of the industrial relations landscape of that period. In my estimation, one of the most graphic of such books was The jungle written by Upton Sinclair, a socialist who was appalled by the inequalities which ruled  the USA and quite spoilt the lives of the vast majority of Americans. Jack London was another socialist whose satirical novels tried successfully to capture the injustice which governed both the economic and social relations in the country within that period of capitalist consolidation in the USA.

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The rock on which American international relations was built in those years was isolationism. After all she was in natural isolation, protected as she was by several thousand miles of ocean on both sides. Her neighbours to the north and the south were politically insignificant countries which then and now did not present any threat to the behemoth which was the USA. Living in geographic isolation was not enough, the USA further surrounded herself with a wall of tariffs behind which her infant industries could grow. This of course enhanced the ability of the robber barons to further enrich themselves. When WW I duly erupted in Europe, the Americans were well placed to reap rich dividends from the supply of both agricultural and military products mainly to Britain and France. It took a little time for American factories to be retooled and made ready for the production of military hardware but as soon as this was done, lucrative orders for the supply of clothing, food and military stock began to roll in. The high rate of unemployment which was held as a threat over the work force was considerably reduced and wages went up significantly. On their own, the bosses were laughing all the way to the bank. By the time America entered the war in April 1917, she had established herself as a major global power and when she sent an army of three million men to fight in Europe, no less than a million women were recruited into the work force. The sun was shining with uncommon benevolence on the USA.

It has to be said that there was a little period of readjustment after the war as returning soldiers were being reintegrated into the workforce. By the end of 1921 however, the economy was bubbling over quite merrily giving way to what has been described as the Roaring Twenties. This was a period of joyous abandon during which the nation let down her collective hair and furiously danced a decade away. They could afford to make merry because there were opportunities everywhere for productive employment everywhere. This drew millions of black people from the backwoods of the segregated South to the less restrictive urban cities of the North. Many of them were drawn to New York, particularly the neighbourhood  of Harlem. This is where black artists, musicians, writers, poets, entertainers and other creative groups of black people came together to create what has been called the  Harlem Renaissance. However, it was all too good to last as October 1929 came around and the bubble burst spectacularly as the Great depression kicked in.

Right from the beginning of the Industrial revolution, the growth of capital has been cyclical. Periods of boom have been followed by those of recession and the occasional depression. These cycles, at least at the beginning were usually caused by local events such as political disturbances, poor harvests, wars as well as any number of unforeseen circumstances. It is also possible that instability is  an intrinsic factor of capitalism. The nature of the beast. Many people, especially those on the right of the political spectrum, that is, those who have well developed capitalist tendencies believe very much in the invisible but powerful forces generated by the  market. They consider any form of control by any recognised group such as governments as undue interference in the sacred rites of capital accumulation. And yet from time to time, the market such as it is, needs to be reset sometimes through the injection of capital from somewhere outside the market. This, for example, is what was done by J.P. Morgan and his colleagues in 1907 when they averted a recession by the injection of needed capital at a crucial point in time. In the last hundred years, the global economy has had to endure a succession of crises, enough to suggest that capitalism is a chaotic system which must never be allowed to run itself. Capital can only be accumulated at the expense of certain groups of people, the workers whose labour is expropriated by the owners of capital, those who control the means of production. The current global reach of the market means that an upheaval within the American economy which is now the most dominant in the world, reverberates throughout the world at more than the speed of sound since it is carried around the world electronically. Since 1973, the year of the oil crisis, the world has been troubled almost continuously by one crisis of the other, some have been local, others regional whilst others have been global in extent. The point to be made here is that there is need for balance between many centres but principally between the workers and the owners of capital. It is apparent that productive amity can only be achieved when the balance is tilted towards the producers who form the overwhelming percentage of global population. Unfortunately, the balance has shifted decisively towards the bosses causing the rise and rise of inequality to accompany the now questionable rise and rise of capitalism.

In a State of the Union address to Congress in 1823, President Monroe laid out the future of American foreign policy in what is now described as the Monroe doctrine. In that speech Monroe declared the area encompassing the Western hemisphere as being an area of American influence from which all European influence was to be excluded for all time. In the same breath, he also announced American disinterest in the affairs of any country that was outside her stated area of interest. In this way she announced her isolation from European affairs as well as the affairs of countries all round the world. This status was more or less adhered to until she was dragged into the cauldron of WWI in 1917.

It is not clear why Monroe made that declaration when he did. After all, the infant republic such as she was at the time did not have the power to back up that grandiose claim of pre-eminence. After all, this was a time when both France and Spain, not to talk of Britain were actively pursuing their own separate sets of agenda in the Western hemisphere. The only thing in favour of the Americans at the time was that their ambitions could be backed up by Britain whose permanent interest was to range round the world cornering all possible markets in favour of her industrialists who were squeezing all those commodities out of their factories. And Britain could back up her ambitions in any part of the world because of the powerful Royal Navy which ranged the world at its pleasure.

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The Monroe doctrine came at a time of many interesting developments in Latin America. Simon Bolivar (El Libertador) had just succeeded in liberating six  countries in that region; Columbia, Peru, Ecuador,  Venezuela, Panama and Bolivia from Spain after several wars of independence. It was important that Spain be not allowed to regain her colonial power status in the region even  as France was sniffing around Mexico to replace Spain as the imperial overlord in that country.  And to tell the truth, the USA was not in any position to influence the tide of events. At that point, the Monroe doctrine which did not even acquire that title until around 1850 was no more than a dream, a diplomatic wish waiting to come true sometime in the distant future.

Within the USA, matters were coming to a boil over the issue of slavery and all minds were turned inwards to deal with the fallouts from the confrontation between the Southern and Northern states. The South stood resolutely for the expansion of slavery into the new states of California, Texas, New Mexico and others which had just joined the Union. The Northern states were no less resolutely opposed to this proposal. The stage was set for the inevitable clash which loomed over the dark horizon. Finally, the Southern states banded themselves together to form the Confederate states which first seceded from the United States and then fired the first shots which marked the beginning of the American civil war in 1861. From that point on, the preoccupation of the American government was to keep out other countries especially Britain from what they labelled as their internal affair. Their fears in this respect were genuine because the economy of the Confederate states was based on the production of agricultural raw materials especially cotton which was in great demand from British industrialists. Any thoughts of foreign affairs had to be put on hold until the end of the war and the restoration of the status quo antebellum in 1865.

The American civil war was ostensibly fought over the issue of slavery but behind this stood the shadow of the economy. It was clear to the people in the North that slavery was no longer an option for sustainable economic development. Any movement on that front had to be towards the industrial production of utilisable goods, to be followed by relevant services. Even during the war, the Northern states were building up their industrial capacity. It can even be said that victory in that war was built on the foundation of the industrial might which was the power behind the Northern armies in the field. With the war out of the way the newly reunited states could now embark on the journey towards the rise and rise of capitalism.

The civil war ended in 1865 and signalled the beginning of an industrial production rush in the reunited country. The USA embarked on a spree of industrialisation such as the world had never seen up till then and it all began within the transportation sector. By 1869, the east coast had been joined to the west by the intercontinental railroad. The immediate consequence of this was that it became possible for a man to travel from New York to say, Los Angeles in six days instead of six months as was the case before. In addition, a large amount of freight could be sent virtually anywhere within the country very quickly and safely. The capital required to build the extensive railroad system which crisscrossed the continent poured in from Europe especially Britain whose industrialists were making money hand over fist. That British capitalists were ready to invest heavily in the USA shows the international nature of capitalism. That the primary area into which capital was directed also shows the pivotal nature of transportation systems to the creation of markets to the continued spread of capitalism. This phenomenon had been observed in Britain at the dawn of the industrial revolution. At that time, it was the building of canals that connected up many parts of the country and facilitated the distribution of factory made goods throughout the land. The lesson here is clear; without the creation of reliable and extensive distribution channels there can be no sustainable process of industrialisation.

Another aspect of industrialisation is the availability of power with which to drive the industrial production of goods. As with a lot of other raw materials, the USA had a generous supply of coal which was available to build an extensive railway system and supply steam power for the industrial production of goods. In addition to coal there was the availability of iron with which to produce steel, the foundation for heavy industry. Taken together all these conditions facilitated the rise and rise of capitalism within the country.

Standing aside from what can be described as natural attributes, there were men who were imbued with the character to exploit the conditions of the time. These were the men who have come to be known as the robber barons. Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller and Morgan. They straddled the emerging industrial landscape of the USA like the proverbial colossus turning everything they touched into pure gold. However, their collective touch had no magic in it and their place in history was cemented by their collective brutality in their exploitation of the emerging American market. Each of them were dyed in the wool monopoly capitalists who destroyed all their competitors and screwed their employees out of every last penny they could get out of them without actually killing them in large numbers. Like octopuses, their lethal tentacles were wrapped around the most important sectors of the economy. Rockefeller, the first American home-grown  billionaire, by today’s value controlled every aspect of the oil sector from mining to refining and the sale of oil products. Carnegie built his monopoly in steel using the same methods that that Rockefeller used in the oil industry. In the case of Vanderbilt known to everyone as the Commodore, he tied up the transportation sector both by water and rail in unbreakable knots which ensured an unending stream of gold into his personal coffers. As for Morgan, he is still very much alive in  J.P. Morgan, one of the biggest banks in the world even if it is now merged with the Chase-Manhattan Bank. He was the banker to the robber barons and helped to consolidate all the monetary gains of their ruthless enterprises. It is most intriguing that their economic descendants; Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, even Gates are still following faithfully in their monopolistic footsteps and as much employee abuse as they can get away with in the more enlightened business environment that is supposed to exist today. As a collective, the robber barons and their contemporaries ruled the American economy with an iron fist but managed to build it into a genuine colossus which ruled the world for more than a century. They built what has been described as the gilded age of American business and left many economic corpses in their way. It is therefore rather ironic that their philanthropic footsteps still look very large on the proverbial sands of time. Each of them has donated most of their stupendous wealth to institutions including world renowned universities and research centres which have made invaluable contribution to the development of life saving vaccines and improvements in public health all over the world. Their business practices, brutal as they were, have been recognised as having been pivotal to the rise and rise of global capitalism.

For the last hundred years, at least from the end of the First World War, the country that has flown the flag of capitalism from the highest mast has been without question, the USA. Some would even argue that the US had ruled the capitalist world for much longer than that. Right until the outbreak of the Great War, the case for which country set the pace for capitalism could very well be made for Britain and not only  because all that business of the industrial production of commodities started in Britain. It could also be for the evidence provided by the British empire to which 40% of the global population at the time owed some form of alliance. Britain at that time was clearly the leader in terms of her imperialistic credentials. And as you know, imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Putting all those aside, the leading capitalist nation in the period after the war in terms of the sheer value of goods produced was the USA. That position has not been seriously challenged by any other capitalist country or society up till now.

The colonisation of North America from Britain started rather inauspiciously towards the end of the sixteenth century. The first of the colonies that were planted in America was set up in 1607 but they really did not show much promise. Indeed, they were failures when judged purely on economic terms. They however contrived to survive the harsh conditions of their new environment on the eastern seaboard of North America. These colonies obtained charters from the English crown which made them the foundation colonies of what was to become the massive British empire from which they were only detached after an eight year war which the Americans call the Revolutionary war.

Those early colonies depended solely on agriculture for their subsistence and they were hardly surviving. The only colony that seemed to have an economic future was Virginia which was able to get by through the cultivation of tobacco. It is through this exercise that the world was introduced to the filthy and enormously unhealthy habit of smoking or chewing tobacco. Thus the rise of capitalism cannot be disassociated from drug use as was the case with opium which the Chinese were forced to adopt to their detriment at the point of bayonets and bombardment from warships. The first drug lords in the world were acting on behalf of capitalism.

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Virginia and indeed other colonies eventually came good but not before slaves were introduced from Africa. The point needs to be made that the first Africans to be landed in Jamestown in 1619 were not slaves. Tobacco is a labour intensive crop and before 1619 indentured servants were imported from Europe to work on tobacco fields. These servants were contracted to work for a defined length of time before being set free to become equal members of the society with their former masters. It was natural therefore that the first Africans to land in Jamestown were treated as indentured servants. They worked side by side on the basis of equality with white indentured servants with whom they must have produced some chocolate coloured offspring later on. However, as the demand for labour increased, the status of Africans was changed through legislation and by 1650, to be black in America was to be a slave, to be owned as property by other people. Furthermore, it was an inheritable condition to be passed down from one generation to another in perpetuity if possible. That arrangement became the foundation upon which all future American prosperity was built. Slavery was to last for more than two hundred years and given the experience of black people in America today, a case can be be made that there are still vestiges of slavery that must  be removed from contemporary American society. Without giving black Americans what is theirs by right, that society will forever be one in crisis.

By the time that the Revolutionary war broke out in 1775, there were thirteen colonies on the Atlantic eastern seaboard of North America. Before the rebellion which led to war, the colonies were governed from London and the colonised people had no voice in their own governance leading them to question the justification for that arrangement. Eventually, the contrasting attitudes of the two sides in this argument precipitated the war which the British lost. Very early on in the war, representatives from each of the thirteen colonies met in Philadelphia in June 1776 to draw up the instrument of separation from Britain and the declaration of independence of the country they agreed to call the United States of America. Although a committee was set up to produce the desired document, it was decided that the draft was to be solely written by Thomas Jefferson representing the State of Virginia. The draft, which can only be described as the result of exalted inspiration, was ratified by Congress on the fourth of July 1776. As soon as that declaration was signed, a new nation was born even though the war of independence was not won until 1783. As a footnote to this discussion the bravery shown by all the signers of that declaration must be acknowledged. Had their side lost the war, every last one of them would have been hunted down, tried, tortured and then hanged for treason. They held their collective breath for the next seven years as the war which decided their fate dragged on. They were all men who were willing to risk everything including their very lives for freedom. Ironically, many of them including Thomas Jefferson were holding thousands of human beings as slaves. To compound his perfidy, Jefferson fathered no less than six children with Sally Heming, a slave he took into his bed when she was fourteen years old. All those children were slaves on their father’s plantation. And they retained their status as slaves until they turned twenty -one. They were then freed according to the pact which their mother extracted from Jefferson before the beginning of their sexual relationship.

At the time of independence, the USA was no more than a rural backwater, a typical shit-hole country powered by slaves who were rated somewhat higher than mules. They were not even regarded as being remotely human by the framers of the constitution. They, who confidently asserted that all men are born equal and imbued with certain inalienable rights. All those rights which were brutally denied to black folk. That republic did not start off on the right note and has been singing off key since then, at least as far as fundamental human rights for blacks are concerned.

The USA was not a rich country and quite probably would have remained so for a very long time. In 1803 however, fortune smiled on her when her geographical  size was doubled practically overnight through the Louisiana purchase from France. This purchase, which has been described, and quite rightly so, as the biggest real estate deal the world has ever seen can be regarded as having set the USA on the path of prosperity. If anything, it allowed the people who occupied the original thirteen states to spread out and occupy a continent, conquering the earth in every which way as they went along. To create a country which was bound on either side by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, they seized what are now the states of California, Texas and New Mexico after a war with Mexico together with the payment of nearly 20 million dollars to Mexico thus securing the present-day external borders of the USA. What went on next within this vast territory was to secure the internal borders through a systematic purge of the remnants of indigenous Indian tribes who were labouring under the misconception that the land and the fullness of it belonged to them. Today, they are herded into scattered arid portions of land into which they were pushed by a relentless US Army. This was the model for South Africa when they created the so called Bantustans into which the majority blacks were to be squeezed.

The Industrial revolution was brought from Britain to America in the head of Samuel Slater in the closing years of the eighteenth century. It was illegal for any Brish citizen to facilitate the transfer of technology from Britain at the time. But the intrepid Mr. Slater simply memorised the entire blueprint of a textile factory and brought it in his head to the USA. Capitalism arrived in America as a crime. That crime has been compounded over and over again since then.

The American landscape has turned out to be especially fertile for the growth of industrialisation. It stretches across four time zones from east to west and from the Canadian border in the north to the Gulf of Mexico to the south. Virtually all the raw material requirement for the industrial production of any commodity can be found somewhere in the USA. From around the middle of the nineteenth century, immigrants poured in from Europe in a seemingly unending stream to occupy the huge expanse of land which was being opened up for human occupation and exploitation. European immigrants poured in from across the Atlantic Ocean whilst the Chinese and Japanese immigrants landed from across the Pacific. Following the end of slavery in 1865, the immigrants from Asia provided the cheap labour with which the country was built. For example the labourers who built the first transcontinental railroad tracks from the west were mainly Chinese whilst predominantly Irish gangs laid down the lines from the east. The Irish, being Catholic and escaping starvation from their own country were regarded as only just racially superior to Asians. The immigrants came to America to make a new life for themselves and were prepared to work very hard to enhance their status within the country both social and economic. They were therefore a ready work force as well as providing a ready market for the products of their industry. This made the USA a capitalist paradise which did not need to get herself entangled in imperialistic adventures, at least initially. But, as early as 1823, the infant USA had attempted to lay down the foundation of an empire in her backyard.