u/a-bad-prime-minister

Alguém sabe onde podemos seguir as estatísticas de adesão à greve?

Edit: okay, não esperava ver pessoas contra a greve que é contra o pacote laboral neste subreddit...

So, right now I'm reading "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa", by Rodney Walter. Chapter "Africa's contribution to european capitalist development", page 102 of the Verso edition of 2018:

"... ultimately the stage was reached during the American Civil War when the Northern capitalists fought to end slavery within the boundaries of the United States so that the country as a whole could advance to a higher level of capitalism."

Now, to me, as an European that was born within the boundaries of a privileged country that has much of what it has thanks to slaves, this thought hit me like a motherfucker.

I'm not particularly interested on USA's history, but thanks to massive media and entertainment infiltration, I do know what the American Civil War was. Or at least, I thought I knew.

The idea that the north were the good guys fighting the bad southerners to end slavery was something that I had as absolute truth. I'm not saying that the south were the good either, nor is Rodney Walter advocating for that. But this sentence alone really opened my mind. The north were already deeper into the capitalist development, that happened partly because slaves were not a good capitalist asset. So the abolition of slavery was not a act of kindness and empathy: it was an act of capital strategy.

That's it. I just wanted to share this mindblowing experience haha

Let me know if you have any other view on the sentence or Rodney's work! Would love to read other opinions on it!