Reflections on Session 5 & 6: Stolen Land, Stolen Labor

A few short thoughts...

Since getting involved in Resource Generation, I've heard a lot of framing of how white people's wealth was made off the backs of indigenous people and black people (and all people of color for that matter) so it's not really our money in the first place.  At first I was resistant to that idea. "My family worked hard to earn our money! We pay workers fair wages! It's not like we made our money from oil!", I thought.  But after some reflection and further learning, I came to accept this notion, recognizing that the land which we prospered from is native land (we had a lumber company for crying out loud) and that there's a lot of labor we can't trace wages for - like the people cutting down the trees, processing the trees in to wood, transporting the wood, etc .  However I think after the last 2 sessions - on indigenous and black resistance - I see how not only has wealth been accumulated through the stealing of land and labor, but that the success of capitalism would not have even been possible in the first place without indigenous land and slave labor.

Some good quotes that further explain this...

"Moreover slave produced cotton played a pivotal role in the expansion of trade. This division laid the basis for a national [capitalist] economy that emerged in the U.S. between 1815 - 1865"
-Ronal Bailey

"The profits obtained [from the slave trade] provided one of the main streams of that accumulation of capital in england which financed the industrial revolution"

And if the land hadn't been stolen from the indigenous people in the first place then it never could have been used for agricultural production during slavery!

And a real life example from Sharon Martinez in Shinin the Light on White:

"My paternal grandparents migrated from Russia in the early 20th century. My grandfather worked in a New York sweat shop, a miserable job by any standards. But the economic reason why he and millions of his peers were able to get these jobs was because of the semi-slave labor of people of African descent in Southern plantations after the defeat of Reconstruction. Cotton was cheap because of the conditions under which African labored, so there was a huge market for cotton goods, which created thousands of jobs for European immigrants, including my grandfather."

I know these are some really short thoughts on a really serious and deep topic, so more to come soon...