This happened a few years ago, but I was reminded of it tonight for some reason.
I was living in Ames, Iowa. I think this was early 1999, one of those January nights when it’s about 20 below and the snow has piled and frozen and gotten covered with dirt, and you’ve forgotten what grass looks like, and every time you go outside you have to get so bundled up and detached from the world that it feels like you’re living in a video game.
So I’m wearing probably thirty pounds of clothing, and trudging around in this awful frozen moonscape, and I go to the grocery store. And I suddenly find myself complaining because “these mangoes are imperfectly ripe!”
A few seconds after I said it, I was struck with the enormity of the entire capitalist system that enabled me to buy mangoes in Iowa, to say nothing of buying mangoes in Iowa in the wintertime. And this isn’t some anti-capitalist screed at all; I am totally OK with having mangoes year-round.
What moments in your life have reinforced for you the amazing benefits of life in an advanced capitalist society?
Three words. Mail Order Spices. I can go online and thru the grace of capitalism I can have paprika from Hungary, pepper form Indonesia, and cinnamon from China. All in one box in about a week. And it’s cheap. Not like the small fortune of centuries past. How great is that? Or wait, is this globalization exploiting the proletariate? Could my giving these people in foreign countries raising spices really be expoiting them when they could be mining gold in Siberia for the betterment of mankind? I will shut up now.
This isn’t quite on topic, but it is about capitalism, and how quickly it can take hold.
Back when the reunification of Germany was not yet complete my folks took a car trip around Europe. So they are in Berlin, and there’s still sections of the wall up, which are enthusiastically being chipped away by eager tourists. My parents brought home a few little pieces. And how did they manage to pry them off? Well, in the video they took, there is an East German teenage boy standing there with some chisels in one hand and hammers in the other, renting them out as needed! Talk about self-enterprise making a comeback. That kid will probably be rich someday.