When I was a kid...
When I was a kid capitalism was bad. I’d sit in my free periods at sixth form leafing through the Marxist manifesto, rereading the archaic passages until they resembled a shape I could digest. I used to browse socialist websites, fantasize about 19th century workers movements and I even bunked off school to attend a rally.I believe I was a typical and healthy middle class child. Only real tyrants (or Americans) fail to begin life as communists. Of course, it made perfect sense. Everyone is equal, right? Hence it is surely only logical that everyone be given the same opportunities – and for that everyone needs access to the same education and the same material benefits, right?
Haha. Wrong.
Boy, it’s funny what a university education does to you. “Red Essex” turned me bluer than blue. A framed painting of Lady Thatcher now hangs above my bed, rows of Tory biographies line my bookshelf and the cheeky features of Mr Cameron greet me most mornings via the magic of rss.
Yet while I outwardly portray a seething contempt for everyone and everything I am at heart still a nice, cuddly and warm-hearted kind of guy. I am a reformed communist. Which is really all a capitalist is. A capitalist is a communist who has realised that greed is the only real motivating force, and that greed is not really a vice at all, because of course greed is really another way of saying ambition. And ambition is what drives all great ventures.
And so it is that these days when I daydream what actually pops into my head is not the factory workers of Tajik-e-waka-stan unionising and toppling their government, but rather their government sending ministers to the World Bank. Their corrupt government has a bright spark who buys them all new suits and coaches them in what to say on their arrival in Washington. Their well put together policy proposals that introduce market liberalisation and protect human rights convinces the Bank to give them a loan which allows Tajik-e-waka-stan to double its standards of living every year for the next twenty. And capitalism marches on over the blazing cornfields singing “M.I.C – K.E.Y – M.O.U.S.E” and leaves hundreds of millions of people better off in its wake.
Cont…
posted by Benjamin Nakizo @ 10:28 pm
3 Comments:
Often it is not even that. Often it is a poor and uneducated textile worker in Tajik-e-waka-stan that somehow (ignoring the fact that she is Muslim and isn’t allowed to leave her home) hears of a micro-finance scheme set up by the western educated son of a local Tajik-e-waka-stan oil baron. She applies for a $100 for a sowing machine and some material. Soon she is producing clothes for the men and women of her village, then the town and then the whole region. She has to hire female assistants, giving them an income and financial independence from their men. Now they have the capital to learn how to read and write before getting married, which means their children grow up with these same skills and can move to the city to become happy and wealthy taxpayers. In doing so they avoid becoming the poverty stricken Muslim fanatics that their friends became because in the absence of parents that could provide for them they regularly attended the local fundamentalist training camp, simply because it provided good food and a place to play soccer.
(Yes – that’s right. My daydreams are overly complicated and have atrocious grammar.)
Then sometimes I would dream that a western media company would take advantage of having large continents of poor people by creating a reality tv show about a poor village somewhere which people could donate to in order to see real progress. Then I saw the advert for channel four’s ‘Millionaires Mission’ and thought someone had stolen my idea. So I went to their website and got linked to www.kiva.org and all my dreams suddenly came true.
That capitalism and globalisation are going to save the world is something all 17-year-old communists eventually find out.
Scroll down my blog until you see the side bar for Nataliya Fishook. She's my new babe.
I just lent her £12.50 to help her purchase an autumn range of clothes for her market stall. She is confident she will make the money back.
She is based in Ukraine, and we need the Ukrainians to get rich and thank the West for it. That way they might be brave, defy Russia and look for EU membership one day.
That'll show them damn commies whose boss :D
Take a look at the site, scroll through the people's stories see if one of them takes your fancy and lend some money. £12.50 is nothing, you'd spend that on one round of drinks on a Friday night. Go on. The site has a good record of getting the money back to. Consider it a way of giving to charity with a very low chance that you might actually have to lose something.
win win situation :D
Nataliya Fishook's loan has been raised overnight hence she doesn't appear in the ad anymore. That's pretty incredible. When i went to bed about eight hours ago there was still $700 left.
Apparently the site is being flooded with eager Americans because recently it was highly praised by both the 'Today Show' and on Oprah Winfrey, it also features in President Clinton's new book 'Giving'.
Cool. And sorry for spaming my own blog.
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