The Ism of Destruction: Part Two

This series of essays relates to Capitalism, and how it has been a tool to promote the demise of Democracy. The theory is that Private Capitalism does not work within a system designed to promote the ends of justice, because Private Capitalization as the reader of these essays will discern, promotes injustice and a transition to an ulterior form of governance.

Volume 2 :Capitalism and the Age of Opium

In the early 1800's, China , by its own design, was still largely cut off from trade with the outside world. All trade with Europe was channeled through one port, Canton . Even there, Europeans could only trade through specially designated Chinese agents known as co-hong. Several Chinese products, such as silk and porcelain, were in high demand in Europe, but the most popular trade item in the early 1800's was tea, consumption of which increased by a factor of 30 times between 1720 and 1830. Unfortunately, the tea trade led to a serious drain of silver from Britain. “The British East India Company”, desperate for something to offset this trade imbalance, found such a commodity in opium, which not only upset China's balance of trade, but the stability of its whole society. American merchants were enlisted to provide the opium in trade protected by the British crown. It was from here that the American founding families made their fortune.

William H. Russell (Skull &Bones; co-founder-Yale University, 1832) cousin Samuel Russell formally established Russell & Co. on January 1, 1824 for the purpose of acquiring opium and smuggling it into China . Russell & Co. merged with the number one US trader, the J. & T. H. Perkins "Boston Concern" in 1829. By the mid-1830s the opium trade had become "the largest commerce of its time in any single commodity, anywhere in the world."

Links between the drug trade, European colonial expansion, the creation of the global capitalist system and the creation of the modern state are closely intertwined. It is said that one would not exist without the other. It is possible to suggest a hypothesis, that mass consumption, as it exists in modern society, began with drug addiction. And, beyond that, addiction began with a drug as a commodity. Something was necessary to initiate the cycles of production, consumption and accumulation that we identify with capitalism. In the nineteenth century, Opium was the catalyst of the consumer market, the money economy and even of capitalist production itself.

So Capitalism, as an economic form, evolved from unlawful and debasing activity, and the wealth of capitalists instead of confiscation, became a tool of governance and control and therefore of political corruption.

Opium was the tool of the capitalist, first used against the peasants and the lower and middle classes in transforming them, and in so doing monetizing their lifestyles. Opium was able to generate thus create pools of capital to feed the institutions that accumulated and accommodated it: the banking and financial systems, the insurance systems and the transportation and information infrastructures. Those structures and that economy have, in large part, been inherited by the successor nations of that state of the world, and today it is not only opium, but cocaine, crack cocaine, marijuana, meth, and ecstasy, each drug has its recourse through the channels of government where it becomes the tool of capital and protected by administrations and their secret communities.

Opium smuggling didn’t just make money. At times, opium was money. Opium built empires and had a hand in financing much of the world’s infrastructure, the railroads, and steam lines, and all major industry and not only in America .

Drug trade tends to destabilized existing societies not merely because they destroy individual human beings, but more importantly, because they have the power to undercut the existing political economy. They create new forms of capital; and they redistribute wealth in an upward mobility.

It is for this reason that their will be a perpetual “War on Drugs” because the government itself is responsible for its importation, and distribution, in actuality drug use is a tax upon the poor and middle class of any nation, and the intelligence communities of each import and distribute it, and the benefits are channeled to that end. It is the same; there is no distinction between the creation of money, as a tax upon the people and the sale of drugs, the distinction relates only to whom the tax is paid. In the former it is the bank that receives the tax, and in the later it is the government agent.

Capitalism is inherently self disruptive of commerce, the reason being, that Capitalists are self serving. Their goal is not to advance society, but to enslave it, and it is all based on a single standard, Greed!