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Sex, violence and resource grabbing in the wild west |
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Alanna Hartzok's contribution to the 24th IU conference chimed with the next speaker Jeffrey Smith, from the School of Cooperative Individualism, also US-based, spoke on land ownership and corruption in the US.
Smith offered a fascinating historical account of how land speculation had been tied up with corruption in the US right from the founding of the state: George Washington himself had made massive profits from speculation, and it played a key part in his military strategies. Smith opened his talk by saying that the mass of the population isn't interested in the type of stories those at this conference would be telling - unless they involve sex and violence.
Smith's paper went on to involve lots of violence, and a little sex. Smith talked about the appalling violence used to introduce and maintain land speculation. The genocide of the Native Americans in order to allow a continual gain in the amount of land available for speculation is one example.
Sex also played a role - the “favours of at least one woman appear to have been involved in negotiations on whether or not to introduce land tax in certain US states. Smith helpfully emphasized the use of violence by wealthy speculators in order to ensure their position, to retain a kind of “full spectrum dominance.
One might note, for example, that, in order to maintain a monopoly over fur sales, one speculator gained and used the right to kill anyone else selling fur in his area! General Von Clausewitz famously stated that “war is politics by other means: while Michel Foucault reversed this dictum to argue that "politics is war by other means".
Regardless of the wider validity of Foucault's claim, Smith's paper clearly showed at least that “land speculation is war by other means. It is surely high time to fight back!
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