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Notes -
Yeah, the parallel occurred to me as well,
Maybe where I'm trying to go is that original colonization was driven by economic adventurism,
Maybe that economic adventurism hasn't really gone away,
But these days involves more getting the right signatures to lock Foxconn into producing iPhones at a favorable rate, and less getting people do things at gunpoint.
Or maybe you'll miss out on the economic value of getting Foxconn to produce iPhones at favorable rates if you start by waving around guns?
Idk, I don't have a theory fully fleshed out in my mind.
I think to get into the economic and corporatist aspects of modernity and value extraction from third world countries, you want to get into leftist critiques of the IMF/WTO/proposed TPP and the Bretton Woods system more generally. If you're interested in fleshing out your theory more. To use your outline:
starts with
inasmuch as a prerequisite to Foxconn producing iPhones is membership in the overall global economic system, dominated by dollar exchange, rule of law, respect for private/corporate property, etc.
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