Nature 2

Among the savage nations of hunters and fishers, every individual who is able to work, is more or less employed in useful labour (…) Such nations, however, are so miserably poor that, from mere want, (…) to the necessity sometimes of directly destroying, and sometimes of abandoning their infants, their old people, (…) Among civilised and thriving nations, on the contrary, though a great number of people do not labour at all (…) yet the produce of the whole labour of the society is so great that all are often abundantly supplied.

Adam Smith, Adam (1776): The Wealth of Nations. Book I, p.11.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher and Enlightenment figure and is considered the founder of classical economics.

The logic of European economic thinking evident in this quote was used to devalue social and economic systems on other continents and dismiss them as irrational. This argument was also used to legitimate the idea that they should be integrated into capitalism, apparently for their own benefit. The fact that non-capitalist societies found other values, such as equality or solidarity more important than the generation of income and profit (see the Southern African concept of Ubuntu) was not recognised. Nor was the fact that these values underlay a much more ecologically sustainable way of life.

*Abeba Birhane (2017): Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’. * Piet J. Naudé (2010): “Fair Global Trade: A Perspective from Africa.” In: Geoff Moore, Fairness in International Trade. Durham: Springer‘s.

1776