Welcome to this throwback edition of the award-winning Best of a Left podcast

where we remember the past and choose to repeat it. Today's episode was

originally published in February of 2023.

It's another that flows well with the discussion members will be able to hear on the bonus show this week.

We talked about the effects of marketing, all the way from the latest viral accessory up to the

influence corporations exert through schools from elementary through university.

This episode looks at some origins, alternatives, and misunderstandings of capitalism as well as the impact of marketing on all of us.

Sources today include upstream, revolutionary left radio, un-effing the republic, off-kilter, and economic update.

When you think about imperialism, colonization, growth industrial society, and you go upstream

from that, what is it that is causing these downstream problems that we see and experience?

My clan, if I go back 500 years, my clan, an Uplatch clan on a place called Cape Kewear up the top of Australia there. We started that.

500 years ago the Dutch came there and tried to establish trade and they were trying to get us interested in rice and soap for example tobacco things like this

but it wasn't as good as the tobacco that we had so nobody liked it and the rice was sort of yucky because we hadn't cooked it and just trying to eat it dried and that wasn't very nice. And the soap was like clearly that was made from fat so we tried to eat that and then we were blowing bubbles and so it was

a pretty crappy sort of a deal and a lot of the Dutch then decided because in Europe at that time

women were chattel and that was a concept that was just completely alien to us here and particularly alien to our women who did not take kindly

to the idea of these Dutchmen suddenly seizing them and trying to carry them off as payment

for rice and soap that we didn't even like.

And so the women took exception to that and sort of fought back as you do.

And it wasn't long before most of those Dutchmen on that ship were

speared to death. And so there was basically a handful of them, managed to sail their ship back to

Holland. And of course they had lost their cargo

lost their crew and the whole thing was a disaster and they owed a lot of money on

...