Gold Fever

[exeexe]

Have anyone of you seen the discovery channels gold fever? Man that shit went real.
http://www.discoverychannel.com.au/shows/gold-fever/

I was really surprised to learn about all the things that happened and workers getting shit on and in the end the state comes in and steal everything.

But i wonder if some of it might have been over dramatized?

[Noa Rodman]

It also had more far-reaching effects:


Since 1894 the effects of gold production predominated and made themselves earlier and more powerfully felt than the other factors which caused increased prices with the exception of tariff’s which only operated in a transitory fashion. Under these conditions there arose that view which we call revisionism, that theory, that the capitalistic method of production develops tendencies, to continually improve the condition of the proletariat, to limit the exploitation of it, and so to put an end to all the tendencies of misery, without a political revolution. Just as in the sixteenth century the force of Protestantism in Germany, and after 1848 of Chartism in England was weakened through the increase in the production of gold, so the revolutionary spirit of the entire working class was weakened throughout the capitalist system. But only briefly on this occasion. http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1913/inflation/ch04.htm

Gold production is an important factor to understand economic life: it corresponds with the long waves: 1890-1913 upturn,
1914-1931ish lack of gold - downturn,
1931 upturn again (of a very long wave until 1960s thanks to SA Apartheid (http://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/the-five-industrial-cycles-since-1945/from-the-1974-75-recession-to-the-volcker-shock/) and I would add the Soviet camps in Siberia),
then downturn until 1981,
then upturn until 2007 I think (see Anwar Shaikh (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9hqta_anwar-shaikh-on-marx-and-the-global_news#.UQhcIWdkxDM)).