Picnic Table Blue Prints

DARKNESS AND LIGHT - Grüner, Eduardo

Edhasa Synopsis

is impossible to think the expansion of capitalism in the nineteenth century without analyzing slavery, an institution instrumental in developing a network for the sale of human beings who intensified the relationship between three continents: Europe, America and Africa. Under this operation, which produced a luxuriant growth, grew textiles, shipping, international trade in manufactures, that is, saw the light, between violence and wealth, a proto globalization. And it created a culture of maximizing income, no matter what that meant for the exploited workers, who were not loved human rights, but slaves, entities with an owner who extended his dominion over their offspring.
While this movement of capital and labor are stretched, there was the first revolution in Latin America: Haiti, in 1805. Besides being the first, was also the most original and radical revolution, and perhaps because the most severely repressed. Under French rule, with its majority black population, Haiti was paradoxically outside the tenets of the French Revolution. Equality, fraternity and solidarity can not be conjugated in the island. Perhaps this explains the enormous impact that occurred in Europe in political, military and intellectual.
In the darkness and the lights Eduardo Grüner discusses how to link capitalism and slavery, as if a source would not have been possible without the other. And how the traces of this meeting will continue today, as the indelible mark that refuses to disappear. At the same time, study the Haitian Revolution, the blind spot that denounces the overwhelming march of capital. Capitalism, slavery and revolution are, in this book, parts of an unstable board, that beyond the successes and failures, generate two opposing cultures: the exploitation and resistance.