the jazz club of uncle pear

“Far from being a site where all individuals freely meet as sellers and buyers of commodities, for centuries the liberal market was a site of exclusion, dehumanization and even terror. In the past the ancestors of today’s black citizens were commodities, not autonomous buyers and sellers. And for centuries the market functioned as an instrument of terror: even more than the lash, what imposed total obedience on the slave was the threat of being sold, like a commodity exchanged on the market, separately from other family members. For a long time indentured white servants were also bought and sold on the market, and thus condemned to a fate not very different from that of black slaves. And in the name of the market, workers’ coalitions were repressed and economic and social rights ignored and denied, with a consequent com modification of essential aspects of the human personality and human dignity (health, education, and so on). In extreme cases the superstitious cult of the Market sealed huge tragedies, like the one which in 1847 saw Britain condemn an enormous mass of actual (Irish) individuals to death from starvation.”

Buddy Bolden: The Elusive Pioneer of Jazz