I have 2. The People's Republic of Walmart is one. Maybe I feel this way because I work in the industry and I'm a little familiar with central planning techniques... but I just thought it was all fluff with little substance. I felt like more than one chapter was just "Walmart and Amazon do central planning so it's possible" without getting into a lot of the details. Very little about the nuts and bolts of central planning. Throw in a good dose of anti-Stalinism when the man oversaw successful central planning... I just didn't get anything out of it. Might be OK if you want a real basic introduction behind the ideas of planning but honestly I bet like 95% of you already know more about it than you realize.
And I love Graeber but jeez, I couldn't even finish Bullshit Jobs. It felt like a good article that was blown out into a book. Maybe my expectations were too high but I felt like he spent way too many pages getting into minutiae about what is/isn't a bullshit job without actually making a broader point.
Capitalist Realism raises a load of good points but then stuffs in a load of anti-communist stuff and just random incomprehensible bullshit.
I was talking to someone about it at a bar and she said “it should either be a third of it’s length so only the actually useful bits are in it, or three times longer so it can properly justify these ideas”
I read this entire book a few years ago and can't remember a single word of it besides its main point, that capitalism is considered the only realistic thing to do.
It was my best friend’s 21st and he invited a hot anarchist girl that I hit it off pretty well with, so we got to talking about music and theory
He rambles on about his students a bit too much, IMO. Write what you know, I guess.
Agreed. I think it's telling that people only ever reference the first few chapters.
Any books written by supposed Marxists who actually have documented connections with the CIA have me raising an eyebrow or two. Adorno, Horkheimer, Foucault, Zizek (these last two not definitely proven), and even our beloved :chomsky-yes-honey:, who called Lenin a right deviationist, who loves the New York Times, and who literally put me to sleep multiple times when I saw him in person. I recently picked up a book by Fernand Braudel because it looked cool, noticed it had some questionable takes about the history of capitalism (he almost argued that it has existed everywhere for eternity because capitalism is when you make / buy / sell stuff), then saw that he had worked for the Rockefellers. That explained it!
And oh yeah, Max Weber sux and is remarkably damaging. He is basically soft Marx—Marx without teeth, historical materialism with a vaguely idealistic escape valve called "culture." For years in college I was like: "Where did capitalism come from? Oh yeah, it came from Protestantism. And never mind where Protestantism came from, we don't need to worry about that, it just randomly appeared out of thin air one day, now excuse me while I enjoy my treats." I suspect that many, many, many history professors would have to invent Max Weber if he didn't exist, because you can't understand history without historical materialism, but every time you mention Marx you risk losing your incredibly cushy job because Marxism itself is explicitly designed to destroy capitalism.
Trotskyist writers annoy me even as I recognize that some (like Victor Serge) are extremely good. I strongly suspect that Richard Wolff and his wife Harriet Fraad are Trotskyists but I still greatly appreciate their input as long as they stick to the imperial core.
Give me Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Fidel, Che, Mao, Ho, the Panthers, and other violent revolutionaries over the wordy establishment stooges any day. I feel like even lib writers who don't hide behind the extremely vague "leftist" label are more trustworthy since at least you know where they're coming from. Silvia Federci starts Caliban and the Witch leaning a lot on Foucault, but to her credit she remarks toward the end of the book that he is basically useless for her project (since he never wrote a word about witches).
Just want to put a note on Braudel, that he's decidedly not saying that capitalism has existed in all places or anything like that, but that capital and capitalists have often existed throughout history, even outside of "capitalism," where the state in effect endorses capital accumulation and universalizes that as the main economic force. Capital has existed so long as trade has existed, that's how trade works. You trade a good for money, and use that money to buy more goods to trade more to make more money. That's pretty standard capital accumulation, and was going on in ancient Rome and China no problem. The key was that the capitalists didn't control the government, didn't determine economic policy, and the state was not really interested in protecting this kind of capital accumulation. Braudel makes the point that during Renaissance Italy these capitalists got control of various city states and oriented the state towards capital accumulation, institutionalizing this process and kickstarting capitalism proper. This is a different and arguably more historical explanation for capitalism than traditional Marxist historiography, and whilst Braudel was not a Marxist many Marxist scholars (like Losurdo and Arrighi) have used his theories to further expand our own understanding of capitalism. Note how Braudel's historical account of capitalism can help explain why modern China, which has capitalists, is not a "capitalist" country.
But what do you make of Wood’s argument that capitalism began in rural late medieval England? The relentless capital accumulation you find there is pretty different from a place like Renaissance Italy, where feudalism and slavery just seem so much stronger. Take Venice as an example. It has so many seeming hallmarks of capitalism—factories, trade, wealth. But the ruling class there is really qualitatively different from the capitalist ruling class, which is always reinvesting capital in improving the forces of production. You find the Venetian ruling class, in contrast, investing in feudal estates and titles which are really not that productive and which ultimately lead them nowhere. The same thing happens even in the Netherlands. Wealth is based on buying cheap and selling dear over long distances rather than improving the productive forces. This is ultimately the reason why England and then the USA conquer the world.
I feel like there’s also a difference between capital in the traditional sense, i.e., stuff you use to make stuff (machines in a factory for instance), versus capital in the Marxist sense—a relationship between the people who own the means of production and the people who don’t. That relationship doesn’t seem to exist anywhere on Earth until the enclosures ramp up in England. Like, you will find an urban proletariat in medieval Florence and Venice, but where are you going to find capitalists? You might have some pieces you need to make capitalism, but they never come together in the very specific required way until the enclosures. The ruling class in Renaissance Italy also makes its money completely differently from English capitalists—separately from the state via economic imperatives (work or you won’t have wages to buy food) for the latter versus via the state and political imperatives (work or we will kill you) for the former.
I think I'm substantially less convinced by Woods' argument after reading Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century, which builds off of Braudel and addresses many of the points you bring up. It's a phenomenal work.
I always saw Arrighi's description of the Italian led non-territorialized networks of exchange as the valuable seed that was planted in the fertile soils of the competitive English leasing market described by Wood
But I think both of them got a little too wrapped up in the historical realities of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that they miss the crucial mutation that transformed capitalism post-1730, not only in terms of technology but also the super-profits generated by the intensification of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade
End of the day I think Marx was dead on in his description of the evolution of industrial capitalism in relation to its previous iterations
the other varieties of capital which appeared previously . . . are not only subordinated to it and correspondingly altered in the mechanism of their functioning, but they now move only on its basis, thus live and die, stand and fall together with this basis
We need a substantial treatment on not only the historical origin of capitalism, but also on the invisible second origin embodied by industrial capitalism
Yeah I think as works of history Woods and Arrighi both have great cases, and can totally complement each other if the terms are changed a bit for each. Would absolutely love to read that kind of substantial treatment on industrial capitalism, if only it existed... this kind of long duree history on capitalism is few and far between.
A while ago I found a useful historical outline to formulate the treatment, but it's limited to only tracking the technological spatial diffusion of early steam engines, but I still think it's a decent map if it was paired to the concurrent developments of capital and labor markets during this time-period
The crucial years for understanding the development of modern industrial capitalism are 1700-1803, the trick is to find all the puzzle pieces shattered around academia, pieces that deal individually with slavery, technology, war, trade, history of labor and generate a work similar to Arrighi's or Wood's
It's pretty telling that something like that hasn't been attempted, we always have to remember even historians are politically minded and politically sensitive, or in the infamous case of Walter Johnson in his treatment of Marx's writings on slavery about this same time-period, outright intellectually dishonest
Like, you will find an urban proletariat in medieval Florence and Venice, but where are you going to find capitalists? You might have some pieces you need to make capitalism, but they never come together in the very specific required way until the enclosures. The ruling class in Renaissance Italy also makes its money completely differently from English capitalists—separately from the state via economic imperatives (work or you won’t have wages to buy food) for the latter versus via the state and political imperatives (work or we will kill you) for the former.
At least for me, one of the reasons why I find the idea of Italian city-states having an early form of capitalism convincing is because the ruling ideology of those Italian city-states wasn't particularly feudal. You can draw a straight line from Renaissance humanism espoused by intellectuals like Erasmus to Protestantism and finally to liberalism of the Enlightenment. Renaissance humanism was also a break from feudal ideology by stressing on the individual, the hallmark of all subsequent capitalist ideologies like liberalism.
I interpret the Renaissance's fascination of ancient Greek and Roman text as a rejection of feudal ideology. Since capitalism didn't exist yet/barely existed, capitalist ideology also didn't exist/is barely developed, so they can't just replace feudal ideology with liberalism but instead had to reach for some nonfeudal ideology, which in the Italian city-states' context, would be the intellectual works produced by societies organized under the slavery mode of production. This nonfeudal ideology would be further intellectually developed until it finally emerged in its mature form as liberalism.
I've been thinking a lot about this because I think you made some really good points, especially with your second paragraph. With the first I would just say that modes of production can coexist even if one is always dominant, and when one dominant mode is replaced by another, the current dominant mode can subsume the ideology of previous modes for its own ends. Italy itself was probably always the most Roman place in the entire feudal world, especially with regard to its continuous trade links with the Arabs and Byzantines, who themselves practiced slight variations on the slave mode of production. (Slavery still existed in Italy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; some of the most successful city-states like Venice and Genoa were powered by the slave trade.) I want to say it was Cardinal Bessarion or some other Byzantine intellectuals fleeing to Italy from the Byzantine world in 1453 who helped kick off the Renaissance devotion to ancient Greece and Rome, although Italian intellectuals like Dante and Petrarch who were active a century earlier obviously helped a lot. Renaissance humanism to me seems like a reawakening and further development of the ideological superstructure of Roman slavery. The fact that you can draw a straight line from Erasmus to Locke doesn't necessarily mean that Erasmus was living under a capitalist mode of production. Capitalism itself still utilizes feudal ideas (Leonard Leo, architect of the modern SCOTUS, is literally a hospitaller); feudalism likewise used Roman ideas even in the middle of the Middle Ages (Charlemagne called himself Emperor of the Romans for instance but there are many other examples).
This is just semantics, Braudel isn't a Marxist so he uses different terms. For Braudel and many historians a "capitalist" is somebody whose primary trade is the production of capital, whether that be industrial capital, merchant capital, financial capital, etc is not the point. For Marx in particular capital and capitalism has a distinctly industrial bent. It's not capitalism unless the capitalists are engaged in commodity production. What Braudel and many of the world system historians are trying to do is broaden this perspective, that industrial capital is a type of capital but is perhaps not necessary for capitalism or capitalists to exist. Capital is a wonderful account of industrial capitalism and the commodity, but it is decidedly not a historical account of the rise of capital, nor is Marx trying to do that. I find the world system theory of capital far more convincing for explaining how and why capital and capitalism came about than Marx, despite being a Marxist myself. It's an ongoing debate in the historical community, though, and there's no one "right" answer for sure.
You're right, I meant productive and not industrial, my bad! Yeah for Marx capitalism is decidedly productive, and it's all about production of goods and commodities rather than just the enlargement of capital as capital. Braudel and others are just trying to say that capitalism predates productive capitalism, and that production is just one form in which capital accumulation can happen.
capitalism
Gonna start with this bc it comes up a lot, and not using terms in the same way will cause misunderstandings, so it’s best to start with terminology. Marx uses the word “capitalism” twice in Volume One. Once is modified by “the soul of English” before it, so it’s not an abstract “capitalism” but a very specific thing about the ideology of English capitalism (and even then, the meaning of the “soul of English capitalism” is to force the cost of labour towards zero, not an absolute law or state of existence or method of organization.) The other use is in “period of capitalism,” using capitalism not to refer to a system but rather a period in history (the period where the capitalist mode of production prevails). There is not a single mention in the book of an abstract “capitalism.” In comparison, “capitalist mode of production” appears 45 times in Volume One alone. Vol2 is less carefully edited for word choice, but the word capitalism appears 5 times, “capitalist mode of production” 22 times. Not gonna control f vol3 bc it’s a mess, a rough draft, and written before most of vol1 and vol2 were written so he’s less careful about terms, but you should get my point. “Capitalism” or “capitalist society” are terms so broad that they are meaningless so Marx avoids them unless he is dealing with very, very broad phenomena. The opening lines of Capital are “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as ‘an immense collection of commodities’.”
This is not Marx trying to hurt your brain with wordiness or him trying to impress his audience. Marx’s letters about the writing and revising of Capital are filled with statements of the opposite; he was trying very hard to make it as clear as possible, as easy to understand as possible. The sentence “The wealth of capitalist society…” would have a very different meaning, his conscious choice to use a “wordier” version is him doing his best to make sure people don’t say things like “capitalist society,” bc there is no society that has consisted entirely of the Capitalist mode of production, and when you say things like Capitalist society people start to reify the abstractions and believe in manichean and binary thinking processes that destroy any ability to engage in dialectical materialism. To my knowledge, there has never been any society consisting entirely of one mode of production. Peoples as varied as the nehiyaw, Ming China, Australian Aboriginals, Haudenosaunee, Sami and 13th century England have/had multiple modes of production, so I don’t think there’s much chance of finding one that does have a single mode of production.
The capitalist mode of production is the prevailing mode of production in our current society. There are other modes of production that exist at the same time (various indigenous ones, peasant ones, domestic ones, to name a few broad categories). These modes of production interact with each other; the food produced in a peasant mode of production in Kenya (albeit formally (increasingly real-ly) subsumed) is prepared into a meal in the domestic mode of production in a house in France which produces labour powers that are consumed in productive (in the capitalist mode of production’s meaning of productive as per vol1) consumption to produce missiles in the capitalist mode of production. Metabolism between modes of production is one of the moments the capitalist modes of production, circulation and distribution makes use of to externalise costs, i.e. to violate the rules of capitalist circulation set out in the opening chapters of Capital to instead take use values for less than the price representing the average labour time to produce those commodities in a given time/place; i.e. as Marx outlines in part 8 “so called primitive accumulation.”
Capitalists (usually commercial, but before real subsumption of labour, industrial too) prefer to produce use values “outside” (nothing is actually outside, but capitalist mode of production generally tries to externalise costs to make the rate of profit seem higher) of capitalist production in this way because they can then be appropriated without providing exact equivalents, either through unequal exchange or direct dispossession of the producers without equivalent compensation (both are used, often together to various extents) and exploited by capitalist production, circulation, distribution and consumption.
In societies before capitalist mode of production was the prevailing mode of production, capital and capitalists (productive and commodity and money capitalists) still exist prior to the prevailing of the capitalist mode of production. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t BE capitalist production to prevail, capitalist production didn’t spawn from nowhere fully formed, it arose out of historical processes and coincidences over millennia, there is a reason Marx turned towards Rome as well as the Haudenosaunee in his analysis of non-capitalist societies.
Further he is saying that our society is one in which it is specifically the capitalist mode of production that prevails. He (repeatedly, explicitly, so people wouldn’t misunderstand him) restricted his analysis to the capitalist mode of production in Volume One. There are many, many paragraphs and footnotes (and Marx’s footnotes are often paragraph(s)) which begin with him saying that he will only examine something in relation to production, or ending with him saying the analysis can’t go further until he has explained capitalist circulation and capitalist distribution of commodities. In volumes 2 and 3 he does this; he examines merchant/commodity and credit/money capital, (i.e. capitalist modes of circulation/distribution/consumption) which prevailed before the capitalist mode of production prevailed, to show how they were necessary to come first, although he also mentions this in volume one.
Chapter 15 of volume one, as well as chapter 10 and part 8 focus in in part on the origins of the current state of society, and Marx examines wage labour, capital, etc as it exists in other societies and then shows why this did not ‘take off’ in the ecocidal deathcult of industrial capitalism. Chapter 10 shows the process by which the profuctive capitalists seized control of and remade insutries in their image in terms of labour organization. This requires the productive capitalists to exist before the capitalist mode of production has prevailed. Chapter 15 very clearly shows how the component parts for the industrial capitalist mode of production existed for centuries (even machines, etc etc), but they were not combined in the right place and the right ways until the primitive accumulation process really took off, particularly post-1492 (although doing some reading of European history and peasantries is also making me look at the crusades (‘regular’ and ‘normal’ crusades both) as attempts at primitive accumulation to raise the rate of profit in the (not yet predominating, this is at the stage where merchant capitalists are growing up between the spaces in divided europe and monarchs are relying on them for funding and administration) capitalist mode of production.
Marx is really, really careful with his words (especially in vol1 bc its the most complete), and when you change them even slightly (or borrow words or meanings from earlier, or especially unpublished) Marx you run into issues when reading the book that Marx wrote assuming it would be the first thing of his you read, bc he is assuming that you will understand the words as he's using them in Capital, not as he did 20 years or more earlier (and there's a lotta changes in those 20 years). With the (essential in my view if you want to seriously discuss such complex topics rather than banter about them like young hegelians) discussion of terminology out of the way, moving into the actual concrete points I take issues with. 1/2
Because a merchant is a different thing than a capitalist
Volume two of Capital explicitly deals with money-capital and commodity capital; i.e. merchant Capital. Marx says: “we shall only be considering the merchant as capitalist, and merchant’s capital, later on” (Vol2p209) and he does so extensively in vol2 and vol3. The focus of the first four chapters, which examine money-, productive- and commodity- capital separately, and then as a whole (although leaving out money-capital for the most part in volume2). The circuits of capital are all necessary, and the existence of developed merchant capital is a prerequisite for industrial capital; unless there are wholesale merchants to buy your mass produced goods and do the work of selling them, you need to do that yourself which interrupts the production process. Marx actually goes in great detail as to the elements of capitalist circulation (including merchant-capitalists) that are required in order for even small scale capitalist production to begin, let alone industrial capitalist production. Marx is very explicit in referring to the merchant as possessing capital, performing capital accumulation, hiring wage labourers who surplus value can be extracted from (Marx explicitly says this on pages 209-210 of vol2).
they produce purely individually, with little to no division of labour.
This isn’t accurate to Volume One. In chapter 13 Marx details extensively the division of labour in pre-capitalist modes of production. He extensively examines the history of division of labour, from Ancient Egypt to Rome to the Middle Ages to the 1700s to prevailing of the capitalist mode of production. In chapter 13 and 14 Marx further shows that in the beginning of manufacturing, the peasant modes of production were first formally and then real-ly subsumed into capitalist production/circulation/distribution/consumption; the agent of this subsumtion is a capitalist; and you’ve been hoodwinked by reified bourgeois abstractions into thinking that “capitalism” as an abstract system exists and into thinking that capitalism is when wage labour and division of labour.
These merchants are not capitalist because their capital has not entered production, in effect it exists outside of production, because of which the law of value does not even apply, so most products are sold at their values, not prices of production.
All productive capital is capital, but not all capital is productive capital. Vols 2 and 3 are about commodity and money capital, respectively. You have a warped view of production. In Marx’s terms, literally everything is production, even resting and relaxation is production that reproduces a labour power. Marx’s constant, repetitious reminders that when he is examining production, productivity, he is talking specifically about production that is within the capitalist mode of production and is productive in the sense that it produces surplus value (vol 1, p644) need to be kept in mind in every line of text following, because unless he says otherwise he is assuming that you will see “productive labour” and understand he means “labour that produces not only the value of the labour power (which is different from the value of labour (labour doesn’t have a value)) but also surplus value” following, because Marx is accepting capitalist terms for sake of argument. Law of value applies to all societies where the capitalist mode of production predominates, it doesn’t matter if a particular bit of capital has entered capitalist production in the last week or 2 seconds ago, it’s value is determined by the average socially necessary amount of labour required to produce that commodity in the place and time it is found (this is why commodities may increase or decrease in value based on location). Products being sold at their values is a very easy, but critical misunderstanding. Products are not sold at their values; the price of a commodity is an approximation of its exchange value which is a reflection of value which is determined by the amount of labour embodied in it. (And it needs to be noted this is a capitalist mode of production definition of value, not something that exists constantly outside of history. Other societies have had other laws of value, there have been variations in capitalist laws of value.) Prices of production is very, very different from embodied labour time; it appears in volume 2 as Marx is talking about how capitalists view production. He argues that the capitalists view “profit” (their term for what marx calls surplus value) as arising from the difference between price/cost of production and how much the commodity is worth, and then they pat themselves on the back saying the profit comes from them making the sale rather than from the production process.
For once merchant people’s have always existed, to say they were capitalist is propousteros, were ancient Arabs capitalists? They were dominated by the merchant class.
I don’t know much about the history of Arabia so I cannot speak to the specifics, but again, you should be thinking in Marx’s terms (i.e. in terms of modes of production, circulation, distribution and consumption) rather than in these idealist terms of “capitalist society” “capitalism” etc. So the question should be, where the Arab merchants capitalists (Yes, see above writings on merchant-capital) and then asking to what extent their mode of circulation and fledging capitalist productions had spread through Arabia? Sounds tedious and academic and not useful for praxis? It is, you should be reading about local news and your own government’s actions and analysing the people doing oppression instead of researching any of this, this is not going to change anything.
most of the time, says Marx, their expansion creates slave societies, like in Rome
Would like to know where he says this; it’s not in Volume One at least. Marx mentions Rome only twelve times, none saying this. With regards to slavery in Rome, Marx says “The class-struggles of the ancient world took the form chiefly of a contest between debtors and creditors, which in Rome ended in the ruin of the plebeian debtors. They were displaced by slaves.” This is not a “most of the time” statement, this is not a claim to knowledge of how societies “should” or “usually” develop, because by the time he wrote Volume One Marx had mostly abandoned colonialist and eurocentric ideas of unilinear progress, in terms of History Volume One is concerned with the arisal of the industrial capitalist mode of production in England, he is not writing a general history of the world or of how things “should” “normally” “progress.” 2/2
Commercial capital and merchants capital, are also different things. He deals with commercial capital in vol 2, the difference lies in that commercial capital is subsumed under the law of value, merchants are not, this is what I meant when I said they are different things. It is ridiculous to claim they are the same
The words “subsumed” “subsumed” “subsumption” don’t appear in volume 2, but if you could provide me with chapters and page numbers I’d be happy to be proven wrong. As far as the substance of this argument, I’d advise re-reading chapter 10 of volume two and noting that he constantly refers to the merchant as possessing capital, holding capital, using capital (i.e. as a capitalist.) I could be wrong on the definition of commercial capitalist, but that isn’t a key foundation of my argument so I’ll accept that merchant-capital and commercial-capital are different for purposes of this discussion. I’m also unsure what subsumption would mean in relation to the law of value; when Marx uses the term in volume one, it’s with regards to the subsumption of labour into capitalist production.
What I meant by “merchants are not capitalist” is that as a part of feudal society, their prices do not fall under the law of value, rate of profit cannot equalize, since capital does not move between the different sectors, because they do not control production
Rate of profit isn’t equalised in the industrial capitalist production of England that Marx was examining in Capital — what makes you think the rate of profit would need to be equal for a ‘feudal society’’s merchants to be capitalists? If the rate of profit were equal, it would be impossible to generate relative surplus value; the drive of capitalist production towards increasing the share of constant capital in production to the detriment of the rate of profit would not exist; the entire tendency of the rate of profit to fall rests on there being differing rates of profit both between and within industries.
Nope, it’s not, it’s a reflection of its price of production under equalized rate of profit, which did not exist under feudal societies
See above, not sure why you think rate of profit is equal, if it were the mode of production would stop functioning.
Vol 3 actually, it is mentioned a couple of times, you should know this if you have read it. Also nowhere did I talk about how things should progress, just how they tended to in the past, the exact phrasing misses me at the moment, but it is along the lines that the expansion of commerce tended to create slave societies in ancient times, and capitalism in modern societies
I started vol3, but the incompleteness of it made me take a break that I haven’t returned from yet. Anyway, I searched vol3 and I think this is what you are talking about: “Merchant’s capital, when it holds a position of dominance, stands for a system of robbery, so that its development among the trading nations of old and modern times is always directly connected with plundering, piracy, kidnapping slaves, and colonial conquest; as in Carthage, Rome, and later among the Ventians, Portuguese, Dutch, etc.” This is more absolute than I thought it would be (which i will justify to myself with this being a rough draft written relatively early compared to the other parts of Capital), but I’d note the phrase “when it holds a position of dominance.” This isn’t a statement about the nature of merchant capital generally, it is a statement about the nature of merchant capital (all capital in my view, but the statement is specifically merchant capital) when it holds a position of dominance (i.e. not in Medieval England, etc, (although slavery very much was an institution at the time, not the dominant one tho)).
it is a prerequisite, but the dominance of merchant capital over the government, the original point I was making, does not capitalism make. All of the spanish american colonies were dominated by merchant’s capital early on, this did not make them capitalist, since they were trading stolen gold from indigenous people, and did not actually take over production
Friend, I’ve talked extensively about why you shouldn’t be using the term ‘capitalism’ in a serious theoretical discussion. I haven’t studied the history of the Colonisation of South America to respond to the specifics, but do you have any books I could read on the topic? (Not Open Veins of Latin America, I’ve already read that). If/when I get around to reading it and it shows you’re correct, I’ll try to remember to update you. The original point you were making (in the comment i was responding to) with regards to merchant capitalists was “a merchant is a different thing than a capitalist, merchants don’t produce anything for once[sic]...” You seem to be lying about what you said. This isn’t comradely behaviour, this doesn’t bring us closer to an understanding of the existing conditions— it obfuscates them. Ignorance helps nobody.
They had merchant’s capital, but you are avoiding the question, the original person claimed that once “capitalist”, even in the sense of merchants, dominated government the society became capitalist, which is ridiculous because as stated, ancient arabia was dominated by merchants, and their society looks nothing like the capitalism we know, in any shape or form
As I said, I don’t know enough about Arabia to respond to specifics. Do you have anything you’d recommend reading on the topic of ‘Ancient Arabia’ (this seems awfully vague, but i’m assuming its jargon specific to the field.)? I’m always looking to learn more. I don’t particularly care to discuss what this other person was saying; I have enough to discuss with what you’ve said. I would note though, that ‘capitalism’ 200-300 years ago looked incredibly different from ‘capitalism’ today, just as, if we define these older societies dominated by capitalist modes of circulation as ‘capitalism’ (we define the abstractions, they aren’t god-given), we would expect them to look very different, only keeping in common the laws(tendencies) of capitalist circulation/production/etc.
No, cite where " Other societies have had other laws of value" , also " there have been variations in capitalist laws of value" where it isn’t just different levels of adoption of the law of value
Vol 1 ch.19 “Apart from these contradictions, a direct exchange of money, i.e., of realized labour, with living labour would either do away with the law of value which **only begins to develop itself freely on the basis of capitalist production…” This means that, before the capitalist law of value developed on the basis of capitalist production there were other means of determining values, unless you’re assuming no values at all existed prior to the development of capitalist production (in which case capitalist production couldn’t develop, because without capitalist circulation wage labourers cannot find their means of sustenance at market and pay for them, i.e. wage labour isn’t possible (and that’s why people lose their land slowly, often even after they work for wages for the majority of their food, you still see people gathering stuff from forests, growing stuff in gardens, until they lose that too). Capitalist law of value has changed over time imo, though I could be misunderstanding what the term means. As I was using it here, by variation in laws of value I was thinking most concretely of the (slow, too slow, insufficient) increase in the value of women’s labour. I don’t care much about the definitional battle, so if that’s called something different, I don’t really care much.
Not sure why you split your answer in two like this, seems like it’d make it harder to respond to the whole thing.
Holy mental gymnastics, Let me guess, you think that China is a society dominated by socialism, where capitalism exists subsumed by it?
No, I think China
spoiler
is a big country in East Asia with a very big population.
The verb here is herrschen, to rule, dominate , it also means to prevail, but given the context it is clear that this means to govern, rather than be a part of.
Never contradicted this; I said repeatedly that the capitalist mode of production is the prevailing mode of production in our society. Prevailing in the context Marx uses it means domination, means supremacy. It does not mean being the only one that exists at any given moment, however, so all of my points wrt that still stand.
Also, why would he use the word “capitalism”? too inexact, he is never talking about capitalism in general, only about some aspect of capitalism, Exactly, that’s why I criticised you using the word. It has no place in serious discussion bc it’s meaningless. Thank you for seeing my point, even if you feel the need to agree with me in a way that implies disagreement.
the opening is pretty much the one of the only times he refers to capitalist societies in general,
This is correct, Marx does not refer to capitalist societies in general much in Capital (as I said in my post, thank you for agreeing with me.). However to further clarify; Marx does discuss the capitalist mode of production very, very generally and abstractly (and with references to moments that are externalised from the capitalist mode of production i.e. performed in other modes of production so that the costs can be externalised.) As I said in my post, Marx does not examine “capitalist societies in general” because such societies don’t exist; the world we live in is one in which “the Capitalist mode of production prevails,” as Marx says.
once you look up capitalist, as an adjective it shows up almost in every single page.
Yes, I mentioned a similar point in my post, comparing mentions of “capitalism” to “capitalist mode of production,” so it should be clear that I didn’t deny Marx’s use of the term “capitalist.” ‘Capitalist’ is a different word from ‘capitalism,’ however. ‘Capitalism’ has very little (none that I can think of offhand at least) meaning apart from the abstracted system as a totality, my criticisms of it I talked about apply. ‘Capitalist’ has several meanings. One is the individual (i.e. someone engaged in capitalist production/circulation/etc), another (as appears in the previous bracket) is an adjective modifying the following noun (e.g. circulation), again, not the abstracted system as a totality. What this means is that the big abstract noun here is, for example, circulation (i.e. the way in which use values are moved between producers (but not including how they’re distributed after movement) which is modified by the adjective ‘capitalist’ to indicate that this is a specific mode of circulation, distinct from other mode of circulation.
The reason why capitalist cannot coexists with other modes of production, at least forever,
I did not claim the capitalist mode of production (and circulation etc) could exist with other modes of production “forever,” I claimed that it exploits them for cheap use values when they exist alongside capitalist modes of production/circulation/etc. Capitalist production and circulation have a constant need to expand as you say, but it isn’t constant and it seizes onto new areas bit by bit in most cases, which leaves it still existing as capital snakes its tentacles into it and starts re-organising production, distribution, etc, along capitalist lines. For example, in the case of the fur trade in the interior of Canada, we can speak of European influence in territories with no direct contact with Europeans as the European demand for furs sees their neighbours seek them out in trade, which sees changes (quantitative) in terms of how much hunting is done (and for what), However this change has not yet changed the mod of production; the furs that are hunted by nations further inland are traded outwards towards Europe (which then included them in circuits of commodity capital accumulation in Europe at the time) in return for European goods. These European goods slowly replace self-made goods, creating a dependency. The continuing needs of Capital accumulation (i.e. growth) demand ever more furs, which leads to a need for production to be re-organised from whatever mode of production was previously used in favour of one that extracts the most from a given area per unit time (disregarding “externalities” like “who will repopulate the beavers/bison/etc”). If groups refuse to re-organise to accommodate the needs of European capital accumulation, they were faced with groups who would invading their territories (and eventually Europeans themselves, of course.) An introduction to the history of the colonisation of the plains is Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains. An introduction to the theory of the development of underdevelopment can be found in Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
capitalism is a totalizing force, seeking to draw everyone into circulation,
This is the manifesto, yes. The manifesto is a pamphlet based on a catechism written by a 20something Engels in a hurry and then turned into something less Christian by a 29 year old Marx in the span of 2 weeks, so, so much stuff in it is contradicted by later Marx, or even better by later Marxist(s) who have done actual empirical research into the stuff Marx was only speculating from armchairs in ‘48 At best, he was speculating based on what early 19th century writers wrote; do you have faith in the empirical skills and good faith representations of history of early 19th century european writers high off their asses on liberal and/or christian ideology? I really, really don’t. If you do, go read Ronald Hutton’s Pagan Britain. It’s completely unrelated to this discussion, but he trashes British (and Broader European) scholarship in such a way that both shows the issues with uncritical regurgitation of sources, as well as provides insights into how to do actual investigation. Also go read Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, iirc (been a while since I read it) it talks about the issues of Eurocentrism, liberal ideology, etc in scholarship even in the 1990s. Reading Both makes it abundantly clear that liberal brainworms are endemic to liberal society (and (secular)Christian ones to secular(Christian) society). Marx was very good at identifying and criticising them, but, as we say “you are not immune to propaganda.”
With my criticism of the manifesto out of the way, yes, capitalist production (again, why are you saying ‘capitalism’) aims to expand, but not because it seeks to “draw everyone into circulation” (this is idealist, capitalist production ), rather because it aims to constantly profit which because of how relative surplus value works, demands constant growth which demands constant inputs of both labour and ‘raw materials’. Totalizing force is very early Marx, along with the idea that capitalist ‘development’ of the colonies would follow from imperialism (e.g. the 1853 New York Tribune Article on India, idk which month/week offhand). By 1857 (another New York Tribune article, you have the euro-communists being too proud to learn english to blame for the articles going so ignored in theoretical discussion) he has realised that capitalist production, rather than ‘developing’ the colonies in the same way, ‘developed’ them specifically to meet the needs of Capital accumulation. In India, what this meant was actually destroying their industry, and then increasing taxation on peasants (guess how they were producing stuff? Definitely wasn’t the capitalist mode of production).and thereby starting the sometimes slow process of destruction of all previously existing classes,
It’s almost always a slow process tbh. Exceptions exist etc, but generally capital seizes onto stuff piece by piece, often without doing anything more than unequal exchange at first. At first the exchange is of the non-capitalist group’s excess use values for European goods. Europeans benefit from the ability to control what they bring and access to a ‘bigger picture’; they will almost always get better deals. Over time, the non-capitalist group’s production, while still not a capitalist mode of production will become more oriented towards the needs of european capital while slowly embracing capitalist ideas of consumption, distribution and circulation. It is only at the point when a system of capitalist consumption, distribution and circulation exist (i.e. that a wage labourer can obtain all their needs through commodity exchange) that the capitalist mode of production can begin. 1/3
other modes of production exist within capitalism as pockets, with little to no overlap with commodity producing societies, these get drawed into circulation, and their people get thrown into the process of pauperization,
No, other modes of production exist within capital and exchange with them as they are slowly consumed by capitalist production/circulation/etc. They don’t exist as autonomies, this is outdated scholarship (outdated even by late Marx people rly need to stop recommending the manifesto just read Capital he really worked hard on it plz ppl read Capital). Even today there are peasant communities who hold their land collectively, produce goods collectively, distribute them collectively, etc, but they are folded into larger global systems that demand they buy fertilisers and GMO seeds which means they need to produce for exchange value (and this transformation warps the mode of production and slowly changes it into a capitalist-approximating mode of production but not the exact same thing bc capital does not remake the colonies in its own image; it remakes the colonies in the image of underdevelopment to serve the needs of the imperial core). There are also peasant communities that aim to become more self-sufficient, as you’re describing, but this is generally motivated not by unwillingness to trade with neighbours (historically peasants actually do travel in their area and exchange goods) but rather because they’d like to stay the fuck out of the capitalist hellworld europe made. I don’t have many sources for stuff on peasants offhand because I learnt it from a class with a author who’s involved (afaik he goes back to India in the Summers and uses his research funding to research the enemy (i.e. multinationals and such)) in a peasant struggle. This class looked over the history of development of underdevelopment and imperialism, particularly in relation to peasants and other non-capitalist modes of production. Some good books that look at similar themes (but these are NOT citations for the above) are Kapoor and Jordan’s “Research, Political Engagement and Dispossesion,” “Open Veins of Latin America* by Galeano, Gordon & Webber’s Blood of Extraction, Engler’s Canada In Africa, and Patnaik & Moyo’s Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry: The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era. For an interesting, though less related bc it’s not about peasants, look at how the process of destroying the AES mode of production in Poland, Dunn’s Privatizing Poland is very interesting (though with some bad takes) read. Process of pauperization is different from this; you’re conflating the process of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ (accumulation by dispossession) with subsumtion.
and formal and real subsumsion , the actual mode of production does not exist in the same time and place as capital, it exists separate from it, and once it enters into contact with it, its traditional forms of production are destroyed.
For clarity; are you proposing that, the moment the nehiyawak traded a beaver pelt to a european on the banks of Hudson Bay, the entire nehiyaw mode of production was “destroyed” instantly? Are you unaware that this process took centuries? Are you unaware that this process was not one step, but several, preceding at times slowly and at times more quickly? Are you unaware that this process proceed not in one direction, but dialectically in a conflict between modes of existence, and that at some times the conflict leaned one way and sometimes another? I suggest you read Mays An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States it goes into the conflicts in the American context. Also recommend Cree Narrative Memory by McLeod as examination of that conflict from the position of the colonised.
Also farmers in Kenya are not part of a “peasant form of production” What even is this? are you calling single family farms the “peasant mode of production”?
No more than talking about a “capitalist mode of production” implies individual factories are their own modes of production. I am calling the widespread, generalised production of crops on land ‘owned’ collectively by a family, wherein the products are distributed (excepting whatever is extracted in rent/taxes/etc) among that family and consumed by that family with the main mode of circulation between families and villages often (but not always) taking the form of specific gifts, services, etc, rather than money and exchange value. On the Origins of English Individualism has a good description in the opening chapter of my criteria, though I disagree with some of the book’s later conclusions (and especially it’s framing of individualism as good).
they are a class of farmers that has not suffered the full centralization of capital.
Centralisation of capital is “concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into few large capitals.” I.e. it is capitalists expropriating each other. You mean to say they are an independent class of capitalist-farmers? This would require them to 1. own land 2. produce on that land in the capitalist mode (i.e. with wage labour) and then 3. distribute the products in the capitalist mode (i.e. owner gets the products, wage labourers get none of the products (they get wage)) and then 4. consume (whether productively or unproductively) the products as they choose. To my knowledge, before the post-2008 neoliberal landgrabs (still ongoing afaik) in Africa, there were actually still peasants owning their lands as families in Kenya, but selling their goods to big capitalists, paying rents/taxes to government or local authorities. To my knowledge (I still haven’t read We Feed the World yet but I’ve read papers in that class which made similar points so I feel relatively comfortable gesturing towards it for further reading) a lot of our (global north) food is actually produced in this manner (in the global south), even today. Family ownership of land (not “father owns and then son inherits”, actual familial ownership) is not the same as capitalist ownership; for one it often does not involve the right to alienate that land, hence why much of the landgrabbing is heavily resisted. This is not the expropriation of capitalist by capitalist that Marx defines as the centralisation of capital in chapter 28 of Volume One; it is the process of ‘so called primitive accumulation’ he discusses in part 8.
Peasants produce for themselves, with little to no trade,
This isn’t true as an absolute (or even general) rule, historically, but that would be digressing too far (and I’d have to get books from the library to check citations which I don’t feel like doing).
Also “domestic mode of production”? is each family its own mode of production now? Apparently these families do not belong to society according to you, or is the family structure not a part of capitalist production?
No. Domestic production is not wage labour and it’s not performed to produce exchange value, it’s performed to create a use value (labour power, in the final analysis) i.e. it is not carried out in the capitalist mode of production (which uses wage labour and produces for exchange value particularly surplus value). This is the term used by Delphy in Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression; her use of it is to show how much labour is done in the household (for free, generally by women) to produce the use values that the capitalists appropriate gratis (similar argument to Marx’s discussion of capitalist appropriation of nature as “free,” basically) as a contribution to marxist-feminist theory. She also does some very important theoretical work in the book with what class means. Her book is not a rejection of class struggle, it is an examination of a form of exploitation Marx was too high on patriarchal ideology to notice. Another book I’d advise reading to get a better grip on the production capital doesn’t want you thinking about is More Work for Mother by Cowan; it examines the domestic labour process from a similar standpoint to Marx’s examination of the industrial labour process in Chapter 13-15. Not going to respond to the other points in this other than to point out that, for expressing “I don’t know modern theory, please explain what these terms mean” you sounded very aggressive here. I would advise, when engaging in good faith with other leftists, you try and actually ask questions and clarify rather than act like a liberal on twitter who’s just looking to start trouble for fun.
“Capitalist” as in merchants do exist in previous societies, but they are not part of a capitalist mode of production that is not dominant, they are just parts of feudal society,.
“Feudal society.” Friend, the same criticism I applied to ‘capitalist society’ or ‘capitalism’ applies here. “Feudal society” would be literally everything in whatever society you’re talking about, and so it would include merchant-capitalists, but this does not mean merchant capitalists are operating using the feudal mode of production; the merchant-capitalists are not land-owners, they do not get anything from the peasants on that land without trading for it (i.e. mediated through exchange value i.e. not feudal mode of circulation) because they are not land owners.The entire structure of feudal mode of production based on relationships and services explicitly defined in qualitative terms (as discussed by Marx in Volume One), merchant-capital operates very differently from that, even in this era. It has to interact with feudal mode, yes, the individual merchant capitalist can wear multiple hats, the individual merchant capitalist moves between different modes of circulation production distribution consumption because, in all societies, there exist multiple means of all of those things. In their role as merchant, however, the merchant would only be doing merchant things. If he manages to buy land, marry into the aristocracy and kept being a merchant while receiving tribute from peasants on that land, he would be engaging in two (many more actually bc domestic would be here too) modes of production at the same time, which is how it usually is (although from what I know, historically if they could become a noble, merchants would stop doing merchant things) in reality. In Capital Marx explicitly says, very early on (before he’s even discussed the working day), that he is only considering individuals in their roles in the capitalist mode of production; this is why he brackets out personal consumption and brackets out so much complexity (often explicitly saying he is doing so because Marx was not trying to describe reality, he was trying to describe the capitalist mode of production which is the prevailing mode of production in our society which means it has the largest influence on the structure of our society, but it is not the only structure (even the totality of volume 3 (production, circulation, distribution and credit) explicitly brackets out everything falling outside of that from the immediate analysis, he does not say they do not exist.
The reason why they operate “outside of production”, is because they only sell the surplus product of peasants, and do not dominate production,
Yes, this is partially correct. You’re neglecting the role of the cities in producing manufactured goods, however. Many peasants don’t make all of their own tools; generally they trade with other people, whether peasants in their or other villages or travelling merchants or some other such way, but they usually do have a lotta stuff that was produced outside their particular family (which is the basic unit of the peasant mode of production as I define it, production and consumption united in the family).
and they do not “prefer to produce use values “outside”” What?
Yeah my bad here. The phrasing was very bad I think. I mean to say that, when possible, capitalists would prefer to appropriate use values without providing what would be (in the capitalist mode of production/etc) an equivalent exchange value as possessed by the use value. I.e. they would prefer to take stuff and pay less, or even nothing for the use value. One example is something “furnished by Nature gratis”; i.e. the ideological belief of capitalists that they can consume the natural world with reckless abandon because it has no value unless altered by labour and as such can be appropriated for free. Similarly, as Delphy shows in Close to Home and Cowan shows in More Work for Mother, female coded/domestic labour is appropriated gratis, allowing for the production of use values with no “value” in terms of the capitalist mode of production. Another example is how the commute to work gets labelled as outside of your labour by your boss despite being a clear and necessary part of getting your work done; they’ve placed that labour, the labour of reproducing your labour power at the till at 5 AM, outside of the capitalist mode of production so that it becomes ‘natural’ that the commute is completed with no need to compensate the worker for the transportation.
This doesn’t mean anything, they do not chose whether they follow the law of value or not, it simply does not apply to them given the fact that capital cannot A. control production at this time and B. flow in and out of the different sectors, thus prices equal values, and prices of production do not exist.
Prices never ever equals value, it’s a reflection of exchange value which is the value of the labour that would be required to reproduce the commodity in given condition. Marx is very clear about this so I’m unsure where the confusion is coming from. Value can and does differ significantly from exchange value and price; that’s the basis of relative surplus value which is the basis of the constant search for new technologies. Capital not controlling production is irrelevant to the functioning of commercial capital; the basis of capitalist production is the profits from commercial capital and accumulation by dispossession. You don’t seem to realise that medieval and earlier societies can and did have different prices for given commodities at different cities, towns and villages based on the value required to produce (production includes transportation see vol2 ch6) that commodity in that place and time. A good book on how medieval English markets worked, for example, is Masschaele’s Peasants, Merchants and Markets (although i would disagree with classifying the peasants in this book as peasants in terms of using the peasant mode of production/etc) 3/3
Crucially you don’t produce goods to make money in merchant capital though, you are valve of supply/demand differentials
Trotskyist literature is really hit and miss. Insofar as certain Trotskyists I’ve read or spent time with emphasize their Leninsit side or sick to relatively orthodox Marxist analysis it can be solid. It can also suck, but there’s some of that in every Marxist tradition.
I think you’ve definitely right that once it doesn’t apply to the imperial core it becomes weaker, but given their emphasis on capitalism as a global system, and the privileged role they place on the proletariat in said core, I don’t think the issues with their analysis of the global core is without fault when what they’re discussing clearly has relations to global struggles.
Federici I’m kind of on the fence about because, while good Marxist feminist analysis is essential, I found some historical issues with some parts of Caliban. Also from what I gather she’s very much in this post-70s Italian autonomismo tradition which I don’t really understand the appeal of.
Ditto on Weber. Never been more bored in my life.
I remember one of the first "theory" books I read was an introductory guide to Marxism by a trot org and one of the chapters was devoted to the orgs insistence that the theory of the Big Bang is essentially creationism laundered through science, unmarxist, undialectical, and therefore something that must be relentlessly fought against.
But then again as far as Trot orgs picking bizarre hills to die on there are probably worse things that a first time reader could be ambushed with, at least the book wasnt from the anti-MeToo/Pro-statutory rape org.
Marxists should understand what their lane is (political economy) and not try be a metanarrative reinventing art, science, etc.
Yes, but the fact that those are always determined by material conditions, and more particularly by the fact that all art and science is materially produced in historically specific conditions, doesn’t mean that knowing a lot about those conditions as a Marxist social scientist gives much real knowledge about the theoretical content of a science or how a traditions types of arts are created. No investigation, no right to an opinion.
I think what the above comment is getting at is that some Marxist often speak too confidently on topics they don’t actually know much about, maybe because of some kind of vulgar materialism.
Most of the time that would be true. But Marxism doesn’t just contain political economy as a tradition. It also has a distinct philosophy of dialectical materialism and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be applied to topics in the natural sciences. Gould and Lewontin explicitly refer to Marx qnd dialectics in biological contexts and David Bohm’s philosophical reflections on his own thougt as a physicist were influenced by his readings of dialectical thinkers like Hegel and Whitehead. Engels wrote the Dialectics of Nature.
I think the problem is more that most times most Marxist who do apply it to those topics which, as Marxists, are not our immediate concern, do it poorly.
Yeah I’ve also encountered that Big Bang denial literature. There’s definitely a worrying amount that seems pretty dogmatic, and shows a misunderstanding of materialist dialectical thinking that is ironically more hegelian than marxist and leads to a-priori, speculative and not empirically or concretely grounded philosophy of science.
To be fair to some of them: the concept of the Big Bnag is actually discussed and debated philosophically and in the context of cosmology by cosmologists. There are cosmologie models with variations or which are very different to the popular idea of reh Big Bang. But yh normally they’re not referring to these.
Also there’s obviously a question of priorities like why tf is the cosmological concept of the Big Bang being brought up here as political before other (even philosophical) topics.
Weber, seen as an elaboration on top of Marx, rather than a refutation or an independent theory on its own, as any sociologist worth their salt trained after 1980 should know, is rather good, and fills in some of the shades between the very sharp objects of Marxism.
Zizek was part of some liberal parties and pushed for anti communism in his country after the USSR fell
That's some good shit. I'm looking forward to his book project on this
who literally put me to sleep multiple times when I saw him in person.
Haha snap! Literally
as for Zizek I don't know why anyone would take him seriously for ten seconds or let him have any influence at all. No charisma or intelligence.
I agree about Graeber, mostly because Bullshit Jobs was a good article (read it here) that got so popular Graeber felt compelled to turn it into a book. I'd encourage you to read his other work, all of which is better than Bullshit Jobs because they were all intended from the start to be books.
Oh yeah, his debt book is great and I imagine the article is good too, but article-length sounds about right for that topic.
Debt is definitely the best of his books and most justifies its length.
You can feel Graeber dialogue tree-ing his audience as he writes. It’s basically a book-length FAQ for people who didn’t think the article was thorough enough.
lmao
is that such a bad thing though? i haven't read the book btw
I think it's an alright enough read. It is a bit circular sometimes but funny enough in places that it's compelling to read.
I think the little red book is more of a fetish object than useful theory.
We found it, the true root of the sino-soviet split.
yea. i get that it's a good summary of mao's system of thought, but i'm not a marxist and it didn't really make me one. it's a collection of tweets.
to clarify, it was clearly useful for marshalling the chinese working people in revolution, but outside of that context it does nothing for me.
The Communist Manifesto is the big one. It's a half-assed statement of Marxism written in a hurry.
Also it was written 20 full years before Kapital. It's presented in culture as the sole text of communism, without context it only serves to obfuscate marxism for people who may be interested in it.
imo Socialism: Utopian and Scientific should be the first text people read when they want to learn about Marxism.
nah this is wack. it's an accessible pamphlet written for people who don't have the a background in fucking hegel and feuerbach. the prose sings.
The bread book. The first few chapters were fire, but it gets, like, really loose and handwavy after that - I basically stopped reading by like the sixth or seventh chapter because it felt like a waste of time.
I've read his three major books and the evolution one is the most interesting. Sleeper hit.
i don't really like how parenti actually writes. mans a splendid lecturer but the books? less interesting versions of his lectures for the most part, with the chief difference being a bibliography properly crediting the news article he'd quote
I agree, but that's because I'd already heard him speak when I first read him. His books aren't the best introduction to his work.
Really? I read a university review from the 90s about Inventing Reality. The professor said he used the book in his class, and some of his students approached him and accused Parenti of either lying or misunderstanding some things because the source didn’t seem right. The professor told the kids to do further research and present him the evidence so he can reassess Parenti. They got back to him and concluded that Parenti wasn’t lying or misunderstanding anything and they were able to verify the vast majority of his citations and considered his commentary accurate.
Citation Challenges: Building Credibility for Threatening Ideas
Andrew S. Hiken
Teaching Sociology, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Oct., 1991), pp. 502-505 (4 pages)
Yeah Inventing Reality is actually properly cited. Most people who have read Parenti only read Blackshirts and Reds, which is kind of a joke scholarship-wise.
i've seen it! i've seen it with my own two eyes! :bird-screm-2:
well not a proper proper bibliography just a chicago footnote [critical support :tito-laugh: ]
references to other scholarly works
this is what i don't like about it. a book needs to have more substance than a lecture. it needs to treat things in depth, not simply prove it's a real new york times article that's been quoted
I agree that the lack of citations is a big problem. Blackshirts and Reds would be a much stronger book if it had footnotes, endnotes, etc. At least the PDF that I read (and I think most everyone else here who read it digitally) did not have any citations whatsoever. I would feel better about recommending it to certain (read: college) lib types, at least.
a bibliography properly crediting the news article he’d quote
sometimes
Teachers and students should teach each other and learn from each other in an effort to humanize one another and overcome dehumanization, okay, got it!
I never liked the idea some people have that Wal Mart and Amazon prove anything about central economic planning. For one, they're market actors ultimately, and their goals have nothing to do with fulfilling people's material needs and everything to do with consuming the universe in order to make numbers go up. No matter how big they are they're still just capitalist extraction devices.
Secondly, the Soviet Union already proved that planned economies work. That's like THE thing they did the best. The McCarthyist conditioning runs so deep that even leftists can`t point at the most obvious example of what we want to accomplish.
I think it's a matter of choosing your argument for your audience, as libs just aren't going to accept that the USSR worked. They will cite the shortage of consumer goods, cars, and empty grocery store shelves all day.
Secondly, the Soviet Union already proved that planned economies work. That’s like THE thing they did the best. The McCarthyist conditioning runs so deep that even leftists can`t point at the most obvious example of what we want to accomplish.
The book had a chapter shitting on the Soviet Union, so that's part of the reason why the book was written in the first place. I didn't get past the first chapter because it kept on trashing the Soviet Union. Kinda weird how the text would keep on inserting opinions on a Euroasian polity that hasn't existed in decades about a US company.
100%. The pro-capitalists argue against centrally planning primarily on the (somewhat false) notion that you need market prices to efficiently allocate resources. Amazon isn't setting production quotas, they are just price takers and order fulfillers.
It absolutely boggles my mind how anybody could believe that market economies are efficient. As things currently are, we have people dig up minerals in Africa, then put them in ships and send them to Asia, where more labourers will turn them into widgets that will be (again) put on ships and sent into Europe and North America, to be sold in large surface retail stores to service and knowledge economy workers. All that, with all the extra effort and time and fossil fuels it implicates, is drastically cheaper than having good produced close to where they are distributed.
Walmart was written by the guy who got dunked on a few months ago for saying we shouldn’t have to sacrifice cruise ships to deal with climate change because it’s too extreme
Also I don’t know why Bullshit Jobs is a book either. You really only need like a 10 minute video or 500 word article about it which many oeoooe have already done
Also I don’t know why Bullshit Jobs is a book either. You really only need like a 10 minute video or 500 word article about it which many oeoooe have already done
Many people including Graeber lmao, he wrote an essay about it first.
Counter Revolution of 1776.
Incredibly poor scholarship. Author obviously stretches really thin evidence to fit an idea he had before actually researching. Dude really dug through piles of letters from people you never heard of to justify the thesis.
Frames the British empire as radical abolitionists. Gimme a break.
It's not unreasonable to think that a lot of the founding slaveowners were worried that the British would eventually outlaw slavery. The issue is we don't have any hard evidence that they actually thought this, so all we can do is make a supposition, not a book about it.
Yeah, I went in to the book thinking it would be a slam dunk because it seems so on it's face obvious.
But the substance just really isn't there.
Frames the British empire as radical abolitionists. Gimme a break.
It absolutely did not. His entire point was that Black and Indigenous peoples know where their bread is buttered, so they would side with the Spanish when the Spanish was at war with the British and side with the British when the British was at war with the Americans. He very much framed the British as a lesser evil compared to the Americans and the Spanish as a lesser evil compared to the British. Hardly a case of framing them as "radical abolitionists."
Not books per se but authors: I find both Marx and Fanon very tedious to read. Their prose is awkward and I feel like the text is fighting my brain when I try to read them.
This is not a slight against their ideas, just their writing.
It should also be noted I've read neither in their original language, just translations, so it's I entirely possible this is just the fault of translators. I don't think it is for Marx though, because even when I read Engels or Lenin and they block-quote Marx the text automatically gets :wtf-am-i-reading:
I think it’s more a very specific style they each have, which some people find very cold, but which I find chillingly analytical and insightful in both. I don’t know what Fanon reads like in English but in French he’s definitely considered to have a powerful style. A great example of his text being used in English is in the documentary Concerning Violence. Big recommend but also CW for violence.
I like bullshit Jobs because it's a very lib-friendly way (it even has the quirky airport book cover and all) to introduce people to labor issues and the contradictions of late capitalism without the byzantine or inflammatory language we love in our more serious theory. That being said, I can't bring myself to take it seriously, or as seriously as Graeber's other work.
I don’t think Graeber himself took it seriously since it was just an expanded article filled with anecdotes.
