Historiography may be defined as a dynamic, global, system of sodomy & body mutilation driven by the ceaseless accumulation of severed penises & extracted uteruses. This is why we must defund History Departments & 'cancel' any and every Historian who writes big, stupid, books.
At any rate, the argument given above would be irreproachable if Sven Beckert's big book on Capitalism wasn't itself a bunch of stupid, paranoid, illogical, lies.
I read in the Guardian that-
'Sven Beckert defines capitalism as a dynamic, global economic system driven by the ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled capital, structured by state power, and characterized by the "power of generation"—the relentless, productive reinvestment of wealth to create more capital. Rather than natural, he views it as a human-made, evolving system that constantly commodifies new areas of life, separating economic activity from mere market exchange'
A global economic system can't be static for reasons Darwin explained. It must be dynamic. Can there be 'ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled capital'? No. Why? Death occurs. People die. So do lineages and tribes and nations. Moreover, Capital depreciates. Control rights over it may get redistributed away from private agents. Large classes of capital goods may become obsolete overnight. They become worthless.
Can we point to any private enterprise or entity which has 'ceaselessly accumulated capital' over the last 500 years? No. We can point to different entities which at different times and different places did such accumulation- but only for a period.
What if I were to say 'It doesn't matter if some capitalists are replaced by other capitalism. Capitalism is continuing to accumulate assets'?
The problem here is that one could equally say 'Monarchy, in the UK, has continued to accumulate assets' or 'the Church has continued to accumulate assets' or the Chinese Communist party has continued to accumulate assets. What is certain is that as countries become more advanced, the State accumulates not just assets but claims on the income generated by assets at a much faster rate than any private enterprise or entity.
Beckert's claim cashes out as the claim that 'Capitalism is structured by state power'. In other words, something which is empirically true- viz. that most non-failed States see an increase their stock of assets from century to century- is coupled with something which isn't true at all. Capitalism does not ceaselessly accumulate assets. Why? Some are 'white elephants'. Others are vulnerable to theft or confiscation. Few generate a return which covers 'depreciation'. Almost all require some degree of supervision & carry some degree of risk. The sad truth is Capitalists can leave buildings empty till they fall apart. But plenty of State owned property too ends up rotting away. Even beavers, which are ceaselessly driven to build dams, heartlessly abandon those assets if they aren't getting a good enough return in terms of fish.
In the early 17th century, the Peruvian city of Potosí
the area had provided silver to the Incas. The Spanish gained 12,000 kilograms of silver as part of Atahualpa's ransom alone in 1533. At a later point they themselves took over mining operations and made some technical improvements.
Neither the Inca nor the Conquistadores could be considered to belong to a 'Capitalist' society or 'global economic order'.
billed itself as the “treasure of the world” and “envy of kings”. Sprouting at the foot of the Cerro Rico, South America’s most populous settlement produced 60% of the world’s silver, which not only enabled Spain to wage its wars and service its debts, but also accelerated the economic development of India and China.
Any great expansion in the supply and distribution of high value to weight tradable item would have this effect regardless of economic regime.
The city’s wealthy elites could enjoy crystal from Venice and diamonds from Ceylon while one in four of its mostly indigenous miners perished. Cerro Rico became known as “the mountain that eats men”.
By contrast the Laurium silver mines near Athens, the biggest source of silver in antiquity, contributed to its cultural pre-eminence- the memory of which lasts to this day. It would be fair to say that Periclean Athens was more Capitalist than Potosi. It was also way more cultured. It is likely that pre-Incan silver miners in Bolivia one thousand years ago had a better material standard of living and more freedom than after they were conquered by shitheads with horrible, sadistic, religions & legal codes.
The story of Potosí, in what is now southern Bolivia, contains the core elements of Sven Beckert’s mammoth history of capitalism:
Though what was exhibited there was servants of the Spanish King continuing & expanding the horrible practices of the Inca Emperors. True, the Spanish didn't go in for human sacrifice but they did burn heretics because they themselves were Cat-licks. Proddy heretics contented themselves with burning witches.
extravagant wealth,
like the Incas
immense suffering
as under the Incas
, complex international networks,
more complex and more international than the Incas but only becomes Kings like Henry the Navigator had sponsored naval expeditions. This wasn't Capitalism. It was Despotic Imperialism of a very ancient type.
a world transformed.
by wooden sailing ships. The first such were produced 6000 years ago.
The Eurocentric version of capitalism’s history holds that it grew out of democracy, free markets, Enlightenment values and the Protestant work ethic.
No. It is that it grew out of 'limited monarchy' after the Third Estate gained control over fiscal policy. Mercantilism was the rule save- for about 80 years- for the UK after the abolition of the Corn Laws. This was because of England's large surplus on 'invisibles'. Also some politicians- e.g. Randholph & Winston Churchill associated 'free trade' (which never actually obtained) with 'cheap bread' which, they imagined, is all the proles cared about.
Beckert, a Harvard history professor and author of 2015’s prize-winning Empire of Cotton, assembles a much more expansive narrative, spanning the entire globe and close to a millennium. Like its subject, the book has a “tendency to grow, flow, and permeate all areas of activity”.
Like cancer?
Fredric Jameson famously said that it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
It was even easier to imagine Fredric Jameson chopping off his own head and shoving it up his pooper.
At times during these 1,100 pages, I found it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism.
Because this dude wouldn't earn any royalties if Capitalism ended before he finished his shitty book.
“No religion, no ideology, no philosophy, has ever been as all-encompassing as the economic logic of capitalism,”
Save the biological logic of penises thrusting into vaginas. Shockingly, there is evidence that this deplorable practice existed during the so called 'Renaissance' which, it is totes triggering to say, raped Bilgramian 'Enchantment' thus engendering the abortion known as the 'Enlightenment'.
Beckert claims, defining it as “the ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled capital”.
Which has never occurred.
Accounting for it therefore feels like explaining water to fish.
A historian has an IQ more similar to a fish than a bloke who had to make his living working in the City of London.
Adam Smith, “the hero of capitalism’s triumphant self-remembrance”, attributed it to benign self-interest.
No. He said the baker doesn't produce good bread out of a sheer altruism. He hopes to make a decent living by his trade. He might have added that guys only pretend to be interested in what girls have to tell them. What they really want is to get their penis wet. This doesn't mean there can't be happy marriages.
Beckert, however, calls it a revolution, centuries in the making, which depended on things that Smith downplayed:
e.g. the existence of penises or the need to take a shit after dining well
“power, violence, the state”.
the epistemic rape of disabled Lesbians of colour by cunts like Jane Austen.
Far from natural or inevitable, it has always been “unstable and contested”,
by disabled Lesbians of colour who were all like 'Oi! Austen you fat cow! Shove your head up your own White ass, why don't you?
proceeding by jolts.
dolts may well think so.
The word “capitalism” originated in France in the 1840s, around the same time as its antagonists “socialism”, “communism” and “anarchism”, but the system was much older.
The question, at that time, was who should exercise power? Aristocrats? Fuck them. Guys who had grown rich dealing in stocks & shares? They didn't want the job. The safest thing would be to talk a bollocks while waiting for Napoleon III to take up where his Uncle left off.
“Capitalism is a process,” Beckert writes, “not a discrete historical event with a beginning and an end”.
In which case Historians can tell us nothing about it.
He begins tracking the process in the port of Aden in 1150.
Whose fortunes had fluctuated for 3000 years. Indian Ismailis know the name of the last Queen of the Sulayhid dynasty because she was given the title of 'Hujja'. After Yemen was conquered by the Sunni Ayyubites in 1175, Aden was rebuilt & fortified & thus attracted more trade.
This vibrant trade hub between Asia and the Middle East, in what is now Yemen, was one of several “islands of capital”
It was not an island & was under Islamic rule. Usury was prohibited. Slavery was encouraged. This is the opposite of Capitalism. Indian 'banyans' residing in Aden had descendants who encountered genuine Capitalism in Surat some six centuries later.
which formed a “capitalist archipelago”.
No. The rulers might protect & tax merchants but, equally, they might just loot them and, if they were off the wrong sect, kill or forcibly convert them. 'Abd al-Nabī ibn Mahdi, who was pretty fanatical was particularly harsh on Jews. Indeed this prompted Maimonides to write the 'Epistle to Yemen'. The Abuyyid conquest permitted Aden to once again attract kuffar merchants. But under, al-Malik al-Mu'izz al-Ismail (1197–1202), persecution renewed.
Inventing new trades like accountancy and insurance,
which existed in ancient Sumer & India etc.
its “strikingly modern” residents were in the vanguard of a global insurgency.
No. They were getting fucked over periodically by fanatical Sultans or marauding tribal chiefs.
But their accumulation of profit for its own sake was regarded with suspicion by rulers, religions and ordinary people alike.
They were sheep to be sheared. Sadly, they might also be butchered for purely religious reasons.
They enjoyed wealth without power or prestige: “capitalists without capitalism”.
Merchants without the Rule of Law. What was cool about the East India Company was that it was a bunch of Merchants which could kick the ass of crazy Sultans & establish the Rule of Law as a profitable enterprise. One may call this an 'export of invisibles'.
He visits Barbados, Samarkand and Phnom Penh;
which never had much in the way of Capitalism.
he quotes cultural texts from Abba to Zola
because he is stupid.
What they needed was the state’s collaboration. This developed during the “Great Connecting” between 1450 and 1650, when the discovery of the Americas (named after a slave-owning merchant)
who had a penis. It was a white penis. That's totes triggering to me. Basically, you have this white slave owning penis raping Turtle Island and then partying with Jeffery Epstein & I'm denied tenure? Is it coz I iz bleck?
finally enabled European traders to challenge Asia and the Middle East while making themselves indispensable.
Fuck off! The Portuguese didn't need the Americas to move into the Indian Ocean.
In the era of “war capitalism”, new trade routes and territorial seizures triggered conflict, which trade then financed.
European powers were constantly at war. But global trade expanded with very little military conflict. If everybody's making money, what is there to fight about?
Colonialism established capitalism’s “connected diversity”, which is to say, think global, act local.
Colonialism had always existed. Sometimes it had a commercial aspect. Quite often it didn't- e.g. Maoris. The earliest Austronesian colonists tended not to maintain such links though, in some cases, maritime trade did occur at a later time- e.g. Madagascar. It had nothing to do with Capitalism which is about 'buying low, selling high'.
Like silver, sugar reconfigured the world. On the then uninhabited island of Barbados,
it had been inhabited but it may have been wholly depopulated before the Brits took it over
just 74 sugar planters used “American lands, African labour
initially it was Irish labour
and European capital” to create a private slave colony – the new capitalist avant garde.
it was a Crown Colony similar to Portuguese or Spanish Crown Colonies. Ancient Empires had used slaves on plantations even if they had no open markets or private capital.
Across the Americas, millions of enslaved people represented trillions of dollars in unpaid labour.
To whom? Nobody at all. That's why nobody could raise any money on the basis of what they did or did not represent. Similarly, the valuable unpaid work we do when we wipe our own bums doesn't represent gazillions of dollars.
Even after Britain abolished slavery in 1833, there were no clean hands.
Because penises had not been banned even though they cause rape.
An ordinary European who began his day with a cigarette and a cup of sweetened coffee was already complicit in three branches of the slave trade.
Whereas an African Chieftain who had just sold a whole bunch of slaves to the Arabs had very clean hands indeed.
The Industrial Revolution, capitalism’s Great Leap Forward, required
exploitation of fossil fuels. Trillions of extinct dinosaurs are owed gazillions of dollars for their unpaid labout.
less explicit forms of coercion and exploitation. One luminary described Victorian Manchester as “the chimney of the world … the entrance to hell realised”.
The people of Manchester benefitted. They and their descendants enjoyed a life more abundant.
Meanwhile, envy of America’s vast territories and abundant resources inspired Europe’s dismemberment of Africa, which one French newspaper called “America at our doorsteps”.
I suppose it is fair to say that Africans currently seeking to move to Europe see its as the America at its doorstep.
Beckert enjoys shredding capitalism’s self-flattering myths.
If he makes a little money by it, good luck to him. True, you can make more money by writing about dragons or wizards but that would take imagination.
He calls the notion of the free market “nothing more than a figment of scholars’ and ideologues’ imaginations”. The Protestant work ethic was deployed to justify child labour at home and forced labour abroad.
The Devil can quote Scripture.
“It is necessary to use methods that best can shake their idleness and make them realise the sanctity of work,” was how the Belgian King Leopold II rationalised working millions to death in Congo Free State. And yet, impossible though it was to imagine at the time, capitalism outlasted both slavery and empire.
Just as penises outlasted the Renaissance. Hopefully, Beckert will devote his next book to explaining this sorry outcome.
No comments:
Post a Comment