[Ukraine] Missing in Action: Western Minds

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ContinuityNewTimes: Dec 30, 2010; Я выдуман напрочь

fits my needs posted:

https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1672662657881571332?s=20

Imagine being president of a country that doesn't have civilian control over the armed forces. Must be crazy

# ? Jun 24, 2023 22:50

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# ? May 23, 2024 13:57

PoontifexMacksimus: Feb 14, 2012

OctaMurk posted:

bay of prigs

# ? Jun 24, 2023 22:51

Meow Tse-tung: Oct 11, 2004; No one cat should have all that power

this is the funniest newsday since that ship got stuck in the canal

# ? Jun 24, 2023 22:51

Homeless Friend: Jul 16, 2007

OctaMurk posted:

bay of prigs

# ? Jun 24, 2023 22:51

JAY ZERO SUM GAME: Oct 18, 2005; Walter.
I know you know how to do this.
Get up.

so lemme get this straight

Wagner hadn't been paid in a while, AND wanted to go super murder on Ukraine?

so they threatened...whatever they threatened and drove toward moscow

but before they got anywhere near moscow, they got paid, and called it off?

# ? Jun 24, 2023 22:51

my bony fealty: Oct 1, 2008

AnimeIsTrash posted:

https://twitter.com/diawlectical/status/1672688056426528768?cxt=HHwWgIC89Zm7yrYuAAAA

whats his username

# ? Jun 24, 2023 22:51

yunichel: Apr 27, 2010

Meow Tse-tung posted:

this is the funniest newsday since that ship got stuck in the canal

We'll have to make do with a T-90 stuck at the entrance to a circus

# ? Jun 24, 2023 22:51

Boat Stuck: Apr 20, 2021; I tried to sneak through the canal, man! Can't make it, can't make it, the ship's stuck! Outta my way son! BOAT STUCK! BOAT STUCK!

Meow Tse-tung posted:

this is the funniest newsday since that ship got stuck in the canal

да

# ? Jun 24, 2023 22:52

Lostconfused: Oct 1, 2008

Also Prigozhin just packing up and going away clinches this as Russia's jan 6th.

# ? Jun 24, 2023 22:52

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

Also re: soldiers and honour and will:

There's a Belgian show (Kamp Waes) where regular civilians (pre-selected for fitness) get to go into special forces training (run by currently active and recently retired operators) for about a week to see if they can make it to the end. There's also a Dutch adaptation (Kamp van Koningsbrugge) of it, with the exact same format with the Korps Commandotroepen.

Anyway, in that show the commandos talk quite regularly about how you "have to will/want (in Dutch it's the same word) to succeed", where they put heavy emphasis on the word "will" and also whenever it comes to giving up the thing that gets repeated is that it is "beneath/against my honor" to give up.

All that stuff is certainly starting to be put into a certain context the more you talk about this poo poo, FF.

# ? Jun 24, 2023 22:53

Nix Panicus: Feb 25, 2007

If anything, this makes Ukraine with an infinite supply of western money and weapons getting its rear end beat even more embarrassing

# ? Jun 24, 2023 22:54

paul_soccer12: Jan 5, 2020; by Fluffdaddy

JAY ZERO SUM GAME posted:

so lemme get this straight

Wagner hadn't been paid in a while, AND wanted to go super murder on Ukraine?

so they threatened...whatever they threatened and drove toward moscow

but before they got anywhere near moscow, they got paid, and called it off?

Idk

# ? Jun 24, 2023 22:54

Regarde Aduck: Oct 19, 2012; c l o u d k i t t e n; Grimey Drawer

fits my needs posted:

https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1672662657881571332?s=20

bla bla bla then just finish this then, attack! End this farce.

I hate the twitter front

JAY ZERO SUM GAME posted:

so lemme get this straight

Wagner hadn't been paid in a while, AND wanted to go super murder on Ukraine?

so they threatened...whatever they threatened and drove toward moscow

but before they got anywhere near moscow, they got paid, and called it off?

well in one video Prigozhin seemed to sympathize with Ukraine, then in another he was angry they hadn't blown more of it up

# ? Jun 24, 2023 22:54

fits my needs: Jan 1, 2011; Grimey Drawer

JAY ZERO SUM GAME posted:

so lemme get this straight

Wagner hadn't been paid in a while, AND wanted to go super murder on Ukraine?

so they threatened...whatever they threatened and drove toward moscow

but before they got anywhere near moscow, they got paid, and called it off?

we are currently on level 3 of disinformatika

# ? Jun 24, 2023 22:55

Tiler Kiwi: Feb 26, 2011

ukraine is the Avengers of countries

# ? Jun 24, 2023 22:58

JAY ZERO SUM GAME: Oct 18, 2005; Walter.
I know you know how to do this.
Get up.

cool ty

# ? Jun 24, 2023 22:58

Cao Ni Ma: May 25, 2010

JAY ZERO SUM GAME posted:

so lemme get this straight

Wagner hadn't been paid in a while, AND wanted to go super murder on Ukraine?

so they threatened...whatever they threatened and drove toward moscow

but before they got anywhere near moscow, they got paid, and called it off?

The real reason is that Prig got really skittish that he was going to be thrown from a window following the integration of the mercs into the regular army in july. So he did a big show, sold his dudes out for an asylum package in belarus.

# ? Jun 24, 2023 22:58

ContinuityNewTimes: Dec 30, 2010; Я выдуман напрочь

Tiler Kiwi posted:

ukraine is the Avengers of countries

Only virgins have ever paid attention to it

# ? Jun 24, 2023 22:59

ContinuityNewTimes: Dec 30, 2010; Я выдуман напрочь

People who gently caress are intimately familiar with the Russian situation

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:00

Homeless Friend: Jul 16, 2007

people who thought moscow was going to fall and have to come to terms with prig going to retire peacefully and not being killed ftw lol. it makes for great reading.

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:03

my bony fealty: Oct 1, 2008

good evening. is Putin overthrown yet?

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:04

samogonka: Nov 5, 2016

https://twitter.com/ilya_shepelin/status/1672707307044569090

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:05

OctaMurk: Jun 21, 2013

my bony fealty posted:

good evening. is Putin overthrown yet?

yup

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:05

sum: Nov 15, 2010

I don't think Prigozhin had anything close to a corps. A motorized battalion in road march is something like 4 miles long, which itself is much longer than any of the columns we saw last night. A corps traveling down the same road would be like a hundred miles long. I think there were probably less than a thousand mutineers overall.

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:05

DesertIslandHermit: Oct 7, 2019; It's beautiful. And it's for the god of...of...arts and crafts. I think that's what he said.

my bony fealty posted:

good evening. is Putin overthrown yet?

Yeah he threw the towel over Prig to trick him that it�s nighttime so he can go to sleep.

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:06

Raskolnikov38: Mar 3, 2007; We were somewhere around Manila when the drugs began to take hold

sum posted:

I don't think Prigozhin had anything close to a corps. A motorized battalion in road march is something like 4 miles long, which itself is much longer than any of the columns we saw last night. A corps traveling down the same road would be like a hundred miles long. I think there were probably less than a thousand mutineers overall.

he had maybe 100 in Rostov and another 100 on the road to Moscow it looked like

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:08

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

drat I just woke up and the mutiny is already over

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:08

PoontifexMacksimus: Feb 14, 2012

Frosted Flake posted:

This is one of those areas where if you want to be a Marxist Historian, this is an opportunity to break new ground.

A Marxist characterization of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages (the whole period from 300 to 800, broadly speaking) involves at least two sets of issues. First, what would a coherent Marxist characterization of the economic structure of Late Antiquity look like? In sharp contrast to Stalin�s theory of the final extinction of classical slavery in a "slave revolution", slavery was widespread and entrenched in the post-Roman West. It had certainly not disintegrated under the hammer blows of a revolution, much less one carried through by slaves. But does the persistence or revival of slavery mean that a slave mode of production dominated the class relationships of this period? Something like this was argued by Pierre Bonnassie from his seminal work on Catalonia. Bonnassie suggested that "Catalan society in the ninth and tenth centuries was still a slave society". Serfdom emerged from the violent and dramatic rupture, the crisis of public authority, that characterized the eleventh century, and in this classic, late-feudal sense, it was not a feature of the early Middle Ages.

On the contrary, "The persistence of a slave economy constitutes one of the chief features of Visigothic Spain". However, no Marxist historians have gone as far as this, and if anything, they have done the opposite, projecting either serfdom or feudalism back into Late Antiquity. Thus, A. Barbero and M. Vigil refer to the "feudalization" of Spain under the Visigoths, arguing this at length, and, among British Marxists, Geoffrey de Ste Croix could even suggest that serfdom was the "predominant mode of production" in the later Roman Empire. This bears some resemblance to Rodney Hilton�s view that Late Antiquity had seen large landowners "creating the production relations characteristic of feudal society". "From at least as early as the crisis of the third century, town life had been contracting, and self-sufficient serf-worked estates had begun to dominate the social structure of the Empire". Hilton was clearly referring to the institution known to Roman historians as the colonate, but, at a deeper level, his views reflected a tradition of Late Roman historiography shaped less by anything Marx himself had written than by Max Weber�s famous lecture of 1896. The paradigm, which Weber himself did more to define than most, was one of widespread economic recession and a ruralization of the life of the empire. The identification of the colonate with serfdom (common to most historians of the early twentieth century; Ste Croix was its last great representative) was clearly what underpinned the half-baked conception of Late Antiquity as a precursor of feudalism.

Today almost no serious scholar accepts this view, if only because feudalism itself is still so contested. So where does this leave us in terms of a general characterization of the late antique world? A more solid Marxist characterization can surely only come from the conjunction of new perspectives within the historiography itself and simultaneous attempts to map out the conceptual landscape in new ways (for example, John Haldon, Manuel Aci�n, Eduardo Manzano).

The second set of issues relates to our notions of feudalism and of the transition from late antiquity to the early middle ages. How well does the theory of modes of production work for this transition? Do Marxists have a coherent understanding of the feudal mode of production? If a fully articulated feudal economy only emerged in the central or even later middle ages, what do we make of the early middle ages? What do we mean by serfdom and when did it evolve?

There is scarcely an integrated Marxist position on these issues. For example, Ste Croix implied that there was no integral link between serfdom and feudalism and seemed to think that serfdom could form a mode of production sui generis (since it was, as he said, the "predominant mode of production" in late antiquity). In contrast, Hilton, with more sense of historical specificity, had always seen serfdom as central to feudalism. But Hilton also believed that serfdom should not be defined by labor services alone, whereas Marx himself had done precisely that, claiming in one passage that "Serf labour...has this in common with wage-labour, in respect of rent, that the latter is paid in labour, not in products, still less in money". Not only was serfdom, for Marx, the "broad basis of social production" in the middle ages but its pure form involved the exaction of labour services, a position that is clearly at odds with Hilton�s view that "labour rent was not an essential element in the feudal relations of production". In even greater contrast (to Marx), in Wickham�s recent book the lord�s lack of control of the labour-process is (almost?) built into his definition of feudalism, which emerges here in the more abstract structuralist guise of any system of "coercive rent-taking" that pits landlords on one side against peasants on the other. It was this kind of abstractionism, depleted of historical content, that Anderson had blasted in some of the best pages of Lineages, even if his own conception of the feudal mode was a haphazard conglomeration of features that failed to have any significant impact on the historiography.

The best work by medievalists working in a left-wing tradition has been decidedly discontinuist, underlining the novelty of the middle ages. The paradox of Wickham�s conceptual choices is that, however one sees that novelty, it is not definable at the level of the mode of production, since his notion of the feudal mode is construed so loosely that it covers both the Roman Empire and (probably) the whole medieval world and much else besides! The tendency to dehistoricise categories such as "serfdom" (Ste Croix) and "feudalism" (Wickham, Haldon) in order to be able to extend their application to Antiquity is surely a retrograde one. It stems as much from the lack of a more sophisticated Marxist theory of the feudal mode as it does from any conception of late antiquity as a precursor of feudalism.

A Background to the Late Empire

In Roman history, the "late empire" generally refers to the period between the fourth and the seventh centuries, the fourth and early fifth if the focus is Western, since the western empire fell apart in the fifth, and the sixth and early seventh as well if we look at the East. The fourth century is thus the watershed that divides Roman from late Roman history. Yet the basic elements of the fourth-century empire were established in the third, with the sweeping reorganization of the army and the emergence of a new command-structure, on one side, and, on the other, the sustained expansion, throughout the late second and third centuries, of a network of provincial, mainly African, families who would later form the core of the Western aristocracy under Constantine (306-337). Reform of the army excluded senators from military command and signified a major break in the traditional pattern of upper-class dominance. If this was a democratization of the Roman army, as Lopuszański suggested in a seminal paper, it certainly paved the way for the evolution of a professionalized officer-corps and the consolidation of an esprit de corps in the higher ranks that dominated much of the political history of the late empire. By the fourth century, senators were marginal to the composition of the army leadership, which came, increasingly, to incorporate a strong Germanic component. The key result of all this was that, from the main part of the third century, emperors were drawn overwhelmingly from non-senatorial/military backgrounds. The politically relevant elite was not the senatorial class but a military elite whose upward mobility found renewed resonance in the civilian side of the administration, as bureaucracies were expanded and professionalized and a new value set on legal and related forms of expertise. The social fluidity of the late empire was the key to its sudden effervescence. The senate itself was transformed and expanded early in the fourth century and the equestrian order subsumed wholesale into the senatorial class, infusing administrative and business skills. The consolidation of the Western aristocracy meant, crucially, an adjustment with the state, the ability to maneuver and as far as possible dominate. By contrast, in the East, state and aristocracy were much more closely integrated, since the aristocracy was itself of bureaucratic origin and the bedrock of the state�s apparatus. These differences would become a major part of the story of why the Empire survived so spectacularly in the East when it fell to pieces in the West.

The key innovation of the late empire that broke with centuries of tradition was Constantine�s monetary reform. Just as the military revolution of the third century was decisive in defining the "style" of the late empire, vesting state-power in the hands of the military, Constantine�s creation of a new gold-currency provided the pivotal foundation that sustained the expansion of the governing class as a whole (both senators, new and old, and bureaucracy). As one contemporary commented, the aristocratic elites of the fourth century accumulated vast quantities of gold, so that "the houses of the powerful were crammed full of it". In the West, the countryside scaled new peaks of activity as the owners of these vast hoards of money-capital expanded productive capacities and upgraded their fixed-capital investments � a process which is best documented, archaeologically, for the Spanish countryside, most spectacularly in the very rich fourth-century villas of the northern Meseta. To ensure efficiency, the state intervened to pin labor down to the large estates, contriving new definitions that were antithetical to the purism of classical law. In short, the fourth century dramatically reconfigured law, society, and economy in ways that were a disaster for the lower classes. For the Italian historian Santo Mazzarino, all this was a major part of the crisis of the western empire, in the sense that "the peasant masses felt themselves crushed under the weight of the new economy" and sought protection with the aristocracy against the state. "The small peasant-proprietors turned themselves into dediticii of the rich, or as it was called in Celtic vassi". "These", Mazzarino claimed, "are the first hints of the economic system of vassalage which marks the Middle Ages". To offset the crisis government unleashed a prolonged deflation which "in conditions of insufficient productivity brought the society nearer to a natural economy". "Thus", that is, with "vassalage" on one side and natural economy on the other, both rooted in the conditions of the late empire, "they set off toward the Middle Ages".

While mostly sound to a Marxist, Mazzarino's position has some issues for scholars who have been educated after Peter Brown's development of the discipline of Late Antiquity in the UK in the 1960's, a tradition which produced Avril Cameron, AD Lee and Wickham. Reconciling Late Antiquity with Marxist theory is the as-yet unresolved gap in the historiography.

This framing of the "transition", of the resilience of an empire undermined by social crisis, is conspicuously absent in Wickham�s book. Indeed, it will be striking to his colleagues in Italy that there is no reference to their great mentor Mazzarino, not even in the bibliography! Wickham charts a very different course, abandoning the speculative-looking constructions of the 1950s and its textual tools in favor of a wider range of sources and considerable emphasis on the archaeological work, late Roman and medieval, of the last two decades. For Mazzarino�s uncomplicated trajectory from late antique patrocinium to medieval vassalage, a model of almost appealing simplicity, Wickham substitutes a more involved and densely textured history � of landscapes, exchange networks, aristocracies and urbanism, and of the fragile autonomy of the peasantry, all moving in complex and uneven ways in a fragmenting world whose sinews were being remorselessly severed throughout this period. The collapse of the state and the fragmentation that flowed from it are the structuring principles of Wickham�s discussion of these diverse trajectories. Unlike Pirenne, who saw the disintegration of the western empire as a "political fact" with minimal implications for the continuity of "Romania", postponing the great catastrophe that ended it to the Islamic expansion of the later seventh century, Wickham ascribes momentous significance to the crisis of the state. In particular, the breakdown of taxation, by which he means taxation in kind, had major long-term impacts in the West: a crisis of the urban traditions of antiquity, with major changes in the scale and quality of urbanism, a general weakening and impoverishment of the aristocracy, and the slow but inexorable disintegration of the Mediterranean world-system. All of this happened unevenly, of course, and Wickham tracks the changes with a strong sense of their local peculiarities, mapping their real or hypothetical evolution by region and subregion, and constructing a transition model of considerable complexity.

Trying to find the source for this, is this from a book or a journal? I could only find a preview PDF from Brill that was very unhelpful...

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:09

Regarde Aduck: Oct 19, 2012; c l o u d k i t t e n; Grimey Drawer

Raskolnikov38 posted:

he had maybe 100 in Rostov and another 100 on the road to Moscow it looked like

yeah, the fact they didn't get blown the gently caress up is very weird. Also his lovely little convoy managed to shoot down helicopters and kill Russian pilots and that was fine apparantly

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:11

OctaMurk: Jun 21, 2013

sum posted:

I don't think Prigozhin had anything close to a corps. A motorized battalion in road march is something like 4 miles long, which itself is much longer than any of the columns we saw last night. A corps traveling down the same road would be like a hundred miles long. I think there were probably less than a thousand mutineers overall.

yeah i mean wagner as a whole organization is like corps sized, even though a relatively small portion was doin the thing (mutiny? Coup? Labor negotiation?)

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:13

Nix Panicus: Feb 25, 2007

The flow of smug neoliberals coming to cheer on the nazis has slowed to a trickle

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:14

Majorian: Jul 1, 2009

Nix Panicus posted:

The flow of smug neoliberals coming to cheer on the nazis has slowed to a trickle

They'll be back, never fear. Like a moth to a flame.

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:19

fits my needs: Jan 1, 2011; Grimey Drawer

Nix Panicus posted:

The flow of smug neoliberals coming to cheer on the nazis has slowed to a trickle

they are just regrouping for the next offensive

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:20

PoontifexMacksimus: Feb 14, 2012

sum posted:

In this war, there are months where nothing happens, and there are days where nothing happens but much faster

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:20

Endman: May 18, 2010; That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even anime may die

Nix Panicus posted:

The flow of smug neoliberals coming to cheer on the nazis has slowed to a trickle

if you think about it they�re the real victims here

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:22

Sudden Loud Noise: Feb 18, 2007

lol a peaceful American protest (that didn't do anything wrong and were just freedom loving patriots who wanted a tour of the Capitol Building) gets closer to overthrowing their government than 25 million (reported) brave Russian freedom fighters who gave up 200 miles from their capital. USA! USA! USA!

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:23

Clip-On Fedora: Feb 20, 2011

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1672706969898033152

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1672708689415884802?cxt=HHwWhMC-1Zns07YuAAAA

Saaayyy�just what the heck IS going on here anyway??? :thunk:

Also lol a negotiating freedom in exchange for information about TRUMP

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:23

OctaMurk: Jun 21, 2013

fits my needs posted:

they are just regrouping for the next offensive

speng31b made a deal with them and they turned around and headed back to gbs, supposedly they will all get pushed out of windows later

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:24

Danann: Aug 4, 2013

You're not a main character of history unless you stall out in front of Moscow.

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:26

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# ? May 23, 2024 13:57

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

Eh, Belarus might be safer than it seems. One of Lukashenko's primary political goals is to remain both very friendly with and also independent from Russia. Having a guy like Prigozhin stashed away might help with that.

# ? Jun 24, 2023 23:27

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