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I recently finished reading Karen Armstrong's "St Paul: The Apostle We Love To Hate". The key takeaway was that Paul's actual writings were very radically egalitarian, to the extent that he advocated for the abolition of gender segregation within the church and for early Christians to set up their own separate sharing economy apart from Roman rule. The letters to the Corintians, Galatians, and Romans were all him, but the letters to the Ephesians and Colossians, and to Titus and Timothy, were probably written by someone else, in Paul's name, to steer Church doctrine back towards more conservative/Greco-Roman values. Also, even in the letters that we already know come from Paul, the passages about telling women to stay silent and course their questions through their husbands show up in different places across different manuscripts, and always interrupt whatever train of thought that Paul was already on, so they had to have been inserted by someone else. ___ I also more recently finished reading Thomas Paine's "Common Sense". I can definitely see why this was such a big influence for revolution, because it's a pretty compelling case for independence and republicanism. The other interesting thing to come out of that is his idea that once a state elects a President, that state is no longer eligible for selecting a president until all other states have gotten their shot. It'd be pretty easy to "game" and manipulate away from its original intent, but it's kinda intriguing to think about the possibility of being forced to only run candidates from Oregon or Alaska.
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Dec 23, 2019 01:54
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I just finished "The Origin of Capitalism", by Ellen Meiksins Wood. The first point the book makes is that "capitalism" is a very specific economic system that isn't just "people trading stuff". The act of buying a good cheaply and selling it for a higher price later on, or somewhere else, is just commerce, but it isn't capitalism. The feudal system of serfs having to work for a lord, or even the Enlightenment-era absolutist system of taxation to a centralized bureaucracy are both examples of appropriation of value, but neither of those are capitalism. Under a strict definition, capitalism was an economic system that began sometime in the 16th to 17th century, and began specifically in England. The central thesis of the book lays out a case against the popular narrative that the emergence of capitalism is a deterministic conclusion of a society that manages to hoard enough "primitive accumulation" (as Marxists might put it), followed by or in conjunction with the establishment of market behavior. By such standards, the development of capitalism would be inevitable, and is bound to happen as soon as a country / region / state becomes rich enough and decides to sever the fetters of feudalism. Rather, capitalism developed in England, first and only, because of a specific confluence of factors. In no particular order: 1. The Enclosure movement, or the conversion of common land into private property, and the accompanying ideological rationale that justified it (as driven by liberal thinkers such as John Locke), followed by the enforcement of such rights by The State. 2. The dispossession of land from serfs. This would eventually lead towards the formation of a proletariat. That is, the absence of a similar movement in, say, France or Germany, meant that the peasants in those countries still owned the means of production, and did not have to resort to having to sell their labor-power (and nothing else). 3. The development of land rents based on some contemporary measure of "market value", as opposed to fixed rents as practiced in feudal societies. Under feudalism, the overlord of a feudal land-holding would extract productivity from serfs via a combination of military and economic coercion, but as long as the serfs could meet that demand (and granting that sometimes they didn't), there was not much of a need to produce more than that, and the serfs still actually owned the same land that they worked. Under absolutism, the extraction was done via taxation, and the extractors were part of a centralized bureaucracy, but the same dynamics largely applied. However, under English "agrarian capitalism": A person could now own land (i.e. become a landlord in the capitalist sense), and then rent out the land to tenants. The amount of rent could vary, and therefore there was an incentive for the landlord to adjust their rent rate to whatever could bring them the most profit, lest they be bought-out by richer landlords. The tenant could hire workers to work the land, and any difference between the value of the harvest, and rent they had to pay, was profit, and so there was an incentive to reduce costs-of-production and labor costs, improve yields and outputs, and so on. The workers did not own any land, and had to sell their labor-power to earn a wage. Since the product of the land (i.e. food) was what would be used to pay off the cost of the lease taken out by the tenant, and since there was now a market in leases, then the price of the food would itself be subject to market forces. And this would reverberate down to everything else. The end result was that the landlords and the tenants were now incentivized to engage in profit-maximization behavior, while workers had to work to survive. The value extraction had shifted from being performed by the political/economic merger of the feudal lord, to being performed by the purely economic imperatives. The author harps on this phrase a lot, and it's important, because it highlights that once the system "got going", everyone was "trapped" in it. The book later goes on to contrast this to how other countries, such as the Dutch Republic or France, did not develop capitalism, because they lacked the same conditions in one or two critical ways. Capitalism eventually spread to these other countries as capitalist-logic started applying to Britain's commercial and later imperialist ventures, but capitalism was spread TO them, rather than it developing outside of England in its own right, and never quite in the same form, or with the same effects. It's a good book, and I'd highly recommend it, in particular because it shows what recent scholarship can do to challenge and iterate on orthodox Marxism.
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Jan 22, 2020 14:41
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Hand Knit posted:Does anyone know of a good history that either (a) puts Locke in the context of Enclosure or (b) writes about how Enclosure affected the character of English then British colonialism? The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood talks about both of these
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Feb 10, 2020 02:47
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seconding Listen Liberal Reinventing Collapse by Dmitri Orlov Unspeakable by Chris Hedges and David Talbot
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Jun 19, 2020 11:55
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BBJoey posted:any recommendations for books about the russian revolution? my experience is that it's a favourite topic for reactionary dickheads so i'm looking for something that wasn't written by a staunch british anti-communist My usual recommendation is Neil Faulkner's A People's History of the Russian Revolution
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Jul 2, 2020 09:28
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Does anyone have a recommendation for viewing epubs on a desktop computer as a Windows application? I've just been using a Firefox extension, but it's very rudimentary, and I'd preferably want something that can search for text within the work, and something that can add bookmarks and highlightsvyelkin posted:My top three recommendations would be Laura Engelstein's Russia in Flames, S. A. Smith's Russia in Revolution and Mark Steinberg's The Russian Revolution 1905-21. Thank you for this!
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Jul 3, 2020 08:15
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I read Grubacic's "Don't Mourn, Balkanize!" from that list and can attest that it's good
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Aug 1, 2020 00:33
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I just finished reading Richard Nixon's Six Crises. From what I've read about the book in parallel, it was written in 1961, after Nixon had lost his first presidential race to JFK, but before he ran for (and lost) Governor of California and before his later electoral success. Supposedly it was something like his own version of JFK's Profiles in Courage, as in a way to keep him in the public eye and raise his national profile. As a book, it's pulling in a couple of different directions at the same time - not only is it trying to convey a historical narrative from Nixon's perspective, but it has a "self-help" like aspect to it where he's giving some vague words of advice to people on how to handle crises and how to behave during crises. The issue is that the latter just makes him sound really neurotic, like he's overthinking things all the time. There's also some stories that really stretch the definition of what could be called a crisis, like how he reacted as VP when Eisenhower had heart troubles - turns out you do most of nothing, and the problem resolves itself, because he didn't die or become incapacitated, so there's no crisis. Finally, Nixon's contempt for the media and the press really comes through in the book, where even as he's writing as calmly and charitably as possible because this was a book meant for public consumption and for his own self-aggrandizement, he still accuses them of being biased bastards at every turn. It was an entertaining read, to be sure, but I can't imagine that Nixon came off as looking better in the process.
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Aug 31, 2020 10:07
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:Reading the book just makes me despise the Clinton/Obama/Biden types even more than I already did. I have Franks' What's The Matter With Kansas? book, but are there any others by Franks or others that are in this vein? "Death of the Liberal Class" by Chris Hedges also tackles this issue. I haven't read it myself, but it is on my list having come well-recommended.
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Aug 31, 2020 16:17
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Wraith of J.O.I. posted:anyone got a good rec on a mao bio or history of the chinese rev? looking to read up on that after i finish fidel’s autobio and deutscher’s trotsky vol 1 (maybe i should finish the rest of trot though, great summation of the man and the era/history so far) I'd recommend Elliott Liu's "Maoism and the Chinese Revolution: A Critical Introduction"
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Dec 21, 2020 03:32
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Wraith of J.O.I. posted:maybe a tall order but is there a good (but not gargantuan) book that provides an overview of post ww2 to collapse USSR and details how their economy/central planning worked? I don't know of a single book that does all this, but what I've read that falls into this wheelhouse is: "Planning in the Soviet Union", by Philippe J. Bernard - this was written in 1966, so it covers post-WW2 economics and central planning during the Stalinist era, followed by reforms under Khrushchev "Gorbachev and After", by Stephen White - this was written in the early 90s, so it covers Gorbachev and his further attempts at reform. It's not exclusively focused on the economy like Bernard's work is, but there's a lot to pick up on "Armageddon Averted", by Stephen Kotkin - this covers the events leading up to the actual collapse of the USSR and why it turned out the way it did
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May 14, 2021 05:08
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Wraith of J.O.I. posted:yeah the first one sounds most like what i'm looking for, thanks i'll start there FWIW I'm reading it through the scribd ebook service - scanning for a buyable copy on the net seems to point to it being pricey
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May 14, 2021 05:37
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