#primitive capitalism

[pateralba]

İLKEL KAPİTALİZM

Merkantilizm, feodalizmin bağrından koptu. Merkantilizm, bir çeşit ilkel kapitalist teoridir. Merkant, burjuva sözcüğünden türemiştir. Kendine kapitalist sistemin hemen öncesinde uygulama alanı buldu. Merkantilizm, feodalizmin çökerek, monarşist devletlerin kurulduğu ve ticaret kapitalizminin geliştiği süreçte ortaya çıktı. Merkantilizmin temelinde ulus devletin ortaya çıkması, uluslar arası ticaretin gelişmesi ve ticaret sermayesinin güç kazanması vardır. Merkantilistler, ulusal ekonomik gücün en yüksek seviyeye çıkması için ekonomiye müdahaleyi savundular. Merkantilizm, paraya ve dış ticarete büyük önem verir. Altın ve gümüş paranın, tek ekonomik güç kaynağı olduğunu kabul eder. Bireyin değil devletin yararı ön plandadır. Çünkü devlet bireylerin topluluğundan başka bir şey değildir. Ekonomik güç peşinde koşmak en yüce amaç olunca, yetkiler de buna göre belirlendi. Bunun için ekonomik olarak güçlenmenin koşulları araştırıldı. Devletler gözetiminde talanlar ve korsanlıklar yapıldı. Din tarafından da ekonomik olarak iyi durumda olmak yüceltildiği için devletin ve toplumun amaçları bu yönde gelişti. Bu düşünceye göre para, altın ve gümüşün varlığına dayandığından devlet; elindeki altın ve gümüş miktarına göre gücünü belirler. Asıl önemli olan dış ticaretten elde edilen faiz fonlardır. Çünkü ülkenin maden miktarının arttırılabilmesi ülke içinde değerli maden üretilmediği sürece ancak dış ticaret yoluyla mümkündür. Bu da dış ticarete önem vererek, yurt içine daha fazla altın ve gümüş girmesini teşvik ederek sağlanır. Merkantilizme göre dünyada sabit bir ekonomi vardır ve biri ekonomik olarak güçlüyken diğeri zayıf olmalıdır. Ülkenin ekonomik olarak gücünün artması da ithalatın yasaklanarak ihracatın arttırılması ile mümkündür. Feodalizm sınıfları burjuvaların yönetimine bırakırken, merkantilizm yönetimin devlete verilmesini sağladı. Merkantilizm, hedeflerine ulaşmak için devletin ekonomiye müdahalesini normal gördü. İçe karşı müdahaleci ve sanayileşmeci, dışa karşı ise korumacı bir ekonomi politikası izledi. Ayrıca koloni sahibi olmak ve kolonileri diğer ülkelerin rekabetine kapatmak çok önemlidir. Çünkü bu koloniler ucuz ham madde kaynağıdır ve bu ham maddelerden üretilen pahalı maddenin pazarıdır. Merkantilizm, ilkel kapitalizmin rekabet yasası gereği, ulusalcı bir görüşe sahip olmakla birlikte merkeziyetçi bir yayılma politikasını da savundu. Devletler ekonomik açıdan ulusçudur ve bu da dış ticarette koruma ilkesini benimsetir. Burjuvalığın teşvik edilmesi, insan ve para bolluğu, sanayinin ve ihracatın gelişmesi, devletin koruyucu rolü oldukça öne çıkmıştır. Ayrıca merkantilistler, ülkelerinin nüfuslarının artmasından yanadır. Çünkü insan bolluğu emek bulmayı rahatlatacaktır ve düşük ücrete yol açacaktır. Büyük ordulara sahip olmayı sağladığı ise ayrı bir konudur. Kalabalık nüfus, iş gücünü artırır ve maliyeti düşürür, bu da ihracatta avantaj sağlar. Bu açıkça sömürecek emek için, emekçi aramaktır.

Temelde merkantilizm, düşük ücret politikasına dayanıyor. Emekçi, emeğinin karşılığını kesinlikle alamıyor. Ücret yükselmesinin emek verme sürecini arttıracağı, düşük ücretlerin ise emekçiyi çalışmak zorunda bırakacağı düşünülüyor. Ayrıca ücretlerin yükselmemesi için bir yandan nüfusun fazla olması isteniyor, diğer yandan ürün fiyatlarının bolluk yıllarında da yüksek olması isteniyor. Ticaret kapitalizminin hacmi büyüdükçe ve ticaret burjuvazisinin planları öne çıktıkça merkantilistlerin bu görüşleri de belirginleşti. 16.yy sonlarında, yaklaşık 100 senede merkantilist ülkeler arttı. Sürekli dış ticaret fazlası vermeye çalışan ülkeler, diğer ülkelerin ekonomik olarak zayıflamasına sebep oldu. Ekonomik olarak zayıf ülkelerde üretilen malları satın alacak para kalmadı. Çünkü ekonomik olarak güçlü ülkeler satış karşılığında yalnızca altın ve gümüş alıyordu ve ham madde ithalatı da yasaktı. Bu da ekonomik olarak zayıf ülkelerde talebi arttırdı. Ayrıca ekonomik olarak güçlü ülkelerde aşırı maden oluşu madenlerin değerini azalttı ve ülkelerde enflasyona sebep oldu. Bu süreçte sermaye grupları aralarında çekişiyordu ve bu durum feodallerle köylülerin yan yana gelmesine neden oluyordu. Bu süreçten itibaren politik ekonomi de sınıf iktidarına giden bir araç olmaya başladı. Burjuvazinin birikim silahı olarak bilimselleşti ve kapitalizmin yapılanmasına yol açtı. Çekişme, merkantilizm karşısında durumu burjuvazi öncesi burjuva bakış ile analiz eden fizyokrasinin ön görüsünü destekledi. Merkantilizmin dünya egemenliği 19.yy başlarında liberal teorilerin güçlenmesine kadar sürdü. Bu süreçten sonra güç kaybetti ve yerini serbest piyasa ekonomisine dayalı liberalizme bıraktı. Sanayi devrimi ile pazar arayışları merkantilizmin yok olmasına neden oldu.

Ekonominin işleyişinde doğal bir düzen olduğunu savunan, devletin ekonomiye müdahale etmemesini isteyen, gücün tek kaynağını tarım olarak gören fizyokrasi, altınla, parayla veya sanayiyle uğraşmaz. Mantığı çok basittir. Güç insandan gelir, insan topraktan beslenir. İnsan sayısı ve toprak miktarı ne kadar fazlaysa bir ülke o kadar güçlüdür. Fizyokratlara göre üretimde tek verimli alan tarımdır. Tarım tüketilenden daha fazla üretime yol açar. Oluşan bu fazlalık net üründür. Ticaret ve sanayi ise kısırdır, çünkü net ürün oluşturmaz. Fizyokratlara göre gelir dağılımı açısından toplum üç sınıfa ayrılır. Verimli sınıf (çiftçiler), toprak sahipleri, kısır sınıf (sanayici ve burjuvalar). Sınıflar arası gelir dağılımı şöyledir: Çiftçiler, topraktan sağladıkları net ürünü toprak sahiplerine kira olarak verirler. Toprak sahipleri, toprağın işletilmesinin bedeli olan bu net ürünü alırlar. Kısır sınıf ise ham maddeyi işlenmiş maddeye dönüştürmek için imalathane ve işçiye ihtiyaç duyar. Bu yüzden bu sınıfın elde ettiği net gelir, diğer iki sınıfa dönmek zorundadır. Fizyokrasiye göre denge bu şekildedir. Verimli alan tarım olduğu için vergi de tarımdan alınmalıdır. İhracat, tarıma dayanmalıdır. Sermaye yalnızca tarımsal yatırımlarda kullanılmalıdır. Fizyokratlara göre ekonomi kutsal bir düzendedir. Üreticiler ve tüketiciler kendi çıkarlarına göre hareket etme hakkına sahiptir. Özel mülkiyet ve serbest girişim ilkelerine dayanan bu düzende ekonomi kendi kendine işler. Doğal kaynakların ülkeler arasında farklı dağılımı, bu ülkelerin birbirleriyle alışverişini kutsal bir duruma getirmiştir. Bu farklılık nedeniyle fizyokratlar "uluslararası dayanışma" içinde başka ülkelerin yoksulluğuna karşı çıktılar. Yani fizyokrasinin dayanışmayı kutsallaştıran teolojik bir yapısı vardır. Fakat fizyokratlara göre ilkel kapitalizmde, temelde yapılacak tek değişiklik, devlet müdahalesinden kurtulmaktır. Fizyokratlar teorilerini hazırlarken ekonomiler tamamen tarımcıydı, merkantilistler ise ticari kapitalizmin etkisiyle devletçi oldular. Fizyokrasi kendine etkin alan bulamasa da ekonomik hayatta serbestlikten yana olduğu için ekonomik liberalizmin kurucusu sayılabilir. Temel farkı özetlemek gerekirse, merkantiliste göre değerin yaratıcısı ticaret, fizyokrata göre topraktır.

[loneberry]

A sea lily marine animal on the sea floor of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone at a depth of 4,800m

“The deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean have rested undisturbed for millennia. But now creatures living thousands of metres beneath the surface may be confronted by new visitors: companies mining minerals key to the green energy transition.

“The International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN-backed regulator, is preparing to consider the world’s first commercial deep-sea mining application as soon as July, despite many member states warning it is too soon for extraction to leap from land into water.”

///

“Ecological treasures on the seabed include creatures such as the transparent ghost fish, dumbo octopus and giant sea anemone, as well as microscopic worms that scientists say could hold the key to understanding human evolution.”

“The Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the Pacific Ocean, where most exploration has taken place, is ‘one of the most biodiverse sedimented marine habitats on our planet’.”

“Environmentalists say the plume of waste water emitted by deep-sea mining machinery could disturb ‘marine snow’, or carbon and nutrient-rich particles of biological matter, that usually settles on the seabed. Noise pollution may also disturb marine mammals.”

“Deep-sea ecosystems ‘take millennia to establish and can take seconds to destroy’, said Tony Worby, a marine scientist at Australian non-profit Minderoo Foundation. ‘We’re playing with fire to think we can go down to the deep sea and strip-mine it without massive repercussions.’”

.

.

Capitalism is becoming post-terrestrial. The next stage of primitive accumulation is beginning—there’s currently a scramble for mineral resources in the deep seas…all in the name of the bullshit ideology known as “green capitalism.”

My heart breaks thinking about all the ways we abuse our precious oceans.

Rachel Carson has this to say about marine snow:

“When I think of the floor of the deep sea, the single, overwhelming fact that possesses my imagination is the accumulation of sediments. I see always the steady, unremitting, downward drift of materials from above, flake upon flake, layer upon layer—a drift that has continued for hundreds of millions of years, that will go on as long as there are seas and continents.

“For the sediments are the materials of the most stupendous ‘snowfall’ the earth has ever seen.”

“The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth.”

(Read the entire chapter “The Long Snowfall” in The Sea Around Us—it is breathtakingly beautiful.)

Now imagine, instead of that gentle silent accrual of marine snow, you have plumes of industrial waste and the infernal racket of machines in a world where so many creatures use sound to orient themselves. It makes me sick.

[ranger-kellyn]

sometimes watching or listening to speculative alien stuff is so fucking exhausting because whenever it's the question of, "if there is alien life out there why aren't they talking to us?" they never seem to take into account that we as humans literally have not stopped warring with our own fucking species. we have racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and all other phobia's and isms, and yet y'all wanna bring in the green dudes with 8 eyes and proboscis into the conversation and act like humanity would just be Chill about it

[mnemotechnicstoo]

Primitive Accumulation

A4 Collage cutout

[headspace-hotel]

so I was running the first paragraph of this essay I hate through google translate, for reasons that are too long to explain, and became very thoughtful about these lines:

Most North American places have shed wolves, elk, moose, brown bears, panthers, bison, and a variety of fish and wild plants, which were all abundant four hundred years ago. Before those species were driven out, there was the slaughter of the mammoth, the ground sloth, the wild horse. The squirrels, rabbits, and sparrows that surround my North Carolina porch are less signs of burgeoning life than survivors of an apocalypse; so are the revenant coyotes that poach chickens and puppies from the neo-hippie farmsteads outside town. 

I was interested that the author mentioned living in North Carolina, a place that is such a stunning jewel of biodiversity. The world capital of salamanders, home to numerous endemic plants including the Venus flytrap, the most biodiverse temperate forest in the world.

I detest nature writing by people who do not engage with nature around them, and worse, denigrate it for being worthless compared to some imagined pristine pre-human Wilderness.

The author grieves the loss of the animals missing in the environment around him, but he does not love or revere the animals that still exist or newly arrive.

The essay goes on to further discuss the extermination of wilderness, the elimination of the human connection to nature, and his longing for a primitive, spiritual sort of connection to land and nature. He presents brief reviews of several books of nature writing, all of which he judges as incomplete for addressing this primitive spiritual yearning. His review of Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane is insultingly egotistical, dismissing the meaning within Gaelic vocabulary because it doesn't give him the sense of "animistic" connection to the land that he wants.

But the author reveals the reason his yearning remains unsatisfied in the first few lines of his essay! He is isolated from the natural world because he has decided the Nature around him, the Nature he can see, touch, experience, and commune with, is "already destroyed" and no longer Nature at all. He refuses to see wildness in the sparrows, therefore wildness is inaccessible to him.

When he thinks of ecological tragedies of the past, or ecological threats of the future, it is all generic: destruction of bison, climate change, losses of species. No sign of intimate communion with the devastating wounds of the land on which he lives: the killing of millions of salamanders in logging, the perishing of the spruce-fir forest due to acid rain... he is tormented by abstractions of ecological tragedy, not the suffering of the land that is his home.

He wants to be deeply spiritually grounded in place....but no, not the place he lives in, some Other place that fulfills all his fantasies of "wildness."

[toastyslayingbutter]

I have a few recommendations for reading further:

The Dawn of Everything by. David Graeber & David Wengrow is a pretty fascinating and accessible text that details the rich history of communalist, anarchic, and socialist formations of people throughout the world pre-capitalist.

Even more helpful is it’s bibliography, which has a bountiful list of texts that provide greater information about pre-capitalist formations.

A Indigenous People’s History of the United States by. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is another easily accessible, well-written, and authoritative book on pre-Columbus indigenous history, societal formations, and class.

As with the above text, you’ll get plenty out of the references and bibliography.

Tbh, and I say this as someone who would on some days call myself a Marxist, I think Marx's understanding of pre-industrial societies and their relationship to the industrial core (especially those of the Americas and Asia, which in his defense were not well-understood by even European scholars at the time) is completely inaccurate and using that as a starting point and going no further into decolonial and anti-imperialist theory winds you up at radically inappropriate theories and praxis in many ways

[psychotrenny]

I don't think "Fascist" is a very useful or accurate thing to call Caesar and his Legion (from Fallout: New Vegas) in the context of the game world itself. Like there are a lot of aesthetic similarities and basically all of their unironic real world fans are some sort of Nazi Nerd, but when talking about their place within the context of fictional post-nuclear Nevada it just doesn't work. Like Caesar's whole deal is that he's a Social Scientist who, living in a world that's been "blasted back to the Stone Age", figures that society must evolve through the same stages if it wants to properly return to modernity. The Legion is basically comprised of "Primitive Communists"* who've been forced into a Slave Society. His criticisms of the NCR boil down to them being a moribund remnant of/reversion to Old World Capitalism rather than something organically adapted to the post-Nuclear world. He repeatedly talks about how the Legion isn't meant to represent an ideal society but simply a stepping stone onto something better (the thesis that will clash with it's antithesis and evolve into a superior synthesis). His interactions with the Courier heavily imply that the Legion's Misogyny, Homophobia, Tech aversion etc. are much more tools of social organisation and control than values that Caesar personally holds. The Legion isn't just some band of mindlessly violent reactionaries but the product of very deliberate Social Engineering; a peculiarly post-nuclear sort of scientifically planned society

Now I'm not defending the Legion as a "good" choice or anything; Caesar's plan has a lot of problems, it's not hard to poke holes into and in terms of unadulterated cruelty The Legion is easily the most morally repugnant of the main factions. But the thing I really love about The Legion is how, within the specific context of Fallout's setting, it makes sense. Like once you really think about it you can understand why someone in Edward Sallow's position would arrive at these conclusions, and there are good reasons why (if you take your roleplaying seriously and don't treat the Player Character as an extension of yourself) someone living in this world might chose to side with him. The Legion may be terrible but it's not evil for the sake of evil; there's genuinely a compelling ideology behind it.

It's why I get sad when I see so many people dismiss them as the "dum dum fascist slavers" because there's so much more to them than that. Like I think the best part about The Legion is how ridiculous they first appear ("These raiders dress like Ben-Hur extras?????) but once you find out more about them then it all starts to click ("Oh I see their leader is trying to assimilate them into a distinct and alien culture in order to maintain their loyalty; severing their previous connections and giving them a whole new identity"). So it sucks to see so many people get caught up in the first part and never make enough connections to reach the second. Like in general, Fallout: New Vegas is very messy and flawed and yet it's full of all these interesting little nuances and I think that's worth appreciating it. It's why, time and time again, I keep walking down that dusty road

*in the very broad sense that Fallouts "Tribals" are meant to represent people who have reverted back to some sort of pre-state society; of course there are countless problems with how Fallout treats this matter (including but not limited to incredible amounts of racism) but in order to understand Caesar we're forced to meet the game on it's terms

[femalethink]

I detect in this question a pious hope that the oppression of women could be blamed on a particular form of society, a particular set of class arrangements. But it can't. If socialism—at least as it exists so far—is not self-evidently the solution, neither is capitalism self-evidently the culprit. Women have always been treated as inferior, have always been marginal politically and culturally. The oppression of women constitutes the most fundamental type of repression in organized societies. That is, it is the most ancient form of oppression, predating all oppression based on class, caste, and race. It is the most primitive form of hierarchy.

—Susan Sontag, “On Women.”

[molsno]

when I was in middle school (around 2010 or so), we read a short story about a machine that took in the writings of thousands, millions of books, and, after analyzing them all to learn how to write by example, generated new books in a short amount of time, and we had to discuss it as a class.

I was beginning to get into programming, and one of the things I'd learned about was markov chains, which put simply, allowed primitive chat bots to form sentences by analyzing how the words we used in conversations were ordered and strung together words and phrases that had a high probability of appearing next to each other. with the small dataset that was our chatroom, this often led to it regurgitating large chunks of sentences that appeared in our conversations and mashing them together, which was sometimes amusing. but generally, the more data it collected, the more its ability to output its own sentences improved. essentially, it worked a lot like the predictive text on your phone, but it chose the sequence of words on its own.

and yet, in that class discussion, everyone decried the machine in that story for committing plagiarism. they didn't seem to understand that the machine wasn't copying from the books it was fed verbatim, but using the text of those books to learn how to write its own books. I was bewildered by everyone's reactions, because I had already seen such a machine, or at least a simple approximation of one. if that chat bot had taken in the input of millions of books' worth of text, and if it used an algorithm that wasn't so simplistic, it likely would have been even better at coming up with responses.

there is valid criticism to be made about ai, for sure. as it stands, it is a way for the bourgeoisie to reduce labor costs by laying off their employees, and in an economic system where your ability to survive is tied to employment, this is very dangerous. but the problem there, of course, is the economic system, and not the tool itself. people also often disparage the quality of ai-generated art, and while I generally agree that it's usually not very interesting, that's because of the data it's been trained on. ai works best when it has a lot of data to work with, which is why it's so good at generating art with styles and motifs that are already popular. that is to say, people were already writing and drawing bland art that's made to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible, because that's the kind of art that is most likely to turn a profit under capitalism; it was inevitable that ai would be used to create more of it more efficiently when it has so many examples to learn from. but it's bizarre to see that the way people today react to generative ai is exactly the same as the way my classmates in middle school reacted.

[txttletale]

could you elaborate on the difference between liberalism and fascism? it often seems like the latter can evolve into the former, but the varying definitions of fascism sometimes make it unclear when the line is crossed - possibly due to fascism’s position both as a politics and a historic moment?

disclaimer: this is a very rough overview and by no means comprehensive

fascism is a political project by which capitalism reasserts itself in the face of the threat of socialist uprising -- fascism adopts some of the rhetoric of communism while offering no actual change to the ownership of the means of production (except further privatisation) and playacts at offering the masses power on a purely affective, expressive level (what walter benjamin calls 'the aestheticization of politics)

this siphons discontent and radicalism away from socialist politics and towards a movement that will violently suppress and attack socialists, offering a two-fold shield against any real threat to the bourgeoise's control of the means of production

when in power, fascists will shore up the power of the bourgeoise and allow an open mingling of private enterprise and the state (corporatism), and answer economic crisis by expanding the genocidal and ethnic supremacist policies of the colony to the nation itself in an act similar to what marx calls 'primitive accumulation'. because there's a finite amount of wealth to be seized by this method and because purely affective politics deliberately blinded to changing the ownership of the means of production, fascism inevitably turns to external war

[silverity]

i'm gonna make my painful contribution to The Discourse and say i do not see the harm in women reclaiming female centric spirituality.

i am not a religious person nor do i want to become one but spirituality is also about culture, community and celebration. i would much rather women celebrate nature, the female form, and "divine femininity" than patriarchal phallocentric religions. that "divine femininity" is used pejoratively has always tickled me considering we live in a world hooked on divine masculinity. the old matricentric religions are really the only form of female culture devoid of male-centric worship we can grasp at, since men have dominated our belief systems for thousands of years. and women learning about the old religions is the best way to unravel the myth of the male creator, and realise it is really women who are the closest thing to a "god" on Earth.

there's also an element here, which i think is deeply capitalist, patriarchal, and a little racist, of people considering the connection to & celebration of nature as somehow primitive. i think that the lifestyles most of us live now, with none of us knowing anything about the land around us is actually very infantile and regressive for humanity as a whole. the ways of life we consider "primitive" (primitive communism, matrilineal societies) are really what we need to find ways to return to post-capitalism. they were in tune to nature, sustainable, and much more communal & equal. how can nature be primitive or ascientific when science *is* in nature, and the practices of these old societies were early scientific discoveries & practices. as a Black person, my community is often trying to reclaim our lost practices. it makes sense to me that women would try to do so too.

[transmutationisms]

from a non-academic, i find parts of comphet to be useful (heterosexuality becomes compulsory when you’re raised in a heterosexual society) but the foundations . suck. what do we do with theories like this, that have touched on a truth but also carry a lot of garbage? can we separate the truth from the founder?

i have to be slightly pedantic and say that i don't think rich's essay is an example of this phenomenon. my central issue with her formulation is its bioessentialist assumptions about human sex and therefore also sexuality. if i say "capitalism includes economic mechanisms that enforce heterosexual behaviour and exclude other possibilities", then what i mean by "heterosexual" is plainly not the same as what rich means—and for this reason i would seldom formulate the statement this way, without clarifying that i am talking about the enforcement of heterosexuality as a part of the creation and defence of sex/gender categories themselves. so rich and i do not actually agree on the very fundamental premises of this paper! rich was not the first or only person to point out that economic mechanisms as well as resultant social norms enforce heterosexual pairings; i actually don't even think the essay does a very clear job of interrogating the relationship between labour, economy, and the creation of sex/gender; she means something different and essentialist to what i mean by sex and sexuality; and i think her proposed responses to the phenomenon she identifies as 'compulsory heterosexuality' are uninteresting because they mainly propose psychological answers to a problem arising from conditions of political economy. so, in regards to this specific paper, i am actually totally comfortable just saying that it's not a useful formulation, and i don't feel a need to rescue elements of it.

in general, i do know what you're talking about, and i think there's a false dichotomy here: as though we must either discard an idea entirely if it has elements we dislike, or we accept it on the condition that we can plausibly claim these elements and their author are irrelevant. these are not comprehensive options. instead, i would posit that every theory, hypothesis, or idea is laden with context, including values held and assumptions made by their progenitors. the point is not to find a mythical 'objective' truth unburdened by human bias or mistakes; this is impossible. instead, i think we need to take seriously the elements of an idea that we object to. why are they there? what sorts of assumptions or arguments motivate them, and are those actually separable from whatever we like in the idea? if so, can we be clear about which aspects of the theory are still useful or applicable, and where it is that the objectionable elements arise? and if we can identify these points, then what might we propose instead? this is all much more useful, imo, than either waiting for a perfect morally unimpeachable theory or trying to 'accept' a theory without grappling with its origins (political, social, intellectual).

a recent example that you might find interesting as a kind of case study is j lorand matory's book the fetish revisited, which argues that the 'fetish' concept in freud's and marx's work drew from their respective understandings of afro-atlantic gods. in other words, when marx said capitalists "fetishise" commodities or freud spoke about sexual "fetishism", they were each claiming that viewing an object as agentive, meaning-laden in itself (ie, devoid of the context of human meaning-making as a social and political activity) was comparable to 'primitive' and delusory religious practices.

matory's point here isn't that we should reject marx's entire contribution to political economy because he was racist, nor is it that we can somehow accept parts of what marx said by just excising any racist bits. rather, matory asks us to grapple seriously with the role that marx's anthropologically inflected racism plays in his ideas, and what limitations it imposes on them. why is it that marx could identify the commodity as being discursively abstracted and 'fetishised', but did not apply this understanding to other ideas and objects in a consistent way? and how is his understanding of this process of 'fetishisation' shaped by his beliefs about afro-atlantic peoples, and their 'intelligence' or civilisational achievements in comparison to northwestern europeans'? by this critique matory is able to nuance the fetish concept, and to argue that marx's formulation of it was both reductive and inconsistently applied (analogously to how freud viewed only some sexuality as 'fetishistic'). it is true in some sense that capital and the commodity are reified and abstracted in a manner comparable to the creation of a metaphysical entity, but what we get from matory is both a better, more nuanced understanding of this process of meaning-making (incl. a challenge to the racist idea of afro-atlantic gods as simply a result of inferior intelligence or cultural development), and the critical point that if this is fetishism, then we must understand a lot more human discourse and activity as hinging on fetishisation.

the answer of what we do with the shitty or poorly formulated parts of a theory won't always be the same, obviously; this is a dialogue we probably need to have (and then have again) every time we evaluate an idea or theory. but i hope this gives you some jumping-off points to consider, and an idea of what it might look like to grapple with ideas as things inherently shaped by people—and our biases and assumptions and failings—without assuming that means we can or should just discard them any time those failings show through. the point is not to waste time trying to find something objective, but to understand the subjective in its context and with its strengths and limitations, and then to decide from there what use we can or should make of it.

[apas-95]

Nazi antisemitism was not based on “economic needs of German capital under the burden of postwar reconstruction”. The price of operating extermination camps and sending out death squads far exceeded confiscation of Jewish wealth. It was based on sincerely belief in Jewish racial inferiority and that Jews, communists, & social democrats had sabotaged the German war effort in WWI.

The direct primitive accumulation of appropriated wealth was not the only economic benefit of the German program of depopulation, this is fairly basic — was the colonisation of the Americas principally carried out for the purpose of seizing indigenous belongings? Were the massacres carried out in the European colonies, such as the Bengali famine, done for the seizure of the wealth of individuals? The very plain fact is that the depopulation of Germany proper and its newly-seized territories in the east was carried out as part of a plan of economic reconstruction explicitly based on European settler-colonial projects, wherein the destruction of fixed capital and the establishment of small-producer wehrbaueren was intended to both reverse and inhibit the tendency of the rate of profit to fall under capitalism.

The further notion that Weimar Germany's opposition to communists was out of revanchism and not an actual threat to the ruling classes and their state is genuinely hilarious, and goes directly against both what was explicitly stated at the time and also basic facts.

Your position here is basic idealism - if you're interested in being correct, I'd suggest looking into Dialectical and Historical Materialism, and On Practice, etc.

[ryin-silverfish]

I know, I know. LMK is kinda its own fantasy setting at this point, not everything has to be mythos-accurate, yadda yadda yadda.

However, I won't be me if I don't take the chance to ramble and nitpick anyways.

Basically: What do I mean when I say "Chaos doesn't work that way in traditional Chinese cosmology", in regards to LMK S5?

When people think of Chaos in the pop culture sense, it tends to be this destructive, corrosive force of entrophy, or a maelstrom of changes and aimless activities.

Even when the Chaos/Order divide doesn't get simplified into Evil/Good, Chaos is still painted as the antithesis of Order, and the two forces are often engaged in an antagonistic, dualistic conflict.

The way the primodial chaos is described in LMK very much fits that mold. It is something Nvwa has to create the Pillar of Heaven to protect humanity from, its magic is dark and ominous-looking, and the villain of the season is obsessed with it.

Yet Chaos——Hundun, when it isn't this cute little guy in the Book of Mountains and Seas:

or the victim of two gods' failed cosmetics surgery in Zhuangzi, is simply the undifferentiated, pre-creation state of the world, before it separates into Yin and Yang and the Five Phases.

In fact, Chaos in early Daoism and later, internal alchemy is something one desires to return to, because with the division of Chaos into Yin and Yang and the subsequent formation of the world also comes life and death, suffering and disorder.

For early Daoists, they yearned to return to that primitive, undivided state, which was viewed as a golden age, on an individual and societal level. For practitioners of internal alchemy, it was a lot more personal: by returning oneself to that primodial, Pre-Heaven stage through the blending of one's Spiritual Mind and Vital Force, one can attain immortality.

In fact, the word for the sort of disorder and mayhem people imagine when they heard "Chaos" is not Hundun, but Luan in early Chinese sources.

Both early Daoists and Confucians used the word Luan in their writings, but had significantly different take on what caused it.

To early Daoists, Luan was the result of people imposing their arbitary moral standards and civilization onto the natural, undifferentiated state of the world, a.k.a. what the Confucians and their idealized sage kings had done.

By introducing order, they caused division in the undivided, and from such divisions comes disorder. After all, if you had to educate people on right and wrong and exhort them to do good, then the world you were living in was already an immoral one.

(That's what the fable of the failed cosmetics surgery in Zhuangzi means...probably. Where two sea gods try to artificially create the seven orifices for the faceless Central Lord Chaos to repay his favor, and end up killing him in the process.)

The early Confucians also shared the same yearning to return to the golden age of the ancients, but their idea of the golden age wasn't the sea of undifferentiated, primodial unity.

Instead, it's the reign of the virtuous sage kings. Luan was the result of a breakdown of the order they established, as people lost respect for propriety and hierarchy of relations and began to behave immorally.

Their most explicit mention of Hundun was in Zuo Zhuan, where it was one of the Four Perils, all of which were immoral offsprings of ancient kings who were exiled by Sage King Shun. It very much fits into the narrative of "triumph of the righteous ruler over rebellious vassals", civilization over disorder.

However, the Confucian Hundun was no actual, primodial force of chaos, merely a historicized personification of disorderly, wrongful *human* conducts. In return, order isn't the cosmological, capital "O" Order either, but a moral and societal one.

Anyways, that's why the Order/Chaos conflict doesn't map neatly onto ancient Chinese cosmology: to have an Order/Chaos conflict implies there is a division, when Hundun is actually the lack of any sort of division.

Neither is Hundun a cosmological force of destructive changes and entrophy. If anything, it's more like the state of nature, from which everything spawns and will ultimately return to.

A cosmic egg, a sea of warm primodial soup, instead of a maelstrom of destruction or a corrupting poison.

(TL;DR: reject Moorcock, embrace Zhuangzi. /lh)

[probablyasocialecologist]

Marx and Engels viewed labour as part of nature, in that they saw workers as natural beings exercising their physical as well as mental abilities on external nature. Labour and nature thus constituted each other in a dialectical, metabolic relationship. The alienation of humans from labour was part and parcel of their alienation from nature, a product of enclosure and dispossession (so-called primitive accumulation) within the capitalist system. Marx’s critique of capitalism is consistent with an ecological critique: capital organised the exploitation of nature (the natural conditions of production) through the exploitation of human work.

Stefania Barca, Workers of the Earth: Labour, Ecology and Reproduction in the Age of Climate Change

[nihildes]

"Land and freedom means being able to feed ourselves without having to bend to any blackmail imposed by government or a privileged caste, having a home without paying for permission, learning from the earth and sharing with all other living beings without quantifying value, holding debts, or seeking profit. This conception of life enters into a battle of total negation with the world of government, money, wage or slave labor, industrial production, Bibles and priests, institutionalized learning, the spectacularization of daily existence, and all other apparatuses of control that flow from Enlightenment thinking and the colonialistic civilization it champions.

Land, in this sense, is not a place external to the city. For one, this is because capitalism does not reside primarily in urban space—it controls the whole map. The military and productive logics that control us and bludgeon the earth in urban space are also at work in rural space. Secondly, the reunited whole of land and freedom must be an ever present possibility no matter where we are. They constitute a social relationship, a way of relating to the world around us and the other beings in it, that is profoundly opposed to the alienated social relationship of capitalism. Alienation and primitive accumulation[1] are ceaseless, ongoing processes from one corner of the globe to the other. Those of us who are not indigenous, those of us who are fully colonized and have forgotten where we came from, do not have access to anything pristine. Alienation will follow us out to the farthest forest glade or desert oasis until we can begin to change our relationship to the world around us in a way that is simultaneously material and spiritual.

Equally, anarchy must be a robust concept. It must be an available practice no matter where we find ourselves—in the woods or in the city, in a prison or on the high seas. It requires us to transform our relationship with our surroundings, and therefore to also transform our surroundings, but it cannot be so fragile that it requires us to seek out some pristine place in order to spread anarchy. Will anti-civilization anarchism be a minoritarian sect of those anarchists who go to the woods to live deliberately, because they don’t like the alternative of organizing a union at the local burger joint, or will it be a challenge to the elements of the anarchist tradition that reproduce colonialism, patriarchy, and Enlightenment thinking, a challenge that is relative to all anarchists no matter where they pick their battles?

Land does not exist in opposition to the city. Rather, one concept of land exists in opposition to another. The anarchist or anti-civilization idea against the capitalist, Western idea. It is this latter concept that places land within the isolating dichotomy of city vs. wilderness. This is why “going back to the land” is doomed to fail, even though we may win valuable lessons and experiences in the course of that failure (as anarchists, we’ve rarely won anything else). We don’t need to go back to the land, because it never left us. We simply stopped seeing it and stopped communing with it." - Land and Freedom An Old Challange