The Offtopicgrad Soviet: A Place to Discuss All Things Red

[Hygro]

I've never seen 17th century Netherlands referred to as non-capitalist.

 

[Lexicus]

Well I guess your horizons are being broadened then.

 

[_random_]

Given the difficulty of pointing to the exact moment when capitalism emerged, I wonder if there'll be similar difficulty when/if socialism emerges. The Marxist-Leninist notion of economic systems emerging due to the violent revolutionary overthrow of one class by another doesn't seem to map neatly onto the past. Erik Olin Wright had a recent piece in Jacobin dealing with these issues that I really liked and I think Cheezy will hate.

 

[Hygro]

How should a pro-communist state deal with medical controversies and the people affected by them?

edit: thought it was the other thread, but probably better fitting here to open up the floor.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Well I guess your horizons are being broadened then.

I'm hardly a specialist in the netherlands, but if we're talking 17th century, I'd be hasty describing such an economic system applying to something as big as a country. It's important to make a distinction between "The Netherlands" and "The Netherlands we like to talk about."

 

[Hygro]

I'm hardly a specialist in the netherlands, but if we're talking 17th century, I'd be hasty describing such an economic system applying to something as big as a country. It's important to make a distinction between "The Netherlands" and "The Netherlands we like to talk about."

Places the VOC held auctions?

 

[Lexicus]

I'm hardly a specialist in the netherlands, but if we're talking 17th century, I'd be hasty describing such an economic system applying to something as big as a country. It's important to make a distinction between "The Netherlands" and "The Netherlands we like to talk about."

Yeah, I mean I'd agree. Proto-capitalist would probably be more accurate. But keep in mind, I'm arguing the 17th century Netherlands was not capitalist here.

 

[Hygro]

It's a fuzzy process. 17th century Netherlands is suggested as a starting point for capitalism as well, along with the modern state (Treaty of Westphalia, which I'm sure Dachs will destroy without mercy).

The British land enclosures are argued as a starting point for both modern statecraft as well as capitalism.

So the answer would probably be "Between the 12th and 19th century".

I can't believe I missed this post.

Yeah, I'm not sure why we're going to define capitalism as something requiring a nationstate to exist, when societies with their primary social organization be labor-time and its relation to profit (and the governing profit motive) already existed.

The East India Company literally parceled out the days its wares were being sold in each city according to a combination of shareholder privilege and direct city bidding. A quasi contract based system uniting a bunch of cities and a corporation.... The Bank of England was founded by Willem III, in the image of the Bank of Amsterdam, which for a century had succeeded in getting all the merchants on their credit-deposit system. Their's was a society decided by markets and property as enforced by the state.

I'm not really sure what wasn't capitalist about, as PCH puts it, "The Netherlands we like to talk about." Was the USA too not capitalist, as westward expansion allowed the reserve labor class to leave if working conditions got too dire? Are we not now truly capitalist since not everything is actually governed by price and non-price based considerations still drive many if not most of our decisions?

I'm just not clear as to why at least the United Provinces, if not also Genoa et al didn't qualify as having sufficient money, labor, and land markets to be recognized as capitalist societies.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by this. Dialectical materialism can't be used to predict any historical events as-is, if that's what you mean by something that's "workable with regard to history."

It would be a first for me, if "history" referred to the future.

I clearly mean our understanding of the past. Historimat doesn't work without diamat, and diamat doesn't work without, well, the -mat part. If the conflict and resolution of internal contradictions of matter doesn't drive the universe, and human ideas does, then our understanding of history in the Marxist sense becomes entirely moot. Marxism collapses without materialism.

Well, it's actually not true that dialectical materialism would predict capitalism coming before the modern state.
The modern state is what allowed capitalism to displace feudalism. The modern state came first in actual history.

What does everyone mean by "the modern state?" Simply the state, or the state in the form it takes under capitalism, or the nation-state? What? Because capitalist economic relations existed before the modern nation-state, but the bourgeoisie did not control a state until the mid-17th century.

The state, period, is an entity which protects private property - Orthodox Marxists would recognize pre-modern states as fulfilling that function as well.
Note also that the mere existence of the bourgeois class is not synonymous with capitalism in any theory I'm aware of. The bourgeois has arguably existed in one form or another since the classical age.

The bourgeoisie is the class that controls capital in capitalist relations of production, which entails both private property and the wage-relation, and the circulation of commodities in a moneyed system.

The mistake is thinking that capitalism only exists where the bourgeoisie commands state power, and that this only happens on a national level. This is absurd and mistaken. In fact, no economic system totally 100% entails an entire economy. Capitalism has come the closest, by far, to displacing all others, but even in the most advanced capitalist nations there exists pockets of non-capitalist production: private production, and yes, even slavery.

When did the modern state arise? Capitalism emerged in 12th century Italy.

Indeed it did. The line being touted in this thread that capitalism requires factories in order to exist is mistaken.

Capitalism began its rise to predominance when the economic logic of capital was able to penetrate into the means of production an exert its logic and the interests of the class that controls capital, i.e. the capitalist class or bourgeoisie. Capital has existed for thousands of years, and wage-labor tied to capital in fits and spurts, but only really emerging as part of prolonged trend in the cities of Western Europe around 8-900 years ago. The collapse of the Carolingian Empire and the rise of feudalism in that vacuum gave room for the bourgeoisie in the cities to assume, for the first time, control over a state (of sorts) and to create a protected sphere in which they could forward the economic agenda of capital; the existence of a class of free workers in the cities is what made this possible, and the developments in agriculture in particular, as well as the massive influx of wealth from colonialization over the next several centuries provided the steady fuel of wealth and labor for that MoP to grow and prosper while feudalism slowly ground itself down through its internal contradictions.

In England they assumed national-state power for the first time in the English Civil War, and the climb from 1650 to the Industrial Revolution is the story of the slow but inevitable victory of the bourgeoisie over the English gentry, and the forwarding of its economic interests over theirs (a task not complete until 1846-7 when the Corn Laws were revoked and the Tory Party collapsed). The Industrial Revolution took off because capitalist relations that already existed in simple form in the cottage industry had ready use for these massive labor-saving tools, and the bourgeoisie abused them and the abundant free labor pool ruthlessly. But that was not the birth of capitalism, that was capitalism finally coming into its own. It shows an extremely poor understanding of both history and capitalism to confuse the two so badly as Lexicus has.

How should a pro-communist state deal with medical controversies and the people affected by them?

edit: thought it was the other thread, but probably better fitting here to open up the floor.

Can you give an example of such a controversy?

 

[Lexicus]

What does everyone mean by "the modern state?" Simply the state, or the state in the form it takes under capitalism, or the nation-state? What? Because capitalist economic relations existed before the modern nation-state, but the bourgeoisie did not control a state until the mid-17th century.

I mean the state form that emerged in Europe toward the end of the 1600s, largely as a result of the demands of prosecuting the wars of the preceding two centuries. Broadly characterized by professionalized administration, enormous technical capacity (eg in the collection of statistics), novel financing arrangements, and more far-reaching powers than feudal states.

The argument here is that the state needed to take its modern form for capitalism to become dominant, because only then were the bourgeois capable of wresting power from the feudal elites.
The power of the modern state was also needed to establish some uniformity of law and custom across relatively large areas, which was a precondition for the creation of national markets (as opposed to patchworks of local markets that were much less consistently integrated with one another).

The mistake is thinking that capitalism only exists where the bourgeoisie commands state power, and that this only happens on a national level. This is absurd and mistaken. In fact, no economic system totally 100% entails an entire economy. Capitalism has come the closest, by far, to displacing all others, but even in the most advanced capitalist nations there exists pockets of non-capitalist production: private production, and yes, even slavery.

Yes, I would agree that modes of production don't exist in black-and-white. My contention is not that capitalism did not exist before the 19th century, but that it only became the dominant mode in the 19th century (I realize this is not really what I said before but we were trading one-liners so...)

This is what Polanyi means by a "market society." Markets had existed more or less since the beginning of recorded history, but until the 19th century were peripheral to economic organization. It was the 19th century that saw the unleashing of the market where before it had been "embedded" in society.

 

[red_elk]

Yuri Antonov - "Snegiri"


Link to video.

 

[red_elk]

"Only Old Men Are Going to Battle" is an iconic 1973 Soviet war drama film about WW2 fighter pilots, fighting in Soviet Ukraine. The film written and directed by Leonid Bykov, who also played the lead role as the squadron commander.

The film combines two storylines: the main war drama plot is paralled with vivid artistic performance - the fighter squadron doubles as an amateur musical group during rest time, led by its enthusiastic commander (nicknamed by his comrades as "Maestro") turned conductor.

The title comes from two scenes in the film, where the squadron is facing very hard dogfights with German fighter planes, so only "old men" are sent up, while those fresh from flying school have to wait on the ground together with the mechanics. Soon, of course, the newcomers have replaced most of those veterans and have become "old men" themselves, taking to the skies while a new group of newcomers wait on the ground with the mechanics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_Old_Men_Are_Going_to_Battle

IMDB 8.6


Link to video.

 

[Agent327]

I mean the state form that emerged in Europe toward the end of the 1600s, largely as a result of the demands of prosecuting the wars of the preceding two centuries. Broadly characterized by professionalized administration, enormous technical capacity (eg in the collection of statistics), novel financing arrangements, and more far-reaching powers than feudal states.

Statistics weren't being systematically collected until the 19th century. I'm not sure what you mean by 'novel financing arrangements'. Wars were often financed until a state ran into debt - and sometimes beyond. Taxation - until well into the 19th century - was limited to the poor.

This is what Polanyi means by a "market society." Markets had existed more or less since the beginning of recorded history

Barter markets, yes. But a barter society generally isn't classified as a market economy, which needs bullion.

 

[Traitorfish]

I've never seen 17th century Netherlands referred to as non-capitalist.

I've seen a couple of scholars who insist that: nyet the generalised wage-labour, nyet the capitalism, but I think they're a bit out of date. Far as I can tell, contemporary scholars accept that there's a great big grey area between simple "not-capitalism" and a fully-fludged capitalist economy, and the Dutch Republic sits squarely in the middle, if not leaning towards the latter. I suppose the diplomatic way to frame it might be that the early modern Netherlands was not a capitalist society as we might understand it in a contemporary sense, but that capitalism was certainly happening?

edit: Also, Christ, I'm back five minutes and the first post I make is about theorising capitalism in the 17th century? I'm a parody of myself.

 

[Ajidica]

edit: Also, Christ, I'm back five minutes and the first post I make is about theorising capitalism in the 17th century? I'm a parody of myself.

Don't worry, that's why we love you.

 

[Hygro]

I've seen a couple of scholars who insist that: nyet the generalised wage-labour, nyet the capitalism, but I think they're a bit out of date. Far as I can tell, contemporary scholars accept that there's a great big grey area between simple "not-capitalism" and a fully-fludged capitalist economy, and the Dutch Republic sits squarely in the middle, if not leaning towards the latter. I suppose the diplomatic way to frame it might be that the early modern Netherlands was not a capitalist society as we might understand it in a contemporary sense, but that capitalism was certainly happening?

"Capitalism was certainly happening?" I like it.

edit: Also, Christ, I'm back five minutes and the first post I make is about theorising capitalism in the 17th century? I'm a parody of myself.

Wherever we are needed, yeah?

 

[plarq]

I have a question in mind. Does Vladmir Putin's regime count as left-wing or right-wing? I personally branded it as right-wing authoritarian regime, then I am puzzled as it sometimes defended left-wing legacy (Soviet Union) and suppresses left-wing movement (Russian Communist Party) at the same time. In international politics, both marginalized left-wing socialists and right-wing nationalists like Putin, while mainstream Western politicians dislike him.

 

[W|M]

The Soviet Union isn't thought of as socialist by many socialists, Putin defends the USSR because he links it to Russian nationalism, and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is a group of reformist electioneers

 

[Lexicus]

"Capitalism was certainly happening?" I like it.

The problem I have with "capitalism was certainly happening" is that it applies to virtually all of recorded history.

 

[Namor]

The Soviet Union isn't thought of as socialist by many socialists

If you are suggesting having anarchistic tendencies is an important school of thought for being socialist, that excludes so many other people that consider themselves socialist too. Including socialists who favor state power as a transition period to communism. Maybe that isn't what you're getting at, I honestly don't know.