Angel Martinez > Recent Status Updates

I am quite fond of Bijaz he is a quirky lil fella

Britain's Parliament and state of affairs (as the British state modernized) during the 1600s was led not by a mercantilist bourgeoisie, but by a capitalist aristocracy.

What made them capitalist? They rented out land to capitalist tenants in enclosed plots of land. The reinvestment in the means of agricultural production meant fewer hands needed to produce agricultural output.

Treaty of Westphalia as the internationalization of the German constitution is a new perspective I hadn't heard before 🤔

"Most of [the United Fruit] company's American oversees, however, were from the deep South and brought their racial attitudes with them; company policy required 'all persons of color to give right of way to whites and remove their hats while talking to them'" (71)

Guatemala up to 1950s basically big plantation where much of the land owned by foreign monopolists (like United Fruit Company, now Chiquita Banana) harvested for bananas/coffee (dependent on intl banana/coffee prices). Lots of land owned by monopolies left uncultivated. inefficiency of monopolists

Beyond scope of book: What was relationship btwn post-civil war South USA and expansion of latifundio system in LatAm?

Electricity as the undoing of the isolation the settlers yearned for in their attempts to move further and further away from the metropoles they viewed as in decay

European modernity defined by property ownership and political self determination

The peak of the 'global settler revolution marked by tension between the settler (aka homesteader), hoping for easy and cheap "free" (not free, there were indigenous people there already) and the speculator/absentee landlord, who monopolized land granting them the ability to set whatever price on land, while offsetting tax to settler.

Necessary to expand frontier, antagonistic contradiction -> conflict

One of my fave things about this book has been how it connects internal (within a state) and external (between states and in the int'l system) development.

Author also understands the importance of developing a theory of social change

Commercialization model of Braudel:

history of structure - passage imperceptible, change slow, relationship btwn man & environment
history of conjunctures - slow but perceptible, social history, of groups and groupings
history of events - basically phenomena

correspondingly, we have geographical, social, and individual time. but Braudel doesnt see a totality within these timelines, instead they are separate.

Been looking for a book that discusses the contradictions between the expansionist settlers and the centralizing 'federalists' (at least in the US context). Interesting to see how the settlers were seen as barbaric and uncivilized by those in the metropole. It seems that stereotype persists in the US conscious (see: how metropolitan libs see MAGA voters in the poorer states, othering them).

settler colonialism: a process that disperses social distress, concentrated in the metropole, outwards into the periphery/frontier. Capitalism -> social distress -> conditions for revolution (per colonial theorist E G Wakefield).

So if settler colonialism dies, is the only path forward revolution? No wonder Israel remains important to imperialism. Palestine must remain at the heart of all revolutionary movements.

Author associates words like revolurionary/reactionary with upside down and time, while colonialism is a process involving space, that (as the author suggests) can even undo time, because it is a kind of 'release valve' for the social distress that capitalism in the metropole produces

"The persistence of coercive agrarian extraction [Middle Ages] meant that noble appropriation remained ... territorially extensive & politically intensive. Precisely because direct producers remained in possession of the means of subsistence, the capitalist logic of systematic cost-cutting (replacing labor w tech innovations & resultant productivity ⬆️predicated on systematic reinvestments, couldn't take hold" (111).

Was not expecting this book to mention several authors I had already previously read: Christopher Hill (read his book on Lenin years ago) and Sacvan Bercovitch (I finished his Puritan Origins of the American Self a couple months ago). Always a pleasant surprise bc im glad others have read what I've read and have elevated the dialogue to write a whole book!

tbh didnt know jack (besides maybe about Charlemagne) about the Carolignian Empire before this but now im interested. social relations back then really are a bit weird to fathom for my 21st century mind, accustomed to 21st century social relations. some serfs actually were free because they were able to arm and defend themselves. knights didnt pop up until the 10th-11th century as part of the feudal revolution

medieval geopolitical system:
- no int'l/domestic, economic/political dichotomy
- based on relations btwn lords & peasants
- lords organized into 'state of associated persons'
- logic of political accumulation (lord-peasant, lord-lord)
- noble right to bear arms means no monopoly of violence held by this 'state'

"... Weber's historical sociology first and foremost serves comparison by constructing ideal types under which the most diverse historical and geographical cases can be subsumed and stored away. This... implies the transformation of history as an open process into history as a database furnishing evidentiary material for a series of systematized taxonomies. This is the death of history as becoming" (50-51).

Chapter 2 (A Theory of Geopolitical Relations in the European Middle Ages) thesis: "... nature and dynamics of international systems are governed by the character of their constitutive units, which, in turn, rests on the specific property relations prevailing within them" (46).

"This book appraises the global history of the exchange between emplaced and displaced transformation" (2).

NTC strat for privatization of climate change solutions:

Short term: climate change denial as the market and think tanks come up with solutions. Doubt lays the ground for the market to determine a solution

Mid term market solution: carbon permit trading

Long term: Geoengineering ("not really about saving the planet; it is instead mostly about laying claim to privatization of the global troposphere")

Role of the neoliberal state is 3-fold:

1. to becalm & mollify the restive public, provoked to constrain/neutralize the market in response to problems

2. to reiterate & deploy the Neolib panacea that addressing any (falsely) perceived market failures requires more markets

3. to facilitate the market in discovering its own eventual transformations of nature/society which will transcend any biosphere crisis.

"... the core of the neoliberal critique of socialism: no human intelligence could ever understand itself, much less the roiling appearance of chaos which constitutes its natural environment, to a degree sufficient to plan the economy, because the reasons it musters are always less complex than the phenomena it would wish to master" (ch 6).

One neoliberal myth the NTC protected post-2008 was the idea that prices reflected all information available to the "supercomputer" that is the market.

Of course, the NTC had to argue that the market was not at fault and it still is that super information processor the NTC believed it to be

"The signal characteristic of agnotology is that it makes use of ... journalistic inclinations to venture beyond ... difference of opinion ... to promulgate artificial “authorities” & calculated deception, ... to foster the widespread attitude that there is so much unfocused controversy rattling around ... that the poor average citizen might as well believe whatever he pleases."

aka "but it's complicated!"

"The advance of agnotology beyond propaganda is lodged in the fact that its hallmark
techniques thrive off a hermeneutics of suspicion, with the result that the populace can
maintain the comfortable fiction that it is not being manipulated by the obscure interests
funding the initiatives" (ch 4).