Angel Martinez > Recent Status Updates

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).

Purpose of mainstream neoclassical economists (heavy sway w/in financial institution, both private [think tanks, banks, etc] & public [govt policy, Fed]) produce ignorance. The public's trust of economists AND market (which came under question post-2008). response from the neoclassical economists was to foment confusion.

Enter: "the postmodern phenomenon of agnotology" (ch 4)

Code of ethics for the economics profession? 🤔

Big theme of the book here seems to be: neoclassical orthodoxy/economics =/= "economic theory"

"As in so many other instances, what the neoliberal self loses in continuity, it gains in convenience" (153). re exchange of body parts, enhancements to self (brain), and gametes

no continuity to the neolib self because the neoliberal self is only a collection of isolated fragments, a reflection of Thatcher's claim that there is no society, only "individual men and women & there are families"

"As religion took on more of the trappings of just-in-time provision of entertainment services, and "values" assumed the mix-and-match character of Do It Yourself bricolage, the materiality of rock-solif "interests" melted into thin air" (104).

"The NTC has demonstrated that true political power resides in the ability to make the decision to 'suspend' the market in order to save the market" (85).

From Carl Schmitt (per Hayek "Hitler's crown jurist): "only a strong state can preserve and enhance a free-market economy"

I was waiting for the author to describe the Mont Pelerin Society of the neoliberals as Leninist!

According to Kenneth Waltz Neorealism treats IR as a separate sphere of human activity, thereby externalizing anything that falls outside of its 'theoretical' scope, leaving history as something to impose neorealism on, rather than history as something for neorealism to integrate.

"The major ambition of [what the author calls] the Neoliberal Thought Collective is to sow doubt and ignorance among the populace" (83).

* double truths in the MPS: from the outside (exoteric) the 2007 crisis is a bad thing. From the inside (esoteric), the financial crisis is a good thing. The double truth reconciles this difference

Seems like the only difference reactionaries (specifically neoliberals in this case) tolerate is that difference born out of inequality.

English transition to capitalism marked by moves from dynastic sovereignty to parliamentary sovereignty (Glorious Revolution of 1688).

* 'blue-water' policy
* power-balancing in a 'mixed' states-system
* playing states off against each other (triangulation) until militarily/financially exhausted
* IR not modern, but modernizing

"In the long run, the breakdown of the absolutist-patrimonial 'tax/office' state was 'externally' induced, deriving primarily from the economic and military pressures exerted by capitalist Britain" (10) - on core argument of chapter 5. seems interesting.

Core Theoretical argument: "...the constitution, operation, and transformation of geopolitical orders are predicated on the changing identities of their constitutive units"

*social property relations define the constitution and identity of these units
*institutions (providing rules & norms) as petrified praxes for reproduction of property relations
*strategies of reproduction define inner/outer unit relations

"...this book argues that 1648, far from signaling a breakthrough to modern inter-state relations, was the culmination of the epoch of absolutist state formation; it marked the recognition and regulation of the international [inter-dynastic] relations of absolutist, dynastic polities... [must] unpack the social relations of sovereignty that underwrote the Westphalian order to reveal its non-modern nature." (3)

setting the stage: "The classical Westphalian system, rooted in the primacy of the modern, territorially bounded sovereign state, is being replaced by a post-territorial, postmodern global order."

*geo-economics
*multi-level global governance
*demands of multi-actor intl civil society

*Westphalian (Thirty Years' War) states-system as benchmark
*turn to history in theory-building