Brad > Recent Status Updates

So far (1: Marxist Examination of the Contemporary State and Law and the Question of the 'Alternative') Poulantzas's greatest contribution is complicating the picture of ruling class rule. In the "relative autonomy" of the bourgeois state, we see moving parts supporting or limiting each other. At the same time, there are limits to how pretenses of liberal values can be leveraged, so a radical break is necessary.

It is in the concrete positivity of working-class praxis that its positive political realization must be sought, while taking account of the mediations required [!] to transpose a democratic economy into a revolutionary political democracy.

Reminiscent of Meszaros on means/ends coordination, and a left-factional tendency to be dismissive of the complex balance of appropriate mediations.

Felt compelled to read James Martin's introduction for background, but...ugh, his way of reading Poulantzas and Gramsci as some sort of epistemological break from an "economic reductionist" Marx just presumes his own crude economistic reading of Marx.

Critiques aside, Poulantzas's reading of the state as a relational field of 'condensation of class relations' seems like it willl fruitfully capture some key nuances.

According to a 2012 survey of American archaeologists,

Pre-Clovis sites are not accepted even when they have published data on all required aspects of an archaeological site and answered all critiques.

Yet again demonstrating the banal laziness of prejudice in hegemonic/status quo bias. As long as hegemony is institutional, it reasserts itself confidently regardless of evidence.

"What remains undiscussed remains unchallenged and hidden."

Museum artifact provenance was a hot topic in my Master of Information degree, and we covered the grand larceny of Indigenous remains and cultural items/consultations in a Canadian context. But I was unprepared for this history of American institutional backlash to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990...from hiding artifacts in a garage for decades to declaring the profession in danger.

rather than an essentializing discourse, the discussion of Western and Indigenous archaeology is an area of dialogue where divergent histories, epistemologies, ideologies, and philosophies may be shared to inform the past, present, and future of the field.

Contra notions of Indigenous knowledge production as a mere decolonizing negation, it is a positive project in dialogue with others.

Thus, knowledge of the human past has always been and remains in a continual state of growth. We should not expect our understanding of early human populations in any area of the world to remain static.

This is the key analytical advantage of ongoing Indigenous decolonization of histories and historical materialism over reactionary & "just-so" romanticizing of an idealized past.

“Cultural terminologies often used by archaeologists to describe ancient human fossils are much more recent.”

It should be intuitive that grafting a colonial human geography on top of, or just plain overwriting, Indigenous mapping is going to complicate the recovery of, or erase, much history.

" Confederation was never imagined as a democracy ."

Two doctors, one an NWMP surgeon, reinforced the view that Jackson was insane, although they possessed no expertise in treating or dealing with patients experiencing mental disorders. A six-person jury then immediately announced its verdict: not guilty by reason of insanity...

What was termed 'insanity'...was their admiration of the Indian mode of living.

*Foucault has entered the chat*...

In 1885, 

An order-in-council was passed forbidding reserve inhabitants to sell, barter, or exchange any produce grown on reserves to outsiders, barring Indigenous farmers from participating in the commercial economy of the North-West.

Unlike the marginal personal plots of chattel slaves, reserves' agricultural produce was precluded from being a source of subaltern accumulation.

[Lands north-west of Manitoba] were no longer capable of being kept under the administrative and political control of an antiquated chartered monopoly. A company, however grandiose, could not quite compete with a state; a mercantile endeavor, craving capital, was overtaken by a nation with grand aspirations and the promise of capitalism.

Maybe he's read Ellen Meiksins Wood!

"In March 1849, the Province of Canada...passed a Rebellion Losses Bill...When Elgin signed the bill, he...ratified the realization of responsible government.

...That evening, a Tory mob of 1,500 attacked the Parliament building, in which the elected assembly was still conducting business. As a rampaging crowd smashed furniture and gas lamps, the members filed out...The building was put to the torch."

It's incumbent on any socialists in Canada to familiarize themselves with the history of the Patriotes and the Lower Canadian Rebellion of 1837-38 (with the direct endorsement of the International Workingmen's Association).

"Nation-building rested on a far more diversified capitalist foundation; if a part of colonialism's past would be discarded as obsolete, other components of the colonial project would be strengthened and intensified."

"The peculiarities of the HBC [Hudson's Bay Company] ‘factory’ system and the complexities of its work discipline thus necessitated a unique blend of compromise and cruelty. A market in furs existed in the early nineteenth century, but a capitalistic labour market did not."

As I read this, a video has been going viral of the arrest of an Indigenous woman, Rose Georgina Angus, 40, of Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nation. She's shown being punched, tazed, handcuffed and eventually dragged away with a bloody face by several RCMP officers, in front of her clearly distraught daughter, after allegedly being "confrontational".

It's not just past history.

"Differentiated First Nations societies were less than perfectly egalitarian communities, but capital and its cravings distorted much.

Palmer does not directly challenge Graeber & Wengrow, but his materialist structural analysis problematizes, or at least complicates, their concept of conscious "schizmogenesis".

"Rarely did those subject to colonialism's suppressions and capitalism's exploitations come together in common struggles...Collective actions of solidarity among these varied contingents, however much they might have been necessary, nonetheless failed to emerge."

"This original internal colonization was paralleled by a complimentary subordination within a class-divided white immigrant, or settler, society. Among the less privileged of such peoples, dispossessions of a different kind were also continuous."

"This nation-state, an eminently colonial and capitalist creation, was built on a ‘panoply of premodern and modern property’ forms operating ‘in conjunction with one another’ in 'fragmentary and contradictory’ ways. But complexity was in some ways simplified, reduced in the final instance to a general original dispossession of Indigenous Peoples...[by] a body politic [of state-backed] capital accumulation."

Final chapter, "Empires of Capital":
1. "Abolitionist Marxism"
2. Geopolitical economy of militarized trade liberalization and subaltern resistance.
3. Marx anticipates anticolonial anti-imperialism.

"There was no question of seeing the colonial world, or even relations of New World slavery, as outside global capitalism. Rather, the world capitalist system was a unitary but complexly differentiated totality."