I have complained about it before but I heard on of the guests from guerrilla history on the deprogram make this argument and it made me want to gouge my eyes out. This kind of trans historical argumentation is both stupid and unmarxist, just stop! Sorry I felt the need to vent.
These states were not imperialist and they weren’t settler colonies. This framing doesn’t make any fucking sense when transfered to a medieval context. Like the best you could say is that the Italian city states represented an early firm of merchant capital, but even then that is an incredibly complex phenomenon that has only a tenuous connection to modern capitalism. Calling these city states early capitalism is just a fancy way of saying “lol u hate capitalism yet you exchange good or service! Curious!”
Seriously just stop. I don’t know why this set me off but it was like a week ago and I am still mad about it.
I think a lot of this is definitional. And I think it’s important to be clear on definitions and that imperialism and colonialism under capitalism are different. However, I also think things that could be categorized as colonial or imperial existed prior to capitalism.
As Lenin wrote:
Colonial policy and imperialism existed before the latest stage of capitalism, and even before capitalism. Rome, founded on slavery, pursued a colonial policy and practised imperialism.
This doesn’t mean the crusades necessarily fall into those categories, but it also doesn’t mean we can simply dismiss it.
For a pre capitalist imperial project to exist you need a class/category of people, who are usual self conscious, who dominate a military hierarchy by using military power to extract value from a subaltern people or regions toward an imperial core. The system is circular in that the military hierarchy exists to extract the value upon which its existence is predicated. Also important is that the system is more or less depersonalized, bureaucratized, and expansionary. The ancient Greek west Asian empires are a perfect example of this where you even had ethnic divisions between the military class and the subordinate producing class. You really don’t see this in the crusader states. These were feudal states with very little burecratc control which were dominated by customary reciprocal laws, duties, and obligations. While they were hierarchical between the productive and ruling class, there was amuch more limited differentiation within the ruling class, and a limited drive toward expansion. Additionally there was not an extraction toward an imperial core, taxes and. Appropriation remained local to serve the sustenance of the local nobility. Also interestingly the local Francis nobility quickly developed their own synthetic culture with their Muslim neighbors and would often ally with them against newcoming Christian crusaders from the west. So no the crusades to the levant were not really imperial projects. You could argue more strongly for the Baltic or Hispanic crusades, but even then I think the argument is weak for it. This matters because sloppy historical analysis can throw doubt on the entire project of leftist historiography this strength should be consistency and impersonal rigor as compared to a more personality focused liberal project.
I love our boys, but they do this with quite a few subjects. They have a really anti-dialectical view of the American Civil War and Lincoln. Like absurdly bad and just replacing Marx’s actual analysis for pretty much a meme understanding of the history. Next person who boils it down to “Lincoln never cared about the slaves” gets a book thrown at them, not because Lincoln deserves defending, he has enough people doing that, but because the reductionism is counter-productive.
Seriously. The end goal of this kind of bullshit is a Reddit “communist” cracking open Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism and yelling at me about how Samir Amin is a “tsarist”.
Trans historical
I remembered we had a thread about this:
https://hexbear.net/comment/2831697
anyways, might shed light for anyone more interested
Thank you for directly linking instead of getting mad that no one else remembered this off the top of their head! I really appreciate it.
