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.
Which guest?
It wasn’t Bret, it was the guy who said he is living in Russia, I don’t remember the name. As I said I got incredibly and irrationally angry lol.
God damn, name a bigger consistent L than every time the deprogram boys try to include a Russian.
The last time they did they included a transphobic ultra.
Edit: I mean this as a condemnation of their judgement, not Russians. I can see how that might not be clear. It’s just weird how they are consistently getting shitty guests. Upon further reflection they also included a transphobic Mexican. They’re just bad with guests in general.
Can you give the name? Or episode number or a discussion thread or something? Just want to read for my own info
The last time they did they included a transphobic ultra.
Konstantin Syomin? lol.
He used to be a Russian TV host based in New York, then he “found” Marxism and started what is essentially a Russian Breadtube channel with a sizable audience. (Do all Breadtubers have their start in New York or something?)
I found his channel through one of his videos making fun of HBO’s Chernobyl a few years back, but most of the content are your typical ultras/Trots stuff - “international solidarity of workers! everyone else is an imperialist!”
His position on China has gotten even worse now. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, he was still “hmmm…. China has so many billionaires and yet claiming to be socialist…. very suspicious….”, this year he went full “China is red imperialist” with his 1.5 hour-long video essay telling you why China is anti-socialist and anti-communist lol.
And I don’t seem to understand
also said that. Or something related to it, like Europe dropped the crusades immediately after fibding America or somethibg like that.
Probably the early invasion and control of america was not settler colonialism as we define it today?
Probably the early invasion and control of america was not settler colonialism as we define it today?
That’s basically correct: it was a domineering and extractive colonialism that revolved around forced indigenous labor to produce raw resources (or whatever you want to call gold and silver) for export, rather than the systematic ethnic cleansing of a region* to provide settlers with land. The earliest colonies were basically just there to exert hegemony and facilitate resource extraction, and it’s the subsequent British colonies along the east coast that began to follow the settler colony model.
* Note that they were still genocidal projects, it’s just that was more about forced labor and establishing hegemony than the sort of land-clearing and replacement with settlers that settler colonialism calls for.
Marx referred to gold/silver in his time and going back to the “new world” conquest as both a commodity and money. I think the reasoning goes that any commodity could be used as money, and it just so happened that silver (and gold) were rare enough and also considered valuable enough to adopt that role. I only remember this because that chapter (3 I think) is apparently very disliked by readers of Capital, but I enjoyed it for the historical background. He talks about the astronomical inflation in Spain mostly but also all of Europe due to the massive amounts of silver and gold being extracted from new mines in South America.
I think I’m gonna give that chapter a reread now that my curiosity is sparked.
Yes. What’s fascinating is that Spain and Portugal didn’t even have a form of early capitalism in place like they had in England, Holland, or maybe the Italian city-states. So instead of using that gold and silver to develop the productive forces, the Iberian kingdoms built massive armies, navies, cathedrals, commissioned art, and otherwise just blew it all while other parts of Europe were happy to take their gold and silver and use it productively.
that was more about forced labor and establishing hegemony than the sort of land-clearing and replacement
This whole thread is such dogshit lol, "ACTUALLY a caterpillar and a butterfly are totally different species, you need education to stop being so confused’
There is a pretty big difference between “a horribly destructive warlord sets up shop in a fortified port city and terrorizes the region for tribute while operating slave mines and plantations, and develops the concept of racism to excuse their behavior to the Pope” and “wave after wave of settlers land and systematically drive off or kill everyone in the region and then repeat this over and over until they’ve conquered and ethnically cleansed the entire continent explicitly in the name of racism,” if only in understanding who was doing what and what the results were.
Like you can look at this happening right now: how different the conditions are between subjugated periphery states that are exploited for resources and brutally kept under the imperial hegemon’s thumb, vs the active ethnic cleansing and landgrabs in occupied Palestine.
I don’t remember them making any of these points, but maybe I just wasn’t paying attention
It was probably a throw away line but I stopped listening because I have a problem.
I stopped listening to the “Revolutions” podcast 100 episodes in when during a Q&A the host (Mike Duncan I believe his name is) said in response to a question about his politics that he doesn’t subscribe to Marxist interpretation of history. I have no idea why that statement, which I already knew to be the case (from the way he covered history and spoke of figures like Lafayette, the king(s) of England, etc.) set me off, but it did. It’s unrealistic for me to expect every historian to view things in a Marxist way. Almost all of them are liberals whether because of the convictions or self preservation.
Well anyway, I can identify with and share this irrational reaction to podcast shit.
I like Mike Duncan but yeah he can be a bit silly. From his own definition of marxism he really doesn’t understand what it is let alone how dialectical materialism works. Interestingly enough he does seem to have an instinctual grasp of how a marxist would more formally analyze history, which maybe is why I have always liked him. The fact that heist conscious of what he is doing though leads to some incredibly painfully lib takes.
Yeah for some reason it bugs me more when an amateur like Mike goes out of their way to say they don’t subscribe to Marx versus an actual pro like Sheila Fitzpatrick (the later, though she is explicitly not a Marxist historian has done a lot of good Soviet history and was a pioneer in explicitly saying it’s ridiculous to compare Nazi Germany and the USSR, like how so many of her contemporaries wanted to do).
I completely stopped watching the most left wing satire show in German TV, Die Anstalt, because they brought up “forced expropriations” under Stalin when covering the Ukraine War. My brothers in Christ, have you ever seen a “voluntary expropriation”*? You arseholes argued for the expropriation of Deutsche Wohnen etc. before, do you think they’ll just hand over 100,000 apartments because you asked nicely? It’s good expropriation when we do it but “forced expropriations” when they do it. There was other fuck ups in terms of bad historiography (like categorising the “holodomor” as a genocide even if the source they listed literally contradicts that classification) but not understanding your own ideology to such a degree is just irredeemable to me.
*Fidel doesn’t count, he’s different.
No but you see, imperialism is when the government does stuff in other countries, the more stuff it does the more imperialist it is and if it does a real lot of stuff that’s colonialism.
