Every liberal does it too, from center right radlibs to far-right "conservatives": the most extreme right fringe liberals hate the mainstream liberals for not being bigoted enough, the mainstream libs hate the radlibs for not being cruel enough, and the radlibs hate the left for not being chauvinist enough.

Denouncing chauvinism in particular is like a liberal moral event horizon, a cardinal sin against their self-interested belief in the righteousness of the imperial hegemon that keeps the treats flowing at gunpoint.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Farman@hexbear.net 1 points 1 year ago

I havent read that book. But i know brenner is a good economic historian and have recommended some of his other books in here before so thanks for the recommendation. I will get to it once i have some free time.

Eestern military technology only got ahead of the rest of the world in the mid ninteenth century. So it does not seen like a reason. Naderan armies for example are comparable in logistics and volume of artillery fire to napoleonic ones. The military argument is valid only in america and australia. And even then the role of germs in creating a demographic gradient seems to have been more important. We also know of cases like yermak were his oponents had the same military technology but there is a clear demographic gradient.

I disagree that imperialist expansion is a feuture of capitalim. Instead i thik imperial expansion becomes viable once the elites in a given society face crowding. This should appliy to feudalistic, pastoralist or mercantile societies. We could argue that highly urban mercantile societies have proportionally more elites than say more rural ones. But this may not be neccesarily the case when comparing with societies with pastoralist economies.

0The role of imperialism is to prolong or/and delay the cannibalistic phase. The discovery of america allowed europeans time to avoid demographic collapse. Even then by the early 19th century england was per capita the poorest it had been at any other point in history. Thats a sure sing that it was under enormous material contradictions.

I as for pre industrial capitalism. It applies to many societies with an agrarian base at diferent points in time many of these regions likley had larger urban fractions than all but the most urbanised regions of early modern europe. In this part i have to stress the postan thesis, that labor and class relationships (in this case wage labor and proletarization) are a result of productive finctions wich in any pre industrial setting are demoraphically driven(and to some extent affected by artificial selection on plant and animal domesticates). And not the other way around as brenner states.