Alexander > Recent Status Updates

As reccomended by David Graeber! - who once lamented that there were not enough books like this being written.

-

Been having alot of fun reading comparative histories recetly. It's a great way to 'isolate' historical factors of change. For Spruyt, it's bargaining between social groups that's key. For Tilly, it's war. For Skocpol, it's state relations and the role of peasantry. For Anderson, modes of extraction.

To the degree that states today are thoroughly captured by capital, it's fascinating to read an account of the time in which states were themselves the 'capturers' of capital. As the state-form settled and consolidated, it incorporated the institutions of capital like so many organs, once 'external' to it. Today, a new twist. The state shed to its most minimal - violent - form, the mafioso enforcer of capital.

Reads like a well written PhD thesis ...because it (mostly) was. Does that thing where it tells you what it's going to tell you, then tells you the thing, then tells you what it told you. It works!

I'm actually so mad at myself - along with my wider (liberal?) education - for never having come across the distinction between 'social' and 'political' revolution before. Or at least, not as a topic explicitly thematized. Even just having this vocabulary in hand allows one to make sense of so much of history and the present (political = change of guard; social = change in economic and social structure of society).

I'm a small-book length into this and I feel like I'm just getting past some of the preliminary stuff! Anyway - wtf is a bougie revolution? Basically, a revolution against the feudal order, but carried out by the bougies, rather than the proles - all the better to establish generalized property relations. This is less (so far) a history of those revols than an assessment of theories about them. Comprehensive AF.

So: Banaji is trying to complicate the idea that 'free' or waged-labour is a distinctly capitalist practice, and show that it was prevalent all through the pre-capitalist world. This makes it harder to 'pick out' capitalism as a distinct historical form, but this cuts both ways too: that the servitude of 'unfree' labour is much closer to our own times than we'd like to think.

This is among the thickest little books I've ever read (Mauss' 'The Gift' comes close). A svelte 140 pages of main text, it may as well be a 500 pager, given the saturation of historical facts within. It's a globetrotter too. Apart from the fact that every sentence is footnoted twice over, reading this requires phone in hand, Googling trading ports and merchant centers from Mirzapur to Kilwa (...exactly!).

This is among the thickest little books I've ever read (Mauss' 'The Gift' comes close). A svelte 140 pages of main text, it may as well be a 500 pager, given the stauration of historical facts on display. It's a globetrotter too. Apart from the fact that every sentence is footnoted twice over, reading this requires phone in hand, Googling trading ports and trading centres from Mirzapur to Kilwa (...excatly!).

This is utterly brutal.

Didn't think that reading about cross-Atlantic sovereign finance would be quite so compelling, but here I am!

SO many numbers. I miss theory :( But this is important!

It's almost - almost - nostalgic to read about the great power mechanations of the 90s/00s/10s. Kosovo, Somalia, Afganistan, Iraq, Iran - everywhere the naked exercise of power and and the brute execution of military action. The sites of power contests now? Public health, intitutional finance, internet giants, public infrastructure, debt politics. An astonishing change - if not in reality, certainly in discourse.

After a good deal of faff and set-up in the intro and first chapter, when the wheels hit pavement in chapter 2, this is a rollicking good read.

Or, A People's History of Western Political Thought.

I think among my favorite things about Wood's histories is her scope of historical vision: haunted by capitalism's pollution of history with its own analytic categories, Wood always strove to provincialize it on the historical continuum. In turn, she brought to life the specificity of all that came before - Rome, the Middle Ages, golden-age Athens. Side-by-side she would place them, and with them, the arc of history.