When you try to give an anonymous quote but are the only person alive who speaks the language in the way you do. https://t.co/nqp77hGQyO pic.twitter.com/0D3pDlIO5k

— David Roth (@david_j_roth) April 22, 2017

pogfan1996 posted:

Anyway you might get something out of this. It's a longer YouTube but it's a pretty definitive takedown of protestantism as revolutionary



Especially Mormonism, it's a settler colonialist fanfic of the Bible

this talk popped back into my head while i was reading some Ellen Meiksins Wood:

In keeping with its own specific social-property relations at home, the Roman Republic, dominated by a self-governing aristocracy of landowners, made a virtue of necessity in its project of imperial expansion by mobilising, and even creating, landed aristocracies elsewhere as an instrument of empire from the start. They embarked on a ruthless programme of territorial expansion, a massive land-grabbing operation. The transition from republic to empire certainly required the development of a complex imperial state. But, even after the republic was replaced by imperial rule and bureaucracy, the Romans administered their empire with a relatively small central state, through what amounted to a wide-ranging coalition of local landed aristocracies, with the help of Roman colonists and colonial administrators.

If the ‘redistributive’ kingdom of the ancient world was the foundation of other great non-capitalist empires, the basis of the Roman Empire was a very different social and political form. The ancient-Greek and Roman states were ‘city-states’ governed not by monarchies or bureaucracies, but by self-governing communities of citizens, with varying degrees of inclusiveness. The state-apparatus was minimal, and the governing bodies were assemblies of one kind or another, with relatively few standing offices. Although peasants as well as landlords were citizens in, for instance, both Athens and Rome, the balance of relations between rich and poor, large landowners and peasants, varied, and was reflected in different political dispensations, such as the democracy in Athens or the aristocratic republic in Rome. But, in all cases, land, not state-office, was the principal source of wealth; and taxation was never the problem for Greek and Roman peasant-citizens that it has been for other peasants throughout history. At the same time, the peasants’ relative freedom from dependence, protected even in aristocratic Rome by their civic status as citizens of the city-state, encouraged the development of slavery as an alternative source of surplus-labour for larger landowners.

The city-state, or polis, became the basis of the Hellenistic empire, which created a new kind of imperial hierarchy. Here, although there was a monarchical centre, the hierarchy descended from the monarch to the city, dominated by a local aristocracy of private landholders, who often had land-grants from the monarch. The Romans essentially took over this form of imperial rule, adopting its ‘municipal’ structure. Although, in the East, the Empire tended to be superimposed on already well-developed political and economic institutions, the Western parts of the Empire were reshaped by this ‘municipal’ form of organisation. But, while the polis in ancient Athens had been remarkable for its democracy, the Romans, in keeping with their aristocratic base at home, used the municipal form (even in rural areas with no real urban centre) to organise and strengthen local aristocracies. In fact, where no sufficiently dominant propertied class existed, the Romans were likely to create one; and everywhere they encouraged the development of Romanised local propertied elites.

compradors, labor aristocrats, etc., as dangerous then as now