Impper posted:
dont ban ppl

i will

babyfinland posted:

Impper posted:
i'm not sure about that - capitalists aren't special, they're simply traders: rather it's the normalization of the merchant class and making them the dominant caste in society. even if a traveling trader is a hero in muslim society, it's not like muslims decided to let him make all the laws and orient the organization of the entire society to serve him

you shouldnt conflate capitalists with traders especially when we're talking about such a broad period of time. they're not the same. I'm inclined to agree with Braundel that capitalists are monopolists and not traders at all.

with that in mind though I would agree, but what was it that permitted the capitalist development in Europe, whereas in other societies nothing of the sort developed? Graeber talks about the corporate forms of feudalism, the city state et al and the introduction of market commerce as developed in Asia into such a society, but surely that alone wouldn't be it? Europe and Asia have been interacting since forever, and while I can understand how those things illustrate the event of capitalist development I still don't see what in particular became so upset in European society that the consequence was such a disasterous snowballing

Marxism has nothing to offer here either

I can't really answer this, but I have thought about it and it seems like what happens is that when feudalism was still strong and banking was a service OF the monarch, the banker jews were literally the king's property. And the control of money increased their power greatly. And they used the creation of money to make themselves richer.

As their old like space for money stuff ran out, they needed colonies to get more gold, more silver, in a very simple old fashioned view of what money is.
Then they realized, as the industrial revolution wound up, how if they controlled something, they could make money from it, even if it wasn't viewed as something valuable before.
And you have the establishment of like the east india company and these other things that are like extensions of the monarch, existing just to make money.

I'm sorry I can't discuss this very academically but it's like the monarch became the bank, and the monarch's power of monopoly became capitalism's aim, or its like spiritual core? So that the colonizing was the monarch transitioning from a person to a thing, the corporation made of many persons that was immune to prosecution, like the king. The thing could take risks to get stuff and not be punished, like the king. It was sort of an alchemical moment, making a person into a thing, and producing gold and gaining power from blood was this things new essential trait.

That's purely my intuitive banged out idea, feel free to tell me what's wrong with it

You can sort of see it's creation, its evolution in debt and other books and histories of the subject, the templars come to europe and have this banking pawn network, then they're systematically prosecuted as they threaten the monarch/aristorcracy's/ church's control of land & m oney, and having the power that goes with that. so they learn and take and destroy them, eventually it becomes politically necessary to separate banking from the king's person, but after it already has the absolute monarch as its heart, the freedom from prosectuion, the ability to be replaced by an identical thing if it is somehow dismantled, but without the ties to the land, like a king has to have his country or he can't make more money or have his protection, these things just go fucking wild. and we live in the world where they've escaped the state and multiplied and are just doing that nanobot grey goo destruction of the world. alll we have to do is turn off their immunity, change the rules they've created for themselves, etc etc and we can be rid of them

Edited by Myfanwy (Oct. 12, 2011 05:22:41)

babyfinland posted:
Yeah that's essentially what happened.

I guess the thing is Europe always hated merchants and preferred the rule of the warrior caste. The warrior caste left Europe and discovered merchant's instruments and put them to their own use. So I guess the REAL thing I've been trying to get at requires a fundamental shift in perspective from viewing capitalism as anything essentially economic or even political at its basis but rather than as a mode of war. There is no commerce and there is no government in a fully fledged capitalist world, there is just the rule of the warrior banks.

Yes~! The warrior banks, first stone and steel, now of digital representations of data, made material and animated with the souls of brutal kings from long ago, no mortal weapons can harm them. The only way they can be defeated is if we collectively stop believing in them. hot damn

drwhat posted:
the black death traumatized european society and so we clutched hard at law and religion, delineation and private property, consequently we spearheaded the most inhuman capitalist exploitation and murder

at least this is what i can come up with after thinking about it for a while and reading some stuff. if it wasn't midmorning i'd write something better

There's a lot of things incidental to the development of capitalism that shouldn't really be attributed as a determining causal factor, because those things have happened in other places and not had any sort of similar consequence.

I'm not saying that's incorrect or anything, it's just not the most useful narrative to explain the development of capitalism.