• Leon_Grotsky [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 month ago

    This article is a waste of time to everyone except the 500 people who listened to the series, and those people won’t care because they are already riding the beam and obviously engaging in history and politics in a completely different way from the author.

    from the conclusion:

    It seems that, contrary to the premise of Hell on Earth, the Thirty Years’ War and the origins of capitalism have little to do with each other. The war may have produced or at least influenced the development of many things — the absolutist state and the maintenance of European standing armies being perhaps the most plausible developments on this score. However, the war’s economic impact was overwhelmingly, in a word, destruction. It certainly did not play any creative role in midwifing a new capitalist mode of production, whatever the war’s other impacts. Therefore, it can be said that Hell on Earth succeeds as an introduction to the history of the Thirty Years’ War, but fails to make any defensible analytical statement about the war’s relation to capitalism.

    Why not Daniel Colligan, PhD candidate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center? He never answers this outside of gesturing at Wallerstein and Brenner.

    I had much more written up but decided it, too, was a waste of everybody’s time.

    • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      1 month ago

      I’m very confused by his portrayal of Matt’s point. I thought Matt’s point was that the unprecedented levels of chaos and destruction in the Thirty Year’s War created the need for the absolutist administrative state and standing armies, all of which needed a new economic model that could sustain it, which by necessity, birthed capitalism, which then eventually devoured it’s father. The very destruction present itself created the drive of creation.

      • Leon_Grotsky [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 month ago

        Right, it almost seems like the author is saying the Thirty Years War could only have “produced” (which I don’t think was ever the stated position of the series) capitalism if the economic impact of the war is positive? He seems to be looking for some sort of description of a new mode of production being constructed rather than the negation of the old one.

    • Formerlyfarman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      1 month ago

      I don’t agree with Brenner, I think the original works from Postan are much more consistent with a materialist interpretation, basically primitive accumulation and demographic changes lead to the development of proto capitalist forms. His example is the 100 years war, by the begining of the 14 century we see the development of banks and finance in England, as well as large merchant capital, but once the plague hits, even if the war was still going on, the demographic basis for these institutions is no longer there, rich merchants buy land and titles, other landlords stop managing their states and ether sell them or rent them the banks and Italian creditors disappear or become much less relevant. The volume of trade decreased and merchants and manufacturers formed guilds to protect their shares of a diminishing pie.

      Once population recovered, mpl fell and it became easier to extract sulprus value from laborers and accumulation started again. It was not a crisis, but the fact that an agrarian crisis like the one in the 1300s was averted by the discovery of the americas, that enabled primitive accumulation to continue. Even with the addition of india, the system was about to collapse in the early 1800. Had the industrial revolution been delayed a few decades, we’d be back at the 14th century.