• sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    The type of soil on this map didn’t dictate whether or not slaves would work these specific fields - people did.

    True, but slaves would inevitably be brought in to work fields of at least SOME fertile geological soil deposits. It's a trivial point which ones happened to be chosen, but some of them would be, and this one ended up being one of them.

    If history turned out slightly differently then the Alabama soil would be settled by whites, and some other mineral deposit would have been farmed by Black enslaved people instead.

    • DingusDangus [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      That's precisely the point. The material conditions of the Atlantic Empires enabled slavery as a means to extract value from their colonies - conditions that extend far beyond the composition of the soil. That's what I think /u/thefunkycomitatus meant by material conditions extending beyond simple geography.

      • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        Ultimately everything comes down to geography, it's just that there's no way to encompass all the multivariate and never-ending downstream effects of every seismic shift change that happened 23409825098 years ago, so we just call certain things "cultural"

        Atlantic empires did that stuff because they found two continents of easily stealable land, so they had more land than they knew what to do with

        Non-determinists fall into the fallacy of "but you're saying people's actions don't matter if it's all preordained", but really their reactions are PART of what is ordained, and are necessary for the future. Preordained geological determinism doesn't mean that people's actions are meaningless, quite the opposite

        • DingusDangus [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Look, I don't really want to get into arguments about whether or not our universe is conducted by a pre-determined series of events.

          Fact of the matter that even if that is the case, geography alone is not enough to pre-ordain a sequence of events. Entropy is an important aspect of the universe.

          That's getting a bit too out there for me though. I'm a communist because I believe in the ability for us as humans to be able to improve things, and believing that everything has already been determined is counter-productive to that.

          The start of our conversation was about material conditions not being the same thing as physical geography, which is true - unless you think that the universe has been pre-ordained. If that's what you want to believe then good on you, and I won't stop you, but it's not really a productive stance to take in my opinion, especially when it puts you in the historical analysis camp of Jared Diamond.

          • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            Entropy is an important aspect of the universe.

            life is anti-entropic

            but yea

            and believing that everything has already been determined is counter-productive to that.

            it isn't tho

            • Nagarjuna [he/him]
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              edit-2
              3 years ago

              life is anti-entropic

              Plants and algae get their energy from the sun and feed all other life on earth. When the sun goes out, so does life. There's no stopping entropy.

              nit picking

              Except chemosynthetic life which gets its energy from geothermic vents, which are powered indirectly by the earth's radioactive core, which will also one day go out.

            • DingusDangus [he/him]
              ·
              3 years ago

              I'm not a student of theoretical physics, nor am I a Calvinist, and I am certainly not nearly high enough to begin digging into the meat of predeterminism with you.

              The point of me commenting was to say that there is more to historical materialism than analyzing physical geography, and I will leave it at that.

        • RealAssHistoryHours [he/him,they/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          This is an incredibly semantic argument now. Ultimately if a system's outcomes can't be predicted from its starting points, for all intents and purposes, the system is not deterministic because its state changes cannot be predicted by observing its current iteration.