The podcast Chapo Trap House’s miniseries Hell on Earth is an entertaining story which proposes that the Thirty Years’ War midwifed the birth of capitalism. Ultimately, however, the interesting argument doesn’t hold up.
This motherfucker must be paid by the word because holy shit does he ever waffle on.
Hell on Earth is an engaging romp through the history of the Thirty Years’ War, but how does its claim about capitalism fare? For a miniseries that advertises itself as explaining the “birth of capitalism,” Hell on Earth’s discussion of capitalism is notably sparse. It is not even clear what the hosts mean by “capitalism,” as the term is never explicitly defined.
Gee it's almost like this is a leftist podcast that expects you to know what the fuck capitalism is going in. Such a debate lord point to make. "Pleath define your termth, or we don't know what we are talking about". Motherfucker if you don't know what capitalism is an does, you shouldn't argue about it in the first place. he continues:
The listener must infer the meaning of this oft-contested term from the passing mentions it receives in association with a variety of historical phenomena: for instance, the corporate structure of Dutch mercantile enterprises, the double-entry bookkeeping of Italian city-state finance, the military leader Albrecht von Wallenstein’s management of his estates, and the organization of the English New Model Army.
He is too dumb to realize that capitalism didn't jump out of a box fully formed sometime during the 30 years war. Thus, he reasons, it did not start during it, that the conditions that made it possible and that made it spread weren't created and accelerated during that time. Genius take on the level of intellect and reasoning a baby shows when it wants it's nose back after you take it away using sleight of hand.
While Hell on Earth may be primarily intended as an entertainment product, the analytical issue it raises about capitalism does deserve to be taken seriously. Could there possibly be any substantive connections to be found between the Thirty Years’ War and the birth of capitalism? This seems unlikely, as both of the most influential Marxist theories of capitalism’s emergence mentioned earlier, those of Brenner and Wallerstein, locate the origins of capitalism in an age prior to the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. The former theory sees capitalist social-property relations as a product of class conflict between English lords and peasants in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, whereas the latter identifies the increase in global trade during the sixteenth-century age of discovery as producing capitalism.
And then he writes this. As we all know, the nucleus of something is all it takes for global instant adoption. If you have one king, boom, instantly kings everywhere with no transitionary period, no time spent and no forces opposing the change. It just springs out of that box I already mentioned, fully formed.
TL/DR: This fucker has read a few books in his life and is overly smug about it, while his entire ass is hanging out of his pants and he has indeed shat on his balls.
This motherfucker must be paid by the word because holy shit does he ever waffle on.
Gee it's almost like this is a leftist podcast that expects you to know what the fuck capitalism is going in. Such a debate lord point to make. "Pleath define your termth, or we don't know what we are talking about". Motherfucker if you don't know what capitalism is an does, you shouldn't argue about it in the first place. he continues:
He is too dumb to realize that capitalism didn't jump out of a box fully formed sometime during the 30 years war. Thus, he reasons, it did not start during it, that the conditions that made it possible and that made it spread weren't created and accelerated during that time. Genius take on the level of intellect and reasoning a baby shows when it wants it's nose back after you take it away using sleight of hand.
And then he writes this. As we all know, the nucleus of something is all it takes for global instant adoption. If you have one king, boom, instantly kings everywhere with no transitionary period, no time spent and no forces opposing the change. It just springs out of that box I already mentioned, fully formed.
TL/DR: This fucker has read a few books in his life and is overly smug about it, while his entire ass is hanging out of his pants and he has indeed shat on his balls.