Sebrof [comrade/them, he/him]

Another user @Lemister@hexbear.net, has mentioned Michael Hudson, and though I haven’t read his books on the ancient economy they are on my list. He mentions ancient economies and tyrants in some articles you can find online. To give you a gist, here are some quotes from Michael Hudson: The End of Western Civilization – Why It Lacks Resilience, and What Will Take Its Place

Some families created mafia-like autocracies by monopolizing the land and tying labor to it by various forms of coercive clientage and debt. Above all was the problem of interest-bearing debt…

Out of this situation Greek reformer-“tyrants” arose in the 7th and 6th centuries BC from Sparta to Corinth, Athens and Greek islands. The Cypselid dynasty in Corinth and similar new leaders in other cities are reported to have canceled the debts that held clients in bondage on the land, redistributed this land to the citizenry, and undertaken public infrastructure spending to build up commerce…

This autocracy vs. democracy rhetoric is similar to the rhetoric that Greek and Roman oligarchies used when they accused democratic reformers of seeking “tyranny” (in Greece) or “kingship” (in Rome). It was the Greek “tyrants” who overthrow mafia-like autocracies in the 7th and 6th centuries BC…

And another Hudson article on the Ancient economy you may find interesting, from Michael Hudson: Debt, Economic Collapse and the Ancient World

The former rival general said just what a classical Greek tyrant Thrasybulus advised in the 7th century BC to his contemporary Corinthian ruler Periander who had overthrown the aristocracy, cancelled the debts that had held the peasantry in bondage and redistributed the land (which is what the Greek tyrants did, and why they were disparaged by subsequent oligarchies, who turned the label “tyrant” into an invective). When asked by Periander what to do to prevent the deposed Corinthian oligarchy from trying to recover its former despotic power, Thrasybulus walked over to an adjoining wheat field and pointed to the stalks of wheat at different sizes. He took a sickle and made a sweeping motion to make the stalks even, so that they were at the same level.

Another book on the subject is Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism by Perry Anderson. One of my favorite books. It gives a quick overview of the modes of production of Ancient Greece and Rome and then discusses how they collapsed and transitioned to Feudalism.

Here are some passages regarding Ancient Greece and the Tyrans:

After the collapse of Mycenaean civilization about 1200 B.C., Greece experienced a prolonged ‘Dark Age’

It was in the succeeding epoch of Archaic Greece, from 800 to 500 B.C., that urban pattern of classical civilization first slowly crystallized… local kingships were overthrown by tribal aristocracies, and cities were founded…

These cities were essentially residential nodes of concentration for farmers and landowners… the social organization of these towns still reflected much of the tribal past… their internal structure was articulated by hereditary units whose kin nomenclature represented an urban translation of traditional rural divisions.

The rupture of this general order occurred in the last century of the Archaic age, with the advent of the ‘tyrants’ (c. 650 - 510 B.C.). These autocrats broke the dominance of the ancestral aristocracies over the cities: they represented newer landowners and more recent wealth, accumulated during the economic growth of the preceding epoch, and rested their power to a much greater extent on the concessions to the unprivileged mass of city-dwellers.

The tyrants were the product of a dual process within the Hellenic cities … The arrival of coinage and the spread of a money economy were accompanied by a rapid increase in the aggregate population and trade of Greece… The economic opportunities afforded by this growth created a stratum of newly enriched agrarian proprietors, drawn from outside the ranks of the traditional nobility…

At the same time, the increase of population and the expansion of disruption of the archaic economy provoked acute social tensions among the poorest class on the land… The combined pressure of rural discontent from below and recent fortunes from above forced apart the narrow ring of aristocratic rule in the cities. The characteristic outcome of the resultant political upheavals within the cities was the emergence of the transient tyrannies of the later 7th and 6th century… Their victory, however, was generally possible only because of their utilization of the radical grievances of the poor, and their most lasting achievement was the economic reforms in the interests of the popular classes…

The tyrants, in conflict with the traditional nobility, in effect objectively blocked the monopolization of agrarian property that was the ultimate tendency of its unrestricted rule… small peasant peasants farms were preserved…

Something interesting to note is that this trend of tyrants was common throughout Greece, but was essentially absent in Rome. Rome didn’t have an age of tyrants (or if they did as Hudson suggests the Roman kings were analogous to tyrants, they were not ultimately successful and the nobility was able to hold on to power till the end.

Anderson remarks:

In one critical respect, however, Roman expansionism distinguished itself at the outset from Greek experience. The constitutional evolution of the city conserved aristocratic power right down and into the classical phase of its urban civilization… unlike the Greek cities, Rome never knew the upheaval of tyrant rule, breaking aristocratic dominance and leading to subsequent democratization of the city, based on a secure small and medium agriculture.

Class struggle is essential in understanding ancient history. Reading Hudson and Anderson really makes it clear how “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”

Thanks! I didn't want to come off as needlessly antagonistic toward a comrade and it's hard to tell tone from text. I think we should always be actively rooting out the liberal in our head. And as it's the hegemonic ideology it can be buried deep inside. Engaging in struggle helps, but I'll be the first to tell you I'm nowhere as engaged as I should be. So that liberalism can creep up in insidious ways. Especially for those in the imperial core. I'm assuming you are, as I am, but I may be off base.

I think this quote from Assata Shakur is good to keep in mind when thinking about liberals.

As far as i’m concerned, “liberal” is the most meaningless word in the dictionary. History has shown me that as long as some white middle-class people can live high on the hog, take vacations to Europe, send their children to private schools, and reap the benefits of their white skin privileges, then they are “liberals.” But when times get hard and money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask and you think you’re talking to Adolf Hitler. They feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged just as long as they can maintain their own privileges.

Edit: my phone's giving me so many problems. I wanted to respond directly to a comment @Venat@hexbear.net made.

Sorry if this sounds harsh, but my thought is that liberals were never going to rediscover their affection for organizing. Sorry if I'm coming across as too cynical and harsh, but liberalism is a death cult. It's a philosophical dead end and it's true believers are too comfortable in the empire to do anything that's not posturing, symbolic, and ultimately meaningless. Americans needs to divorce themselves from the Democrats and see them as a bourgeoise parties that don't express their interests. I think the die hard liberals do have their interests represented by bourgeois parties and so they were always a lost cause. Working class people who are either checked out of the process, or only go with the dems out of fear of Trump need to be reached with a political message they can actually see and believe in. Bernie was that for people at a time, but he's useless now.

Sorry for the rambling. I think my main point is that liberals were never going to organize and we actually shouldn't wait or want them to. I have no faith in them nor expectations. When they do organize it just absorbs movements back under their fold. The working class itself needs to be the ones organizing. We shouldn't rely on, or expect, or want, liberals to do the tasks of the working class. Working class movements and institutions have to be the ones taking the active role in history

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It's disappointing. As more and more moments of truth come out, as WW3 breaks our and/or the empire is in obvious terminal declin,e there'll be western leftists (even here sadly) who will make some heel turn and support the empire. It'll be justified by who knows what, about the tough choice of needing to save what little "democracy" America represents even if they don't "fully support it". The same predictable cycle on higher and higher levels.

If that happens to me then please hunt me down and shoot me

Al Jazeera has a section focused on battleground states and different paths of victory for each

https://www.aljazeera.com/us-election-2024/results/

Show

King today would be casting his vote for the Greg Stillson of yesterday

I would love to talk about this stuff with anyone who is interested. I've learned some (linear) production theory along the lines of Sraffa, Pasinetti, Ian Wright etc - essentially representing production relations as a network. If you feel comfortable with some Linear Algebra you can start there. And I have been working on a way to model this production network, but I sometimes spin my wheels and get stuck on tangents. I am thinking of a model along the lines of what Ian Wright has worked on, and either doing a macro model (modeling the explicit emergent relations) or micro model (model the micro interactions and letting the macro structure emerge). Wright has papers for both types of models. The later would be more along the lines of complexity science. The former is closer to diff eqs, and would be easier for applying ideas of control theory to. I think.

There are a series of papers from Political Economists from the new school arguing about whether to start models from the individual interactions, vs the emergent macro conditions (which is more in line with classical political economy).

Later one could add financial networks, etc. to such a model.

But if you're familiar with linear algebra, diff eqs, and control theory, then you may find the authors above interesting. If anyone wants to brainstorm let me know. I think this stuff is interesting and would love to know more, but I also have to work to pay bills lol

Very cool, I got to see it years ago (and at that time I didn't know his original gravesite was elsewhere, wish I would have seen that too). There were a couple of letters that people had left from all over the world. It was touching.

Europeans. Why are you this way?

A little off topic, but I remember when Arecibo collapsed and my astro friends didn't seem that worried as "they'll just build it back". I wasn't even fully China-pilled back then, but I knew that from where the largest (full dish) radio telescope was and from where all the astro academic papers we were citing were from that the US was cooked.

Sometimes you get heavy bombardment

Gliese 710

Nemesis eat your heart out

I like to read the comments on those articles, I shouldn't because it damages my brain. But I'm fascinated by how deranged they are. Ever since I was young I've been fascinated and horrified by how right wing and conspiracy-minded pretty much all comment sections are. Like in the FT article you have manty people calling Merkel a communist, boring. But I got a chuckle when one was challenged and they respond by literally saying that Germany's not far off from having the means of production owned by a classless society, and that's the problem.

While I can't speak for liberal policy makers and higher-ups, the average liberal voter is so supportive of civility politics and "free speech" that it's going to get them killed. A protest I was at recently had neo-confererate counter protestors and a progressive lib I spoke to at the protest said that while they didn't like the neo-confererates, they had as much right to be out there as we did, and we have to respect their freedom of speech.

So yeah, the frustration is real.

Liberals voters are fucking idealists and they don't understand power. When they lose they'll be so confused because they followed all the rules! They think politics has refs or something. Most won't even care too much, they'll keep shifting further and further right as the empire decays.

I don't think the argument would be that the opinions that people form, or want to form, always come from a conscious understanding of imperialism. The author would likely say that Westerners want to believe, and do believe, the rest of the world is bad, dangerous, unfree, undemocratic, totalitarian, etc. to make them better about their own lives - even if, or because they are, facing difficulties themselves.

The article mentions China and the supposed genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang as an example. The phrase may as well be gibberish to Westerners. They don't know, nor want to know, anything about the topic.

You are right, they aren't doing any critical thinking. They are simply repeating nonsensical lines and absurdities, and they don't want to think about it.

They don't understand imperialism on a conscious level. But they want to believe that even if they can't pay their bills, and their own life in the West has its hardships, and their state could be doing more, that at least other places are worse. And they want to feel superior to the rest of the world, so they believe any atrocity propaganda they stumble across to fuel their coping mechanism. But it doesn't require an understanding of imperialism on their part. If they think about it at all, I'd guess they would attribute the superiority of the West to white supremacy, "democratic values", etc.

As said in Masses, Elites, and Rebels

Westerners aren’t helpless innocents whose minds are injected with atrocity propaganda, science fiction-style; they’re generally smug bourgeois proletarians who intelligently seek out as much racist propaganda as they can get their hands on. This is because it fundamentally makes them feel better about who they are and how they live. The psychic and material costs are rationally worth the benefits

Westerners are willingly complicit in crimes because they instinctively and correctly understand that they benefit as a class (as a global bourgeois proletariat) from the exploitation enabled by their military and their propaganda — organs of coercion and consent.