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July Update: The Asymptote
🕑 Added 2022-08-01 17:48:51 +0000 UTCHey team! Happy August!
What You Already Know
Not gonna do a full recap of the last month of work because you already know most of it! I have been able to work at a pretty steady clip. Not hitting 200 slides in a week like I did right after going on Concerta, but I'm averaging over 100. My schedule is such that a lot of bi-weekly obligations have synced up, so I have busier weeks with less time at the desk where I manage ~50 and alternating weeks where I do 100-175. We are currently at 558, meaning this is on track to be the most slides of any video so far, despite definitely not being the longest.
I also sent you the script revision I did last week, souping up the ending by tying it to the historical context and the general theme of the series. Very odd to feel like I found the thesis 2 years after starting this script.
Even with this revision making the video longer, there's still fewer than 2 pages left to animate, so I think we're going to have this thing out by the end of the month. Which is wild!!! You all will get it first, then Nebula, and finally YouTube. It's going to be interesting to see what kind of numbers this thing does.
Reading List - The Anatomy of Fascism
As you know, I am in the early stages of Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism, and the early chapters are what led me to rewrite the ending of the current video. Here are some takeaways from the first 60-odd pages:
- by the end of the 19th century, European socialism was a) politically ascendant, and b) incrementalist. Engels himself was writing that socialism was spreading so well that revolution seemed unnecessary; countries were clearly going to just reform themselves away from capitalism.
- socialism seemed to be the first populist politics, one steered primarily by the public rather than kings, nobles, and aristocrats. it was hard to fathom that a mass politics could be anything but socialist until fascism arrived.
- by the 1920's this optimism had deflated. the Revolution in Russia had not spread throughout Europe as expected (and people had mixed feelings about how it was doing), the devastation of World War I had left much of the country unsure that anyone was going to save them, and a number of socialist uprisings had been violently put down (often by liberal governments).
- "Those dislocated countries where a landless peasantry was still numerous and where a disenfranchised middle class still lacked basic liberties polarized to the Left (as in Russia). Those with a large but threatened middle class, including family farmers, polarized against the Left and looked for new solutions."
- fascism borrowed ideas from psychology, evolutionary biology, and sociology, even as most voices from those fields would end up denouncing fascism; there is little fascists won't pervert if it suits their needs.
- fascism cannot be understood by what it claims to believe, because, unlike other government models - even totalitarian ones - it has no real philosophy, or any real philosophers. Stalin wrote constantly to justify how his regime was in keeping with Lenin and Marx, but there is a paucity of such writing by fascists; Paxton even quotes a fascist writer flatly saying that ideas are only useful inasmuch as they further fascist aims.
- fascism's focus on minorities is typically just grabbing whatever bigotries already exist in the country where it arises, which is why racism is so common across different movements yet none demonize all the same groups.
- nationalism proved a reliable antidote to socialism, a "mobilizing myth" that could counter the narrative of proletarian revolution. had a strong emotional cachet.
- people with strong, rooted social networks were hard to recruit to fascist causes, which is why they got little traction with socialist movements despite appropriating much of their rhetoric. unions were too strongly bonded to be pulled apart. fascists mostly appealed to jaded military vets, lower-middle class folks threatened by the proles but also resentful of wealthier elites, and young folks rebelling against the nation out of anger at WWI.
- Mussolini in specific built his early base of power on landowners who hated having to pay farm laborers. the socialist movements in Italy had unionized the farms, such that they had to be paid year-round instead of seasonally and increase their wages, and the owners were pissed. so Mussolini set up a bunch of squads that raided local socialist establishments - Labour Exchanges, newspapers, etc. - and beat the shit out of them, ultimately killing 40 people and burning a number of buildings. they got so entrenched in the Po Valley that eventually the government had to treat them like a legitimate movement, breaking up the state monopoly on power.
That's what I've got so far!
Reading List - The Origin of Capitalism
I left my copy of The Anatomy of Fascism at the office and had several stretches of reading time where it wasn't at hand, so I started The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood, which is proving similarly fascinating. Here are some takeaways on the first 60-odd pages:
- Wood spends a lot of the early book discussing how most economic theory about capitalism begs the question of where and why it came into being. most writers - even Marxists, even Marx himself to a degree - act as though capitalism is an inevitable outcome of human behavior, and would occur as soon as certain obstacles were removed. much of the early book is summarizing different arguments of this kind, and throwing (polite) shade on writers for making such weak arguments. it's got a very "now that I've got a book deal I'm gonna win all those forum arguments" vibe and I'm kind of into it.
- she gives a nice, succinct definition of capitalism early on: "Capitalism is a system in which goods and services, down to the most basic necessities of life, are produced for profitable exchange, where even human labour-power is a commodity for sale in the market, and where all economic actors are dependent on the market." I find this especially useful because so many defenders of capitalism seem to think anything to do with money, profit, or markets is capitalism and therefore it is as old as civilization, rather than having existed only about 250 years.
- Wood has some critiques of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation but clearly thinks it goes a long way to rebutting some of these crap arguments. Polanyi stressed that, while markets have long existed, there is a big difference between a society with a market and a "market society." for much of European history, there were many types of exchange - "kinship, communal, religious, and political" - that had no economic factor, and that most economic exchanges were secondary to these. reciprocity and redistribution shaped society more than money. markets were more complementary than competitive, and were often regulated to prevent competition because it tended to disorganize trade. under capitalism, all exchanges are either made economic, or are made secondary to economic exchanges, which was a major and unprecedented rupture.
- Wood points to a set of very specific circumstances in medieval England that compelled people to behave in a proto-capitalist way, rather than barriers being lifted that allowed the opportunity to behave as capitalists, as is the usual framing. there was a much higher-than-average number of landlords and tenants in England at that time, and rent was collected primarily in cash rather than the usual feudal arrangement of peasants who pay feudal dues in a mix of cash, labor, and goods. (Wood has a tendency to allude to medieval conditions as though we are all familiar with it, which I am absolutely not, so some googling had to be done to confirm this.)
- to the best as I can understand (and I'm hoping Wood elaborates and confirms this in the later chapter on agrarian capitalism), tenants having to pay entirely in cash meant they had to sell way more goods, which made them much more dependent on what the market demanded. you can't just grow onions, sell some, and pay the rest of your rent with the onions you didn't sell; you had to sell a lot. so tenants had to produce high quantities of goods based on local demand, which meant there was an opportunity cost to growing for their own subsistence like peasant farmers did, so they also had to buy many of their basic necessities. this transition of goods and labor from intrinsically valuable things to commodities meant to be exchanged is the earliest form of capitalism.
And that's as far as I've gotten.
Til Next Time
I'm gonna keep on trucking and you'll see more results soon. Have a great month!
-I
Comments
Ian Danskin
there's this observation about evolution that cooperation is advantageous WITHIN groups, and competition is advantageous BETWEEN groups. I feel like a lot of human behavior can be (partially) understood by looking at these two drives: who is and isn't "the group?" whom should you work WITH and whom should you work AGAINST? the Left seems to focus on expanding the borders of "the group" and fostering cooperation, and the Right focuses on shrinking it to increase competition.
Peter Sturdee
There's something really interesting in how both socialism and fascism are populous, collective movements, but where socialism asks, what can we do for each other to better our circumstance, fascism asks, who can we blame for our current circumstance.
Kait Hatch
Danskin's Notes on the kind of reading my brain can't do these days is much appreciated. :D
