Written Compulsion

The purpose of this blog is to show quiet ramblings in my journal, notes on books that I read, my engagement with what I read, possibly some essays and to document my intellectual evolution. Expect the subject matter involve what may be called "radical theory" (as much as I dislike the term) or writings of a historical, theoretical and political nature. Feel free to comment, ask questions, raise discussion etc. ____________________________ Novels; Marxian/Marxist philosophy and political economy; geography; anti-developmentalism; libertarian wing of the left and ultraleft. ____________________________ Intellectual dabbler level 3.

[limpxwrist-deactivated20170913]

Monique Wittig: Partial Collection

Monique Wittig was a French lesbian feminist, co-founder of two important French feminist organizations, the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (Women’s Liberation Movement) and Gouines Rouges (Red Dykes), as well as an important theoretical contributor to materialist feminism, lesbian feminism, and literary theory. She also wrote several novels and short stories that express her radical lesbian feminist visions of a world without sex or gender. Her texts express the material basis of women’s and lesbians oppression in heterosexuality and not in any sort of essentialist idea of womanhood. Wittig died in 2002 and was survived by her partner and collaborator Sande Zeig.

Theoretical Works (Some in French)

The Straight Mind

The Category of Sex

Avatars

The Constant Journey: Preface

The Point of View: Universal or Particular?

The Trojan Horse

The Mark of Gender

One is Not Born a Woman

Homo Sum

On the Social Contract

Fiction

Un jour mon prince viendra (French)

L’opoponax (French)

The Lesbian Body

Paris, la politique et autres histoires (French)

If anybody has PDF’s of other WIttig texts they’d like to be added, or English translations of texts not available here, please send me a message. If any texts don’t work, please send a message as well.

[limpxwrist-deactivated20170913]

In a democratic state, social stability rests principally on the internalization of the values behind the rules, the morality behind its reification in law. One can dislike school and still believe in its mythology — most people do. The stereotypes of good students, bad students and every other category of student conceal the question of the desirability of systems of grading and categorization.

Towards the Destruction of Schooling - Jan D Matthews (via crimethinctank)

[revolutionaryeye]

A Selection of the Works of Ellen Meiksins Wood

Ellen Meiksins Wood (1942-2016) was a Marxist historian and political thinker of enormous significance. We are proud to publish many of her books and, in order to encourage readers to engage with her work more broadly, we have collected the following list of articles and interviews currently in the public domain. With the kind permission of her publishers a number of the pieces are being made freely available for the first time. 

1978 - ‘C.B. Macpherson, Liberalism, and the Task of Socialist Political Theory’, Socialist Register 15, 215–240 1981

- ‘Liberal Democracy and Capitalist Hegemony: A Reply to Leo Panitch on the Task of Socialist Political Theory’, Socialist Register 18, 169-189

- ‘The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism’, New Left Review 127, 66-95 1982 - ‘The Politics of Theory and the Concept of Class: E.P. Thompson and His Critics’, Studies in Political Economy 9, 45–75 1983 - ‘Marxism Without Class Struggle?’, Socialist Register 20, 239-271 1984 - ‘Marxism and the Course of History’, New Left Review 147, 95-107 1985 - ‘Beyond Class? A Reply to Chantal Mouffe’, Studies in Political Economy 17, 141–165 1987 - ‘Why Class Struggle is Central’, Against the Current 10, 7-9 - ‘A reply to ‘Looking for alternatives to reformism’, International Socialism 35 1988 - ‘Capitalism and Human Emancipation’, New Left Review 167, 3-20 1989 - ‘Rational Choice Marxism: Is the Game Worth the Candle?’, New Left Review 177, 41-88 1990 - ‘The Uses and Abuses of ‘Civil Society’, Socialist Register 26, 60-84 - ‘Explaining Everything or Nothing’, New Left Review 184, 116-128 1991 - ‘Review of Bread and Circuses: Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism’, History of the Human Sciences, 4(3), 469-471 1992 - ‘Custom Against Capitalism’, New Left Review 195, 21-28 1994 - ‘Ralph Miliband, 1923-1994: The Common Sense of Socialism’, Radical Philosophy 68, 62-63 - ‘Edward Palmer Thompson: In Memoriam’,  Studies in Political Economy 43, 26-31 1995 - ‘A Chronology of the New Left and its Successors, or: Who’s Old-Fashioned Now?’, Socialist Register 31, 22-49 1996 - ‘Interview with Ellen Meiksins Wood - Democracy & Capitalism: Friends or Foes?’, New Socialist Magazine, January 1996 1997 - ‘Back to Marx’, Monthly Review 49(2), 21-39 - ‘Labor, the State, and Class Struggle’, Monthly Review 49(3), 1-17 - ‘A Note on Du Boff and Herman’, Monthly Review 49(6), 39-43 1998 - ‘Capitalist Change and Generational Shifts’, Monthly Review 50(5), 1-10 - ‘The Communist Manifesto After 150 Years’, Monthly Review 50(1), 14-35 - ‘The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism’, Monthly Review 50(5), 1-10 1999 - ‘Kosovo and the New Imperialism’, Monthly Review 51(2), 1-8 - ‘Unhappy Families: Global Capitalism in a World of Nation-States’, Monthly Review 51(3), 1-12 - ‘The Politics of Capitalism’, Monthly Review 51(4), 12-26 2001 - ‘Eurocentric Anti-Eurocentrism’, Against the Current 92, 29-35 - ‘War Without Boundaries’, Canadian Dimension 35(6), 16-17 2002 - ‘Class, Race, and Capitalism’, Political Power and Social Theory 15, 275-284 - ‘Contradiction: Only in Capitalism?’, Socialist Register 38, 275-293 - ‘Explaining September 11’, Studies in Political Economy 67, 25-31 2003 - ‘Christopher Hill and the Recovery of History’, Against the Current 104, 43-45 - ‘Capitalist Empire and the Nation State’, Against the Current 106, 21-26 2008 - ‘Why it Matters’, London Review of Books, 30(18), 5-6 - ‘Review of Pierre Dockès, Medieval Slavery and Liberation’, Social History, 9(1), 1010-103

2009 - ‘Capitalism and Social Rights’, Against the Current 140, 28-32 2010 - ‘Happy Campers’, London Review of Books 32(2), 26-27 2011 - ‘Social Property Relations in the 21st Century: An Interview with Ellen Meiksins Wood’, Alternate Routes 24, 159-170 2016 - ‘The Strike at York University’, Canadian Dimension

- read more about #EllenMeiksinsWood on the Verso blog

         More in #History #EllenMeiksinsWood        

[limpxwrist-deactivated20170913]

A critique of a formulation of gender nihilism.

I wrote this a bit ago but only kinda surreptitiously posted it because I wasn’t particularly interested in getting into a big argument about shit but I’ve been seeing a lot of discourse around the revolutionary subject with regards to gender nihilism and this is somewhat a critique/somewhat an extension of the position of the GN manifesto on that idea. This essay deals a lot more with Wittig than most of the stuff from that milieu so if thats your thing give it a read. Essentially though this piece is a small argument about the necessity of beginning from a particular position for a political project

[thepeacockangel]

Andrea Dworkin’s Analysis Of Witch Hunts Is Bad and Badly Researched.

“ The medieval Church did not believe that cleanliness was next to godliness. On the contrary, between the temptations of the flesh and the Kingdom of Heaven, a layer of dirt, lice, and vermin was supposed to afford protection and to ensure virtue. Since the flesh was by definition sinful, it was not to be uncovered, washed, or treated for those diseases which were God’s punishment in the first place — hence the Church’s hostility to the practice of medicine and to the search for medical knowledge. Abetted by this medieval predilection for filth and shame, successive epidemics of leprosy, epileptic convulsions, and plague decimated the population o-f Europe regularly. The Black Death is thought to have killed 25 percent o f the entire population o f Europe; two-thirds to one-half o f the population o f France died; in some towns every living person died; in London it is estimated that one person in ten survived: “

So this is wrong because: The church was not hostile to the practice of medicine (actually establishing hospitals and doing most of the medicining, and yes they did encourage prayer but they did other stuff too, and were the ones maintaining the store of classical knowledge cause they were the only classical institution fucking left), and bathing was actually common up UNTIL the plague struck and many baths had to be closed (Communal baths were a great place for a disease to spread) and one of the reasons the plague swept through was the fact that Europe was going through a mini ice age resulting in people immunocompromised from cold and hunger.

“ Hunger and misery, the serf’s constant companions, may well have induced the kinds o f hallucinations and hysteria which profound ignorance translated as demonic possession. Disease, social chaos, peasant insurrections, outbreaks o f dancing mania (tarantism) with its accompanying mass flagellation — the Church had to explain these obvious evils. What kind o f Shepherd was this whose flock was so cruelly and regularly set upon? Surely the hell-fires and eternal damnation which were vivid in the Christian imagination were modeled on daily experience, on real earth-lived life. The Christian notion of the nature of the Devil underwent as many transformations as the snake has skins. In this evolution, natural selection played a determining role as the Church bred into its conception those deities best suited to its particular brand o f dualistic theology. It is a cultural constant that the gods o f one religion become the devils o f the next, and the Church, intolerant o f deviation in this as in all other areas, vilified the gods of those pagan religions which threatened Catholic supremacy in Europe until at least the 15th century. The pagan religions were not monotheistic and their pantheons were scarcely conservative in number. The Church had a slew of deities to dispatch and would have done so speedily had not the old gods their faithful adherents who clung to the old practices, who had local power, who had to be pacified. Accordingly, the Church did a kind of roulette and sent some gods to heaven (canonizing them) and others to hell (damning them). Especially in southern Europe the local deities, formerly housed on Olympus, were allowed to continue their traditional vocations of healing the sick and protecting the traveler. The Church often transformed the names of the gods —so as not to be embarrassed, no doubt. Apollo, for instance, became St. Apollinaris; Cupid became St. Valentine. The pagan gods were also allowed to retain their favorite haunts — shrines, trees, wells, burial grounds, now newly decorated with a cross. But in northern Europe the old gods did not fare as well. The peoples of northern Europe were temperamentally and culturally quite different from the Latin Christians, and their religions centered around animal totemism and fertility rites. The “heathens” adhered to a primitive animism. They worshiped nature (archenemy of the Church), which was manifest in spirits who inhabited stones, rivers, and trees. In the paleolithic hunting stage, they were concerned with magical control of animals. In the later neolithic agricultural stage, fertility practices to ensure the food supply predominated. “

  Also no there was no witch cult, witches were not pagan survivals, and why second wavers love valorizing pre-Christian religions I DO NOT KNOW, Roman women?  Not treated that well.  Read the Rape Of Lucretia, look at some goddamn history.

“ T o deal with the increasing tide o f witchcraft and in conformity with the Pope’s orders, Sprenger and Kramer collaborated on the Malleus Maleficarum. “

Also the Church condemned the Malleus Maleficarum, most of the persecution was committed via mass hysteria and landed gentry.

Also do not get on me with that goddess crap

“ Anthropologists now believe that man’s first representation o f any anthropomorphic deity is that o f a horned figure who wears a stag’s head and is apparently dancing. That figure is to be found in a cavern in Arriege. Early religions actively worshiped animals, and in particular animals which symbolized male fertility—the bull, goat, or stag. Ecstatic dancing, feasts, sacrifice o f the god or his representative (human or animal) were parts o f the rites. The magician-priest-shaman became the earthly incarnation o f the god-animal and apparently dressed in the skins o f the sacred animal (even the Pharaoh o f Egypt had an animal tail attached to his girdle) “

WRONG  WRONGITY WRONG WRONG WRONG.

“ The nobility, when not out butchering, enforced that most curious of customs, the jus primae noctis, which legitimated the rape of newly wed peasant women. “

Nope  

“It is hard to arrive at a figure for the whole of the Continent and the British Isles, but the most responsible estimate would seem to be 9 million. It may well, some authorities contend, have been more. Nine million seems almost moderate when one realizes that The Blessed Reichhelm of Schongan at the end of the 13th century computed the number of the Devil-driven to be 1,758,064,176. A conservative, Jean Weir, physician to the Duke of Cleves, estimated the number to be only 7,409,127 “

Not that many people were killed, given the population of Europe at the time that would have been impossible

“ It was especially as midwives that these learned women offended the Church, for, as Sprenger and Kramer wrote, “No one does more harm to the Catholic Faith than mid wives. ” 27 The Catholic objection to abortion centered specifically on the biblical curse which made childbearing a painful punishment —it did not have to do with the “right to life” of the unborn fetus. It was also said that midwives were able to remove labor pains from the woman and transfer those pains to her husband—clearly in violation of divine injunction and intention both “

Nope, they weren’t after midwives

“The ratio of women to men executed has been variously estimated at 20 to 1 and 100 to 1. Witchcraft was a woman’s crime. “

And although most women were targeted witch hysteria was not exclusively used against women and that ratio is wrong as fuck.

Nor was it simply an expression of misogyny

[stigmataparty]

thanks for this… someone once told me that the witch hunt persecution of midwives was the cause of a european population increase and that that in turn was the cause of colonization (……………….). i knew that aint right but it’s nice to have some sources on common misbeliefs

[thepeacockangel]

Oh my fucking god

[puliaczka]

As with every commodity, price changes for the commodity labor-power do not always express a change in value, but might also reflect the momentarily favorable or unfavorable situation for the sale of this commodity (a temporary scarcity or a temporary sur­plus of labor-power). Actual changes in value of labor-power can result from two sources: from a change in the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the reproduction of the laborer or from a change in the extent of the amount of means of subsistence necessary for the reproduction of the laborer. The extent of “necessary means of subsistence” differs among the various countries and historical periods, and depends upon what is normally counted among the necessary requirements of life, as well as which claims workers are able to assert. Since it is not nec­essarily the case that capitalists willingly concede such claims, it is the class struggle between workers and capitalists that determines the value of labor-power, as specific claims are imposed - or not. In this context, Marx speaks of a “historical and moral element” that enters into the determination of the value of labor-power, which is not the case with other commodities.

Michael Heinrich, “An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Capital” (via puliaczka)

[chrisdornerfanclub]

The assignations reveal that what is understood to be biological sex, is socially constructed. During the late nineteenth century until WWI, reproductive function was considered a woman’s essential characteristic. The presence or absence of ovaries was the ultimate criterion of sex. But there are a large number of factors that can enter in “establishing someone’s ‘official’ sex:” chromosomes, gonads, external morphology, internal morphology, hormonal patterns, phenotype, assigned sex, self-identified sex. At present, chromosomes and genitalia enter into the assignment, but in a manner that reveals biology is thoroughly interpreted and itself surgically constructed.

Maria Lugones, The Coloniality of Gender (via evilscum)

[puliaczka]

The difference between a material product and an “imma­terial” service consists solely of a different temporal relationship between production and consumption: the material product is first produced and subsequently consumed (a bread roll should be consumed on the same day, but an automobile can remain by its manufacturer for a few weeks or even months before I have the chance to use it). In the case of a service (whether we are talking about a taxi ride, a massage, or a theater perfor­mance), the act of production is concurrent with the act of consumption (as the taxi driver produces a change of place, I consume it). The differ­ence between services and physical objects consists of a distinction of the material content; the question as to whether they are commodities pertains to their social form, and that depends upon whether objects and services are exchanged.

Michael Heinrich, “An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Capital” (via puliaczka)

[class-struggle-anarchism]

The proposition that history is simply the inexorable progress of productive forces is vacuous and by itself inconsistent with Marx’s analysis of capitalism… Technological change and improvements in labour productivity are not the only ways in which societies have adapted to their material needs, or even to the exploitative demands of dominant classes; and systems of production do not necessarily contain a compulsion to be succeeded by more ‘productive’ systems. It is, again, a specific characteristic of capitalism to demand the constant transformation of productive forces as its principal form of adaptation. If that compulsion has become a more general rule, it is because one of the chief consequences of the capitalist impulse has been an unprecedented capacity—and need—to drive out, or impose its logic upon, other social forms.

Ellen Meiksins Wood (via class-struggle-anarchism)

[puliaczka]

The United States is the first, and so far the only, capitalist empire. This is so not in the sense that it is the first capitalist power to possess an empire but rather in the sense that it dominates the world largely by manipulating the economic mechanisms of capitalism. The British Empire, which had hoped to exploit the commercial wealth of India without incurring the costs of colonial rule, found itself creating a tribute-extracting military despotism more akin to traditional imperialisms than to a new mode of capitalist hegemony. On the whole, the preference, and the practice, of the US has been to avoid direct colonial rule wherever possible and to rely on economic hegemony, which is less costly, less risky and more profitable.

Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Empire of Capital” (via puliaczka)

[butch-king-frankenstein]

I’m reading Don Quixote for my world literature class and apparently when it was first published in 1605 it was world-changingly popular, one of the first “popular novels” as we know it today, and there were all sorts of people who were writing and publishing their own unofficial fan-sequels to Don Quixote which was basically the first fan-fiction, and then in 1615 the original author wrote an official sequel in which Don Quixote reads a piece of fanfic about him and sets out on a quest to beat up the author who mischaracterized him

[allacharade]

This is all true. What happened more specifically is that one fan fiction got really really popular and since people weren’t all that familiar with how novels worked (because there weren’t really any other novels in Europe yet), a lot of people just took this as a valid sequel. Cervantes (the original author) had pretty much stopped working on any kind of sequel to the original at point, but he got really pissed that people were reading this fan fic and assuming it was as legit as his canon. So he got off his butt and wrote this sequel, which academics call big words like “meta-textual” when really it was Cervantes trying to make sure people understood his canon correctly and didn’t get carried away with their silly fan theories based on this one fic writer’s interpretation.  Now-a-days, the “true sequel” is normally just lumped in and stuck onto the end as a “part II,” in case you are wondering why you’ve never heard of a Don Quixote the Sequel. By all accounts, the fan fic was pretty bad, which makes it’s a perfect beginning to the grand tradition of fanfiction. Calling this the first instance of fanfiction, though, comes from the fact that this was the first time, as far as we know, that the author of the original stepped in to officially denounce fan work as not canon. For most of history (at least western history) there wasn’t really an idea that stories had ownership. Most famous greek plays and poems are based on other works. Virgil’s Aeneid can easily be called Homer fan fiction (we have no real way of knowing how much of the story existed in folk tradition and how much he made up). Most of the versions of greek myths you know come from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, which is largely his short fics about other myths. Moving out of the classical world, bible fic constitutes a lot of what literature is for a while. Dante’s  Inferno, specifically, (which is, lets be clear, a self insert fic where the author meets his fave author - so it’s also RPF - and they take a tour through a crossover fic between the Bible, historical fic, and greek myth) was so popular that it’s kind of crossed over into fanon (quick - biblically how many cicles does Hell have? Answer: none, they all come from Dante and in turn Virgil, and eventually Homer…) On the run up to Don Quixote, we have Shakespeare, who adapted most of his plays directly from other works by other people, from which he asked no permission (nor was he expected to.) The real move that makes this false sequel the first official fan fiction is that the author of the canon material asserted his ownership of the intellectual property that was the characters and the story. Not in the legal sense - there was nothing illegal about this sequel - but in the sense that you could call this sequel “unauthorized.” It’s the beginning of thinking of characters and stories as belonging to a specific person, rather than simply being created by said person.

[thepeacockangel]

i am trying to get a better understanding of how patriarchy is reinforced by capitalism, could you direct me towards any resources that could inform on this? thanks

https://libcom.org/files/Caliban%20and%20the%20Witch.pdf

https://viewpointmag.com/2015/11/02/issue-5-social-reproduction/

https://libcom.org/library/power-women-subversion-community-della-costa-selma-james

https://libcom.org/library/aufheben/aufheben-13-2005/the-arcane-of-reproductive-production

https://caringlabor.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/james-sexraceclass-read.pdf

[guy-debordiga-deactivated201602]

pitched battles, barricades, trenches and storming of the palace or parliament are borrowed from a time before the real subsumption of labour to capital. the totalising of the bourgeois world order makes it fairly absurd to conceptualise revolution like a couple centuries old Jacobin.

[shituationist]

are you saying history is over (because i kind of agree)

[guy-debordiga-deactivated201602]

not exactly, i think capitalist history is over though and the processes which will actually abolish this society and institute a new one does not take the same form as past palace coups or even fairly mass revolutionary upsurges. like there is not really any throne of power to overturn as such. i guess i wonder if it becomes a question of mass non compliance (plus willingness to use force, like i talked about in the last post) or if it does need a more significant form than this kind of ‘insurrectionary general strike’. on the other hand, I think from our perspectives in the 'global north’ or whatever term is popular to use, it is somewhat different. I would not be surprised if over the next few decades China faced more workers struggles in the more traditional mass-strike form etc, and that would rock the world economy dramatically. in a way history is over and extremely self-regulating and stable… until it isn’t. not sure if that makes sense.

[guy-debordiga-deactivated201602]

violence and revolution and stuff under the cut

Keep reading

[aiminoes]

With the elimination of the factory councils and the smashing of the peasant movement – particularly that section of it lead by Makhno – radical demands and aims did not simply disappear; rather, in a perverted form they were integrated into Soviet society. The push for the socialization and transformation of the production process was answered with the nationalization of the factories and the militarization and Taylorization of labor. It is a theoretical joke that the Trotskyists, who correctly repudiated the ideology of “socialism in a single country”, nonetheless held the idea that only a “political” revolution was necessary in Soviet Russia, that the property relations already corresponded to communism. But it is an even more macabre joke that those who insisted upon workers democracy in their struggle with the Stalinist bureaucracy had a few years before, invested with the highest authority of the Red Army, drowned the resistance of the peasants, workers, and soldiers in blood. But the commemoration of the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921 becomes mere mythology if it exclusively emphasizes the demand for council democracy against the dictatorship of the party, while ignoring the not very revolutionary demand for “free” commodity exchange between the cities and the countryside. Immediately after the smashing of the revolt, these economic demands were taken up by the Bolshevik government and realized in the form of the “New Economic Policy” (NEP). Ultimately, bread for all – of a poor quality – was guaranteed by the extension of compulsory labor to all. The access to land was realized by the forced collectivization conducted by the state. Peace was brutally imposed in the form of social tranquility. Class-specific interests were converted into national ones. The class struggle was celebrated in the perverted form of the great patriotic war and the ideology of anti-fascism. The internationalist perspective of the Bolsheviks, above all during the First World War, anchored them to the revolutionary camp. And in the case of a proletarian revolution in Western Europe, they might have remained in the revolutionary camp. But the Bolshevik concept of the party, their distrust of the possibility of a communist attitude of the class emerging from the dynamic of class struggle, already indicated, even before the revolution, an authoritarian conception of communism. But a crude anti-Leninism that purports to locate the reason for the revolution’s failure in the Bolshevik Party itself forgets that in the case of the Bolsheviks, social existence determines consciousness. This crude anti-Leninism does not notice how much it itself remains trapped within the conception of an all-powerful leadership that can arbitrarily direct history’s course. Nobody can say what would have happened if social conflicts had taken another direction. But viewed from the perspective of historical results, the dictatorship of the party executed one of the alternatives allowed by the internal and external conditions in 1917, which can be characterized as “primitive accumulation”: the social and economic integration of the mass of Russian peasants into the world market through industrialization and the generalization of wage- labor. Thus the historical achievements of the Russian Revolution ultimately consist in the Orwellian dressing-up of a terror regime as Soviet power plus electrification.

http://www.kosmoprolet.org/node/52 (via aiminoes)

[aiminoes]

In her important and provocative book, Silvia Federici (2004) argues that the whole of the European witchhunt was about the imposition of bourgeois control over proletarian bodies. There are powerful insights to much of this analysis, but Federici’s interpretation involves a certain over-generalisation, particularly in her tendency to see the whole of Europe, even Germany, as involved in capitalist development from the fifteenth century. In my view, the case that England underwent the first capitalist transformation has been powerfully substantiated both theoretically and empirically (see Robert Brenner’s contributions in Aston and Philpin (eds.) 1985, and Wood 1999). Federici’s own interesting analysis sits uneasily with her attempt to correlate the European witchhunts as a whole with the rise of capitalism. As she notes, Europe’s witch-hunts began in the middle of the fifteenth century (p. 165), well before the capitalist mode of production was emergent outside of England, and started in southern France and northern Italy – not England (pp. 165, 177–9). Indeed, only in England were witchcraft-trials principally about the struggle over customary obligations in the face of encroaching capitalist property-relations. Moreover, as Thomas (1971, p. 569) notes, sexual offences did not figure prominently in English witchcraft-trials. In short, there is something distinctively protocapitalist about the persecution of English witches, a fact which undercuts Federici’s attempt to squeeze continental Europe and England into the same explanatory matrix.

David McNally - Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (via aiminoes)

[actuallyexistingbarbarism]

Primitive Accumulation - early colonialism

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder, flowed back to the mother country and were turned into capital there.

Karl Marx  (Capital, 1:915, 918)