this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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Image is from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' recent article on Kashmir.


It looks like the spat between India and Pakistan could be dying down, due to a new ceasefire. As of the time of me writing this paragraph, it seems both sides want to maintain it (despite some reports of violations here and there).

Both sides have declared victory, which is completely expected given their mutual political parties and nationalist histories. It's a little harder to say which side has actually won, as both sides seem to have managed to shoot down aircraft and hit military bases. India has, in my opinion, had the more embarrassing moments, but international conflicts aren't cringe compilations. I feel no good-will towards Pakistan's comprador government, but it is at least nice to see Modi knocked down a few pegs. Regardless of the final technical victor, it's obvious that - if the ceasefire is maintained - who won are the hundreds of millions of people who won't have to live in fear of dying in nuclear hellfire.

This conflict is a good example of what multipolarity will truly entail. Countries that have been previously limited in their nationalist ambitions by American pressure will now take opportunities to revolt, sometimes against America itself, and sometimes against other countries in their regional neighbourhood. It's also why, as communists, our goals do not stop at multipolarity; it is merely the establishing act of a new era of agitation against peripheral and semi-peripheral capitalist countries that are forming powerful national bourgeoisie classes as the international American capitalists are forced away.


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Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
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Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.

Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.

Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:

Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.

https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.

Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:

Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.


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[–] [email protected] 33 points 9 hours ago (7 children)

This is a big question, and not actually news, but you are all well-read nerds so I figure you can help me out. Why was it that 1700s Europe was able to industrialise and allow capitalism to emerge, but not other societies? What societal structures prevented, say, classical Greece or medieval China or the middle east in the golden age of Islam, from utilising steam power? Why did burghers emerge in Europe as a powerful class? If anyone could point me to some reading about this topic, that would be great.

Also, a fun worldbuilding idea I've played with is ancient Rome or Greece undergoing a sort of industrial revolution and utilising steam power. What changes would have to occur for this to happen?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 58 minutes ago (1 children)

Others have answered your question, and thethirdgracchi gave a good reading list. A book that I'd like to add which actually touches on much of what others have said is Perry Anderson's Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. It discusses how antiquity transitioned to feudalism and has chapters deeicated to the historical materialist paths the modes of productions of various European societies took.

It starts with Ancient Greece, to Rome, the barbarian invasions, Charlemagne, the spread of Feudalism to East Germany and Poland and eastern Europe, Spain, Italy, the impact the Mongols had on Eastern Europe and Russia, the stagnation of the Byzantines, and more. It is focused on European history though. It is a very fun book that actually uses the lens of a mode of production to discuss history.

Roland Boer also has a book on the ancient Roman economy called Time of Troubles.

Something that Anderson points out is that a mode of production will not change just because the new technology has come into being. There must be new social relations that put the technology to use in a new way. Even when Rome did improve tools and basic machines, they never applied them toward production.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 58 minutes ago

In Rome's slave based economy, the social relations themselves do not incentive industrialization. Slaves, as an act of understandable disobedience, would break equipment. That discourages investment in expensive tools. Also, if you are a latidundia owner, you don't mind just working your slaves harder instead of investing in more productive tools. As long as slaves are cheap on the market, you can buy more.

Also, the internal market for most commodities was not very large in ancient Rome. Slaves were the most bought and sold commodity (Boer makes this point in Time of Troubles). Transportation was very cumbersome, so most products that were produced were consumed locally. Any transportation would be done by sea, so major centers had to be near the ocean. Land transport was slow and expensive. It would cost the same amount to transport grain some 30 miles on land as it would to ship it by sea from Egypt to Italy.

The economy was also largely agricultural, and the cities were not powerhouses of handicrafts and manufacturing but instead were where the rich latidundia owners lived. There was an urban proletariat, but it was not engaged in manufacturing to a large extent, at least that I am aware of. The poverty and destitution of the urban masses (see Parenti's The Assassination of Julius Ceasar), and the enslavement of those in the country side meant that a large market for commodities did not exist outside luxury items that the slave owners could afford.

The low productivity of agriculture also means that there is less surplus agricultural product that can go toward the non-agricultural laborers like handicrafts. If someone is not engaged in farming, then that is less labor extended toward growing food. So the productivity of agricultural must be high enough to compensate for a laborers moving to handicrafts, manufacturing, administration, etc.

And when thinking of structural incentives, the production of goods was not regulated by increasing profits or by the exchange-value of products. There isn't a large market due to the above reasons, except maybe in luxury goods. And a latifundia owner is more likely to be interested in buying things they (actually their slaves) can't produce on their premises or on one of the other plantations they own. But if possible, the latifundia will produce it itself. Any profits can go to buying luxury items produced elsewhere. But the consumption of the owners and their families is limited by their stomachs. So luxury consumption plateaus for each latifundia. That's less of an incentive to accumulate high profits.

There isn't much competition, nor is the market that big due to poor transportation, communication, and general destitution. So the market saturates pretty quickly in a local area. And so there isn't an incentive to produce a cheaper product, or out compete other latidundias. And as mentioned before, why invest in more productive equipment when we have slaves? Wage labor isn't a major social institution at the time either. So no need to accumulate profits for increasing production.

As Marx mentions in Capital, Instead of exchange value driving the anciemt economy, it was quantity (up to a natural limit, owners can only eat and slaves can only produce so much) and use-value. Effort was put into making a better item for luxury but not into making it more efficiently with less slave labor.

There isn't a drive to accumulate capital, there isn't a drive for ever increasing profits. There aren't many avenues for value to expand and grow, and hence no capitalism.

And the low productive capacity of their means of production (and that includes transportation), in addition to social relations (slavery) that actually disincentivize increasing productivitiy is at the heart.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 hours ago

Adding to one reasons that China didn't develop capitalism in the same way as Europe.

Confucianism played a huge role both culturally and politically in China at the time. There was a civil service exam that you needed to take to get into government positions, and almost all commoners would have experience with Confucius philosophy. And Confucius considered making a profit to be something that petty men do.

I think it's one of the major reasons that the merchant classes never held the same sway with the the government as they did in Europe.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 hours ago

We tend to romanticize the classical romans and greeks so much and forget that these societies were very small in size and economy in comparison to 1700s. Their material development was not advanced enough to develop steam machinery, which would've seemed futuristic by their standards.

As to why did Europe win the race to industrialziation? I tend to think of it as a combination of external events and random chance.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I haven't read the books other people are suggesting, but the arguments I have heard mostly center around materials science. Rome did not have access to high enough quality metals and was unable to machine parts to the standards required for steam engines. Britain sits on top of large coal and iron deposits, exactly what an early society needs to produce high quality steel. Producing steel in the Americas before European contact was not possible due to the large distances between coal and iron deposits combined with the lack of waterways or transport animals to move the required quantities of ore.

This is just how I remember it, there are probably a few issues with it, but the main point is that Britain and Europe to a lesser extent got very lucky with geography.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 hours ago

The entire material reality of greece & rome. They didnt have a need or ability too. Bengal could have been reasonably another fulcrum of industrialization and then spread to Burma, Persia, Egypt and so on.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (3 children)

This is a huge topic, with a lot of scholarship and debate within the historical academic community. So for China specifically (it's a book about why Song dynasty China, despite having a lot of the preconditions for industrialization, didn't industrialize), probably the best place to start is The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy by Kenneth Pomeranz. I don't agree with all the conclusions of that monograph but it's a great first foray into the questions and concerns of this kind of longue durée history. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century by Giovanni Arrighi makes this argument that the Chinese state was strong enough to stop capital from taking over and that the way capitalism formed in the West is actually rather odd; this is a wonderful book but it requires quite a bit of context, and you might even be better off starting with his more broad account of the rise of capitalism called The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Time, which (despite its name) covers around 500 years from the formation of capitalism in Renaissance Italy up to the modern era. Fernand Braudel's three part Capitalism and Civilisation, from which Arrighi draws a lot of his ideas, is phenomenal but very long and again requires even more familiarity with the historical period.

If you just want a quick summary of all the above, distilled into something quite short but still well done, I'd recommend The Origins of Capitalism and the 'Rise of the West' by Eric Mielants. It's not specifically focused on China, but it does cover the "capitalism requires the state" bit and why capitalism happens in Western Europe and not anywhere else. For some additional counterfactual history of why the West got rich and the East didn't, I recommend ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age by Andre Gunder Frank and Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming by Andreas Malm (this book in particular is important, since it doesn't cover the larger question of why the West and not China, but it does push back and disprove a lot of Pomeranz's points about coal power).

You can also check out The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood for a specific look at how the capitalism virus spread from England to the rest of the world, but she kind of disagrees with a lot of the historians above. A lot of the argument comes down to how you define capitalism and where it starts. Wood would argue that capitalism doesn't "start" until the agrarian revolution in England, whereas historians like Arrighi and Braudel would place it a bit earlier in the merchant republics of Renaissance Italy and their financialised capital-intensive economies.

EDIT: Missed your last point, basically you need for there to be incentive to do labour saving technological advancement. Steam power already existed in Ancient Greece and Rome, it just wasn't applied to labour saving things because there was no need. If you can accumulate power and capital via slaves and trade, labour is really cheap, and why would you bother?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 hours ago

Its also worth mentioning that countries like bourbon Naples or Poland actually destroyed their own potential for future "industrialization" because of fear by the feudal classes. It was called refeudalization.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 hours ago

Of all the books you’ve mentioned, personally I only read Meiksins Wood’s book but I will say I enjoyed reading it and got a lot out of it. I do jive with her approach that “capitalism” begins when you have a certain set of social relations. It really helps differentiate when you have simple markets and when you have capitalist production.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Also, the Mongols.

The Kievan Rus was geographically unfortunate enough to stand in between the Mongol invasion and the rest of Europe in the 13th century, and the Russian/Eastern Slavic people spent the next four centuries on a stalemate with the descendants of the Mongols (Tatars), became the victims and captured slaves of frequent Tatar raids that went on for centuries, while effectively shielding the European subcontinent from total destruction.

Edit: obviously the Islamic civilizations were destroyed during the Mongol invasion and China itself suffered from both an external invasion and internal political upheaval until the Ming dynasty in the 15th century.