60
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
60 points (100.0% liked)
askchapo
23019 readers
25 users here now
Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.
Rules:
-
Posts must ask a question.
-
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
-
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
-
Try [email protected] if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
Thanks for the bibliography, I’ll check out the rest of the stuff in there.
A theme that keeps seeming to come up is luxury goods. Do you think it would be fair to say Europe is rich in useful goods (iron, wood) and poor in everything else? If Europe was truly that poor it wouldn’t be able to actually conquer anyone. Unless I’m mistaken on how poor is meant.
Is debt a good first Graeber? I really should read him soon. He keeps coming up.
Well in the context of international trade it was poor. Iron is all over the place, trees are pretty common. Europe had nothing other places couldn't get for themselves, and a strong incentive to develop a method for getting things it wanted by a means other than exchanging precious metals for them.
I think Debt is the first of his books I read, I think it's a good one, approachable and also concrete. Would recommend.
So the shipbuilding was purely an incentive structure thing?
As for iron, it varies so much in what a particular deposit is good for… I should have specified that it’s actually good iron that doesn’t need the katana treatment to make a solid sword. Unless that’s a myth and I’m dumb. The point of this post was to learn lol.
What's required to produce those things at a scale that matters is a transformation of social relations that frees up a bunch of people and forces them to do new, alienating work. It's not enough to have good techniques, you need to fill a nasty city with people who have to be there using them to make a hundred new ships a year.
As with your katana example, technology was not unique to Europe. Many of the things they ended up using to dominate the world came from China, the Arab world, etc. But they had incentives to escalate the use of expensive technology and a social base that was suddenly uprooted by a new form of market relations that killed the previous ways people met their needs.
Economies are, at their core, a social phenomenon, not a technological or resource system. So I wouldn't discount technology and such as contributors but I don't think they are the main cause of the transformation Europe experienced.
THANK YOU.
you made so much stuff click with that explanation. Genuinely good at teaching, you are,
That means a lot. Thanks. I'm glad it made sense.