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pontiFLEX

As a Colombian the idea of a new Gran Colombia is very fringe in the mainstream, and honestly not very useful in my opinion. Bolivarianism is much more useful, but kinda hard to put it in the mainstream because it is associated with Chavismo and FARC-EP.

But Colombia improving relations with Venezuela and China is a very good step in the right direction. And signing the BRI yesterday is based as hell.

We'll see what happens on the elections next year. But it is more likely than not that we get a right wing government, but we'll see.

Would it strengthen socialism in the area? Or make both countries easier to coup and break down? reactionary enemies in both countries could find allies in each other as well.

Ok but would a Neocon refuse to do Bibi’s laundry?

They run “preparing for war” stories every other week to keep up the paranoia levels and boost defense spending, if war really is imminent it wouldn’t be that impressive a prediction, and wouldn’t be the result of their journalistic capability, cf. the Twitter accounts that posted the Queen would die on X date for every possible day in the near future and deleted all the wrong ones when she really croaked.

The cynic in me thinks this can double as preparations to seize Ukrainian land in the event of a Ukrainian collapse. Iirc Hungary has been making similar noises about bits of western Ukraine, I wouldn't be surprised if these vultures pick apart Ukraine's corpse under the guise of "protecting ethic minorities" (ironic)

Poland prepares for war

Also called "getting your lightbulbs in order"

The airbase in Poland is probably target number 1 for Oreshnik in a hypothetical Russia-NATO war.

The EU MIC is trying to kick into gear. There has been a push across all media and politicians to cut social spending and increase war spending. Fearmongering constantly is a necessary part of that

Kaliningrad oblast, a Russian exclave surrounded on all sides by NATO members including Poland, is in a very precarious position. It's why Europeans are always talking about Putler invading and annexing the Baltic states.

I don't think Russia will take military action unless forced to, by a blockade or whatever.

don't they say this every year

i still struggle to think of a scenario where russia would expand into poland, obviously short of nato troops actually in the frontlines

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.