ARTICLES
…Remarkably, the authors of the Guanzi have developed a system for understanding the functional continuity between ritual sacrifice, profit and surplus, warfare, and class relations[18]. In modern times, politics, culture, and economy are often approached as absolute, isolated entities, but in the Guanzi, these various social forms of appearance appear highly integrated…
Silver, Trade, Pawnshops and Early Modern China
Considerable historical work has evaluated the size and significance of global trade during the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries,i. At Chinese coastal ports and at entrepots spanning East and Southeast Asia, Europeans relinquished large quantities of New World (South American) silver in exchange for Chinese tea, porcelain, silk, and other goods highly demanded in the West. Many historians have spoken to the possible abstract economic and political significance of commodity money flow and trade imbalances during this period but most have not sufficiently outlined let alone evaluated the concrete historical significance of silver demand in China at this time. In many ways, the simple question of ‘Who used silver in China, and for what?’ has not received adequate attention.
What happened in the 1970s? A Macro-Historical Perspective
We can better understand the political-economic transformations of the 1970s if we approach these transformations from a macro-historical perspective. We can benefit from developing a framework for understanding the significance of war, debt, and liquidity relative to the cyclical transformations and recurrent crises that have characterized global capitalism from the nineteenth century to the present. By identifying and evaluating macro- level cycles, we can shed light on non-cyclical developments that make the political economics of the 1970s unique.
I want to focus on the state and state-backed finance, specifically on the expansion and transformation of internationally hegemonic governments in their price-stabilizing and employment-stabilizing capacities as lenders, borrowers, spenders, and, most recently, dealers of last resort1. Highly significant developments in the means of hegemonic price stabilization occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. Rejecting some standard interpretations, I argue that the 1970s is not a failure, but a great success, perhaps the greatest to date, of Keynesian policy in maintaining status quo hegemony.
JOURNAL ENTRIES
Homeless People, and a Surplus of Ornaments
…Note, though, that this narrative is not one of strict continuity. I’m not at all trying to say that slavery is then as it is now. In fact, I want to emphasize a monumental shift. What I want to emphasize is that, by my estimation, ornamental slaves were fairly exceptional then, but something of the norm now. As more and more people become homeless or, for that matter, unemployed, and as power is more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, more and more people are becoming what I described above, distorted mirror-images of ornamental slaves. This is a huge development, though largely by virtue of its bizarre, semi-antiquated character has it generally not been properly recognized and conceptualized…
the fundamental unit of historical analysis is nothing (fragments of a philosophy of history)
…What is most critical to understand is that the power of historical determination corresponds with the difference in magnitude between the determinative power of abstract violence and the determinative power of physical violence. This space between abstract and physical violence, between ideas and instantiated reality, is nothing, and nothing is the base-level conceptual unit of any model of historical analysis aimed at fulfilling the condition of significant explanatory and predictive power…
Is Modern Taxation an Artifact of Ancient History?
…Still, the whole system of taxation, then and now, reflects the material contingencies of commodity money, namely the fact that alchemy never succeeded. Taxation as we know it, I am inclined to believe, is predominately an historical artifact. In an era in which money has no material substratum (not “backed by gold,” etc.), the fact that an institution with the power to create money directly and straightforwardly prefers instead to procure it indirectly from its populace, person-by-person – by means of a massive army of civil servants specially trained in this astrological art – ought to strike us as highly unusual…
