Mastodawn

Graydon 1d ago

@cstross There's this sense in which the point of taking over governments for the global right-wing conspiracy is to fund taking over other governments.

Looting a sovereign entity is, after all, about the most profitable thing you can do in one-lifetime time frames.

Hugo Mills

@graydon @cstross So, private equity... for governments?

Graydon 1d ago

@darkling Pretty much, yes.

Only with greater scope; private equity firms don't have the ability of a sovereign to make things legal.

(You can view everything since 1500 as a process of enclosure and not be hugely wrong in terms of economic history. Which is a detached way of saying "farming human lifespan".)

@cstross

militant_dilettante 21h ago

@graydon @darkling @cstross pretty grim point of view. Fundametally correct though (well, I give it inordinately high probability of being correct). And, as with many other general things, it came to different parts of the world at somewhat different times.

Peter Brown 14h ago

@graydon @darkling @cstross I might place it a little earlier than that. When society moves from broadly equal tribes under a king towards feudalism this is the start of a money economy.

It is also the start of trickle-up economics. Rentals start at the bottom and finish up at the top.

And we still have a slightly different form of trickle-up economics about 1000 years later.

@peterbrown It starts with the Problem of Armies; once some neolithic king uses a storable food surplus to make a deal with the lower two-fifths of the male population that they can act like they have high primate status if they'll fight his enemies, you've got to have an army yourself or you get used as a status object.

Feudalism is a response to not having enough social organization to maintain centralized power; you can't have a nation state or a god-king autocracy.

@peterbrown Once you have enough organization for professional armies and centralized power (that is, you've got a working bureaucracy and can more or less tax reliably), you can get back to god-king autocracy (Great Harry, in the UK) and from there you get to the beginnings of an aristocratic oligarchy with very low social mobility, only two things happen.

One is the creation (by adopting ship-crew social norms into wider society) of the Pirate Kingdom by Elizabeth I.

@peterbrown The second thing is that by the time of the protracted struggle over who has the biggest world empire/colonial holdings/external cash inflow with the French, the UK is far enough into maritime norms that their oligarchs will accept that the choice between Napoleon guillotining them all and sharing some power socially ought to come down on relaxing the utility of incumbency.

Combine that with the institutions created to supply the navy and industrialization.

@peterbrown Industrialization includes enclosure; private property was already extending, agriculturally, to a whole lot of things that had been historically common, but now it's coal seams and iron ore and so on. Extractive norms get added to the mix. ("I have the right to nigh-all the profit from extraction based on a philosophical abstraction"; this is a more or less linear progression from pirate->colony->mineral rights.)

@peterbrown From 1860 for about the next century there's a hiccup, because from 1860 or so power rests on rifle regiments (and after 1914, industrial mobilization) and you have to get the majority of the male population to believe they're in on it; thus the Century of the Common Man, universal suffrage, and so on.

This ALSO involves the maximum territorial expansion of territory under colonial (=purely extractive) administration, because rifle regiments are North Atlantic.

@peterbrown From there you get the VLSI Oops, the resulting gold rush, displaced incumbents (or at least incumbents with rivals), and the semblance of innovation. The problem is the only actual innovation was to create a global panopticon, and suddenly the administrative possibilities, stuck on quill-pen-and-ledger for millennia, change. Which means the kind of state you can have changes, and the whole progression has been toward extraction.

@peterbrown All wealth arises from work and if you want to be really rich you have to capture the work of others, which means the whole progression of the norms of enclosure (which are functionally a selection pressure; the better you are at this, the greater your relative success, and that includes "my culture colonizes effectively so children born to it eat better") is about "how much of this person's life span can I structurally compel them to use for my purposes?"

@peterbrown It's not precisely slavery; or at least, it doesn't have the chattel aspects. It's just really hard to do anything but the stuff that surrenders your lifespan to another's purposes, because the penalties for non-compliance are death by exposure or starvation.

And this really gets going as an identifiable, post-aristocractic-autocracy stultification thing, with the Pirate Kingdom of Elizabeth I and just kept rolling on selective advantage thereafter.

Peter Brown 11h ago

@graydon @darkling @cstross “all wealth arises from work” - yes, but once there is a feudal overlord, they take their cut.
My point was that pre-feudalism it more resembled a patriarchy or a team. If you supported another member, it was because you wanted to not because you were forced to.
But post feudalism there is an obligatory trickle-up.

Graydon 10h ago

@peterbrown Pre-feudalism we could have the Divine Augustus or Sargon of Akkad! lots of direct taxes before the feudal period.

The thing I'd consider unusual about feudal taxes would be a combination of hierarchy-by-public-oaths (effectively contracts) and the change from a gift culture setup (the king gives you stuff, including land tenure, for service) and the creation of permanent land tenure by Christianity. (Can't give a temporary gift to an eternal god.)

Peter Brown 10h ago

@graydon @darkling @cstross yes, well I can’t vouch for other countries, but in Scotland that occurred in the beginning of the 12th century. And from that point you can see a steady unstoppable growth of wealth both in the nobility and the church (who were also feudal overlords).
Hence my comment that it’s the beginning of trickle up economies.

Graydon 10h ago

@peterbrown I think that's more bookland/charter land (=permanent tenure for entities smaller than a sovereign, aka it's not a gift economy where the king rewards service but it all resets when anyone involved dies) rather than feudalism as such; feudalism works pretty well, and arguably better, pre-bookland.

And, yes, growth of wealth because this is the invention of private property. It's enclosure zero, the idea that land is a thing you can own. (As distinct from hold.)