^{"I'll give one or two of the chapters a chance, and if it's equally retarded I'm probably just gonna quit. Not worth anybody's time this nonsense."} #1416952

I basically quietly quit this book club reading…

I also sort of forgot about the project (until an editor reminded me a few weeks back), even though the mad-sized monstrosity has been sitting untouched, gathering dust on my desktop for six months straight. Also: life got in the way. And I started writing the Nordic Node (#1489832). And then summer (#1508570). Eeeeexccsuuuuuuuuses.

@Scoresby valiantly proceeding to the next cypherpunk book club (#1561419), plus the recent and frequent “capitalism” talk (#1547767, #1550646,  #1550794, #1553596) has shoved me back to this self-flagellating exercise. Also, winter is coming; there shall be long, dark days and nights of reading!

RECAP:

Beckert is a credentialed-af historian at Harvard who spent his career writing about slavery and cotton trade and random New History of Capitalism stuff — super trendy, ridiculous fad in history departments everywhere. He just published a 1300-page book that's giving me Piketty vibes. This is a thing a lot of peeps are going to look at and say, "see! SEE!" (#1401462). Someone needs to take it apart, take the bull by the horns etc, and point out that the emperor is a tad undressed. #1421528

My initial reflections on the book revolved around its uselessness (“it’s precisely as worthless and stupid an academic exercise as I first suspected,” #1416952). Dude can’t (properly) define the object of his obsession, and his poor intellectual grasp of it is frustrating; his jumping from one thing to another is unnerving:

Beckert proceeds to remark on how ancient capitalism is in some places (Florence or Cairo) while for most people, in most places, even a few generations ago (parents+grandparents) might have resorted to some non-market production of e.g., food or clothing. You can see the bait-and-switch techniques evolving; sometimes ordinary human economic affairs is capitalism, sometimes it's not. In that gap, mark my words, we are going to jump around — a lot!
(#1416318)

Every page of the miserable 25-page introduction chapter had some stupidity, contradiction, hyperbolic sweeping statement or annoying phrasing. When you see words like “denaturalize, “accumulation,” “commodification,” “mobilization of labor” you know you’re in for pointless Marxist troubles. These linguistic perversions are just not particularly good ways of trying to figure out the past or understand the present.

@Mo had this nonsense in his brief post-capitalist rant, too. It’s not a serious way of thinking or intellectualizing about the world. (#1561631)

"accumulation" (of capital) is one of these terms that instantly indicate to you that the speaker is an asshat. It's just not a serious way of describing or thinking about markets/finance/trade/humans arranging their economic affairs. Nobody "accumulates" shit à la Scrooge McDuck, sitting on (hoarding?!) treasure. #1416318

What we learned over the first two-ish chapters:

1. Beckert weaves a wonderful story of global commerce over the last millennium or so
2. He has great troubles understanding what capital means #1434507
   2b: ...that it doesn’t automatically regenerate or accumulates. #1550646
   2c: ...More of us moderns #1550794  (and even stackers #1553596) struggle with this idea
3. Everything is capitalism: even the state, the most important of capitalist institutions (#1416952). I mean, get real.

“Capitalism is conceptually unimaginable without the state.” Except that I can imagine it right now; except that any description of reality, past or present, devolves into endless definitional quibbles if we expand the object of our investigation (“capitalism”) to, uh, everything — (“…in the state, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”: if you didn’t catch that, this isn’t a capitalist war cry but a fascist one.)

One final observation: commodification and market intrusion of our lives

Deirdre McCloskey’s forthcoming book, Equality of Permission, which I finished last week (hashtag, author/reviewer privileges) is great: flowy, beautiful, punchy, powerful. And it repeatedly talks about this issue, especially in chapter 19.

commodification -> the idea that more things, more aspects of our lives turned into a profit-seeking venture and subject to a price-system test.

That’s, I think, empirically false — if anything, we moderns have removed more and more things from the market test of commercial viability because we’re rich enough and “moral” enough — though we all have everyday examples to point to, Tinder and romantic relationships being the go-to example.  

In TWO short sentences, McCloskey (2026, 211-12) unravels Beckert’s decades-long crusade and thousand-page account:

“Karl Polanyi argued in 1944 that markets are new. His followers [including, especially, professor Beckert] down to the present have been unwilling to listen to the evidence that markets are ancient” (pp. 211-12).

One can readily agree that buying grades in school or buying honorary degrees, or paying for a friend’s advice or a husband’s sexual services, are viewed nowadays by “some people” as immoral. But why exactly, Professor? Once upon a time all such things were for sale. In the European Middle Ages one could buy almost anything— wheat and iron, yes, yet also husbands, marketplaces, bishoprics, kingdoms, eternal salvation. [Harvard philosophy professor Michael] Sandel claims repeatedly that “market triumphalism” is a novelty. But that’s bad history, albeit the sort that most people believe— that in olden days we were pure and fair, and now we are “capitalist” and corrupt (McCloskey 2026, p. 181)

Also: the market for marriage is long, wide, and varied… not exactly “capitalistic” in nature.

Anyway, back to Capitalism business. I’ll post chapter 3 notes later tonight or tomorrow.   

#4: “Interlude — We Need To Talk About Capital”

#3: “CHAPTER 2, We Get Capital-ISTS Without Capital-ISM”

#2: “CHAPTER 1, and the Historian Returns”

#1: “INTRODUCTION, and the Trouble of Defining ‘Capitalism’”

#0: “Sven Beckert Begins His Tale”