Yeah I have never understood that tendency to treat slavery in the colonies as somehow separate from or unconnected to capitalist development. Of course slavery and capitalism were deeply intertwined, who do you think was distributing and selling all that sugar and tobacco?!

Altho I certainly acknowledge the debate and agree that the dismissive tone is weird, but I just chalk that up to Chibber being a cantankerous old man. Looking forward to reading more!

generate more wealth and maximize profit (i.e., wealth as capital, not just riches). I just don't see the mechanism by which colonial plunder alone creates either of those. Not a historian tho, and haven't cracked open Capital v.1 in a while

So my read is that colonial accumulation certainly led to its rise as a global system, but to be considered capitalism in any meaningful sense you also need 1) the social relation of wage labor and capital in a labor market, and 2) the widespread practice of re-investing wealth to...

Any recommendations on who to read on the other side of the debate?

Meanwhile folks over there are calling him an apologist for slavery and white supremacy for this lol

Basically he's just arguing that colonial plunder alone can't be the sole cause of capitalism because you also need the marketization of labor forces and the profit motive, which had both been separately developing in English agriculture in the preceding century or so. Sure, makes sense to me

People are losing their minds over this article over on Twitter. Tbf I haven't actually read Brenner or his critics (although I have read Meiksins Wood, who also gets a shout-out), and sure Chibber comes off a little old-man-yells-at-cloud at times, but this seems pretty sensible to me?

Okay but what's your definition of neoliberalism? I'm just in the peanut gallery for this but I'm kind of invested now

My guess is it's "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" but he thinks William Zanzinger is the good guy

It's even weirder than that. He was already circumcised as a baby, so when he converted he held a ceremony where a mohel just nicked the tip of his penis with a scalpel. And then he wrote all about it in The New Republic in oddly sexualized detail

What am I ill-informed about? Has Israel committed genocide in Gaza or no?

?

My point was about the Dems willingness to actually try to win elections. Mamdani was the Dem candidate, he won the primary. If the party leadership really wanted to win why wouldn't they full-heartedly endorse him? Vote blue no matter who, right?

In November 2024 Mamdani was a NY assembly member who few people outside of NYC had even heard of. If you think criticisms he had of Harris had any impact on her chances then I don't know what to tell you. Also he voted for Harris and urged others to do so despite those criticisms

Not sure I follow. Cuomo, disgraced though he was, still had a lot of support among centrist Dems. Schumer and Jeffries' hedging on the endorsement certainly undercut Mamdani's campaign, and could have helped cost him the election were it not for his incredible grassroots ground game

If they really are interested in winning, why was the party leadership so reluctant to endorse Mamdani? It was the left that put in the work of getting him elected - he was polling in single digits at the beginning of the year and ended up winning an outright majority in a three-way race

Gaza is probably the most thoroughly documented in real time genocide in history. You sound like a Holocaust denier and should be treated by society like one