Sven Beckert. Capitalism.

     

      The strongest point of his 1100 page book is his emphasize of "war capitalism" as the motor for the European expansion. Namely, for the first time in the human history, the conquerors instead of using loot for their prestigious consumption or, in the best case, taking artisans as captives, decided to invest surpluses in more production. This did not happen in Spain and Portugal proper for a number of reasons but in the Northern Europe (Low Countries) and parts of Italy -- both possessed at the time by Habsburg Empire(s). 

The rest 3/4 of the book more or less follow traditional neocon narrative because the alternatives were expelled from the Western universities. Marxism and socialism occupy about three paragraphs of Beckert's overstretched book. Yet, the spread of welfare state in Western Europe and North America and, consequently, the expansion of government powers was, to a large extent, the answer to the propagation of the socialist ideas. Welfare state in France had direct origins in Saint Simon and his circle and Bismarck's "White Revolution" was an answer to the growing power of Social Democrats in Germany. Further on, UK elites decided on the welfare state course immediately after the First World War before the Great Depression being afraid that millions of unemployed soldiers would imitate the  Russian revolution. Only in the prosperous United States, the Great Depression, to which Beckert describes the birth of the Big Government, was the main driver of massive social programs. 

Equally, a de-colonization of Africa, South Asia and the Far East in the aftermath of the Second World War was imposed on the reluctant European powers and Japan by the United States as a policy paradigm for a fledgling Cold War. 

    This author views modern society as very distant from the capitalism a-la Adam Smith or Karl Marx dependent on one's preferences. In "old" capitalism, the capital appeared from profits on sales of something (cod, nails, so favored by Smith, or even books). In the "new" capitalism, the capital comes from investors: banks and private equity and debt funds, who suck money from pension and insurance funds, i.e. in the final reckoning, from the accumulation of workers' wages. This system has more in common with the Ancien Regimes in Europe where governments worked as giant monetary pumps from the Third Estate, including capitalists, into the first two. 

Tony Blair towering over Gaza (Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.).

 

Daisy Dunn. The missing thread.

         

                A totally misguided book by the beautiful lady Daisy Dunn. Greek and Roman women could not influence politics except as through their men. And the content of their pillow talks is forever lost. So Mrs. Dunn invents them as if she was present there. A few women (Empress Livia and Severan Syrian broads) influenced politics on their own but their influence was mostly destructive. 

    Whatever was the influence of the wives and lovers of the powerful Hellenistic and Roman politicians and generals, the influence of their catamites was much greater. Emperor Claudius was particularly derided by the contemporaries because he did not seem to express any noble interest to boys and men, preferring to them company of low-born women. 

Alexander Etkind. Nature's Evil.

     George Soros created a plethora of his NGOs to grow new neo-colonial elites of the post-Communist world. His strategy worked in some small, economically unviable countries: Armenia, Moldova, Balkan and Baltic states but failed miserably in Russia and China, which were the first targets of re-colonization. So, most graduates of Soros' "academies" had to enjoy teaching or journalistic jobs somewhere, mostly on the periphery of the Western world. One of these is Etkind.

    His book rechewes an old racial-colonialist discourse that the "backward nations" cannot put their natural resources to a good use and so have to be robbed from them. In a new packaging, this sounds as follows. The abundance of natural resources allows undemocratic elites to keep power by distributing goods to the populace in lieu of democratic rights. So they have to be despoiled of their natural wonders, which must be transferred to the efficient Western corporations.

      Why these "undemocratic elites" appear only in Venezuela, Iran and, first and foremost, Russia but not in Norway, Canada, Australia and, by the way, UK, which has no large scale real, non-financial, non-service economy barred the extraction of the North Sea oil, of course, is glossed upon. This screed belongs to a long tail of garbage neocon propaganda, which currently fills the bookstores and libraries, probably subsided by the invisible hand of non-market forces. 

    

Alexander Karp. The Technological Republic. Hard Power, Soft Beliefs and the Future of the West.

 A famed German education obviously greatly suffered lately. Gone is the gymnast and sometime Foreign Minister of the Bundesrepublik, Annalena Baerbock with her "360 degrees turn of policies" and "defenses of hundreds of thousands kilometers from the German borders". But, militaristic imperialist in the Willhelmian (i.e. colonial Victorianism on steroids) tradition Karp with a PhD in philosophy from a German university suffers from severe logic deficiency. 

    His justification of the European colonial expansion is based on a diagram showing the mean proportions of population and GDP of the "backward" and Western nations, who, in view of Karp and another cited colonialist Churchill, enjoyed democratic elections instead of tyranny and dictatorship. First, before the 17th century, i.e. the century when poor but war-proficient Europeans began to pillage the world for earnest, the most of the world's GDP was produced by China and India (see P. Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers"). Second, most current GDP of the Western nations is centered around "financial services". Not to speak of Denmark or Holland, UK's share of the real economy in its GDP (mining, manufacturing, agriculture, transportation) is hardly 5%. What is the magic of the City of London and Canary Wharf, 2.5 square miles or so, where 20% of the British GDP is produced? Third, to consider even the then British Empire a democracy is a gross misstatement. Barely 10-15% of the population of the British Empire enjoyed any semblance of political rights, with even Canada, Australia and New Zealand having no control of the their foreign and defense policy until approximately WWII. Before, aristocratic English generals generously spilled blood of its colonial subjects in the fields of Gallipoli and Flanders. Other "Western" nations had even more limited suffrage, and foreign, defense and financial policies were largely excluded from any parliamentary control.

      Another oddity is his irony that the most powerful politicians and the civil servants earn a tiny amount of his and his tech- and private equity bros incomes. Earning a PhD from a German University and not knowing that salaries for the civil servants is a relative innovation? Till the end of the XIX century, the applicant for the British Foreign Office position had to prove a sufficient independent income. Most of the human history, politics, military commands and civil service were unpaid occupations, which aristocracies and patricians performed out of civic duty. The ones who absconded these duties for the private enrichment and/or pleasures of the harem/slave quarters were called "idiots" in Greek. His reasoning suffers not only from historic ignorance but from the lack of logic. Police officers occasionally have to arrest drug lords for whom their salaries are a small change. Should their salaries also be raised by a few orders of magnitude? Obviously, greed -- and not even fear -- is an only motivator for the tech bros but, for simpler people, it can be different. 

    Only when the middle classes became the backbone of the modern society, and bureaucracies had multiplied in size, the idea of government service as a paid profession proliferated. The demise of the political and economic significance of the middle class in the West and the rise of billionaire oligarchies (like Karp himself) resulted in the return of the "Ancien Regime"-type governments. There ambitious gentlemen knowing nothing in particular -- Oxbridge of XVII and XVIII century was described not as a "Cathedral of Learning" but as a place were gentlemen went drunk -- presided over civil services of their minions and sycophants. 

    What Karp proposes as the future of humanity is the rule by "philosopher kings" of the tech industry in the West and merciless colonial exploitation of its periphery by its armed might. Not so different from the "Beautiful garden vs. the Jungle" of the former EU Foreign Policy chief Borrell. I am too old and feeble to work that this future never comes. But the younger people may.