/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Hecking bumping for an actual interesting thread for once

It was capitalism. It was always capitalism. Even the Soviet Union was state capitalism. I’m sorry but it’s capitalism all the way down there is no escape.

>>2376145
No, capitalism is a recent thing.

>>2376152
nah uh

>>2376098
There's an episode of RevLeft Radio where they discuss the historical Christ and part of the discussion is about what you are asking about, like the challenges and methods of studying the ancient world in the way you are mentioning. You might at least find it interesting if not helpful
https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/jesus_

>>2376167
Ah uh

My impression of ancient socioeconomic history is that it's difficult to study because the development of algebra and statistics which are considered so essential to understanding an economy today were not fully developed until the enlightenment onwards. Statistics used to be called "political arithmetic" in its infancy and algebra was developed as a series of tools for balancing equations and abstracting arithmetic to general cases before it was applied to economics specifically.

But to your point about going beyond the surface of mere chronological "event log" history: I think the key is finding works which ask and answer the right questions. The right questions are the questions that expose assumptions we didn't realize we were making, bridge seemingly unrelated areas of inquiry, and seek to clarify areas of ambiguity, clear up areas of confusion, or eliminate areas of redundancy. You have to figure out what feels strangely important and follow that.

And with economics you have to look across multiple distant civilizations, ask what their economies shared in common, and figure out what the historical material forces that gave rise to those common practices were. If people from very different standpoints are doing the same thing despite not ever meeting each other, there are historical material forces at work. It's why writing for example was invented multiple times by different groups of people who never met. And what was writing used for the most by the earliest Sumerians? Not poetry or literature, that came later. No. Simple "political arithmetic:" Counting herds, crops, dried goods, meat, inventories of kept at storehouses, temples, markets. of the thousands of cuneiform tablets that have been translated, most of them are economic recordkeeping documents rather than literary works or even letters addressed to particular individuals. So you see even with writing the superstructural element (literature, poetry) emerged after the base element (economic record keeping, accounting, inventories). Even in highly superstructural documents, like triumphal documents exaggerating the deeds of kings, their conquests, and their political consequences, there is always an accounting of the bounty of that conquest. How many slaves, sheep, goats, oxen, swine etc. were gotten by conquest.

If you look across multiple human societies and find the same pattern, such as a technology being invented independent of communication, then you have the basic elements of a historical-material approach, and the basic ingredients for understanding a mode of production. This is the beginning of an analysis of economic history that is not based on simply chronicling events in linear order by date.

>>2376212
High I.Q effortpost, very rare now days on LeftyPol

>>2376145
>I FUCKIN LUH CAPITALISM
>I am National Socialist, btw
wow

>>2376098
read how the world works by cockshott

>>2376098
Personally I read Ste Croix's Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, Anderson's Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism then Banaji's Theory as History.
However, I wouldn't necessarily recommend exactly this route for a few reasons:While Ste Croix's work does a nice job of balancing events, actors/institutions and economic movements, it does suffer from anachronism at times.
Meanwhile, while Anderson's Passages illustrates part of the "transition" between antiquity and the medieval period, he does suffer from tying modes of exploitation too strictly to modes of production ie failing to see the gradation between free peasant, serf, tenant, slave, wage laborer etc and the different relationships with the state that these different classes had in different places. This contributes to him being unable to properly deal with the empire's eastern half and its relatively high amount of involvement with the economy, even towards its twilight. After talking about the empire in the Balkans he sort of claims that the core of its economy was just the hopelessly outmoded free peasant economy that the Roman latifundia never managed to expand into.
Finally Banaji's Theory as History investigates economies from across the Old World, from Antiquity to Early Modernity. This one was amazing for attacking "stagism" and the vague blob that used to be called "the Asiatic mode of Production" that was used to describe societies where the state played a large role in the economy. However, it does go pretty far afield into the debates about these ideas, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for people that are looking to get their feet wet with economic history.
Having said all that, I might point you to Banaji's other work like Exploring the Economy of Late Antiquity which seems to be more about the economy of the time rather than the debates around it. As for the events and actors, I would say that good economic histories that aren't just Farmer's Almanacs will still make sure to make note of the highlights in between detailing grain yields.

Economics as we understand it today wasn’t the same in ancient times. The majority of people worked in agriculture and so that was their economic life and they gave a part of their proceeds as taxes. The ancient state also found ways to get people to work on building shit like buildings or roads even if it was just dirt roads through wages in the form of food beer such as ancient Egypt. Excess laborers could find work from the state as laborers for the state in state owned mines and shit, but usually slaves worked ancient mines. What we know as commerce was indeed very important to the wealth of an ancient state but it was much more concentrated and specific where merchants or even state contracted merchants would send out surpluses in a specific specialized good to other nations who got other goods in return. So like Italy which specialized in olives and Egypt which specialized in barley. Both would have an excess amount of those goods and trade that surplus for goods elsewhere.

>>2376098
the ancients didn't have a concept of le economy as modern people do which is a result of abundance of resources. the word didn't even exist till the late middle ages early renaissance and again it had different connotations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equites#Regal_era_(753%E2%80%93509_BC)
whats crazy is that the roman Equites was originally the class of people rich enough to own a horse that evolved into the proto-bourgeoisie