Tuesday 2 December 2008

Skeptonomics: Progress and the Deflation of Monumental History

More questions:
Was there really any such thing as capital?
Is it possible to have a capitalism with multiple caputi?  A cerberus, or a body with a soul or a mind in many places?
Observe:
"In the last years of the reign of the ever more melancholic King Ulászló, Hungary experienced the most bloody and ferocious rural revolt of her history.  The economic and social situation of the peasants had begun to deteriorate in the late fifteenth century, when Hungarian landlords, like their fellows in Poland and Bohemia, started to impose restrictions on their tenants.  One of the reasons was that the lords, wanting to profit from the rise of food prices on the European markets, wished to enter the marketplace with foodstuffs extracted from their serfs.  Seigneurial dues in kind, together with the tithe (mostly rented by the landlords from the church), and different traditional taxes gave the seigneurs control over a considerable amount of marketable produce.  Laws of the late fifteenth century confirmed their right to trade in these commodities free of taxes and customs duty." ---From "Rural revolt and the Laws of 1514" in A History of Hungary
A commodities bubble caused one of the great peasant revolts of the early modern period.  The bubble was caused by free market protectionism, and feudal exemption from taxation -- all instigated under the passive oppression of a melancholic and ineffectual sovereign.  Sound familiar?  
He continues:
"While one day of robot counted as a quite heavy obligation in the preceding century, three days weekly was not rare 1520."
Robot here performs precisley the same function as central banking interest rates under the monetarism of the contemporary banking class:  increase wealth by maximizing the percentage of worker production which will be paid directly to you.  Contemporary economics has never succeeded in being anything other than a technology for optimizing this strategy.  Indeed, all it has contributed is the ability to create inflationary bubbles at will, resulting in an intensification of robot, by using the printing press to expand the monetary base at just the right moment.  But in this, if in nothing else, Marx is even more dishonest and unhistorical than Keynes, for, even in 16th century Hungary, it is the bourgeoisie, Marx's own class, which is the revolutionary class.  The burden of performing an abject surrender to theological brutalities always falls on them, is always a function of their cosmopolitanism: 
"The growth of the market towns, with their limited but promising liberties, seemed also to have threatened seigneurial interests, and beginning in 1492 Diets revoked the right of peasants to transfer from one lord to another or from village to market town."
So, if, in this history of kings and classes, a caput can be found always elsewhere and again, what can be said of all the forces which seem to work against it?  And what can such an "against", such a contra, mean where these kinds of revolutions appear to be the turnings of gears within a single robot?