As the kids say, I'm back on my bullshit and reading some Marx again, so some of these writings are going to become inflected with that material.
Which dovetails with one thing I've been wanting to do for a while: to pivot back over to money and capital, and take another look at them: what they are, what they do, how they structure human contrivance, how they move and the consequences of that movement, etc.
This time though, I want to express it in more colloquial and simpler language, and work it into the ongoing analysis taking place here. Easier said than done maybe; we'll see how it goes anyway. This will be an on and off thing, working it into the regular discussion. I'm engaged in intense physical work again, which will throw my reading and writing schedule into disarray once again as well, and I imagine it will elicit some other thoughts on subjects related to that activity as well.
Moving on, we've taken some time to explore the ancient and early medieval world, especially in terms of the continuous system behavior of human societies as a whole as they flow through time and interact with each other.
A lot of that - which is unavoidable - is through the lens of the present and what we presently have to work with, and what kind of contemporary problems and concerns are informing these efforts, "hooking up" the historical narrative and its perceived spatiotemporal flow to the present, as it were, that age-old cultural activity of mythmaking, where in this case I intend to use "myth" in the best possible light.
And describing the modern world in light of the past couple of thousand years is quite tricky in light of the unprecedented technological upheaval of the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent lesser revolutions which have characterized the perpetual creative destruction that is industrial capitalism. We are dealing with a very different political economy now, and our geopolitical dynamics look quite different now as well. So I find it quite useful to pivot to the language and concepts of money and capital to describe all this.
But nevertheless, this is all built on deep spatiotemporal flows of human activity and knowledge, which extend far into the past, and much of the human motivations and dynamics underneath it all have not changed that much themselves. And that's setting aside the eternal implacability of basic thermodynamics.
Indeed, what capital theorizing often accomplishes is a lifting of the ideological veil of the homo economicus - which attempts to clothe itself as a radical departure from the dark, primitive past, standing as a proper and timeless result of history's culmination - and reveal it as the natural outgrowth of human development that it is, by locating and contextualizing its relations to historical development.
There! Simple and colloquial; no problem. But I think all of this will become more clear as we proceed, and I'll try to reiterate and rework the thoughts presented here in time. I've got plenty of other subjects to discuss alongside our money and capital pivot, but I did want to signal that we'll be continuously returning to these economic concepts, hopefully more frequently, in the coming posts.
