The implications of “an approach that captures the geopolitically interconnected and sociologically co-constitutive nature of its [capitalism’s] emergence.”
“Uneven and combined development is capable of bringing together – not only theoretically, but concretely – historical processes understood from multiple vantage points into an interactive totality of social relations.”
“A rethinking of what historically and theoretically constitutes capitalism.”
“Capitalism is neither natural nor eternal: it has been historically constructed by annihilating or subsuming other – non-capitalist – ways of life.”
“The conquest, ecological ruin, slavery, state terrorism, patriarchal subjugation, racism, mass exploitation and immiseration upon which capitalism was built continue unabated today.”
“In the contemporary period, the divesting machinations of capitalism have continued and expanded into a global system of geopolitical violence and integrated production processes which afford it coercive and disciplinary capabilities with an unprecedented international reach. The fluidities of finance capital, ‘just-in-time’ production, and logistics have only sharpened this sociological multiplicity – the international – into a machine of tyranny. Today, as always, wage repression, deteriorating work conditions and anti-strike practices are actively determined by variegated labour processes in different societies across the globe. In these ways, unevenness and combination act as disciplining features that maintains the capital relation as the basis of social existence.”
“For in the process of attempting to build socialism by taking state power and harnessing it to this end, Marxist-inspired revolutions have all too often been transformed into their very negation.”
“Political challenges to capitalism have often identified the ‘universality’ or ‘totality’ of capitalism as the basis on which it should be challenged and overcome. This serves as an important warning against any endeavour to build ‘socialism in one country’; anticapitalism can only be global in scope.”
“The perspectives constructed by the leadership of parties and organisations are presented as the historical prime mover – the royal road – which simply needs to replicated everywhere for capitalism to be overthrown. This negation of political difference sought by programmatic organisations generates a form of political autocentrism, and ontological singularity, where any given party or programme is posited as the sole and sovereign author of historical change. In this programmatic approach, difference is something not to be articulated, but destroyed; something to be redirected onto the True Path or – where it cannot be redirected – exiled as a ‘bourgeois deviation’.”
“By acknowledging the differentiated and uneven sociologies of different social movements, the politics of revolution must be understood not in terms of a singular strategy. Rather, we must be cognisant of the necessity for many strategies, each irreducible to each other and specific to the particular challenges faced in the course of struggle. And in the spirt of combined development, this would also involve considering how such multiple strategies can be learned from, adopted and modified, or if necessary discarded and ‘skipped over’.”
—Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism, Pluto Press 2015
The book and its approach has made me question the origins of capitalism and rethink what I have read.
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