Of course, the analogy was invoked mostly as a corrective to Doug's open-ended skepticism. If capitalism is a historical system, like feudalism, with a beginning and an end, it should follow at at some point, the system "passes its zenith", so to speak. What that point is, though, is certainly open to debate. The (highly abstract) criterion deployed here is that in which capital attains a scale and scope of development to the point where capital itself becomes its own "greatest barrier" to its further development, whereupon there ensues the process of its own "self-abolition". This is not an automatic process - capital surely does not abolish itself willingly! - but on the contrary must strive to disguise this process from itself (meaning us, subsumed with capital as we are) to the point that it opposes this as a process of ultimate triumph (in this sense Fukuyama was right - we are at the 'endtime' of _a_ history). So the current 'neoliberalism' is but a religious reflection of the 19th century classic projected upon our own time, not an accurate representation of our real condition at present. Yesterday it was the spontaneous ideology of a class; today it is the mechanical prefabrication of a hybrid social order of capital and state so closely interleaved that even some of it "opponents" - as some are in the "antiglobalization" as well as some in the "worker" camp - can be positively engaged in its reproduction.
>I think that's right. "Late feudalism" and "late capitalism" are
>respectively state feudalism and state capitalism. Both feudalism and
>capitalism for all their differences are at the outset non- and even
>anti-statist, growing up as they do in the interstices of an existing
>state system (resp. Imperial Rome, Absolutist Europe).
As for historical analogies, the standard caveats apply. "Feudalism" varied widely from place to place, serfdom was specific to Europe, etc., in fact, medieval societies are opposed, precisely in the heterogeneity of different, specific, modes of production, to the totalitarian tendencies inherent in the (unrelenting) spread of a single, universal capitalist mode of production. It follows that the corresponding state-forms, and the relations of state to society, are likely largely incomparable, and this would hold even more so for ideology.
So "antistatism" is not really to be found in medieval societies. It is quite specific to capitalism, and has its roots in the character - so opposed to the 'steady-state' of medieval economy - of capital as self-expanding value. But lets not get started on that jag now! Later...
>It remains to be seen whether "Empire" is significantly different from the
>dominance, now more two generations old, of the leading state-capitalist
>state. I rather doubt it. --CGE
Me, too. I would oppose to the "Model of two Romes" another image: that of a sort of Castilian Hapsburg Shogunate. (And a non-Eurocentric one, to boot ;-) Violence - that special province of The State - distributes itself quite uncontrollably along the network nodes, especially as the would-be Imperiator is the leading propagator of the means of that violence on the world market. It is hardly indicative of the attainment of an Eternal Roman Peace.
Eckk, must crawl back to work....boss wants to lay us off s'more...
-Brad Mayer