[lbo-talk] vaca reading

Joseph Catron jncatron at gmail.com
Mon May 9 09:31:27 PDT 2011


On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 5:41 PM, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:

Guns, germs and steel didn't cause the differences in societies in
> the last 500 years. It was people, Europeans with capitalist ideology.
> The guns, germs and steel allowed them to conquer the world.
>

And as one might guess from his title, it's the guns, germs and steel that Diamond sets out to explain, no? Of course, we quickly run into a chicken-or-egg dilemma regarding their relation to capitalism and other modes of production, all of which I would consider things substantially different than "ideologies," but he never pretends his book offers the resolution to that. And you're simply avoiding the obvious question: why did capitalism and its concurrent technologies arise in some parts of the world but not others?


> The author is a biologist , who , not surprisingly devises another
> technological determinist, or vulgar materialist, and social darwinist
> theory

Oh, he does no such a silly thing.


> It is an amateurish jumping into a discipline without any attention to
> the many already existing works in this important area of knowledge.

Such as ... ? I'll admit to a near-complete ignorance of prior attempts to tackle the problem Diamond addresses:

"We keep seeing all those glaring, persistent differences in peoples' status. We're assured that the seemingly transparent biological explanation for the world's inequalities as of A.D. 1500 is wrong, but we're never told what the correct explanation is."

So let's hear something about the better explanations. References to "many already existing works" that are never named grate on one's nerves.

-- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað."



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