This post will be in two parts, both of which I find are illustrative of the difficulties of public health strategies. One makes particularly obvious the severe misanthropic consequences of profit seeking drives in the areas of health and medicine, and the second is a remarkable case point in the iatrogenic potential of public health interventions which may be completely benevolent in intention – something that all states irrespective of political structure must address. Part one is contained below, you can find part two (here)[]

Original at https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ . Linked to it via Paul Cockshott.

The Question

That said this is a question that is not absurd a priori. As we’ll see, the Roman Empire was never close to an industrial revolution – a great many of the preconditions were missing – but the idea that it might have been on the cusp of being something like a modern economy did once have its day in the scholarship. As I’ve mentioned before, the dominant feature of the historical debate among scholars about the shape of the Roman economy is between ‘modernists’ who argue the Roman economy is relatively more like a modern economy (meaning both that it was relatively more prosperous than other ancient economies but also that the Romans themselves maintained a more modern, familiar outlook towards money, investment and production) and ‘primitivsts’ who argue that actually the Roman economy was quite primitive, less prosperous and with the Romans themselves holding attitudes about the economy quite alien to our own. But here we need to get into a bit more specificity because beneath that quick description it is necessary to separate what we might call the ‘old modernists’ and the ‘new modernists.’

Darwin’s Delay

Few events inspire more speculation than long and unexplained pauses in the activities of famous people. Rossini crowned a brilliant operatic career with William Tell and then wrote almost nothing for the next thirty-five years. Dorothy Sayers abandoned Lord Peter Wimsey at the height of his popularity and turned instead to God. Charles Darwin developed a radical theory of evolution in 1838 and published it twenty-one years later only because A. R. Wallace was about to scoop him.

The articles contained in this book were written some ten years ago. Author and reader may well ask why they should be republished just now. At first sight they might seem to lack all topicality. Subject and tone alike may appear remote to a considerable section of public opinion. I believe, however, that they have some topicality in that, without entering upon any detailed polemics, they represent a point of view in opposition to certain literary and philosophical trends still very much to the fore today. Let us begin with the general atmosphere: the clouds of mysticism which once surrounded the phenomena of literature with a poetic colour and warmth and created an intimate and ‘‘interesting’’ atmosphere around them, have been dispersed. Things now face us in a clear, sharp light which to many may seem cold and hard; a light shed on them by the teachings of Marx. Marxism searches for the material roots of each phenomenon, regards them in their historical connections and movement, ascertains the laws of such movement and demonstrates their development from root to flower, and in so doing lifts every phenomenon out of a merely emotional, irrational, mystic fog and brings it to the bright light of understanding.

A Marxist perspective can be most helpful for understanding race and racism insofar as it per- ceives capitalism dialectically, as a social total- ity that includes modes of production, relations of production, and the pragmatically evolving ensemble of institutions and ideologies that lubricate and propel its reproduction. From this perspective, Marxism’s most important contri- bution to making sense of race and racism in the United States may be demystification. A histori- cal materialist perspective should stress that “race”—which includes “racism,” as one is unthinkable without the other—is a historically specific ideology that emerged, took shape, and has evolved as a constitutive element within a definite set of social relations anchored to a par- ticular system of production.

Adapted from https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1960/08/19.htm

I was put onto this article from the reading of the terrific text on the Cuban and Venezuelan healthcare systems and practices by Steven Brouwer: “Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba Are Changing the World’s Conception of Health Care”

This simple celebration, another among the hundreds of public functions with which the Cuban people daily celebrate their liberty, the progress of all their revolutionary laws, and their advances along the road to complete independence, is of special interest to me.

A small but very important subsection from Robert Fogelson’s book “Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870-1930”. I would say it speaks for itself.

Many subdividers also employed restrictions to exclude ‘‘undesirable’’ people as well as “undesirable” activities. By far the most common of these provisions were racial covenants. Under a typical covenant, an owner was forbidden to sell or lease the property to a member of any of a number of allegedly undesirable racial, ethnic, or religious groups. He or she was also forbidden to allow a member of these groups, other than chauffeurs, gardeners, or domestic servants, to use or occupy the property. A few subdividers had employed racial covenants in the mid-nineteenth century. In Brookline, for example, one forbade “any negro or native of Ireland” to occupy a dwelling, and in Baltimore another barred the sale or lease of a house to “a negro or person of African or Mongolian [that is, Asian] descent.” But such restrictions were very much the exception before the 1890s. Indeed, not even the most racist subdividers imposed racial covenants. A case in point was Francis G. Newlands, the mining magnate and U.S. senator who laid out Chevy Chase in the early 1890s. Newlands saw the United States as “the home of the white race.” To him, “race tolerance” meant “race amalgamation,” and “race intolerance” meant “race war.” Fusing the racism of the South with the racism of the West, he called for repealing the Fifteenth Amendment, thereby denying African-Americans, “an inferior race,” the right to vote, and restricting immigration to “the white race,” thereby excluding Chinese, Japanese, and other Asians. Despite his outspoken racism, Newlands did not include racial covenants among the minimum cost requirements and other restrictions he imposed on the first subdivisions at Chevy Chase.

The conclusion to Mauss’s incredible essay on the uses and concepts of gifts.

Moral Conclusions

It is possible to extend these observations to our own societies. A considerable part of our morality and our lives themselves are still permeated with this same atmosphere of the gift, where obligation and liberty intermingle. Fortunately, everything is still not wholly categorized in terms of buying and selling. Things still have sentimental as well as venal value, assuming values merely of this kind exist. We possess more than a tradesman morality. There still remain people and classes that keep to the morality of former times, and we almost all observe it, at least at certain times of the year or on certain occasions.

Cross posted from Nonsite.org.

Passages between brackets are drawn from the manuscript version of the essay and differ slightly from the published variant.

Published July 7, 1970

We on the democratic left are living through a real crisis. And precisely because I believe the Socialist Party has a very vital role to play in this period, I would like to say something about the problems we confront.

One aspect is that many people on the [so-called democratic] left today substitute psychology for politics. Now, I have no objection to a lifestyle, or how you wear your hair, or whether you eat pig’s feet[, or whether you want to dress so one cannot distinguish between male and female except upon very close inspection]. But to substitute this “how I feel, what my thing is,” for politics, is an extremely dangerous attitude which the Socialist movement must fight. In fact, the Socialist movement is one of the few movements which has the credentials for fighting it.

This brief writing belongs to the Introduction to Boris Kagarlitsky’s book “Restoration in Russia: Why Capitalism Failed”. The work is both a valuable reflection of, and look into, the tumultuous years following the dissolution of the USSR.

‘You can’t hammer in a bolt.’ This was among the slogans used by the pro-government political bloc Russia’s Choice in its campaign for the parliamentary elections of December 1993. Spokespeople for the bloc explained to voters: it’s pointless to dream of a just society, so you have to reconcile yourself to the new order. The slogan turned out to be unintentionally ironic. The attempts by Yelstin, Gaidar and the other Russian ‘reformers’ to construct liberal capitalism in a country where there is neither a normal bourgeoise, nor a market infrastructure, were a case of ‘hammering a bolt’.