Reddit reviews The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

In short, nationalism is a fiction. There are no real, actual, natural nations - they're boundaries, ideologies and understandings that have come about through historical processes, just like every understanding of our societal relationships to others. I'm only American, for instance, because I reside inside of some borders that some white people made up way back when.

The industrial revolution paved the way for nationalism because it gave humans access to unprecedented, massively powerful tools. A gallon of oil yields roughly 25,000 man-hours of human labor in terms of energy (discussion here), to give a sense of just how powerful these tools are.

What happened over the last couple centuries was that small numbers of people (capitalists, in the Marxist sense), were able harness and control this power, and use its influence on massive numbers of people around them. This makes sense spatially, as oil fields, coal mines and the like are located in geographically specific places, allowing relatively few people to take ownership of them.

With few people controlling massive amounts of energy (and therefore power), they are able to impose influence on those around them by developing infrastructure on their terms, using their industrial power to amass wealth, centralizing political power, and creating a unifying culture around their locus of power. As the article you linked points out, nations could not have come about in the sense that they have without this centralized power, which itself has come about through the harnessing and controlling of industry.

Some excellent reading on the subject:
Karl Polanyi - The Great Transformation - This is essentially the historical transformation that the title refers to
Timothy Mitchell - Rule of Experts - My all-time favorite academic book, the first few chapters especially show how Egypt as a nation came about through this type of centralization of power.


tl;dr: Modern industrial economies allow for the requisite centralization of massive amounts of power necessary to put large geographies of people under the umbrella of one "nation".

Thanks for your kind words. I started having these thoughts back in my early college days when I was majoring in econ. I found it odd how the theories I was being taught were so simple and clear, yet there was so much political disagreement. I thought, "Why is there so much argument over what to do when the answers are so obvious!?"

Then I started actually reading history and realized that things were not nearly so simple. That economics as it was taught to me is simplified and censored to the point of having almost no relationship to the real world. I eventually stumbled upon political economist Karl Polanyi's classic The Great Transformation and his concept of fictitious commodities, and that broke the dam/blew my mind.

Once I got into science, I found it very telling how all the economists and business people I had met were much more confident in their theories of the world than the chemists and biologists I was working with, despite the fact that the latter had much more solid empirical ground to stand on. That's the effect of ideology, I guess; you don't question it or even realize it is there.

If you are interested in these topics, I would recommend:

the aforementioned Polanyi book

Debt: the First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama

This long academic paper by law professors Jon Hanson & David Yosifon

And some essays by Pierre Bourdieu, such as Social Scientists, Economic Science and the Social Movement and Neoliberalism, the Utopia (Becoming a Reality) of Unlimited Exploitation, which can be found in Sociology is a Martial Art

A quick Google or wikipedia search will reveal these authors' backgrounds and any possible biases they may have in your view. It is fun to see a founder of neoconservatism (Fukuyama) and an anarchist anthropologist who helped start Occupy Wall Street (Graeber) essentially agree on the total historical inaccuracy of modern economic thought and the corrosive impact of economics on the other social sciences.

You seem like a naieve enough person to think that capitalism works in spite of government rather than because of it. I recommend you put down the programming manuals and close the youtube economics videos and read The Great Transformation.


Here's another hint: those screwed over people in the third world don't want capitalism and especially don't want your euphoric brand of BS spawned in a suburban manchild's fever dreams. Capitalism was imposed on them by government, not the other way around.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Transformation-Political-Economic/dp/080705643X

I mean, I get how C-M-C and the like might be confusing (heck it is for me) but Capital has some great literary value just for the stories and aside's Marx uses to show how shitty and exploitative capitalism is. I mean, if the images he paints of the factories aren't enough (though I suppose Engels' condition of the working class is also good since he was actually there), then surely hearing it laid out how waged labour appears be be paid for its entire duration when in fact its not would be enough to piss anyone off.

Not much in my area people are fond of the ones I have I could mostly do without. It has nothing to do with their life to find a real way towards freedom. But if you take some time to think about what was obviously going to happen any time soon, and for purposes of oppression. http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Transformation-Political-Economic/dp/080705643X. But I think socialism needs to be supported by a scientific consensus, simply on the basis of inequality.

So I would second Integrald's list as great, and I think everyone should read all of the books in the Core section. If you're interested in political economy, I'd specifically point out these from it as nice general-interest introductions:

• Guns Germs and Steel
  
• Why Nations Fail
  
• The Mystery of Capital
  
  If you're interested in alternative models, there are two particular works that I'd recommend reading. The first is probably obvious - get yourself the big old Marx reader. Marxist thought is less important than it used to be, but still worth getting acquainted with.
  
  The second might be less familiar but I think is also very important - Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation. It is basically a sociologically-oriented history of the rise of capitalism. Polanyi's argument is that the "free market" is no less a utopian vision than the communist one, and that in many times and places people seek protection from the market rather than a desire to participate in it. This is one of the very few books I've read as an adult that actually changed my perspective in a meaningful way, and if you're interested in the "big questions" of politics and economics I can't recommend it highly enough.