Bret Devereaux

Drafting my next blog post. Sure is turning out a bit more ::L'internationale plays:: than I normally think about these things. Part of that is order-of-operations: all of the bad exploitative elites are in pt. 2, but the positive impacts of connectivity and markets are in pt. 3

So breaking it up this way has been helpful in that sense in that it makes me think about the structures around pre-modern farming differently than I normally do (my research conditions me to think of surplus outputs enabling other activity) Both perspectives valid & important.

Not really? Marxist 'labor theory of value' economics are - pardon me being blunt - pretty much worthless. They don't do a good job describing actual economic relations. Das Kapital is important as a historical document, but as an economic one, less so.

That's not to say that other economic thinkers haven't hewn useful rock out of the mostly useless mountain of Das Kapital - they have. But I've never found the edifice itself useful.

OFC I am not an economist, but a historian. So when I say useful, I mean "does this theory give me a template to help me to understand interactions in a historical society." Even Finley recognized that direct application to the ancient world didn't work, and he was hard Marxist