Javier Moreno Zacarés
@HarveyMurenow
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Assistant Professor at @Durham_SGIA | Spanish politics | Housing | Social property relations | Capitalist transitions | Historical materialism | Own views |
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here we go
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Some notes on uneven development under Francoist Spain (1939-1975). The very crowded figure below is my attempt to map the rural exodus of this period.
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When you talk to a Marxist about historical meteriaism
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Yesterday I spoke with my 92-year old gran while I cooked and today is the 85th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War. Might as well share some family stories
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Don't do it kids, it's a gateway drug.
Still think political Marxism is cool?
The first episode of our
@histmat
podcast is now out!
@broseph_stalin
and
@lslothuus
talk with
@maia_pal
,
@pashukanist
,
@sven_ja_b
and
@HarveyMurenow
about Political Marxism.
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In the latest NLR, I address the question of whether we are transitioning out of capitalism by putting in conversation three recent (and excellent) books by Brett Christophers,
@abenanav
, and
@mckenziewark
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Film idea: Battle of Agiers-style neorealism, but about the year-long mass rent strike of 1931 Barcelona
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Brenner is the definitive victor in the transition debate
A turkish man invented the steam engine 200 years before the industrial revolution but he only made it to spin döner
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The sheer scale of historical change that she has experienced in a single lifetime is immense, both for good and for worse. People sometimes forget how recent 'modernity' is in the European south
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Big if true
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A reminder for all Brenner-haters out there. Stop avoiding the key question - what is capitalism (and more importantly for you, what isn't) - and we can debate. Here are some pointers in case you want to stop talking past each other:
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While writing my book, I sketched out -largely for self-clarification- a theoretical framework charting out the place that housing occupies in the capitalist economy.
@HousingTheory
kindly agreed to publish it and to organise a debate around it.
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Even more striking is that as late as 1979 PSOE defined itself as a Marxist-Luxemburgist organisation, aiming for a nonaligned democratic socialism that rejected both the authoritarian character of the USSR as well as the capitalist nature of Nordic social democracy.
The evolution of European social democracy in a nutshell. To the left, the iconic PSOE poster from tis 1982 smashing electoral victory. To the right, its recent remake. Every reference to the world of production has been deleted.
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Anyway, a bit rambly but whatever. Maybe next year I'll share some stories from the other side of my fam, with anarchists and shit. That could have been an entirely different trajectory of historical development (one that was closed off by the outcome of the war)
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📢🚨CALL FOR PAPERS🚨📢
Pleased to announce Residential Contradictions, a two-day conference bringing together housing studies and political economy, taking place 28-29 August at Durham University (UK).
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British IPE / American IPE
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As is typical of safety-first agriculture, social reproduction was prioritised over accumulation. Richer households never reinvested their profits in risky productive innovations, only in buying up more land, so they could later partition it amongst their children
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She claims they didn't use any money, all exchange was bartered. She was bewildered when I asked her about taxes: 'with what cash?' She described money as being only for rich farmers and for the very poor, with the latter getting it by working for the former
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Im always amazed by my gran's childhood memories. Her portrait of life in rural Spain prior to the war resembles what you read in books about Old Regime Europe
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This is the origin of the so-called 'hollowed-out Spain' (España vaciada), the areas of the Spanish interior that have seen vast processes of rewilding and reforestation in recent decades, now becoming a burning political issue.
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She was born in 1929, to a family of Castilian peasants. They were all illiterate (and she pretty much still is). There were obviously no roads, no electricity, and no running water. Altogether, they were relatively poor, and yet, they were nevertheless pretty self-subsistent
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🧈 Core and periphery 🫒
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🚩📡CALL FOR PAPERS: CAPITAL & CLASS 📡🚩
We are putting together a special issue exploring the connections between Political Marxism & Open Marxism. Deadline for abstracts: October 15th.
👇Full CfP 👇
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Agriculture was extremely labour-intensive, with little or no productivity-enhancing tech. Despite the area being a grain-growing dryland, a combine harvester was unheard-of until the 1970s. All irrigation efforts came from hand-dug wells
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My grandfather's family were considered 'rich' because they owned a couple mules for ploughing. They looked down on others because of that. They didnt consolidate holdings to improve output - their land was scattered across many tiny smallholds, some owned, some leased
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Never forget this 2012 gem from JP Morgan on the problems of the European periphery
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First and last slides of today's lecture, the final installment of a year-long course on capitalism
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(4) Markets, up to quite a high degree of sophistication, have existed for millennia without setting in motion, or even approaching, anything like modern economic development. This is the real puzzle that commercialisationists insist in avoiding.
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Local agrarian workers formed a militia and stormed the estate of the local marquis, taking him out to the fields and executing him point-blank. My grandmother, who later became a hairdresser, heard the story from the marquess herself while doing her hair
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Depopulation was very striking in provinces like Soria (-37%), Cuenca (-35%), Guadalajara (-30%) or Teruel (-30%). By the latter years of the dictatorship, one fourth of Spaniards had migrated at some point in their lives, something without parallel in the country’s history
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Only just read this great piece by
@cacrisalves
on Joan Robinson's work, focusing on her synthesis of Keynes and Marx. So well written. Straight to my students' reading list.
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The HM sympsosium on Knafo & Teschke's essay 'The Rules of Reproduction of Capitalism' (aka. the airing of grievances of the Political Marxist family) is finally out! It condenses a decade-long debate about the role of historicisation in PM and in the social sciences more broadly
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The pattern of population movement in this period reversed that of the previous era. In the nineteenth century, the exodus had a north-south direction, bc the the surplus population then was released by the overpopulated small farms of the north
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A textbook example of a Castilian middle peasant during the interwar crisis, my grandfather's elder brother joined the fascists and came home sporting the blue shirt of Falange
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My grandmother was only seven years old when the Spanish Civil War broke out, but she remembers it quite vividly: 'I woke up hearing explosions in the sky and the sky was entirely red'
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Under Franco, the exodus inverts this direction and assumes a south-north pattern. Rather than peasant overpopulation, the driver now is the spread of labour-saving tech in the south, which starts expelling the proletarians of the latifundia from the 1950s
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New article on political corruption and urban development in Spain. Open access 👉
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After the war, my gran moved back and forth between the town and Valencia, where her elder siblings had previously migrated for work. At the time, the advance of capitalist agriculture was devaluating crops and expelling peasants from the land at an unprecedented rate
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She ran to her father, asking what was going on. He only uttered a cryptic response: 'The movement was exploded'
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Her and my grandfather permanently relocated to the city during the rural exodus of the 1960s. They settled in one of the industrial peripheries mushrooming in this period. He took up a job as a factory clerk and she ran an informal hair salon from home,doing that til retirement
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Have at it, but just be clear about what the implications are: you’ve just abolished the capitalist mode of production as an explanatory device and embraced a techno-whiggish perspective of historical development. Welcome to liberalism.
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So where did the rest of the 'unnecessariat' go? Many went abroad, mainly to France, Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium, where salaries were multiple times higher. Their remittances of covered 40% of the trade deficit. The rest came from tourism receipts.
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(3) Fyi - you can think that colonialism had an ambivalent relationship with the emergence of capitalism and still condemn colonialism and capitalism. There is a lot of fake outrage around this issue that is just quite absurd.
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Really enjoyed
@AntonJaegermm
's latest. Great blend of contemporary political commentary and historical sociology to tackle issues of social atomisation and populism. Also (imo) correct take on the fascism debate, pace Riley et al.
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What Brennerites do say is this: though capitalism couldn’t have happened without a pre-existing market infrastructure, it also didn't happen because of it. It was ultimately a necessary but insufficient cause of the transition.
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In my grandmother's case, the shelter was the basement of a convent vacated during the revolution. The instruments that the nuns used to harm themselves were still hanging from the wall. She stared at them as the bombs fell outside. That childhood memory haunted her forever.
Bomb shelter discovered last month in C/Cabanes, Poble-sec. It wasn't among the more than 1300 known shelters built in Barcelona during the war.
Terrified children running down this street, sirens screaming.
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However, the uncompetitiveness of Spanish industry resulted in an insufficient job creation in urban areas. In the 1960s, the active population only saw a net increase of 200,000 in spite of a population growth of 3 million.
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I would argue that this change of gear reflects the transition from a pre-capitalist rural exodus, driven by the Malthusian constraints of subsistence farming, to a capitalist rural exodus, driven by the imperative to subsitute labour by capital
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Ogro (1979), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo (also Battle of Algiers). On the assassination of Franco's premier and successor, Carrero Blanco. What a film.
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New political economy podcast is off to a strong start. Three-part conversation between Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner, on: (1) Brenner's background, (2) the long downturn thesis, (3) the ongoing relapse to pre-capitalist plunder
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Some exceptions aside, Spanish manufacturing was uncompetitive by world market standards. Most industrial output thus went to an expanding domestic market, feeding of the transferrence of a vast swathe of the population from agrarian subsistence to urban consumerism
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Perhaps the most striking change was the outgrowth of Madrid, which went from a relatively minor industrial area to a major manufacturing hub. Madrid province tripled in population under Franco.
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Also striking was the population of growth of Cádiz (shipbuilding) and of the Balearic and Canary archipielagos, both important loci of a tourism boom
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In the 60s, the pressures of rising productivity then ripple north, towards the central tablelands. Rising productivity comes with a fall in grain prices that depresses the incomes of Castilian wheat farmers. They form a second wave of rural outmigration in this period.
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Overall, Spain's pattern of accelerated development was largely due to the capacity of the Francoist developmental state to hitch its wagon to the ‘golden age’ of North Atlantic capitalism. Alignment w the US in 1950s = FDI + tech imports = rural exodus + urban/industrial dvpt
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The fact that some empires ended up squandering the wealth that they stole (e.g. Spain) does not in any way erase or diminish the atrocities of colonial conquest and imperial domination. The crimes of empire remain there either way.
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The resulting commercial deficit was covered by the Spanish 'Gastarbeiter' working there and by Western European tourists coming to Spain for a cheap, beach-side holiday (largely workers with a rising purchasing power)
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The urban poles of attraction were the classic ones: Catalonia (see Barcelona province) and Basque Country, together concentrating two thirds of industrial output. Also, the smaller industrial centres of Valencia, Zaragoza, Sevilla.
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By the way, I made this meme you chumps. And it’s not a critique of political Marxism, it’s a celebration💫
Team Brenner-Wood all the way.
Don't do it kids, it's a gateway drug.
Still think political Marxism is cool?
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🥹🥹🥹
Un lujo contar con
@HarveyMurenow
y
@preyaraujo
en Traficantes para la presentación de 'La democracia contra el capitalismo', de Ellen Meiksins Wood.
¡Pronto el audio!
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In any case, when you treat Marx as scripture and use Marxology as a substitute for historical evidence to support your argument, you look fucking ridiculous. (And that goes for any Marxist debate, by the way).
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All of the above was indirectly supported by the development of Western Europe. Spain exported agricultural products there and in turn imported obsolete machinery to upgrade its industrial equipment
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(2) No Brennerite disputes that capitalism couldn't have happened without robust commercial networks. In this regard, the formation of a world economy in the ‘early modern’ period acted as necessary infrastructure for the transition. This is uncontroversial.
Ellen Wood 👇
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The manufacturing sectors experiencing most growth were precisely those catering to urban consumption patterns: construction (housing); metalworking (automobiles, electrical appliances); chemicals (cleaning products, pharmaceutics); and agro-industry (processed foods)
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In the wake of the Ackerman-Benanav debate, it is more pressing than ever to get the facts straight about crisis theory, Brenner, Clarke, etc. We want to put political Marxism and open Marxism in conversation and see what happens!
📢REMINDER📢
October 15th is the deadline to submit an abstract for our Special Issue of Capital and Class (
@CapitalClass2
) titled 'Political Marxism and Open Marxism: Divergences and Convergences'.
More details here:
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The PCE bore the brunt of the anti-Franco struggle, had a large and mobilised membership, got massively outflanked anyway. Amazing what the blessing of Brandt and Miterrand and the SPD funnelling you money from their bribe funds can do to boost your electoral chances.
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Some old Simpsons memes rescued from the 2018 strike. Solidarity with all those at the picket line today!
#UCUstrikesback
#UCUstrikes
#UCUstrike
✊👩🏫👨🎓🧑💻👩🔬🚩
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The figures of the Spanish housebuilding boom of the long 2000s are pretty shocking by any measurement
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Techniques of domination have a tendecy to fold back on the core
You cannot make this up: new German finance minister Lindner says that Greek "reforms" are a role model for Germany.
Just for the record: Greek GDP is still ~25% below 2007 level; youth unemployment still >30%, unemployment coming down gradually from a high of 27.5% in 2013. 🤷
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The Spanish housing market has never recovered from the massive crash of 2007-8. Very, very long hangover
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@its_mccarthy
Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Cybergeoisie and Protosurpiat.
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The rate of urbanisation -population living in centres with more than 10,000 people- grew from less than 50% in 1940 to around 80% in 1981. The rural exodus ended then, partly due to industrial stagnation, partly due to the depletion of the agrarian surplus population
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Bono, Blair, Putin, and Bob Geldof during the G8 summit in Genoa (2001)
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@AntonJaegermm
Hang on, the conspiracy included 'seers' with supposed prophetic abilities from a new age association.
Nevermind, they're still in the long 90s
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This book - which I thought was probably going to be quite boring - turned out to be very well-written and gripping. Great stuff on the history of PSOE
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This is where Gunder Frank ended at (‘capitalist world system is 5,000 years old’) and Banaji will be there soon, if he isn’t already (he talks about ‘Roman capitalism’ in a recent piece).
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contrary to common misconception, the Industrial Revolution was actually about product differentiation, branding, McKinsey consultants
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Pork Markets' meeting with the Ruseians went well it seems
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Owning the Future by
@adribuller
and
@DantonsHead
starting strong. They had me at the Ellen Meiksins Wood quote
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Some thoughts about the situation in Catalonia👇
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🫡 🫡 🫡
Don't do it kids, it's a gateway drug.
Still think political Marxism is cool?
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@pseudoerasmus
@adam_tooze
others define capitalism so expansively that it essentially boils down to a timeless form of trade, with no clear beginning and no plausible end 😚😚😚
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(1) Cherrypicking Marx’s writings on the transition is not an argument. Economic history was still in the cradle and the man struggled with the question himself. He was ambivalent about the issue.
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Great article on Britain's disastrous imperial expeditions since 2001. 'An aphakic view of the British military’s role in the world persists. The UK remains a country in which the phrase "east of Suez" is used without irony'
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Another fun fact: after having played a major role in the Second Republic, the party went largely dormant under Franco. It lacked much grassroots presence until the mid-70s, when it was revived from the outside by the Socialist International to compete with the Eurocommunist PCE
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@zeithistoriker
Isn't this the 'Marx wasn't big until 1917' guy? Is absurd revisionist history his general thing?
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By contrast, the PCE's ex-Stalinist leaders were battle-hardened old timers. A young Carrillo had been in charge of the defence of Madrid. Ibárruri had coined the slogan 'no pasarán' herself. Their image was inseparable from the memory of the war
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That reminds me: the Germans taught the Spanish how to do electoral corruption in their young liberal democracy. No more Prussian sanctimoniousness ok? I say this w peripheral love 😘
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Tfw you read Simon Clarke
Paper someone Me thinking I’m
wrote way back doing something
in 1967 novel in 2021
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The problem is that, even as a nascent Atlantic economy beefed up urban-mercantile economies of early-modern Europe, there is no clear connection between that and the subsequent economic performance of their enclosing countries (Quote below is from Epstein, 2000)
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(a) You save face by separating ‘capitalism’ from self-reproducing growth; i.e. capitalism is basically trade and has existed as long as merchants, but it couldn’t deliver modern economic development until its ‘industrial’ phase, presumably bc the tech wasn’t there yet
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