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Ryan Annett's avatar

With regard to what you write at the beginning about the White Goddess and kingship, that's something I've been reading into recently. In the myth of the Tuatha De Danann in Ireland, the prospective king Nuada is unable to take his place on the throne because the goddess Brigid has told the people that the king may not have any blemishes, and Nuada has lost a hand in battle.

"the state’s role..... is to manage the working class on behalf of the capitalists, not to protect or liberate them."

Very true, now more than ever.

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Julie Bond's avatar

This is such a long and detailed chapter that I might have to come back later with a further comment, but so far it seems to be fairly clear that it wasn't a 'transition' to capitalism at all; it was more of a brutal enforcement. I notice the 'divide and rule' tactic was being used early on to make divisions between people in the lower classes, and I see that continuing today particularly with 'identity politics'. I wonder if all the people who think identity politics is so great realise that they're doing the capitalists' job of dividing people for them? I note too that nowadays 'identity politics' is enforced at the state level with all sorts of new 'crimes' being invented to keep people in line, or at least shut them up. In this I think it could be seen as the fencing off of some more 'commons', e.g. the internet which is dominated by people with a certain set of views and anyone who dares to say something contrary to these views gets hounded and insulted, and quite possibly 'cancelled'. People can even end up losing their jobs as a result of posting something which doesn't fit in with the identity politics agenda. This suggests that work is also possibly a new 'common' being fenced off; only people with certain views will be employed. Very worrying indeed.

Something else which struck me is how the peasant populations ceased to be seen as people and were viewed solely as work-producing units. Yet today, people seem to wear the title of 'worker' as some sort of badge of honour. They don't seem to have noticed that they're not seen as actual people particularly and are only valued as 'workers', but they go along with it and even seem proud of it, without noticing the fact they're being de-humanised and no longer seen as actual 'people'. The phrase 'working people' is a bit better but it's still clear that the 'working' bit is more important than the 'people' bit.

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