History

This article is a waste of time to everyone except the 500 people who listened to the series, and those people won't care because they are already riding the beam and obviously engaging in history and politics in a completely different way from the author.

from the conclusion:

It seems that, contrary to the premise of Hell on Earth, the Thirty Years’ War and the origins of capitalism have little to do with each other. The war may have produced or at least influenced the development of many things — the absolutist state and the maintenance of European standing armies being perhaps the most plausible developments on this score. However, the war’s economic impact was overwhelmingly, in a word, destruction. It certainly did not play any creative role in midwifing a new capitalist mode of production, whatever the war’s other impacts. Therefore, it can be said that Hell on Earth succeeds as an introduction to the history of the Thirty Years’ War, but fails to make any defensible analytical statement about the war’s relation to capitalism.

Why not Daniel Colligan, PhD candidate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center? He never answers this outside of gesturing at Wallerstein and Brenner.

I had much more written up but decided it, too, was a waste of everybody's time.

It produced absolutism, idk about capitalism. I haven't listened to the podcast yet but have they ever addressed Ellen Meiksins Wood's thesis of English agrarian capitalism? Basically, she says that capitalism has already came into being in England by early 17th century and the absolutist states of western Europe were not stepping stones to capitalism but alternatives to it - they were a way of preserving feudalism in some form.

While ‘Hell on Earth’ may be primarily intended as an entertainment product, the analytical issue it raises about capitalism does deserve to be taken seriously.

However, even in these two episodes, capitalism’s origin is only cursorily mentioned rather than rigorously elaborated.

Seems like no, it does not need to taken seriously within the context of the podcast given they didn't take it very seriously.

My way of understanding this is that while the author is right in that Matt and Chris saying that the Thirty Years War was the "birthplace of Capitalism" is not literally correct in that it wasn't the case that there was feudalism before the war and capitalism after, or the transition and trends towards capitalism started in the war. But I think that what Matt and Chris meant, and why I think it is important to the formation of capitalism, is that it intensified and sped up many of the trends necessary for forming capitalism. Such as increasing financialization to fund the war, building up state power and apparatuses, the resultant secularization and rationalization of certain aspects of society laying groundwork for liberalism, the undermining of feudal institutions that would have stood in the way of capitalism, etc.

This motherfucker must be paid by the word because holy shit does he ever waffle on.

Hell on Earth is an engaging romp through the history of the Thirty Years’ War, but how does its claim about capitalism fare? For a miniseries that advertises itself as explaining the “birth of capitalism,” Hell on Earth’s discussion of capitalism is notably sparse. It is not even clear what the hosts mean by “capitalism,” as the term is never explicitly defined.

Gee it's almost like this is a leftist podcast that expects you to know what the fuck capitalism is going in. Such a debate lord point to make. "Pleath define your termth, or we don't know what we are talking about". Motherfucker if you don't know what capitalism is an does, you shouldn't argue about it in the first place. he continues:

The listener must infer the meaning of this oft-contested term from the passing mentions it receives in association with a variety of historical phenomena: for instance, the corporate structure of Dutch mercantile enterprises, the double-entry bookkeeping of Italian city-state finance, the military leader Albrecht von Wallenstein’s management of his estates, and the organization of the English New Model Army.

He is too dumb to realize that capitalism didn't jump out of a box fully formed sometime during the 30 years war. Thus, he reasons, it did not start during it, that the conditions that made it possible and that made it spread weren't created and accelerated during that time. Genius take on the level of intellect and reasoning a baby shows when it wants it's nose back after you take it away using sleight of hand.

While Hell on Earth may be primarily intended as an entertainment product, the analytical issue it raises about capitalism does deserve to be taken seriously. Could there possibly be any substantive connections to be found between the Thirty Years’ War and the birth of capitalism? This seems unlikely, as both of the most influential Marxist theories of capitalism’s emergence mentioned earlier, those of Brenner and Wallerstein, locate the origins of capitalism in an age prior to the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. The former theory sees capitalist social-property relations as a product of class conflict between English lords and peasants in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, whereas the latter identifies the increase in global trade during the sixteenth-century age of discovery as producing capitalism.

And then he writes this. As we all know, the nucleus of something is all it takes for global instant adoption. If you have one king, boom, instantly kings everywhere with no transitionary period, no time spent and no forces opposing the change. It just springs out of that box I already mentioned, fully formed.

TL/DR: This fucker has read a few books in his life and is overly smug about it, while his entire ass is hanging out of his pants and he has indeed shat on his balls.