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KulakRevolt  7mo ago (anarchonomicon.com)   1949 thread views

After the State: The Coming of Neo-Medievalism and the Great Decentralization

anarchonomicon.com

An Epic length essay of mine in which I lay out my theory of history and why briefly summarized: The Age of the nation state is almost certainly coming to an end under the corroding forces of decentralizing military technology and institutional decay.

The future will not resemble post French Revolution centralized governments asserting their control over each other, but rather will slowly come to resemble the Greek City states (misnomer) or the Holy roman empire's vast network of thousands of polities and war making entities.

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I'd like a citation on Napoleon saying "quantity has a quality all its own"; the paper trail on that quote is inconclusive but I'd never before seen a claim of it being pre-20C.

I first heard it attributed to Napoleon by Dan Carlin of Hardcore history

It's attributed to Stalin, usually, but source can only be traced to some US DoD consultant in 1970s.

There are apparently some sources for the Stalin quote (him only really paraphrasing Marx and Lenin) in Russian writing. The English formulation originates from the DoD guy as far as I know.

But it's the first time I'm hearing of it being attributed to Napoleon.

Apparently they found an earlier use in English (also from an American Cold War analyst)... but that use attributes it to Lenin. Hence my "inconclusive".

It was taught as part of Marxism Leninism attributed to Marx in the Eastern block. Roughly the accumulation of quantity leads to qualitative changes

It follows therefore that in proportion as quantity accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his quality high or low, must grow worse.

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