- cross-posted to:
- leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
On May 5th, 1818, Karl Marx, hero of the international proletatiat, was born. His revolution of Socialist theory reverberates throughout the world carries on to this day, in increasing magnitude. Every passing day, he is vindicated. His analysis of Capitalism, development of the theory of Scientific Socialism, and advancements on dialectics to become Dialectical Materialism, have all played a key role in the past century, and have remained ever-more relevant throughout.
He didn’t always rock his famous beard, when he was younger he was clean shaven!
Some significant works:
Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Critique of the Gotha Programme
Manifesto of the Communist Party (along with Engels)
And, of course, Capital Vol I-III
Interested in Marxism-Leninism, but don’t know where to start? Check out my “Read Theory, Darn it!” introductory reading list!
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Today I honor Cowbee’s Sisyphean task of explaining that production/trade and capitalism are two different things 🫡
It gets easier, actually! So I wouldn’t call it Sisyphean. Different parts of Lemmy have different levels of understanding, if I can get parts mostly aware to be more aware, then that helps trickle into other instances, and it’s easier than doing so in instances where Marxism is seen hostiley.
trickle down economics
lessons. Reagan was right all alongNot really “trickle down.” If I go to a MAGA conference, I am going to be immediately attacked. If I go to a place with progressives, I’ll face less hostility. If I go to a place with Leftists, then I’ll generally be recieved favorably. If this Leftist base solidifies, it can expand and fold in the more radical of the progressives, and then expand outward.
In other words, if it takes immense effort to “wololo” a MAGA into a Leftist, but much less effort to “wololo” a progressive into one, then it’s better to focus on the progressive so that the new Leftist can also aid in the “wololo-ing.” As the proportion of Leftists grows, and more proletarians go from MAGA to liberal, and liberal to progressive, this Leftist movement becomes better able to fold more people into it.
TIL Wololoing
So as a leftist that I think identifies with Marxist-Leninist ideology but that didn’t find the communist manifesto an interesting nor easy read (it was small but not really approachable) are there any books that you recommend? I’m no economist but I do like reading logical arguments as to why capitalism doesn’t work, or better said, doesn’t work for the good of the majority but instead for a small minority (for whom it works very very well)
Welcome, comrade! @dessalines@lemmy.ml has a fantastic Crash Course Socialism you can check out, and if you want to get into theory but don’t find the Communist Manifesto to be approachable, I recommend my “Read Theory, Darn It!” introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list. It has audiobooks, and starts off simpler than the Communist Manifesto.
That seems great! I’ll definitely check it out
Any communities here on Lemmy that you’d also recommend?
And thank you once again!
No problem!
As for Communities, I don’t really have any recommendations. I do recommend making an account that can interact with Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml, though, as that’s where most of us Marxist-Leninists are. You can make a Lemm.ee account or Lemmy.ml, and you’ll still be able to see them, just not on Lemmy.world as .world has defederated from them.
I personally use Hexbear.net and Lemmy.ml.
And no problem, once again!
Most books by Ha-joon Chang, especially 23 things they don’t tell you about capitalism. Fun fact, Ha-joon Chang isn’t a Marxist, he’s a liberal, but his writing is still critical enough of capitalism that South Korea banned his books.
Anything on prolewiki’s library are good reads as well.
For a broad look at the evolution modes of productions and how capitalism came to be there is this 60s textbook from the soviet academy of science, there even are a series of videos following the textbook by the finish bolshevik that is pretty good.
For a more all-round perspective, I recommend Hajoon Chang’s “economics: the user’s guide”.
Is it? I’m pretty sure private property and ownership was a thing in the middle ages. People selling stuff to make a living, merchants… Isn’t the oldest known text some babylonian dude complaining about the faulty products of a merchant?
Trade has existed for as long as humanity has existed, correct, but trade isn’t Capitalism. Capitalism specifically emerged from Feudalism. The historic ability for a class of property owners to employ wage laborers was only made possible through advancements in production.
To give an example, the feudal peasant largely produced most things they used, from clothes to housing. They would produce excess for their feudal lord, and some small handicraftsmen and guilds formed specialized labor. These were not Capitalist formations, but pre-Capitalist.
Eventually, technological advancements like the steam engine appeared. This revolutionized production, and gave huge rise to a class of owners that could purchase this new machinery, and employ workers in wages to create commodities. The barrier to entry is progressively lowered skill-wise, while the barrier to entry in the market as a Capital Owner raised, as firms began to solidify into factories. This coalesced into a marketplace of wage laborers selling their labor power to various Capitalists, eventually becoming the Capitalism of the time of Marx.
Does this all make sense? Engels, in Principles of Communism, summarizes it as such:
The proletariat originated in the industrial revolution which took place in England in the second half of the last [eighteenth] century and which has since then been repeated in all the civilized countries of the world. This industrial revolution was brought about by the invention of the steam-engine, various spinning machines, the power loom, and a whole series of other mechanical devices. These machines which were very expensive and hence could be bought only by big capitalists, altered the whole previous mode of production and ousted the former workers because machines turned out cheaper and better commodities than could the workers with their inefficient spinning-wheels and hand-looms. These machines delivered industry wholly into the hands of the big capitalists and rendered the workers’ meagre property (tools, hand-looms, etc.) entirely worthless, so that the capitalists soon had everything in their hands and nothing remained to the workers. This marked the introduction of the factory system into the textile industry.
Once the impulse to the introduction of machinery and the factory system had been given, this system spread quickly to all other branches of industry, especially cloth- and book-printing, pottery, and the metalware industry. Labour was more and more divided among the individual workers, so that the worker who formerly had done a complete piece of work, now did only part of that piece. This division of labour made it possible to supply products faster and therefore more cheaply. It reduced the activity of the individual worker to a very simple, constantly repeated mechanical motion which could be performed not only as well but much better by a machine. In this way, all these industries fell one after another under the dominance of steam, machinery, and the factory system, just as spinning and weaving had already done. But at the same time they also fell into the hands of the big capitalists, and there too the workers were deprived of the last shred of independence. Gradually, not only did manufacture proper come increasingly under the dominance of the factory system, but the handicrafts, too, did so as big capitalists ousted the small masters more and more by setting up large workshops which saved many expenses and permitted an elaborate division of labour. This is how it has come about that in the civilized countries almost all kinds of labour are performed in factories, and that in almost all branches handicraft and manufacture have been superseded by large-scale industry. This process has to an ever greater degree ruined the old middle class, especially the small handicraftsmen; it has entirely transformed the condition of the workers; and two new classes have come into being which are gradually swallowing up all others, namely:
I. The class of big capitalists, who in all civilized countries are already in almost exclusive possession of all the means of subsistence and of the raw materials and instruments (machines, factories) necessary for the production of the means of subsistence. This is the bourgeois class, or the bourgeoisie.
II. The class of the wholly propertyless, who are obliged to sell their labour to the bourgeoisie in order to get in exchange the means of subsistence necessary for their support. This class is called the class of proletarians, or the proletariat.
What would you call employing people for wages around 0AD? I don’t think it’s feudalism.
Can you give an example? It could be small manufacturing, the small handicraftsman, guild work, etc. Being paid money for labor isn’t exclusive to Capitalism.
Ceramics (roof tiles and pots) were manufactured on an industrial scale in Rome for example. They employed workers and produced massive numbers of products.
What is your distinction between employing people for money and capitalism?
Very interesting example! I’d say it’s definitely a proto-Capitalist example, undoubdtedly. I wouldn’t call it Capitalist out right, however, for a few reasons:
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Ceramics manufacture was relatively unique among the entire Roman economy. The Roman economy was largely slave-driven.
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Ceramics manufacture itself was technologically limited. The vast majority of what went into creating a pot, for example, was human hands, the Kiln was really the largest technical instrument. As a consequence, there wasn’t continuous iterative improvement at voracious scales as is characteristic of Capitalism.
I would classify it closer to a large version of manufacturing workers, but certainly could have expanded into Capitalism had the Roman society at large developed similar structures, giving rise to a dominant bourgeois class and the abolition of slave labor in favor of wage labor proletarians. The context of the entire economy is critical.
I think I answered the differences between paying people in general and Capitalism specifically, but I also recommend Engels’ Principles of Communism, the first few pages go over what makes Capitalism distinct from pre-Capitalist economic formations.
I was asking to clarify, because it sounded like your definition of capitalism was something like ‘uses industrial machinery to allow for unskilled work.’ By that definition, I agree that by definition capitalism didn’t exist till after the industrial revolution, since industrial machinery didn’t exist yet. But I disagree that capitalism requires industrial machinery.
That’s not quite my definition. In order for Private Property to become the dominant aspect of society, technological advancements needed to be made to allow a small class of people to dominate society through ownership of the Means of Production. Marx explains it quite simply here:
The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
Feudalism also employed some industrial machinery (water wheels for milling grain is one example). But the primary energy source was still muscle power, the primary product was agricultural produce, and the workers were peasants tied to the land, not mobile wage workers producing consumer goods.
Marxists consider these important distinctions that define entire historical periods, even if they’re still both examples of class society.
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Also, the surplus in nearly all the periods of ancient Rome, was still largely an agrarian surplus, extracted either from slaves, or from feudal workers / colonates in the territories outside the city.
The city / empire survived not by its own products and a commodity-producing economy, but by feeding an agrarian surplus off its many colonies.
Free market trade has existed and changed shape throughout most of human history. Advice with how to deal with it is in the Old Testament. how often or consistent it revolved around a common currency is/was constantly changing, though
For most of human history (tribal / pre-agricultural societies), markets were rare and mostly unecessary. Small groups of people survived by foraging / hunting for food and sharing it among themselves. Usually elders, or some type of communal decision-making process was how food was distributed. Sharing, not trade, was the distribution system.
You can have some trade in tribal / feudal societies, but it isn’t the most common way that goods are distributed.
I’m just saying that, one of the oldest known written texts, waaay before than when the old testament was written, is a customer complaint where they mention copper coins as currency. We don’t know how common copper coins were, but saying that capital based societies are “young” is not correct either.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir
Capital and money are not exactly the same thing. Capital is money used to make more money through (1) ownership of the means of production, (2) wage labor, and (3) economic rent & fincancialization.
Currency isn’t Capitalism, though. Capitalism has currency, but not all systems with currency are Capitalist.
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I think you’ll also find that the upvote to downvote ratio is very positive, few people are commenting expressly to agree with me, while those who disagree feel compelled to respond. Further, there is a strain of liberal economics that believes Capitalism is the natural end result, the Thatcherite “there is no alternative.”
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My point is that the response you pointed at with people pushing back is a minority of those who chose to engage with the post, though a majority of those commenting. Using the presense of the comments in the context of them being the minority of responses I think doesn’t actually point to people not understanding the difference between Capitalism and commerce, IMO.
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Do you believe that the average person saying “capitalism is human nature” uses your definition of capitalism? Or that they are just vaguely reference something that they don’t really want to argue?
If they’re mis-using terms why should they not be corrected? Capitalism isn’t “trade” by any acceptable definition. Ppl should be educated and enlightened, not dumbed down to.
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I don’t see anyone here discouraging communication, and we’ve provided links that should help ppl get past the misdefinitions.
I have no way of knowing the average, but without doubt there is a large school of economic thought that believes we have arrived at the “most optimal” form of society. It’s the whole notion behind “there is no alternative.” These people fully acknowledge Capitalism as it truly exists, not as commerce, but believe it to be all there can be.
Some do confuse Capitalism for Commerce, but that’s a much weaker argument and thus less interesting to debunk, pretty much no academic uses those terms as such. Yet, these very same academics will claim Capitalism is itself Human Nature as it in their eyes epitomizes the ability to trade, which earlier societies did not in the same capacity.
This is a very interesting thread. Thanks.
When I think of the statement “capitalism is human nature”, my interpretation is more along the lines of:
If you create human society and let it evolve in an un-constrained manner, there is a large probability that you will at some point pass through a period of capitalism.
This is not about it being “optimal for society” but is rather a meta-stable state that is easy to arrive at given a simple set of rules and initial conditions. “Human nature” refers to those rules and initial conditions. It doesn’t mean that it is a good thing, it is not unavoidable, and it is not likely to represent a global optimum or the final point in human society’s evolution.
I’m not saying that I think that this is the general interpretation. It is just how I interpret it.
You’re 90% of the way to the Marxist concept of Historical Materialism, actually. Have you studied it prior to writing this?
Edit: also, good work on Mander! I don’t participate in it much, but it’s a very cool concept. I love specialized instances, and think that that’s the true benefit of Lemmy as a platform, not endlessly making large general instances in a race to best replicate Reddit.
My brain instinctively thought the hand being stopped was Thatcher’s.
Didn’t put that together, that would be really funny!
The solution to ignorance is education, not humouring the ignorant. People need to have a basic understanding of the world around them if they are to improve it in any manner. Unfortunately, that involves learning some technical terms. Yes, some people will be confused, but realising that you are confused is the first step in learning something new.
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One plus one is two, not three or twenty six. If a bunch of people go around thinking that one plus one is three, that has no effect on reality. Such people must be educated as necessary, yes, but we should not avoid speaking the truth out of fear of confusing them.
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Oh no, I understood what you meant. But I feel that OP’s approach is correct. They used the words correctly, so that those who already know the meanings can understand what they are saying. Some people did not know what ‘capitalism’ meant, so they critiqued the meme based on their own understandings. Then OP was able to explain to them the correct meaning.
Returning to my analogy, let us say someone is teaching that 2 + 2 = 4. They can say, ‘you already know that 1 + 1 = 2, now multiply both sides by 2’. If a student does not know that 1 + 1 = 2, they can then explain it.
A meme can have only so much text. If they had to derive everything from first principles each time, we would get nowhere.
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Where does 500 years come from? Capitalism goes back at least 3000 years, right?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir
I answered more in-depth in this comment, but trade is not Capitalism itself. Rather, Capitalism as a system is merely one of the many Modes of Production based on trade. Capitalism emerged specifically alongside the Industrial Revolution, the system of workers selling their labor-power to large Capital Owners competing in commodity production could only arise with advancements in productive technology such as the Steam Engine.
Prior to the rise of Capitalism, various pre-Capitalist forms of production existed, such as small manufacturing workers who used their tools to make a complete good to sell, or the guild system, but these were never capable of giving rise to the vast system of accumulation the Capitalist system created through the
M-C-M’ circuit
Where M is an initial sum of money, C a number of commoditied sold at value, and M’ the larger sum of money gained from selling the commodities.
Thanks, well said
No problem!
Communism is actually human nature. Think about before the human era when everyone was hunter gatherers working together and sharing was what kept everyone alive. There was no currency or concept of ownership.
I recommend this thread, though maybe don’t bother going down the chain that far as it becomes a stalemate.
Essentially, you’re correct in that tribal societies were very communistic, but not Communist. Marxists call this “primitive communism,” as a distinguishing factor from Communism, a highly industrialized and global society emerging from Socialism.
The truth is, all modes of production are “human nature.” Human nature, after all, is malleable, and is largely determined by which mode of production humanity finds itself in. Each mode of production turns into another due to human nature, Capitalism is merely also human nature, just like feudalism, tribal societies, as is Socialism and eventually Communism.
But is human nature not more acutely observed within the view of coercion, control and oppression? Marx says himself that the human history is defined by class wars between the haves and the have nots, with or without capitalism we will have a system that expresses control and oppression.
Marx states that all hitherto existing history is the history of Class Struggles. In analyzing tribal societies, he did so as they did indeed lack class, money, and a state, but were distinctly not “Communist” as production was low, and life relatively harsh and brutal. Communism as a mode of production is the classless society of the future, the end of class struggle. There will be new contradictions and new changes, most likely, but class as a concept is abolished through a global, publicly owned and planned industrial economy, in Marx’s analysis.
This is where i struggle agreeing with Marx, i find him to be selectively pragmatic and idealistic whenever the former or latter is convenient.
He acknowledges human nature is to oppress or be oppressed, as even in prehistoric human groups leaders would have formed and social rules enforced, we can assume this from our experiences in social groups. Yet does not believe that communism would lead to centralised oppression despite his historical studies, to me its either he chooses to ignore this factor or people misinterpret his writing and they cannot be applied in a post industrial capitalism society.
Marx doesn’t acknowledge “human nature is to oppress or be oppressed,” though. Marx builds the economic analysis of class society and charts how it will eventually erase its own foundations. Primitive communistic societies did not usually have classes, as they didn’t have an economic basis for it.
Communism would be centralized, but it would also be democratized.
If you define economics as have and have-not, they obviously had economics. Who are he to tell us that bartering didn’t happen on any scale within a tribe of cro magnom.
I think the point being is that economics is a large scale class system with fairly complex structures. There’s always been have and have-nots. Just look at a pride of lions on how they distribute the feeding based upon ranks within the pride. It’s not economics, but it’s s class based system with distributed means (i.e access to food).
So maybe all of nature is oppress or being oppressed in a way. We just industrialised it.
Nobody defines economics as “have or have nots” or denies that trade existed a long, long time ago. I think you’re missing the point of class society and how that plays in economics, but isn’t all-encompassing of it.
It isn’t about oppression or being oppressed.
Interesting take, thank you for your opinion.
Peter Kropotkin comes flying down from the sky in a cape:
“Mutual aid is human nature and a factor of evolution”
I’d say it depends more on the Mode of Production. Early humanity found it integral to survive, and many groups even today rely on Mutual Aid to continue. However, it isn’t a hard requirement across all classes in society, yet these class formations are also “human nature,” just as the conditions to eventually abolish class society are “human nature” as well.
Yes I believe that human nature is to be fluid and shaped largely by one’s experiences. I just wanted play with the OP meme. However, mutual aid is 100% absolutely a factor in evolution, especially that of social species like ours. Not the only factor obviously, but a large and defining factor.
Sure, humanity’s cooperation has been a key factor for how we’ve evolved. So has the part played by labor in the transition from ape to man. I wasn’t really denying Mutual Aid as important, more trying to provide a multi-sided understanding of it as its role in human development even today, and how it might play a role in the future.
Yeah I don’t think we disagree at all.
I don’t think the Marxist definition of capitalism lines up with the colloquial definition. Colloquially, it’s thought of as systems in which money is exchanged for goods and services. As opposed to communism, where it is not. (These are both oversimplified)
When people say capitalism has been around for thousands of years, what they mean is the colloquial definition. Redefining their terms with the Marxist version doesn’t address their actual point.
The “colloquial definition” isn’t the colloquial definition, though. Even in liberal academia, it’s the same as the Marxist conception. Using currency for trade isn’t Capitalism, not even in Libertarian theory.
When you survey people on the street, would they use that definition? English isn’t a prescriptive language, the definition is what people use it as.
I don’t survey people on the street, but they likely would be closer to the definition accepted in academia than the mere buying and selling of goods.
I’ll be honest, I don’t really know what you’re arguing for, here. Capitalism as a term has a very useful and descriptive definition as used by Marx and liberal academics alike. Trying to use Capitalism to refer to concepts like commerce that already have their own words just weakens understanding, rather than strengthening it.
I don’t survey people on the street, but they likely would be closer to the definition accepted in academia than the mere buying and selling of goods.
I think that’s optimistic. The average persons understanding of these concepts is very limited. They’d most likely call ancient Rome “capitalist”, because “they’re not communist”.
That’s the average persons understanding. There’s capitalism and there’s communism, and communism is when you own nothing and everyone is poor and capitalism is everything not-communism. It’s deeply disappointing but that’s what you’re up against.
So when an intellectual person says “capitalism is human nature”, it means something completely different from when an average person says it. To both the 400-years argument won’t make sense.
An intellectual will argue that it naturally came about, so it must be human nature for it to arise so prominently. An average person will laugh in your face “because Rome wasn’t communist”. Neither is correct in their own way, but they’re also not going to be convinced by the 400 years argument. One doesn’t believe you, the other doesn’t care.
Historical examples of proto-socialism or communal living would be a stronger counterpoint imo. Not because it’s more correct in a theoretical sense, but because it more directly challenges the core of the opposing sides argument.
Most people wouldn’t call feudalism “Capitalism” either. It isn’t a stretch to see the slave-driven society in Rome as non-Capitalist as well. I don’t see it as that optimistic, if I’m being honest.
The reason I don’t directly bring up tribal societies as more fitting for “human nature” is that all Modes of Production have been a result of “human nature” as it historically shifts from one Mode of Production to another.
I think you’d be surprised how poor the general state of education is… I think it’s also in part why left-wing politicians lately are failing to get traction with the lower-educated. They speak in a way that doesn’t resonate, and that’s in part because they’re working with different assumptions and definitions.
It’s what people like Trump do understand very well, he speaks like they speak to each other. As a result, even if they don’t fully follow along, it makes more sense to them.
I think education is certainly poor, but the ability for the Working Class to grasp the essense of Capitalism is quite easy, as we all work within the boundaries of it.
This rings true.
When someone says capitalism is human nature, I don’t think they mean that industrial automation allowing unskilled workers is human nature. So they’re using a different meaning of capitalism. To address their concern, you would show counter examples of large groups of people working together for a common good rather than their own enrichment. Rather than just saying they’re using the word wrong.
I answered this in this comment.
Do you think you can have effective communism with only self interested parties? That was my take away from your comment, that you can get communism as a logical extension of greedy motives?
Sure? I don’t really see why not, nor is that an accurate view of humanity anyways.
The reason why this “colloquial definition” is this way is so that capitalists can convince the masses that capitalism is natural “because it has always existed” by claiming that antique slave society, feudalism and even late hunter gatherer society were actually capitalist. This isn’t a neutral definition that is as valid as the other, it is a lie crafted for propaganda purposes and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Language changes over time, and technical words are often misunderstood. It is definitely unfortunate, but I don’t think it is some sort of conspiracy.
Control of language and ideas is a critical part of cultural hegemony:
In Marxist philosophy, cultural hegemony is the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of that society (the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores) so that their imposed, ruling-class world view becomes the accepted cultural norm; the universally valid dominant ideology, which justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.
If you live in the USA, you’ve probably already seen this a dozen times in your lifetime: Anti-unionism becomes “Right to work”, colonized peoples become “terrorists”, social support becomes “Welfare mothers”, immigrants become “illegal aliens”, petit bourgeiosie and the working class gets confused into “middle class”.
You can call these campaigns to miseducate conspiracies if you like, but they enter the public lexicon via mass inundation from capitalist media and educational institutions.
Also just thought of this pertinent quote by William Casey, the CIA director during the 1980s:
We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.
You guys would have a very bad time in the 1500s let’s be real
I think the vast majority of people would. What do you mean by “you guys?”
What came before capitalism was even uglier, yet reflects our nature as a species just the same.
It’s more that what is “human nature” is malleable, and is ultimately determined by the systems humans find themselves in, and ultimately propels change to new modes of production. Feudalism gave birth to Capitalism.
Someone from the 1500s would have a horrible time in the 21st century.
What kind of quality-of-life do you think modern day subsistence farmers and hunter-gatherers enjoy? How critical has English standard literacy, modern mathematics, and digital technology sophistication become for survival?
Like, you’re thinking as a settler-colonialist living a middle-class lifestyle in the modern moment. You’re not thinking as a denizen of Hispanula prior to the Columbian exchange, where the primary past times were fishing, frolicking, and fucking. Move that guy up to the modern era in the highest quality of life countries in the world and they just become homeless illegal immigrants.
If I have a choice to live in the 16th century or the 21st century, and I know I’m going to be born in Haiti… fuck the 21st century, that shit sucks.
My friend what do you think Haiti was like in the 16th century?
Crack open a copy of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History” and find out. He quotes the original Columbian explorers in how they found the native population. The conditions were downright utopian according to the Spanish. Their response to this paradise was to rape and plunder it.
And the raping and plundering never stopped, even 500 years later.
Wrong, capitalism exist since exist money and greedy people which govern countries, since Pharaons and Kings, since the concept of property.
Answered here. Commerce isn’t Capitalism, and neither is small manufacture.
I don’t speak about small manufacture and commerce, capitalism is only another name of feudalism, where a small minority is the owner of the most part of the resources of a population and even of the population itself. This is the situation which is the same since thousends of years, it’s irrelevant how we call it, it’s always the same pyramid scam.
You’re using Capitalism as a catch-all term for Class Society. Different forms of Class Society have existed for thousands of years, but Capitalism itself is relatively new.
As said, only the name, not the system, it’s irrelevant if they are pharaos, kings, clerics, or like today billonairs, big corporations and banks.
It’s extremely relevant, because the manner of production is entirely different. In feudalism, as an example, production was largely agricultural, while serfs tilled their parcel of land and produced most of what they consumed for themselves. They didn’t compete in markets, as an example, and specialization was relatively limited outside of handicraftsmen.
If you fail to accurately analyze the differences between modes of production, you fail to find meaningful conclusions. Oak trees aren’t penguins, even though both are living things.
capitalism is only another name of feudalism,
There are fundamental differences between different production systems that we Marxists think are important enough to warrant distinction, even if they’re both instances of class societies.
I have a feeling you’d digest something better in video:
Paul Cockshott - Feudal economics
Watch that and them get back to me.
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Classic vapid comment.
Sure?
Maybe not have him be represented as a genocidal facist?
I stole the meme, so 🤷
Just wrote the text.
He got better cause he had sex with a bug.
Isn’t capitalism itself not only like 100-150 years old?
It really arose during the Industrial Revolution, around 1760. Imperialism, the final stage of Capitalism, began towards the end of the 19th century.
So how is 19th century imperialism different from Roman imperial expansion or Greek colonialism in antiquity for example? Or the various attempts to resurrect the Roman Empire by basically everyone? Why don’t we call Roman emperors or Alexander the Great or even Sigismund imperialists? Honest question here, I’m not a historian or anything.
First, it really doesn’t matter what we call each system, you can call the older Roman expansionism “Imperialism” and you aren’t wrong. What matters specifically is Capitalism as it turns towards Imperialism. We can call it “Capitalist Imperialism” for the sake of clarity, and what’s important about it specifically is how it relates to Capitalism.
Capitalist Imperialism largely occurs when a Capitalist nation develops enough to where the economy is dominated by large trusts, rather than small competing factories, when bank Capital and Industrial Capital merge into “Financial Capital,” and the only way to continue to compete is to expand outward into foreign markets, essentially where outsourcing labor to the Global South from the Global North occured. This results in a “division of the world among the largest powers,” and was the ultimate cause of World War I and World War II.
Colonialism is similar, but wasn’t impelled by this system of Capitalism. The necessary distinction is the rise of industrial production and export of Capital to the Global South.
If you want to read more, I recommend Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Lenin’s analysis of Imperialism picked up where Marx left off, as Marx had died before he could truly observe Imperialism. Imperialism is actually the reason why Communist revolution never came to the Global North, like Marx predicted, as Imperialism creates a system of bribery for the domestic proletariat and large armies for maintaining this system.
Instead, it came to nations in the Global South, which brought a whole host of questions on how to achieve a post-Capitalist system in countries that were by and large underdeveloped, with large proportions of workers belonging to the peasantry and other non-proletarian classes.
Imperialism can occur in any class society. In its most general definition, it means the theft of land, labor, and resources of a weaker country to feed a stronger one. So we do call it “Roman imperialism”:
The surplus here is an agricultural one.
Imperialism takes a different shape under capitalism, where instead of a landed aristocracy / slave-owning class doing the colonizing, its finance capitalists in the imperial core exporting production to low-wage / underdeveloped countries to produce commodities cheaply.
And they say that marxism is outdated lol
Somewhere between every man (and woman) for her (him) self and a general safety net for all the truth lies. And it’s probably closer to the safety net. There’s an awful lot of last stupid people, a few hardworking smart and educated people, lots of hardworking smart people and a few handful of rich assholes. Somehow we’re all trapped in this flying ball of dirt.
One day we’ll all be hardworking, smart, educated, and have our needs all met, and we won’t be trapped, either.
