Welcome to todays episode of criticizing things you haven’t read:
and won’t read. lol
Liberal doomerism based on imaginary restrictions, how new.
it’s not just imaginary, humans thrived of mutual cooperation for tens of thousands of years while capitalism has only existed for a few hundred, but somehow that it’s became the default position of everyone.
Definitions of “capitalism” are variable but I think it’s totally inaccurate to say that it’s only existed for a few hundred years. You look at ancient Roman/Greek society, they have privately owned businesses with shareholder type structures. One of the key influences on Western legal systems today (something hinted at by half our legal terms being in Latin). Something similar about the economic structure can be said about many historical empires, older than a few hundred years. Where does the line get drawn on what’s “capitalism” or “capitalism-like” vs. what’s not. The basic idea of monopolizing control over production etc. in order to privately benefit, is not particularly hard for people to arrive at. Heck, it goes hand in hand with “empire”, because when you have a structure based on elevating a huge number of people against a huge number of other people, it’s not a stretch to have the same structure occurring within the society, because you already have one type of inequality normalized.
that’s very true. capitalism has changed throughout the centuries and the version that we have now is significantly different than how it existed in the past.
when i use the words like capitalism or liberalism i’m referring to their present day incarnations because that’s how the world uses them; but there’s definitely a disconnect between westerners and the rest of the world. the western world (americans in particular) use the centuries old definitions of both words that conflates capitalism and liberalism together; but the present day situation is very different and those old definitions are incapable of lending themselves to political analysis of the modern day world because of these old definitions.
in other words: liberalism was the leftist movement that could “liberate” the world from its monarchical hegemony and capitalism was its most dominant political theory. liberalism slowly became the world’s hegemony, but now it’s become neoliberalism and leftism now stands in opposition to neoliberal hegemony.
“thriving on mutual cooperation” speaks to time long before the ancient greeks or romans. recognizable modern humanity (ie toolmaking, painting, sculptures, religion, trade, etc.) has existed for roughly 70 thousand years and the existence of the greeks, romans, or even capitalism is roughly less than 6,000 years old. in other words capitalism has existed for roughly less than 8% of humanity’s history and even then, the version of capitalism practiced back then was very different than the version we practice now.
I wouldn’t call pre-capitalist society “thriving on mutual cooperation” and neither would Marx. It was different, yeah, but ultimately still exploitative for most people. Consider that Tsarist Russia was still largely pre-capitalist (in the transition to being a capitalist economy) and that this fact led to a lot of debate among socialist and communist thinkers during the leadup to the Russian Revolution because Marx himself believed that Capitalism was a necessary stepping stone to Communism. But yet, people still felt conditions were bad enough that they revolted, killed everyone in charge, and instituted socialism. Even going back to the bronze age shit was pretty brutal. Read about how kings dealt with disobedience back then and it would make anyone today seem like a saint.
mutual cooperation for tens of thousands of years speaks to the human prehistory; long before tsarist russia was a thing.
also the type of capitalism that existed during feudalism/serfdom is not the same as the one we have now; it wasn’t the dominant hegemony at the time.
I mean, the bronze age took place during class society, and it wasn’t even that long ago compared to the time anatomical humans have existed. As for whether past cruelty would make modern people look like saints. If we’re talking about Joe right across the street or something, sure, why not. But we have had non stop bombings, coups, invasions, sanctions and so on for a while, I consider modern capitalists to be more cruel as a class than many kings of old.
They said “tens of thousands of years” and you thought that meant two centuries before the Russian Revolution. I think you’ve mistaken dominant narratives of history as a European discipline with what has actually happened in the past. Yes, there are very many accounts of hierarchal violence, but that isn’t descriptive of how human beings behave. Most of what we’ve built has come from cooperation (think about how dependent the internet infrastructure is on free labour and cooperation) and the greatest obstacle we’ve faced as our communities grow is the exploitation that arises from patriarchal hierarchies. Exploitation is the site of those brutalities youre referring to.
Marx also wasn’t a historian, and wasn’t very knowledgeable about societies outside of Europe at all. That isn’t something we can fault him for as though it was his responsibility, but it is something you need to take into account if you’re going to engage with this progressive history model (Hegel didn’t know about’em either).
Kathleen Duval makes an interesting argument in Native Nations that we have evidence that indigenous Americans, in particular those who lived in relation to the Cahokia (Mississippian) civilisation, intentionally altered the trajectory of their social organization in response to this same exploitation. This isn’t to say hierarchy never existed again, though certainly in a less stratified way than the European settlers that arrived a couple centuries later, but it does teach us that humans do not want to live that way, which means they do not have to.
Yes. I am pointing that out. That is the imaginary thing.
“Somehow,” looks behind us at five centuries of European settler-colonialism.
“Everyone,” looks ahead at the millions of people who defy hegemonically enforced constructions of human nature despite the overwhelming power those systems possess.
Capitalism doesn’t work, and it’s for the same reason.
It used to be human nature. Nowadays it’s nothing more than social engineering that teaches us what is up is down and what isn’t, is.
Observing humans in capitalism and assuming greed is just human nature is like observing humans on the Titanic and assuming drowning is human nature.
It’s just rejecting your responsibility in the way you behave. “It’s not me, it’s the nature”
Anyone ever commenting “human nature” should be forced to explain how: (a) some behavior is an inevitable result of brain physiology, and, (b) why examples of people who don’t exhibit that behavior exist. The absence of those explanations disprove like 95%+ of “human nature” arguments. Like, “oh, religion is human nature, we must believe in a higher power because we crave meaning” - which part of the brain mandates that thought, and why do atheists and agnostics exist then?
Tbf religion scholars believe we do tend towards religious behavior, which isn’t to say humans must be religious or believe in the supernatural, but patriotism is analogous to civil religion, and fandoms can also be very similar to religious communities.
I believe skeptics have always existed, even Cicero included skeptics when writing about Roman religion before the Common Era, but we engage in behaviors that are analogous to religious behavior regardless of our beliefs, so from that point of view our nature includes worship, imo.
One has to wonder how capitalism arose, if the traits which gave rise to it aren’t part of human nature.
Capitalism arose from European feudalism. Which in turn arose from Christianity. Which in turn became mandated by the Roman Empire right before it totally coincidentally collapsed. The decisions behind this progression were limited to a tiny subset of the local human population, the ruling class which back then was basically seen as a completely different (superior) race compared to the commoners and peasants, to the point they chose to breed with their own relatives instead of polluting their blood with that of the people below them. Therefore, they absolutely did not represent the wishes of most humans at the time and certainly did not represent the “nature” of most humans, just the ones most corrupted by power and exceptionalism in a system they created specifically to keep themselves in power and separate from the masses. They’re not human nature, they’re the societal cancer that actively rejected and suppressed real human nature.
So the ruling class, with all the wealth and power and ability to do whatever they wanted acted against their own natures to create a system which would create in humans the desire to hoard wealth and power?
Yes. When your rule is based on seizing wealth and power you’ll keep doing that perpetually so you don’t lose your place in the ruling class. The fact that they did that is more consistent with the Marxist notion that human “nature” is shaped by the material conditions they’re born into.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of peasants of that time fully accepted and even embraced their position due to all the religious brainwashing. Most had no real aspirations of power (supposedly despite their nature to desire power) because they’ve been taught their whole life that it’s better for that to be taken care of by someone else that “God” supposedly chose. If anything, our uncritical acceptance of our place within capitalism is closer to what the serfs thought.
So then it’s not capitalism which causes in humans the desire to hoard wealth and power?
Any system predicated on obtaining as much wealth or power as possible will see people fixating on that and eventually divorcing the wealth/power itself from the material conditions that they arose from. Why do you think so many corporations turn into death spirals where they try to increase profits at all costs, abandoning their actual products and customers, and then act all shocked when they inevetably go bankrupt due to no longer having a customer base because they alienated everyone with their shitty profit oriented practices? The only way to solve this is to change the system people live under.
If it’s not in human nature to hoard wealth and power, then how do systems arise which are predicated on obtaining as much wealth or power as possible?
You know that humans lived in communal societies for a long fuckin time before all the bullshit we know today, right?
Human nature is not greed. That’s capitalism.
Humans were constrained by their material conditions. Now that those material conditions have changed, their behaviors have changed to match. This is not a fixed state of affairs. Humans continue to transition between stages just like every other living being.
Greed is as much a part of modern human nature as fear and love. And it is the product of a social condition that rewards growth, punishes disobedience, and requires a larger community to reproduce itself. It is a consequence of social conditioning executed iteratively from parent to child. And a consequence of statistical survival and prosperity played out over populations.
What defines human action is not the basic libidinal impulse, but the interplay between people and their environments over lifetimes and generations. That’s not socialism or capitalism at its root. Socialism and capitalism are simply fruits grown from the post-industrial branches of the tree of human history.
Greed isn’t inescapably “human nature”, but results from it under some basic conditions. The nature of enjoyment and suffering means the pursuit of enjoyment and avoidance of suffering as a biological imperative. Desperation, lack of cultural/learned empathy, cultural normalization of disparity, etc., can quickly allow unchecked greed. The same thing, with different conditions, can be said for… not sure there’s a single word for it, but behavior motivated by empathy promoting equality and sharing and so on. The conditions actually kind of close to being the inverse of those for greed - some combination of not having desperation, having cultural/learned empathy, cultural normalization of economic equality, etc. Both types of thinking are just basically pro-social or anti-social thought with regard to material/economic gain, depending on what influences individual thinking.
Mesopotamians tracked agricultural debt on clay tablets in 3000 BC
Per David Graeber in “Debt: The First 5000 Years”, people used to record debt with “Tally Sticks”. You’d notch the debt you owed at the end of a branch. Then you’d bend it in half. Creditor would get one end. Debtor the other. When you wanted to call in your debt, you’d hold the sticks up together to confirm they matched and that’s what was owed. This practice goes back to the Paleolithic Era.
Incidentally, the Tally Stick would often be longer on the creditor’s end. This was the stock of the stick and thus designated its recipient the “stock holder”.
But assignment and collection of debts isn’t the same thing as assignment and collection of rents and interest, which is at the center of the capitalist economic system.
Debt and capitalism are not the same thing if that’s what you’re insinuating. Markets are not a feature of capitalism either, they are simply tools for economic control.
Yeah of course, this meme is meant to be making fun of the idea that “human nature” (whatever that may be lol) in any way disproves communist or anticapitalist theory
You’re right that the best arguments against Marxism are the falsity and over-simplification of economic determinism, and the falsity and over-simplification of the labour theory of value.
But have humans have never had a non-hierarchical large scaled society?
Sure, but we freely traded with each other.
No matter how many wish communism to work and devote themselves to it, it will fail. They can hold back agorism indefinitely by great effort, but when they let go, the ‘flow’ or ‘Invisible Hand’ or ‘tides of history’ or ‘profit incentive’ or ‘doing what comes naturally’ or ‘spontaneity’ will carry society inexorably closer to the pure agora.
This is a deeply idealist view of production. There is no “invisible hand,” no universal Spirit of Hegel. Trade and industrialized production gives way to centralization and the death of competition, and it makes more and more sense economically to plan production and collectivize it as this competition dies out of itself. Communists aren’t “holding back” trade, trade naturally gives way to the very structures that compel communism and kill off trade.
Human nature on its deathbed when it realizes it forgot to account for Karl Marx
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My opinions about it are obviously great actually thanks
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Even if you assume human nature is greed, it’s also human nature to have their babies eaten by wolves but I don’t see anyone suggesting we should center our society on baby tossin’ wolf pits.
Killing people who don’t worship the same Gods as you, taking slaves from the neighboring city state, and having a harem of
sex slaves“wives” are all “human nature” that have all been done since before we had the technology to record them all the way up to today. Should those be tolerated in modern society too? Hell no.Well that’s WHERE youre wrong buddy. Wolf pits are the last GREAT thang ABOUT this cuntry and I won’t HAVE no liburels taking them!
Edit: capitalized more words.
It’s in Human Nature to be violent, which I why I’ve made sure to arm my kindergarten class with knives. Because otherwise I would not be accounting for Human Nature.
(note: this is sarcastic, I did not arm a kindergarten class with knives)
you armed them with knives in a gun fight?!
They’re doing the best they can with a teacher’s salary
it bet we’ll get gun equity before we get healthcare, childcare, or educational equity. lol
(However I did give them hard plastic clubs shaped in the form of shovels)
Oh, you are being sarcastic? Wouldn’t have guessed
In some ancient text I read it talks about how the ancient Greeks had stopped wearing swords all the time for protection, but there were still some primitive areas where they did. Civilization reduces the necessity and the rate of return on individual violence it would seem.
Me when I take all napkins and salt shakers from every restaurant because apparently greed is just human nature
?
Common refrain from capitalism fans is that communism can never work because humans are inherently selfish/greedy as proven by their observation that humans are selfish and greedy in the system that rewards selfishness and greed.
OP is selfish and can’t imagine why people would want to be nice to one another.
Begging you to click on my profile this is meant to be a joke 😭
I think you need to go to HR for an hour long meeting about what jokes are.
I guess it gets understood a little different when it is not posted in explicitly communist spaces :/
even so. it isn’t a joke and more a reflection of what you think. at least that what it sounds like. don’t blame the audience for the way your joke is interpreted
Most people are interpreting it correctly, though.
I just don’t get how saying a statement you believe is wrong without any indication of it as a joke.
Seems more reminiscent to people who say something shitty, then when they get complaints say “it was a joke, bro”.
And I personally have no patience for that. Also, there is no punchline, it is just a BS quote.
