Gotta start them off young
Gotta start them off young
187 comments
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Also gotta remember about the Irish Potato Famine where the English just literally stood by and said "well yeah that's just how it is" due to "free market" reasons. (In fact, they made everything worse by demanding that Ireland continue to export wheat)
The Irish Potato Famine killed approximately 1 million people due to "free market above all" ideology.
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Don't forget the, "no, you can't grow what you used to eat, you have to grow potatoes" part.
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The worst part is they could and did grow what they used to eat. It just was packed off to England while the Irish starved as their own potato crops (which they could afford to eat) failed.
There was no famine. It was a deliberate and political choice to let the people who grew the crops starve.
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I think the point is more that there's a ton of focus on the evils on non-capitalist systems, but no mention of capitalist evils
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I hate how tankie has become a pejorative used by low information posters for anyone left of center.
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What the fuck is wrong with capitalists that they act like they didn’t kill and enslave a whole bunch of people (and continue to) and instead are like but but communist famine!
Edit: Downvote me all you want liberals. I don’t support the USSR and never did. But western history is so full of shit - communism bad capitalism good! Meanwhile how many people has capitalism killed? How many millions?
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Because the basic understanding western plebs have of the holodomor have its roots in anti communist 1950s propaganda with all context removed.
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There are so many good arguments against capitalism, why make such a terrible one full of holes, lies, and fallacies?
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Hehe I hit a nerve with that one
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Not to undermine the argument, but capitalism did not start in 16th century England.
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Google says it's origins can be traced back that far. OP probably just counted that. What we call capitalism really started kinda alongside the industrial revolution late 17-1800s.
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I suppose you can try and pin this on the Dutch. But the economic practices of aggregating ownership around a legal business entity and organizing production towards the maximization of profit were quickly adopted by English shipping magnets from their Dutch peers.
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If you think of the first corporation as the start of capitalism the Dutch East India company started in 1602, so that would be 17th century Netherlands, not 16th century England. In any case, I think the obvious choice for a date is 18th century England (together with the Industrial Revolution). Of course, you can trace the origins back much earlier even to antiquity, but capitalism the idea to organise most economic activity around capital is in my understanding more recent.
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People usually treat as starting simultaneously with the industrial era. A better date range puts it earlier:
That’s an important and. Situating coal’s epoch-making capacities within class and colonial relations predating steampower’s dominance yields an alternative periodization. British-led industrialization unfolded through the linked processes of agricultural revolu- tion at home and abroad – providing the labor-power for industry by expelling labor from domestic agriculture and, in the case of the West Indian sugar colonies, channeling capital surpluses into industrial development (Brenner 1976; Blackburn 1998). The possi- bilities for the ‘prodigious development of the productive forces’ flowed through the relations of power, capital and nature forged in early capitalism.
[...]
The erasure of capitalism’s early-modern origins, and its extraordinary reshaping of global natures long before the steam engine, is therefore significant in our work to develop an effective radical politics around global warming … and far more than global warming alone! Ask any historian and she will tell you: how one periodizes history powerfully shapes the interpretation of events, and one’s choice of strategic relations. Start the clock in 1784, with James Watt’s rotary steam engine (Crutzen 2002a), and we have a very differ- ent view of history – and a very different view of modernity – than we do if we begin with the English and Dutch agricultural revolutions, with Columbus and the conquest of the Americas, with the first signs of an epochal transition in landscape transformation after 1450.
PDF Jason W. Moore (2017): The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis, The Journal of Peasant Studies http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1235036
(middle of the 15th century)
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Surely Rome wasn't a warmongering, genocidal, capitalist-colonialist society with the rich elite hoarding untold wealth and trading in slaves 1500 years earlier, right?
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The Roman mode of production wasn't capitalist exploitation of wage earners who sold their labor, but through their exploration of slaves in an agregarian system. There's some arguments to be made that capitalist systems start as early as 12th century Italy, but it becomes dominant in 1600s England and is able to radically transform that society.
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There's actually a lot of interesting recent work that points to wage labor being very prevalent in the Roman economy! The idea of slavery as the main driver of the production of the Roman economy is not nearly as popular now even amongst academics who take a 'primitivist' view of the Roman economy (ie that it resembled the customary economies around it more than later, early modern economies). Though, obviously, either way it had significant social influence and implications, and was far from economically inconsequential.
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That really does not apply to Rome. There was some private industry and profit, but at the end of the day, it was all about enriching the empire and giving the people bread and circuses to keep them quiet. Every Roman citizen got fed. Which is pretty anti-capitalistic.
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There was some private industry and profit, but at the end of the day, it was all about enriching the empire and giving the people bread and circuses to keep them quiet.
Less than you might think! The Imperial state apparatus was actually very skeletal compared to what we think of it, at least during the height of the Empire. We're talking entire provinces with only a few dozen actual imperial officials to manage it, most of whom brought their own private staffs. Senators were formally barred from large-scale commerce, but they got around this by investing their money with non-office-holding individuals to engage in business on an obscene scale. Most of the resources moving around were moved by private trade, and at immense profit. Only a few resources were subject to imperial monopolies or had widespread imperial control; everyone else was playing a more-or-less recognizable hustle of commerce - buy or lease cheap, produce at low cost, sell at high profit.
Every Roman citizen got fed. Which is pretty anti-capitalistic.
Not even close, I'm afraid! Even in the city of Rome itself, and it was only in the city itself where the grain dole was in effect, it was limited to a certain number of citizens, and most of it was sold subsidized by the state rather than free. Those citizens who received the grain dole, furthermore, were not selected out of the poorest of the poor - it was largely the established working families - semiskilled workers, artisans. small merchants and the like, who might be expected to have times of hardship but not be in constant danger of starvation - it was a political subsidy to these people, who still had some social pull and connections in the city but were not integrated enough into the power structures to have a firm interest in sustaining it, to keep them from calling for anything dangerous, like more democracy!
The ultra-impoverished largely were left to the issue of charity and political patronage (which was big in Rome), and starved about as much as any impoverished pre-modern group. Maybe a little less, considering votes were almost literally bought long after voting ceased to be meaningful. One supposes that's a bit more money than most would have.
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and giving the people bread and circuses to keep them quiet. Every Roman citizen got fed.
Fed and entertained.
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Since @PugJesus@lemmy.world seems to be the expert in all things Roman, I'd be interested in seeing their take. Seems to me from what I've read that Rome was capitalist as hell and that was a major reason for expansion.
The notion that they gave out "bread and circuses" somehow made them other than that seems pretty facile. The bread and circuses was usually a quid-pro-quo to the colleges for their votes. There were very, very rich civilians and dirt poor nobles, and that doesn't seem to happen in an inheritance feudalism very often. Funding an army as a general and taking the wealth it conquered seems about as capitalist as you can imagine. Yah, you had to wait for an appointment as a governor for the areas you conquered, but that was usually just a matter of form.
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Rome wasn't capitalist.
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Rome was like that already when it was just a town, some argue that is one of the reasons why it became a
bullysuperpower.I enjoyed this insight into that mentality: youtube/P3IIRiSTc3g.
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It's a good thing there were no genocides, slave grades, and constant wars before capitalism. Pheww
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Scale. It's about scale. Capitalism gave the economic incentive to take these historical evils and industrialize them to a scale not even imaginable before. A scale so large that even you, today, with the world at your fingertips are unable to comprehend, evidenced by the fact that you are currently failing to comprehend it.
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Kings sending Conquistadors was not capitalism. Or if it was then the entire middle ages was also Capitalism. Capitalism did plenty of bad shit without covering for the authoritarian sanctioned missions of the 1500s.
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No, everything bad that happens is capatalism.
capitalism = evil therefore evil = capitalism
It's just basic maths.
ITT: people who are comfortable with conflating ideas and labels and ignoring historical context so that they can advertise their ideological conformity with the prevailing community narrative.
Also, all the whoosh. Just all of it.
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That's not basic math, that's just wrong and is the inverse fallacy
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Somebody let Spain know they're off the hook for all the colonizing, slavery and genocide since they hadn't invented capitalism yet!
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16th century England wasn't even capitalist. It was mercantilist-- strong central control over a zero-sum economic system focusing primarily on lopsided international trade as the means of building wealth.
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It was mercantilist-- strong central control over a zero-sum economic system
It became mercantilist when the English, French, and Spanish colonial empires began to abut one another, and state actors identified stateless trade as a threat to state sovereignty. But the original process of chartering ships for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade came out of the private financing system pioneered by the Dutch and rapidly adopted across Western Europe.
Capitalist expansion was what allowed the English piracy fleets to leapfrog the originally better-financed and better-equipped Spanish state navy. While the Aztec gold that Spain brought home devalued their currency and destroyed their economy, the Dutch/English/French system of reinvestment and economic expansion swelled their capital stock by continuously circulating the specie, commodities, and chattel slaves that would make Trans-Atlantic trade so lucrative.
Mercantilism was a step backwards, inhibiting economic growth in the colonies, that colonial powers at home deliberately imposed on those territories as a means of preventing colonial governments from getting rich enough to revolt. And the economic theories of Adam Smith were transgressive in large part because they embraced domestic industrialization and economic expansion as a form of political rebellion.
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guys, i think human society is just innately evil.
Like i hate to break it to you, but conquest and war has existed for a long ass fucking time.
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You aren't breaking anything with this basic view. Human society isn't monolithic; there have been, and will continue to be, many different forms of it.
Conquest and wars occur throughout time, but corporate firms, investment banks, stock markets, ownership and commodification of land, and other hallmarks of capitalism are more recent.
This lazy argument shows a defeated attitude that we should just accept things as they are, or worse, that it is in our nature to be terrible to one another, when history actually shows more evidence of cooperation than strife.
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but corporate firms, investment banks, stock markets, ownership and commodification of land, and other hallmarks of capitalism are more recent.
these are more recent, and the things they have done, are in fact, also more recent, HOWEVER. The point you entirely miss out on here, is that capitalism is ultimately just an extension of mankind. There is nothing inherently different from capitalism, to any prior system, in the context of abuse of human rights, or however you wish to frame that particular problem.
It's merely an extension of the problem that has plagued humanity throughout history. I don't think as the meme suggests, that this is a problem with capitalism, i think this is a problem with humanity, and capitalism just allows it to bleed through, as every other system throughout history has done, and every new system ever invented will continue to be vulnerable to. I do not think this is a problem that can be solved.
also to be fair, that meme is probably missing out on the hundreds of millions of human causalities that were had during the time period of the USSR. No system is immune to this problem.
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Not the whole of society. The problem with biology is that no matter how many nice people there are, there will always be someone willing to take advantage of them.
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yes, however. It only takes one to ruin them all.
It doesn't matter if only 0.00001% of the worlds population is inherently evil and strives to do the most evil deed possible, because that is still 80k people. If any one of those persons gets into a position of power anywhere all hell will break loose, if only for a fraction of a second in the grand scheme of total human history. These things tend to snowball.
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Not to undermine the argument, but plenty of other cultures without capitalism were horrific and did ridiculous wars for basically all of history.
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Scale. It's about scale. Capitalism gave the economic incentive to take these historical evils and industrialize them to a scale not even imaginable before. A scale so large that even you, today, with the world at your fingertips are unable to comprehend, evidenced by the fact that you are currently failing to comprehend it.
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The wars of Genghis Khan are said to have killed 10% of the population of the entire earth at the time. Is that enough scale?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_Empire
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“During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime's atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn't go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.
If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
Additionally, check out Willam Blum's "Killing Hope" (pdf link), and/or "America's Deadliest Export", by same (pdf link).
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Yeah, the citations of factual events are in the links below the quote. Check out Willam Blum's "Killing Hope" (pdf link) for more citations than you can shake a stick at.
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If you're talking about communism in the USSR, people having "nothing to strive for" and being "depressed and drunk" were definitely not the primary issues. That's a seriously uninformed and sophomoric position, and you should read up on history a bit if you're curious. There were serious issues relating to central planning that were the cause of the famines, their military logistics issues, and corruption at the local level. Not to mention the various internal and external conflicts that plagued the USSR. These did not relate to some vague notion of people being unmotivated, depressed, or drunk.
Bonus historical fact: Russia's rampant alcoholism has roots in the Czarist period where the Czar decided who could distill and sell alcohol. At various points, this meant aristocrats only and then a state monopoly. During the czarist period, vodka sales to Russians made up like 20% of the state's income - so the czarist state had a vested interest in maintaining the demand for vodka. During the communist period, the government tried to ban or limit vodka production and consumption numerous times (decreased worker productivity, made people bad parents, etc) - but that went about as well as prohibition has gone in other parts of the world.
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It's like both sides forget that free market socialism exists too.
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people had nothing to strive for and got depressed and drunk.
Have you ever considered questioning that some of the things you learned about the USSR, when we were literally calling them the "evil empire," and were in a constant state of existential dread over the possibility of nuclear war, might have been propaganda? And that maybe some of these things are worth further investigation? Especially when they sound that absurd?
I dunno, just a thought.
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I'd argue that it was the huge boats capable of crossing oceans, first built around the 14th century, which could comfortably sail around Africa. Look at the borders of the Portugese Empire, doing very similar stuff to what England was doing, but apparently that's different somehow? It's the boats that enabled them to become imperialists over huge distances.
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You'd argue that because after the age of those ships, while capitalism is still around, we haven't got any of the things mentioned anymore?
Capitalism is the cancer of market economies.
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Around that period there was a huge leap forward in the quality of the boats. England and Portugal were maritime powers. They were limited by the distance they could sail, and suddenly could sail much farther. Enforcing control on the opposite side of the world would have previously been unthinkable. Capitalism isn't the reason they started conquering the globe. It's the improved boats that allowed them to travel the globe in the first place. The spirit of imperialism was already there before capitalism came around.
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interestingly, the neanderthals never did this, and they went fucking extinct....
something to think about i guess.
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You can take your hot take somewhere else, because it won't be here
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Pure vibes based politics
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Capitalism didn't invent slaves lol
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No, but they created entire industries based on the sale if humans
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Civilization is a product of slavery and it started in mesopotamia
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Due to Ukrainian anti-soviet (nazi) influence in 1990s, the famine was upgraded to a genocide for Ukraine (Holomodor). "Stalin bad" is a welcome narrative for US/CIA.
There was a genuine global famine at the time, and the US demanded Stalin pay USSR debt in food. Most of those exports went through Ukraine, and so Ukraine had some agency in its own famine levels. Ukraine's per capita food allotment was higher than most USSR states including non-nazi/non-antagonist Kazahkstan which had more deaths but did not declare famine a genocide.
The complex politics, like Syria's famine/drought that sowed the seeds for ISIS/Israel takeover, meant not making everyone happy. Bourgeois farmers outside of Ukraine, the Kulaks, wanted extortion, famine market, pricing, and Stalin wanted to pay them less.
The Irish Potato famine, was an oligarchist driven famine, the US would approve Stalin of having chosen. There was plenty of Irish potato production, but the prices were too high for the Irish to pay, so they were exported more. Stalin's "crime" was fighting extortion pricing.
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Psh, Portugal was doing it before it was cool.
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This place is going downhill.
187 comments
Real communism has never really existed. They’re just authoritarian dictatorships that hoard power and wealth at the top while paying lip service to whatever variant of social policy they offer the masses. The people are never actually given the power over the State or control of production.
Of course, there are no true communists.
And it never will exist, because politically inert western liberals who have declared themselves the true arbiters of "real communism" will reflexively disqualify anything western propaganda tells them to.
I personally prefer libertarian socialism (in particular, anarchism), but I'm down for anything that is not authoritarian and not capitalistic.
It’s arguably not socialism without democracy in some form. If the people have no say, then it isn’t social ownership. Vanguardism can claim it’s a step towards socialism, but until power is decentralized somehow it’s just state capitalism.
The external forces in the west via war, opposition, and sanctions, had a part to play in this Soviet contradiction.
That’s pretty much what Engels called it. He argued it was a step in dismantling capitalism, similar to Lenin.
So sure, maybe they were socialist in intent, but vanguardism is really just state capitalism until power is decentralized.
These people think that when you change the names of things, the nature of the things themselves change
I'm not sure how you think quoting words that were written before Soviets' massive failure to build anything described in them would help your argument, but sure
This is a communist space, there is no 'waking up'