this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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While I agree with the sentiment, saying that it's been hundreds of years in the making is just wrong. If anything, labor rights are at historic highs, and that's been centuries in the making.
both are correct. As long as their has been expropriation of labour there has been struggle for liberation, also enclosure and forced market participation has been a project of centuries.
As in all things it's push and pull. If you want to learn more read about enclosure of the Commons and at least the bits of Debt: the first 5000 years that deal with imposing currency.
I often think of this famous line to remember that there’s been a whole lot of improvement: “he must a king, he doesn’t have shit all over him.”
Capitalism is just feudalism with a glow up
Technically feudalism is a separate system of resource extraction. Someone who owns the land basically just takes a percentage cut of your goods or earnings for being on their space and leaves you to do whatever you want as long as you survive .
So arguably being something like a content creator on a platform or working for uber is closer to feudalism than capitalism.
Capitalism is more the complicated system of landholders wanting to profit from selling, holding, leasing and developing land for profit as an investment good forcing people to perpetually earn to afford to live as individual family units.
It's a subtle distinction.
Capitalism is supposed to put the worker at the top
It doesn’t because the people with capital make decisions
Christianity straight up opposes wealth, but it doesn’t play out that way because people with wealth make the decisions
It’s the same for every system/ideology because a power vacuum will always be filled
No it isn't. It's supposed to put capital at the top. It's right in the name!
It’s supposed to take money away from the owning class (lords) and give it to the working class (craftsmen)
The idea is that no matter what you do, you are paid based on hours put into it
So then billionaires are just simply putting in more hours than everyone else, is that it?
Refer to my first comment for why that’s not the case
You are assuming someone always has to be in power over someone else. Historically most communities where run without anyone in charge, but with direct democracies. It just became harder with bigger cities, because it was harder to communicate with everyone else. Perhaps we can change that with the Internet.
Historically you are incorrect
If you don’t put power over someone else then someone comes in and puts it over you
The vehicle for change was just how easily that other person can get to you
You can go back to bronze age kings to demonstrate how what you said was false in all of recorded history
There is a good yt channel talking about egalitarian societies in prehistory called What is Politics
If you want to go far enough back that we use theory
Then we can say prehistoric nomadic humans still had fights with other clans and territorial disputes because our genetic ancestors (chimps/monkeys/apes) also have those
And if you were there with a gun, would you be able to dominate them? If so then you are able to put power over people without a power structure
Territorial disputes where only common after agriculture in humans, because territory wasn't as important before as mutual aid.
You can point to territorial disputes between non-agrarian humans to suggest otherwise
Hunting grounds and shelter were more important than mutual aid
You don’t even need to use humans, you can use other primates
it is not just farming land that is valuable, sometimes there are good fishing spots and etc in scarce regions. However those are far rarer situations and usually there is plenty of food for everyone, but hard times also happen and then most animals and humans practice mutual aid. There is a good book about it, by Kropotkin, called Mutual aid. It isn't long, I listened to the audio book.
Most animals practice mutual aid?
Yes, there is a good book about it, called "Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution".