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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smh why do libs have to embarrass themselves everytime there is a reference to Marx
I’ll be honest, I picked this meme precisely because I knew it would draw out liberals, and I think it’s been effective in convincing a few people to reconsider their prior understanding.
Because they are taught to never, ever, read any of his books. It’s the Necronomicon for them.
Communism is human nature. Communism existed in the Americas and Australia for thousands of years. It probably existed in the rest of the world too before agriculture, but our historical records from other regions were destroyed. By contrast, Australia has the most intact ancient histories in the world.
The mode of production is never human nature. Human nature is a factor, but the mode of production is something that is socially constructed and subject to material constraints, like tools and the environment in which people live.
But socializing and sharing empathy is virtually universal, and the impetus to share food or shelter or community is something that capitalist society teaches us to avoid. So one of the things we strive for through the abolition of capitalism is the restoration of human connections and care that are currently robbed from us. So I can totally see where you are coming from re: the extent to which the communism we want to build constitutes a return. But it is even more a step forward, a transformation into the future constructed from the bones of the present.
Re: what Marx called “primitive communism”, which we might better call egalitarian societies based on hunting and gathering and sometimes agriculture, such societies have actually existed everywhere people have lived. You can find clear historical examples of such societies in the Americas and Australia, yes, but also in the Middle East, Ukraine, Great Britain, Ethiopia, Pakistan/India, China, etc. As you mention, any of these societies did not have written records or they were lost, but we can understand how they lived based on their homes, food, tools, dress, cohabitation, and spatial distribution of all these things.
It’s important to draw a line between Primitive Communism and Communism as a post-Socialist society. Primitive Communism is founded upon small, isolated communities, while Marx’s Communism is one of large industry run along a common plan, democratically, to suit the needs of all.
What’s more accurate is to say that what’s considered “Human Nature” changes alongside Mode of Production. It was indeed “Human Nature” to have cooperative, communal units, but it is also “Human Nature” to produce under Capitalism, and still further “Human Nature” to move beyond the discordant production of Capitalism to a cohesive Socialist, and eventually Communist, society.
It’s important to draw a line between Primitive Communism and Communism as a post-Socialist society. Primitive Communism is founded upon small, isolated communities, while Marx’s Communism is one of large industry run along a common plan, democratically, to suit the needs of all.
That feels like some noble savage stuff. Societies aren’t different because they have different technology with the same economic system. It feels like you’re saying indigenous societies wouldn’t have been able to industrialise without changing their political system radically.
But indigenous societies made conscious political choices about how to structure society, and drag believes they had the political structure required to adapt to industrialisation without losing their political system.
Drag doesn’t buy the distinction you’re making between indigenous communism and industrialised communism. Drag doesn’t think the difference is relevant to whether something is communism, and the only way drag could see it being relevant is through the noble savage trope.
The economic system isn’t the same, though. Tribal societies don’t have incredibly massive logistical chains and production methods suitable for satisfying the greatest amount of needs with the least amount of work possible.
Indigenous societies were and are incredibly complex and sophisticated in their own ways, but they aren’t the same economic system I am speaking of, and they can’t accomplish what post-Socialist Communism can.
The only difference you’re talking about is quantity, not quality. Drag feels you’re othering them on a weak basis. Industrialised communists have ten times as much in common with tribal communists as with industrialised capitalists, and what differences do exist, are our lack of knowledge of the land and respect for the traditional ways. We have more to learn from them than we have to teach them. You’re dismissing them unfairly.
I’m not dismissing tribal societies, I just don’t think tribal organizations are suitable to modern conditions in most of the world, nor do I want to live as tribal societies do. The quality is fundamentally different, tribal production is based on hunting and gathering, Marx’s conception of Communism is based on massive industry and global cooperation. The quantity and quality are different.
Tribes are perfectly capable of running industrial manufacturing supply lines in terms of administrative ability. In Australia, tribes are refuelling helicopters. They’re doing it under capitalism, because white people suck, but they could just as easily do it under communism if the white people had left well enough alone and not stolen the land and enslaved generations.
I’m not making an argument based on ethnicity, but mode of production. You yourself admit that those tribal societies no longer fit what we were talking about as Hunter/Gatherer societies, but are now being swallowed by the very same Capitalist machine, in fact to greater degrees thanks to the evils of settler-colonialism.
A hunter/gatherer society cannot make a helicopter, that’s just a fundamental fact. If you move onto large industry capable of creating helicopters, you are no longer in the stage of “primitive communism.”
I believe you’re misinterpreting what comrade Cowbee is saying. Primitive here is not a moral term being used to say something is savage, it’s merely a descriptor of the system in the past, before the advancements that allow it to take on a new form.
The distinction here is important because both systems are different and because we cannot simply go back to a past mode of production.
Thank you comrade, that helps get through what I was trying to say. It’s not at all a derogatory and racist term, but one used to describe an earlier mode of production.
I’m glad to help o7. Your work here is indispensable and greatly appreciated, comrade!
Yours too! I’m always trying to learn more, and having comrades like yourself fill in the holes or help me better communicate helps everything I do. It’s all a team effort!
Societies aren’t different because they have different technology with the same economic system. It feels like you’re saying indigenous societies wouldn’t have been able to industrialise without changing their political system radically
Societies with different technologies would tend to have very different social and economic systems. Indigenous societies that industrialise do end up changing their political systems because of this.
Drag doesn’t buy the distinction you’re making between indigenous communism and industrialised communism.
Industrialised communism does not exist, at least yet, but any industrial society will necessarily need to organise itself in a very different way from a primitive society (whether communist or not).
Indigenous societies have largely industrialized in nearly all the world. Take nearly any country (except the USA, Canada, and Australia, western colonial projects), and you’ll find ethnic peoples from those areas with an industrial mode of production.
If you exclude Turtle Island and Australia from the dataset, the continents with the best record of recent communism, then there’s no point in this conversation, because drag is talking about continents with recent communism and a strong historical record.
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.
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.
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.
Weird take, i guess the current definition of capitalism, but go to Ancient Rome or Babylon and tell me you don’t see capitalism
Answered here. Commerce isn’t Capitalism, and neither is small manufacture.
Sure. But that was largely due to the constraints on the rate of growth prior to the industrial revolution. Capitalism was still functionally exigent, it was just operating under a rate of growth capped by the surplus human and animal labor could produce.
The advent of transatlantic travel (wind power) and the waterwheel and eventually steam power and modern fertilizers was what caused human productivity to spike. Suddenly, you could see returns on investment at double or even triple digits within decades. Prior eras saw single digit growth in even the wealthiest countries on Earth. Wealth was accumulated at a glacial pace.
Piketty’s “Capitalism in the 21st Century” covers this in depth.
Rome was a power center for over a millennia in large part because of the enormous consolidation of investment capital within the city limits. The Republic-cum-Empire took in revenues, built capital, expanded its economy, and then consumed the expanded economic output as revenue. But that took centuries to accumulate. None of Rome’s neighbors ever had the surplus necessary to invest or the time to expand like the Romans did. London managed a similar scale of development in decades. And then it burned down. And then it was rebuilt a few decades later.
You can argue that the desire to rapidly accumulate wealth is a facet of human nature. You can also argue that the rate of accumulation only became notable in the last 400 years, such that “capitalism” as a productive force wasn’t relevant until recently. But you can’t argue that cumulative gains were somehow unknown to anyone prior to the Dutch East India company.
That wasn’t really my argument though. As you yourself said, a bunch of quantitative changes from proto-capitalist formations resulted in a qualitative shift.
The mechanism of capitalism - deriving revenue from capital to further develop and accumulate capital and thereby expand streams of revenue - were always here. The rates were lower, limiting the accessibility and the appeal to individuals who were already cash flush and very forward looking. But capitalism, as a productive force, has always been with us.
I disagree. Back in earlier forms of agricultural accumulation, technology hadn’t developed the same system of rapid expansionism as Capitalism and the creation of large industry has brought. The M-C-M’ circuit wasn’t always here. Class society has existed, but not the same mechanisms of Capitalism as an encompassing system.
The M-C-M’ circuit wasn’t always here.
Periodically, some community would find an opportunity for capital improvements that afforded a rapid growth cycle. Capital projects like the Roman Aquaducts and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, for instance, dramatically increased the surplus yielded by labor. The number of people who could live within a community rose and economic output rose with it. But it was still dwarfed by industrialization and geographic constraints limited the rate of expansion (you can’t build aquaducts and hanging gardens everywhere and expect to yield equivalent surplus). So you hit that classic Marxist diminishing return on profit and the rate of economic expansion fell back down into the low-single digits.
The circuit did exist though. The fundamental economic benefit of cyclical growth had a soft ceiling that primitive societies hit.
Now we’re in an industrial era that doesn’t feel like it has a ceiling. But it does. There really are ecological and resource limits, even to a post-industrial world. One day, we’re also going to hit that ceiling (assuming we haven’t already). I don’t think it would be fair to say - a few centuries after peak production / climate apocalypse sends us into a perpetual global depression - that Real Capitalism Has Never Been Tried.
Neither would I benchmark “When capitalism starts” the day after we construct a Dyson Sphere and master superluminal travel, because we’re kicking off a bigger wave of economic expansion than we enjoyed while earthbound.
What I might argue the ancient world lacked more than the M-C-M’ circuit was the degree of fictitious capital (which requires a big surplus-laden economically literate middle class). But that’s not capitalism et al, just a facet of modern speculative investment.
The technical constraints were also constraints on the Mode of Production. The Roman Aqueducts were largely slave driven like the rest of Roman society, not through commodity production and the M-C-M’ circuit affording it. Rome also extracted vast rents from the colonies.
Elements of the old exist in the new, and elements of the new existed in the old, yes. However, Capitalism as an encompassing system is only a few hundred years old.
Where’s the steam engines and factories?
And the conveniently small children?
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.
What came before capitalism was even uglier
No one is disputing that, in fact the communist manifesto praises capitalism for massively developing the productive forces at one point in time, it’s just time to move on from it as it started to hinder the development of production.
yet reflects our nature as a species just the same
This is straight up a wrong, if our nature was being greedy, selfish, or an asshole everyone would have to conform to law, without exceptions, just like we all have to eat, shit and breathe. Those 3 things are actually part of our nature, everyone has to conform to these laws without exception.
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 explorers. Their response to this paradise was to rape and plunder it.
And the raping and plundering never stopped, even 500 years later.
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 be labor played 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.
Good meme but terrible martial arts. Never try to catch a punch.
This comment is like telling Superman not to lift with his back.
lol
I didn’t make the meme, so 🤷
Just wrote the description.
It’s from Invincible and the guy’s a superhero, so maybe superheroes can catch punches.
I’d hope so, if they existed, haha.
If they existed it would be The Boys style super"heros". So I don’t know, I’d kinda prefer they didn’t know how to catch a punch.
Good point, yikes.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 off Capitalism is quite easy, as we all work within the boundaries of it.
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.
Eh, isn’t that argument more about being greedy for ressources rather than capital in particular? I mean, why did empires conquer stuff?
Capitalism is not about individuals being greedy. Calling capitalists greedy is like calling fish greedy for needing water. The capitalist system requires constant profit maximization to prevent firms from crumbling, the capitalists are tasked with ensuring this, generally by (at first) maximizing exchange value of their product and minimizing costs (usually labor), then later using monopoly position to charge economic rent. In the heart of empire, financialization has meant trying to skip the first step via large financial investment up front, like with tech monopolies. The system itself forces exploitation, dispossession, colonialism, and ultimately crisis and war.
Historical empires conquered for reasons we often don’t really know specifically, as the accounts we have are written by victors with limited access and understanding. But ancient peoples were just as sophisticated as us and subject to material forces as us, so it was certainly not just being greedy. The economic base can force hands, for example. The Roman slave and debt system was unsustainable and required debt jubilees and war and invasions to be maintained, for example. For the ruling class of Rome, was maintaining the empire only greed or was it what they were taught to do as the moral and right thing?
There exists a strong current within Liberal economics that asserts that the formation we have arrived at now is because over time, Humanity has assumed the system most fit for our nature. Some take the path you percieve it as, a focus on greed, rather than Capitalism specifically, but that’s not what the meme addresses.
The advancement Marx made is recognizing Capitalism as merely one stage in the progression of Modes of Production historically. His analysis of Socialism and Communism was rooted in how it naturally emerges from Capitalism, just as Capitalism had emerged from Feudalism. The Capitalist Realists, who see Capitalism as eternal, stand in contrast to that notion and assert Capitalism as the final default stage. “There is no alternative,” of Thatcher.
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!
classic Lemmy.ml post
Sure?
Classic vapid comment.
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)
For a more all-round perspective, I recommend Hajoon Chang’s “economics: the user’s guide”.
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.
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!
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?
Private property isn’t unique to capitalism, feudalism and antique slave society each had a form of private property even tough feudalism and antique slave society have little else in common with capitalism.
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?
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?
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.
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:
-
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 and Capitalism, 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. 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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Most of the Roman low and medium skill artisans were slaves, actually.
But capitalism is best recognized by the proliferation of commodities, as it is made up of various wage labor capitalist enterprises producing large quantities of fungible goods for market. A chair is a chair is a chair and you can buy 50 varieties of basically the same thing at the furniture store. Under capitalism, all economic life is governed by this: you work a wage labor job and you buy everything else (commodities made by other wage laborers).
Rome did not have such a system. A vastly larger proportion of goods were made at home by oneself or by servants or by slaves. When goods were purchased they would have mostly been produced by slaves or petty bourgeois artisans or apprentices. Wage laborers still existed, but they were not typical.
An important part of Marxist analysis is to focus on the shift from quantitative to qualitative in social development. The high proportion of wage laborers is something that typefies capitalism, but wage laborers have existed for a long time. At some point there was a watershed moment - or watershed many decades - where the material forces that increased this proportion crossed various thresholds to create a new ruling class that became dominant and started throwing their weight around (capitalists). The capitalist class was in no way dominant in Rome.
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
The idea of a “free market” is an invention of capitalism in the last few hundred years. Laissez-faire was coined by French businessmen in the late 1600s.
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
Currency isn’t Capitalism, though. Capitalism has currency, but not all systems with currency are Capitalist.
The existence of coins does not imply a capital-based society, in the same way the emergence of personal computers in the 70s does not mean the economy of the 70s was highly computerized.
Check out David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years for some anthropology on how exchange worked in early societies. Trading currency for goods or services was the exception, not the rule.
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.
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.
Today I honor Cowbee’s Sisyphean task of explaining that 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.
TIL Wololoing
Well that’s a very meme description of shifting the overton window to the left.
As Marx’s favorite maxim goes, “Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me]”
I love memes and gaming, same with Marxist-Leninist theory, same with space, science, and technology. Connecting to others with shared culture is part of what makes us human.
@Cowbee @Cypher Marxist-Leninist theory is fine. Theoretically the concepts of communal ownership and resources sharing is a laudable one. Too bad the only example of this concept actually working is Star Trek. The instances when it’s been tried in the real world, ended in authortarainism and/or collapse.
Western supremacists tend to use “Authoritarian” only to demonize the countries that stood up and fought back against colonialism / imperialism.
And it usually is never directed against the actually non-democratic / oligarchical countries like the US, who’ve bombed and meddled with nearly every government on the planet.
You should question your preconceived notions about China, Vietnam, Cuba, and the USSR, because you likely grew up in a country that has spent the entire historical period of the cold war, trying to strangle those countries and many others out of existence.
All countries are “authoritarian,” what matters most is which class is in control and thus exerting its authority. In Capitalist society, that class is the Bourgeoisie, a tiny minority of society. In Socialism, that class is the Proletariat, the majority of society. Countries like the PRC are labeled “authoritarian” not due to how the people themselves feel, but because Capital is limited by the government. Even if over 90% of Chinese citizens support the CPC, western media slanders the system as “authoritarian” because their corporate masters can’t move as they please in Chinese markets.
“Authoritarianism” is when the imperial core’s freedom to exploit the periphery is thwarted.
o7
o7
Maybe not have him be represented as a genocidal facist?
He got better cause he had sex with a bug.
I stole the meme, so 🤷
Just wrote the text.
