cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/c/tankiejerk/p/635809/i-can-excuse-transphobia-and-covid-denial-but-i-draw-the-line-at-anti-communism-and-criticis
- Ever faithful Cowbee will tolerate transphobic admins because they're communist >
- PieFed is worse than transphobia because it's anti-communist >
- Nutomic will stop being transphobic by 2050.
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I largely agree, but with a few exceptions, particularly the comment that capitalism is not the natural order of the world. I'm assuming that by "natural," you mean the natural growth and change of society? It tends to get tricky when you refer to nature and animals for how human society should function, since the planet is so diverse, you'll find all manner of different societies among animals.
Anyway. Capitalism is young, yeah, but didn't suddenly appear. The rough timeline of societal growth is first with nomadic tribes with stone-age tools, and some slavery still existed during this time, such as leaders trading their daughters. Later, early agricultural settlements started to develop as these tribes learnt how to cultivate the land. Of course, you'll need more people to manage this land, so slavery was introduced, which in turn ended up with those who control all the agriculture being the top dogs. This is where feudalism develops: a lord reigns over everyone else, but as society grows larger, managing slaves becomes less efficient (it still exists), so the slaves are granted serfdom and some rights. As societies around the world developed, they began to interact, fostering a merchant economy. Now the merchants are taking power since they're the ones introducing all the new commodities, which means they control more products, and with more products, you can make more products, and by this point, who needs lords anymore, and thus capitalism was born. Of course, none of this development happened in a vacuum, and there are always exceptions and oversimplifications when you summarise the entire evolution of human civilisation in a lengthy paragraph. It's also important to note that all the changes are gradual, they don't all happen at select points in time, and one doesn't create the other. I mean, we still have slavery today.
I think I prefer capitalism over the past systems. I'm not defending it either, I was born into it, never experienced anything else. My main point is that capitalism didn't emerge out of nothing.
Though it is true that capitalism is failing and change is in the air, what will come next is still unclear. Social democracy, maybe? Liberalism and individualism are becoming an increasingly significant part of societal identity. Though, there is also the rise of authoritarianism. Technocracism perhaps? You can't live without technology anymore, it's forced into everything, and whoever controls those technological systems will have the most power. Corporatism? Who really knows? I guess that's up to us to decide.
At least in Europe, serfdom (which is basically slavery barring some minor distinctions) only came to an end due to the plague, which limited the supply of able bodied workers so drastically, other lords began to offer to actually pay another lord's slaves/serfs to work their land.
Slavery in the rest of the world ended for various reasons, but a big one was moral objection, not that managing slaves become less efficient (AFAIK, anyway. The Confederacy in the US only ceased slavery due to being psychically stopped from a more powerful adversary. They would've continued, and indeed would've expanded the slave trade to new territory as planned, had they not been stopped. Remember, those merchants taking power were also gleefully profiting off of the slave trade, which was one of their 'commodities').
But If anything, slavery has only ever increased, as there are now more people in US prisons alone than there were slaves before the Civil War, and they're often doing labor for pennies on the dollar. And since private prisons profit from having more prisoners, they've even sued the state when they aren't happy with how little prisoners they get.
From the archeological evidence presented in the book 'The Dawn of Everything' by David Graeber and David Wengrow; humans were able to sustain egalitarian societies as both hunter gatherer and after agriculture was discovered. It is only quite recently in our species existence that authoritarian hierarchies seemed to develop, and not necessarily due to an environmental need. There is no technical reason slavery had to develop, it was simply performed and enacted due to the benefit it gave the owning group.
There's examples of slave-owning hunter gatherers presented as well, with neighboring tribes finding that behavior disgusting and refusing to participate in it, even taking in escaped slaves from those slave owning tribes.
Highly recommend reading it if you have the time, it's quite a compelling book. (Alternatively one of the authors gave a very (very) condensed talk about it at a TED talk here, and a longer interview about it here at Novara Media).
But at least in my view, it's clear that the evidence we have at hand shows this mode of society we live in that's highly hierarchical, competitive, individually selfish to the extreme, and operates on artificial scarcity, is quite the aberration from the norm.
It's all very fascinating. I wouldn't mind being in a hunter-gatherer society, but I love my technology too much.
i wonder what the turning point was.
I think the crux of what Graeber and Wengrow get at, is that history shows us we can be an agricultural technological society without the unnecessary authoritarianism, hierarchy, or capitalism. This inherent but actively suppressed ability of humanity was demonstrated in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. It was the closest we ever got to getting out of the rut we somehow got ourselves into all those thousands of years ago.