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Ye the world was a peaceful place before capitalism, there were no wars, no slaves and no …
checks history books
Oh no
Oh no no no no
Scale. It’s about scale and centralization. Sure there were slaves but capitalism made more than ever in human history. Sure there were wars but capitalism made them bigger and further away from the rich nations committing them’s population.
It’s about scale. It’s like comparing a single thief to a crime syndicate of organized thieves and saying “well there has always been thieving”
Yes. But never with so much damage.
Sure there were slaves but capitalism made more than ever in human history but capitalism made them bigger and further away from the rich nations committing them’s population
Wouldn’t completely agree here. There has simply been a massive technological advancement if we compare, for example, the “norse raids” with “european raids”. Europeans could transport more and travel further. Also, there have been way more people alive if we compare those timeframes. Global population has grown steadily.
Don’t get me wrong, capitalism certainly had a certain impact, but pretending like capitalism is the sole source is dishonest at best and stupid at worst. There have always been powerhungry people. Capitalism just gave everyone a chance to be power hungry instead of just the select few that were born into places of power.
Something I’d also like you to keep in mind that every communist regime that wasn’t 50 people on a deserted island has resulted in a disaster for the population and surrounding countries. The soviet union has waged more than 15 offensive wars, for example georgia, poland, finland, iran, czech etc., which is almost as much as the US which has existed for like 250 years at this point. So pretending that communism is completely free of the things you criticize capitalism for is pretty dumb tbh.
And theres the rub. You are willing to grant this system that HAS committed great evils every kinda leeway in the book. You’ll handwave away any kind of evils it has committed as “well those things just happen, and its not really capitalism as a systems fault” but when it comes to communism you will do away with those same excuses. So lets play the game where no system has excuses, count the bodies and then compare then? Or we excuse both for their human failings, count the bodies and compare. Either way you cut it, capitalism comes out worse, so you wont do that. You’ll excuse the one and not the other. It’s the only way you can see past your bodies.
You are willing to grant this system that HAS committed great evils every kinda leeway in the book
Yes, because there is no system that’s perfect. You have to accept shortcomings. Nowhere have I said that capitalism is the perfect system and solution to all of humanities problems, but when I look at the raw numbers, it’s dozens time better than practiced communism.
With the introduction of capitalism, extreme poverty rates have decreased MASSIVELY, from ~85% during the 1800s to 9% today. It has set the stage for economic growth, technical innovation and improved living conditions for many many billions of people. Only thanks to capitalism, we even have stuff like the internet.
On the other hand, we look at practiced communism, and all of those states that attempted it either collapsed rather quickly (soviet union) or is a authoritarian hellhole like North Korea, Laos, Cuba or Vietnam. The living conditions in these countries are disastrous, political freedom basically non-existent. The only country that is still communist (or rather socialist) on paper and very successful is china, but only because they have massively adapted to the modern world and are actively employing capitalist ways for their economy. However, the country is still an authoritarian shithole like the 4 I mentioned before.
Scale. It’s about scale and centralization. Sure there were slaves but capitalism made more than ever in human history.
Depends on who you ask, and when, I guess. For instance, if you asked one of the nations conquered by the Mongols, they would’ve said that empire was the largest enslaver in history.
The Mongol Empire established a massive international slave trade founded upon war captives enslaved during the Mongol conquests, which were distributed by market demand around the empire via a network of slave markets connected through the cities of the empire.
Considering this was the largest contiguous empire in human history, the exploitation and damage was pretty extensive.
scale
More people had access to more people. Not complicated.
Capitalism is broken. It kills and needs to be completely broken down.
Communism is also broken. It kills and should not be pursued again by a major power.
This post is fucking stupid.
Yes. Capitalism is a tool that allows us to scale industry up. Good or bad. Just like fire is indispensable for our society, but if you don’t regulate it properly, it will burn things down.
Capitalism allowed for scaling things up. Assholes got a hold of it first and used it to scale up slavery and wars. Doesn’t mean it is inherently evil.
Sure, it is an imperfect and dangerous tool, but by far the best we have.
Mmmm, that’s what you say. But take a step outside what you were taught all your life and it is soon revealed as an ideology that you bow down to worship, defend against any criticism, and demand all others bow down to it as well, no matter how they feel, on pain of their total subjugation.
There is a difference between ideology and objective reality.
My goals in life and what I want the world to look like are part of my ideology. Capitalism being a useful tool to achieve them is (or isn’t, if I am wrong) objective reality.
So you know nothing about the extent of pre-industrial slavery? Because it dwarfs the tiny bit they bought over to the Americas.
Anything to excuse the white man ey wizard?
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.
Don’t forget the, “no, you can’t grow what you used to eat, you have to grow potatoes” part.
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.
Malthusianism is very different from “free market reasons”.
But in any case those were all internally contradictory excuses.
Reducing widespread human rights abuses in the Soviet Union to “one famine” shows a heady mixture of deliberate ignorance with hubris that only a western university educated leftist can posess.
The sad thing is, famines weren’t that widespread after a while, unless your standard of “famine” is “not eating beef steaks in a country where beef aren’t that common”.
Not exactly, but whatever.
Mao and Stalin are both often cited as killing more of their own citizens than Hitler managed to do.
For Stalin is was a result of the 1930-1933 changes in policy to heavily prioritize heavy industry over food. Honestly hard to blame him, going from a war to a bloody revolution then overthrown for militaristic autocracy probably complicated a lot of things with no time between to normalize.
For Mao is was the result of making all private agriculture a offense worthy of capital punishment and instead made a grain quota for peasants to fill and send to the central government for distribution, then heavily investing in steel production and urbanization. Peasants didn’t fill the quotas because the surpluses just didn’t exist, if the central government just took what they wanted then in those cases the farmers just starved reducing next year’s yield. Mao’s came much later so he had no excuse.
So, yeah, they didn’t get to eat meat every day. Or bread. Or even cereals.
The ussr was infinitely better for human rights than what came before or after in Russia and the baltics, and was better than all “free nations” at the time until the late 1970s, when a few European nations decided to ignore France, the UK, and the US and write their own laws.
The WHAT?
Please explain to me how sending most of the Baltic intelligensia to die in Siberia and replacing them with Russian settlers who held most positions of power was better for my rights than what I have right now.
Please tell me how great my grandmother in law had it living in the outskirts of Archangelsk in a wooden barrack because she was sent there against her will, how much more rights and opportunities she had back then.
Please explain to me how great the industrial management in the USSR was, where they built a bunch of heavy industries in countries that had few mineral resources to support them locally, leading to plant closures in the 90s.
Before WWII, Estonia was a bit richer than Finland. Not it is lagging behind by decades.
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Life expectancy doubled under Stalin.
So he could see them suffer longer.
Anti-communists continue to be deeply unserious people, my God.
Except you know, no homelessness, by Stalin’s time no starvation, free healthcare, guaranteed days off, guaranteed vacation time, wages significantly higher than the majority of the population has ever seen, oh and free education.
Yeah, you couldn’t be a Nazi or other enemy of the state, how oppressive.
There was mass starvation under Stalin. His rule started in 1929, directly before the 1930-1933 famine resulting in somewhere between 5 to 9 million deaths which occured as a direct result of policy changes.
No, homelessness existed until Khruschev. Could been solved earlier, but WW2 reduced amount of homes.
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They haven’t yet, and there’s no profit motive for it so it really can’t happen.
While I can’t speak to the veracity of your claims about the quality of life of the Soviet Union under Stalin, there are in fact many capitalist countries that have been able to achieve these feats that you mentioned.
The housing first policy in Finland has practically eradicated homelessness where only 3,429 were homeless in 2023.
Similarly in the Nordics, the majority of the population Sweden (72.2%), Norway (71.8%), and Denmark (71.8%) is food secure. The US to an extent has also been able to mitigate against food insecurity with the existence of food stamps and free/reduced school meals essentially meaning starvation is rare in some parts of he country.
Also, the NHS provides all individuals residing in the UK with free healthcare, so… yeah.
Furthermore, all employees in France are guaranteed up to 5 weeks of annual paid leave.
In Switzerland, for a full-time job, the median monthly pre-tax salary was a tidy CHF6,788 which is approximately 7500USD. I guess you can tell that this isn’t a small amount of money compared to the low wages received by workers in the Soviet Union under Stalin (which if i might remind you, the piece-rate system was later revised under Khrushchev).
And finally free education. While most nations in Europe (Germany and the Nordics) offer free to low-cost education, you need not really look further than the US to see that while not entirely free, public schooling and community colleges provide accessible enough education to many that need it.
You can see it’s not really about the capitalism, but the governments that run it
They can’t
Look at the other comment i posted in response
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
It’s a good thing there were no genocides, slave grades, and constant wars before capitalism. Pheww
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.
Not to undermine the argument, but capitalism did not start in 16th century England.
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.
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.
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.
capitalism the idea to organise most economic activity around capital is in my understanding more recent
That’s a very literalist definition.
More broadly, capitalism is a system of private for-profit renting of capital for the purpose of using excess revenue to reinvest in new capital stock.
The main distinction between modern capitalism and traditional feudalism being that reinvestment aspect (feudal lords historically did a poor job of generating surplus or reinvesting in capital stocks). And the distinction between capitalism and socialism being private ownership versus public ownership of capital.
But all three were functionally “organized around capital”. Feudalist capital was just overwhelmingly real estate based, while the Dutch/English/French capitalists were more interested in industrial machinery (ships, mills, etc).
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)
Somebody let Spain know they’re off the hook for all the colonizing, slavery and genocide since they hadn’t invented capitalism yet!
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.
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.
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.
Not to undermine the argument, but plenty of other cultures without capitalism were horrific and did ridiculous wars for basically all of history.
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.
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
“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).
That quote basically describes every politician from every ideology that has ever lived. You can literally swap out communism for other words and it still reads the same.
Its got no substance or citations of factual events. Basically word salad.
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.
I’m not going to waste any more hours of my life reading substanceless tankie bullshit than I have, thanks.
Scared it might not confirm your biases?
Do you sit down and read political theory books written by hedge fund managers?
It’s okay to write off low value sources, it doesn’t make you biased.
Yes, in fact, I do. I specifically seek out and read literature from people with whom I have knee-jerk disagreements.
How else will I be sure I’m not trapped in a thought bubble? It’s important to read critically from a variety of sources, while reserving judgement. That’s literally how you learn. It’s too easy to fall for propaganda, otherwise.
Whats your favorite?
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.
Capitalism didn’t invent slaves lol
So… I guess we’re just forgetting about King Mansa Musa, then?
Or medieval trade entirely?
He doesn’t know Capitalism describes a method of production and distribution, he thinks it means western world power currently opposed to eastern world power.
Seems like there’s a lot of that going around here.
King mansa musa does not compare even an iota to the transatlantic slave trade. It’s not about the fact slavery was happening. It’s that capitalism industrialized slave trade to a degree that was unfathomable to humanity before.
It’s not specific to slavery, but the entire claim of “capitalism started in the UK” and that that’s somehow the cause of all the world’s problems.
However, the Kingdom of Mali profited greatly from slavery, with the trans-Atlantic slave trade simply being a later chapter in its long history of trading slaves.
As for capitalism; King Mansa Musa went on a pilgrimage to Mecca and deliberately crashed the value of gold in Cairo, the then trade capitol of the world during the middle ages. He did this as a move to bring, and steal, trade interests for Mali.
UK conquered effectively the entire world. They are literally the source for global capitalism as it exists. If your hangup is “well, UK didn’t really start capitalism” then your on a semantic that makes any further argument with you disingenuous, either due to you willfully manipulating the conversation or ignorantly being unable to comprehend what is being said. Either way really.
This isn’t semantics, it’s facts. Strong words coming from you, calling me disingenuous, when what you’re doing is defending a grossly oversimplified, inaccurate, and mostly dumb meme.
Open up a history book. Might do you some good.
Get a history degree. Beat you to it. Teaching your children too.
Then retake your history degree. Clearly you forgot a few things along the way.
Feudalism isn’t capitalism.
*looks at bigtech*
Same.
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Doubt it
(The ‘just as much’ specifically)
I bet per capita, “communism” was worse. Of course it wasn’t pure communism but nothing is ever going to be pure because people are dicks.
Pure vibes based politics.
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Go out and ask your local starving homeless how communism has effected him before betting on anything.
just as much
I was with you until that point.
So much of the communist movements following out of the post-WW era were explicitly anti-communist struggles for national sovereignty. The Cuban Revolution, the Vietnamese Revolution, the South African revolt against the Dutch/English Apartheid Government, Tito’s unification of the Yugoslavian states in opposition to the German Nazis, revolutions across Latin America from Nicaragua to Venezuela to Bolivia, failed revolutions in Japan and Indonesia and the Philippines, Native American organized revolts and African American civil rights protests in the United States… All built on the philosophical principles laid down by the 19th century communist historians, economists, and philosophers.
What regularly gets described as Soviet/CCP imperialism - particularly during the 60s and 70s - was Russian/Chinese support of nativist uprisings against European/Imperial Japanese occupying governments. Even then, the Trotskyist global revolutionaries were largely excised from the Russian Revolutionary Government in the 1930s, with Stalin embracing “Communism in One Country”. Mao was far more invested in reconstituting mainland China than spreading revolutionary fervor over the border to India (which was having its own revolution under Gandhi) or Korea or the Indochina peninsula.
The surviving Communist states of the post-Cold War era are now in a struggle simply to secure their own borders against encroachment by the American military and intelligence services. Somehow, that now qualifies as “imperialism” in the eyes of western liberals. What’s more, any amount of foreign trade or travel seems to be defined as “imperialism” by conservatives.
I’m sure you have examples with documentation and sources to share
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The first one isnt anything listed, the last one has less evidence in support of it than any other claimed genocide in history, which is amazing because we know what genocide looks like under an ultra authoritarian government that has complete control of the flow of information thanks to Israel.
The middle one was the US and Henry Kissinger.
So, unaware of context?
