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The entire world was socialist from the time of the Lubang Jereji Saleh cave paintings 40,000 years ago until 10,000 years ago. Societies with different classe
by feedforward 2y ago
The entire world was socialist from the time of the Lubang Jereji Saleh cave paintings 40,000 years ago until 10,000 years ago. Societies with different classes only sprung up 10,000 years ago. They only scaled with force, and the literature from 4000 years ago to now attests to this.
> Capitalism is very much like Democracy. It's the worst system other than all the others that have been tried.
Hunter gatherer bands in the Amazon live the way they have for 50,000 years - even prior to crossing the Bering Straits. Whereas societies where the capitalist mode of production predominant were barely even formed less than 500 years ago. Also from the time of the Paris Commune to the Cold War until now, it has been racked with threatening crises. Even in the US we see self-described socialist politicians being elected nowadays.
It's hard to make capitalism sound permanent when it has been so impermanent.
- _mlbt 2y agoThat's not scale though. Socialism works great in small loosely organized tribes, but fails at nation scale every time.
- namlem 2y agoIt doesn't even work that well at the local level. The Kibbutzim in Israel were socialist for like 70 years, but now are almost all mixed market capitalist in some form or another.
- FrustratedMonky 2y agoCapitalist internally or externally? Do Kibbutz have highly paid CEO's that earn much more than the members, and subject them to pay cuts? As pointed out in this thread, a Co-op is socialist internally by sharing wealth across more of the labor. But capitalist externally since it sells to a capitalist world.
- adolph 2y ago> Hunter gatherer bands in the Amazon live the way they have for 50,000 years As much as “noble savage” is a comforting story, the truth is likely more complicated. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67940671 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67940671 https://www.npr.org/2011/01/12/132853997/Amazon-Once-Was-Home-To-Advanced-Civilizations https://www.npr.org/2011/01/12/132853997/Amazon-Once-Was-Hom... https://davidgraeber.org/books/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-history-of-humanity/ https://davidgraeber.org/books/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-...
- FrustratedMonky 2y agoTechnically everything is more complicated. In threads like this, people play fast and loose with terminology.