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Remember, the ideas of any age are that of its ruling class. To say that the goal of capital accumulation is the "natural" state of humanity, is to ignore each

Remember, the ideas of any age are that of its ruling class. To say that the goal of capital accumulation is the "natural" state of humanity, is to ignore each set of social relations imposed on the populace by the ruling class of each social epoch. In the Feudal period, it was the divinity of the monarch and the "natural" state of the peasantry being tied to the land, surrendering a tithe to the king and the clergy. Before that, it was "natural" to conquer and subjugate the enemy within a slave society like Rome. Also, everything that was tried before was either smashed by state intervention backed by capitalist interest, e.g. the Pinochet coup in Chile in 1973, or Franco during the Spanish civil, or was a Stalinist dictatorship.

gloob 17y ago
All the evidence we have suggests that human history and prehistory is primarily concerned with two things: firstly, people making stuff, and secondly, people taking other people's stuff and optionally killing them. This is widely true for societies ranging from stone-age tribal groups, all the way up to the present day. Of course many beliefs are created and imparted by society at large, but not all are. The belief that our planet is roughly a sphere is more accurate than the belief that it is flat, and the belief that the Earth orbits the sun is more accurate than the reverse. I'm fairly sure we've hit on something with the whole "People would rather be rich than poor," idea.
- unalone 17y ago
  They'd rather be "rich than poor" because we have a society that says rich is awesome, poor is terrible. I'd agree with you if you'd said "comfortable rather than stressed", but there's a difference between the two. Everybody can be comfortable at once. Not everybody can be rich.
  - gloob 17y ago
    Everybody can be comfortable at once. Not everybody can be rich. That's a poor criterion for deciding whether or not something is an intrinsic human desire. Whether or not something can be universally achieved is orthogonal to the question. I don't doubt that we have a society that says rich is awesome, poor is terrible, but here's the thing: when we say that "society says foo", what we mean is that a large percentage of individuals are saying foo. Lots of individuals say "rich is awesome, poor is terrible" because they actually believe that they prefer the one to the other, not because some external "society" (I place it in scare quotes because any society does not have an existence independent from individuals) forces or tricks or brainwashes them into it.
    - unalone 17y ago
      But you can't separate a person from the context of their society. We had millenia of human existence without any idea of riches, so obviously it's not an intrinsic desire. Perhaps it's intrinsic in the context of a society that has things such as rich and poor, but that's different. (I'm finding it hard to track replies in this thread, so apologies if I stop my side of the discussion.)
- turkishrevenge 17y ago
  For the majority of humanity's history, man lived by producing roughly enough subsistence to survive day to day. With the advent of agriculture and domestication of wild beasts, etc, man, for the first time ever, had the capability to produce a surplus of goods. From this society formed--as well as the oppression of man by another for the purposes for controlling said surplus. Due to the inherent need to innovate within capitalism, i.e. revolutionize the means of production for the purposes of besting the competition, we have over time, gradually built up the means to produce such a quantity and variety of goods unrivaled in all of human history. We possess the material means to provide for the needs of all people across the world many, many times over. One simply needs to look at the fact that industrialized U.S. agricultural production is so efficient it can be run by an extremely small pool of workers compared to the rest of the working populace, and yet produce such a glut of goods, that many times, the surplus (the very thing capitalism is compelled to produce over and over again) is destroyed in order to uphold food prices via enforcing an artificial scarcity of goods, e.g. in milk production. The issue is not about being simply wanting to rich or poor (no one wants to be poor), it's about seeing the system for what it is and what its productive capabilities could potentially be harnessed for.

gloob 17y ago

All the evidence we have suggests that human history and prehistory is primarily concerned with two things: firstly, people making stuff, and secondly, people taking other people's stuff and optionally killing them. This is widely true for societies ranging from stone-age tribal groups, all the way up to the present day. Of course many beliefs are created and imparted by society at large, but not all are. The belief that our planet is roughly a sphere is more accurate than the belief that it is flat, and the belief that the Earth orbits the sun is more accurate than the reverse. I'm fairly sure we've hit on something with the whole "People would rather be rich than poor," idea.

unalone 17y ago
They'd rather be "rich than poor" because we have a society that says rich is awesome, poor is terrible. I'd agree with you if you'd said "comfortable rather than stressed", but there's a difference between the two. Everybody can be comfortable at once. Not everybody can be rich.
- gloob 17y ago
  Everybody can be comfortable at once. Not everybody can be rich. That's a poor criterion for deciding whether or not something is an intrinsic human desire. Whether or not something can be universally achieved is orthogonal to the question. I don't doubt that we have a society that says rich is awesome, poor is terrible, but here's the thing: when we say that "society says foo", what we mean is that a large percentage of individuals are saying foo. Lots of individuals say "rich is awesome, poor is terrible" because they actually believe that they prefer the one to the other, not because some external "society" (I place it in scare quotes because any society does not have an existence independent from individuals) forces or tricks or brainwashes them into it.
  - unalone 17y ago
    But you can't separate a person from the context of their society. We had millenia of human existence without any idea of riches, so obviously it's not an intrinsic desire. Perhaps it's intrinsic in the context of a society that has things such as rich and poor, but that's different. (I'm finding it hard to track replies in this thread, so apologies if I stop my side of the discussion.)
turkishrevenge 17y ago
For the majority of humanity's history, man lived by producing roughly enough subsistence to survive day to day. With the advent of agriculture and domestication of wild beasts, etc, man, for the first time ever, had the capability to produce a surplus of goods. From this society formed--as well as the oppression of man by another for the purposes for controlling said surplus. Due to the inherent need to innovate within capitalism, i.e. revolutionize the means of production for the purposes of besting the competition, we have over time, gradually built up the means to produce such a quantity and variety of goods unrivaled in all of human history. We possess the material means to provide for the needs of all people across the world many, many times over. One simply needs to look at the fact that industrialized U.S. agricultural production is so efficient it can be run by an extremely small pool of workers compared to the rest of the working populace, and yet produce such a glut of goods, that many times, the surplus (the very thing capitalism is compelled to produce over and over again) is destroyed in order to uphold food prices via enforcing an artificial scarcity of goods, e.g. in milk production. The issue is not about being simply wanting to rich or poor (no one wants to be poor), it's about seeing the system for what it is and what its productive capabilities could potentially be harnessed for.