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Why People Say Capitalism is Violent
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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I am not sure how you reached this conclusion. Yes, capitalism is new in comparison to Mesopotamian culture, and therefore the idea of property ownership. No, it's not new in comparison to European colonialism.
I have never heard or read any theories that try to make an argument like this. I would be very interested if you had some that you could point me to, but offhand this seems like it would require major stretching of the definition of capitalism in order to make recorded events fit into it. I think it would mostly be an exercise in confirmation bias.
Accumulation of wealth is not inherently capitalism, nor is simply profiting from another's labor. This definition is so broad that it would make anyone in history who ever acquired anything that they did not previously own into a capitalist.
Which other arguments am I unwilling to entertain, and which goalposts am I moving?
My argument is, as from the beginning, that the concept of private ownership of property and legal rights attached to such is not born of capitalism but is in fact as old as recorded history. Because the conclusions in the cartoon depend on this initial faulty idea, the whole thing is nonsense.
I jive with most of what you write... but you have weird things sprinkled throughout...
Like, differentiating between the pharaoh and the state... the pharaoh was the state. I mean, there was more of a state than just the pharaoh... but practically the pharaoh was the state.
It's like saying that there is a difference between the Russian state and Putin... technically yes, but practically no. Putin is the Russian state. Obviously there is bureaucracy as well, but is just a weird separation.
Obviously we have different definitions of capitalism... which makes the rest of the discussion difficult.
Fundamentally, serfs in a feudal society did not own the right to their own labor for the portion of their labor assigned to their lord.
Fundamentally, people in modern capitalist societies do own the rights to their own labor.
Practically, the ability to exercise those rights is severely limited (which is what the meme is trying to point out). There are reasonable arguments that the poor in modern capitalism have less freedom than serfs of feudal societies... but that doesn't make them equivalent.
And, for what it's worth, Marx wasn't arguing about 12th century feudalism... that was some 700 years before the form of capitalism that was present in his time.
Forced labor is not capitalism... Egyptian pharaohs did not practice capitalism. Feudal lords did not practice capitalism. Black Americans in the south did not participate in a capitalist economic system for themselves (the white slave owners may have practiced capitalism amongst each other, but the slaves did not). To suggest that they are equivalent systems of economic activity is insane.
Elements of capitalism certainly existed prior to the industrial revolution... but that is like saying that socialism is basically capitalism with regulations on ownership of corporations that employ more than a handful of employees. Or that communism is essentially capitalism except there is communal ownership of all property.
There are fundamental differences between them that is a strawman to say they are the same. It is incorrect to say that the Egyptian pyramids were built in a capitalist society because "the pharaoh owned the mines". I can't even express how inane that sounds.
We can certainly compare the difference in the lives of the common people in these societies and, like I said before, there are reasonable arguments that modern commoners have worse situations than some did in historical system... but we can do that without conflating nonsense.
Marx identified feudalism as a system distinct from capitalism, separated historically by a transitory system called mercantilism.
Mercantilism may be considered as a kind of proto-capitalism, because it entails the employer-employee relationship, but lacks the systemic consequences of capital accumulation, which depends on continuous growth enabled by the changes in production following the industrial revolution.
Marx identified feudal and capitalist societies both as characterized by "class struggles", that is, having multiple classes with mutually antagonistic interests, as had "all hitherto existing society".