“If Roman Emperors were capitalists, they would do capitalist things” isn’t really the great point you think it is bud lmao
If you actually cared about history, you’d ask more interesting questions like ‘why with did the Roman Empire’s economy never consolidate into a fully realized capitalist mode of production despite having many proto-capitalist institutions and practices’
But of course you libs don’t have the capacity to ask interesting questions about history, because you’re too busy parroting half-baked neoclassical theorems on “human nature”
What is very interesting is that based off of existing historical and archaeological records, the Romans did have the capacity and academic know-how to harness steam power and theoretically create steam-powered mechanisms, which could have eventually translated into coal. So even that point is generally unsound. They could have, but they didn’t, with these contraptions remaining as academic theory or novelties such as water clocks.
The general materialist theory around this is that this is mostly because of the elite reliance on the slave economy, the slave economy’s gutting of the political will of the bourgeoisie, and the lack of translation between purely academic knowledge and trades knowledge. Basically, the empire was too physically large to sustain any kind of coherent industrial movement, and what movement may have occured would have been fought tooth and nail by an elite class who’s primary mode of production was the monopoly of slave labor.
Theorists like Marx see capitalism particularly as a revolutionary moment that is, on the whole, a positive development for humanity and labor, just that at some point these large systems will have to deal with its own contradictions, in particular the immiseration of the very workers that are the primary producers of value. That said, he did not recognize it as system without violence or the requirements of empire, simply that it created a class that could potentially, because of it’s access to and knowledge of industrial practices, succeed in a social revolution, unlike the slaves and peasants before them. And to some degree he was correct, and to other degrees he was incorrect. In general, Marx’s socio-economic theories hold empirically stronger than his socio- political theories, but I am generally not one to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
It is more theorists like Proudhon who see capitalism as a pure net negative, an immiseration and proletarianization of the skilled working tradesman without any real compensation or hope of social revolution. For him, fighting against the capitalist machine itself as it was developing was the primary battle, not letting it take hold and then advocating for a social revolution in an inevitable moment of crisis. And again, he has been proven correct to some degree and incorrect to another and his socio- economic theories, especially those that dovetail with Marx, have proven empirically stronger than his socio- political theories.
That being said, we don’t really live in the exact same capitalist model that Proudhon or Marx were describing. We are actually living in a socio- political and socio- economic order that adheres more closely to what Lenin predicted, where the old-school rentier landlords and financial barons are the ones that dictate the terms of industrial development, after reasserting control over the market, not the internal industrial capitalists themselves, with the majority of profits being ‘super-profits’ created by imperial dominance, funneled to an imperial core. It’s a strange set-up more reminiscent of feudalism, where finance capital flows freely, but people are tied to the land, a reactionary form of capitalism even by Adam Smith’s standards.
Anyways, tldr, that’s fucking stupid, ahistorical, and reductionist.
I mean, he wasn’t happy about it. He more or less saw the Russian revolution as the last stop off the train before it ran itself towards oblivion (he was kind of a mix of Marx and Proudhon in that way), because he thought that if Tsarist Russia had it’s traditional boot off of Germany, the German proletariat would become the real vanguard of the revolution, which could then take on the real enemy (the British). And then when that didn’t happen (failed) in 1918 and then again in 1923 (right before he died) he generally became much more pessimistic about seeing a way off the tracks, and it is this line of thinking that was most influential to Stalin, because while he believed Lenin’s theories and observations, because of the success of their revolution he also believed that with organization and sacrifice, they could still get off the tracks. And so they did, for a time, but they didn’t quite forsee the U.S. becoming what it became (even though Marx in his later letters to Engels did predict that if anywhere was the last place to experience a profit decline crisis it would be the U.S. because of how large and relatively uninhabited it is).
One of the fundamental assumptions behind most eco-fascist rhetoric is that the amount of resources on Earth is insufficient for the current number of people or some arbitrary number of future people, and therefore that those resources could either be shared equally (and everybody will eventually starve) or a subset of humanity should get more of the resources and let the rest starve. I cannot stress enough that this is unequivocally false. The amount of resources and food that Earth is capable of supplying humanity far exceeds current and projected future populations.
It’s a problem of distribution as the West takes far, far more resources than the rest of the planet’s population. It’s also a problem of exploitation, because developing economies are pressured into growing crops for making money - like opium poppies - rather than for food agriculture. Human development and technological advances in fertilizers and seeds and so on created the ability for humanity to not need to starve. Capitalism created the network in which those resources are funneled to a global minority via markets.
Recommended reading on this is Late Victorian Holocausts, in which the authors describe how famines which killed tens of millions of people in impoverished countries in the late 19th century - so, firmly in the capitalist era - were not caused by a lack of food in total (in most cases), but rather by imperialist countries like Britain taking away their grain for domestic consumption and merchants in markets in countries like India marking up prices so severely that the poor could not possibly afford it. The same railroads that were lauded for their ability to distribute grain from areas of bountiful harvest to areas with bad harvest ended up taking that grain from developing countries to Europe while the rest starved. Amartya Sen: “Famine is the characteristic of some people not having enough to eat. It is not the characteristic of there not being enough food to eat.”
As @iridaniotter@hexbear.net said in the replies, the feudal mode of production was unable to change the climate to the same degree that the capitalist mode of production is able to, and was too inefficient compared to capitalism for the problem to necessarily be one of distribution and not total food production. Humans were generally victims of climate and environmental conditions, whereas now we can, to a significant degree, bend it to our will. The crime is that we do not use those powers to end starvation when it is now entirely within our means to do so, when that wasn’t (as) true before capitalism.
Capitalists do not destroy the environment because of malice, no one wakes up one day and decides they really wanna fuck up some coral or drive a species of frog to extinction
Capitalists destroy the environment because of a specific profit imperative that dominates their thinking and behavior, profits go up when costs go down, and the maintenance of the environment is an external cost
So the snuggly or non-snuggly nature of humans prior to capitalism is completely irrelevant
Yes actually. We know full well what humans were like in hunter gatherer tribes, because we still have such tribes living today.
I suggest you meet the Hadza. A living demonstration of how different human beings are depending on the system you place them in. When humans have neither competition with one another nor a lack of material abundance they become something quite different.
Your interpretation of humans as assholes comes from never having known anything other than capitalism. If you lived in a burning building and never knew any different environment you would also believe that it is natural for humans to endlessly cough.
Do give that thread a full watch, and read the last couple posts. It will change your attitude.
There are two massive problems with that line of thinking: the first is the fact that capitalism is fundamentally a continuation and escalation of what it originally replaced, many of the core concepts of it originated under mercantilism, and the fundamental inequity and ownership-based-rule stretches back through feudalism all the way into antiquity, for all that it’s had different flavors and social expectations along the way. The second is that capitalism is the hegemonic system now, so there’s no reason to rail against feudal proto-capitalism or the primitive accumulation of the Roman empire, because they are all dead and gone.
Hell, a not insignificant chunk of the European bourgeoisie are literally the failchildren of landed aristocracy, and most non-aristocratic “old money” families at this point got their start under mercantilism. If the old Roman patrician families were still around instead of having diminished into obscurity in the middle ages they’d be bourgeoisie too, and probably weirdo hyper-fascists like most aristocratic failchildren are.
Yeah, because humans were real snuggly before capitalism
Ah, the human-caused climate change of 5000 BCE, truly a tragedy the likes of which we had never seen before and will never see again
You think if Roman emperors would abstain from burning gas for money if they knew how to?
“If Roman Emperors were capitalists, they would do capitalist things” isn’t really the great point you think it is bud lmao
If you actually cared about history, you’d ask more interesting questions like ‘why with did the Roman Empire’s economy never consolidate into a fully realized capitalist mode of production despite having many proto-capitalist institutions and practices’
But of course you libs don’t have the capacity to ask interesting questions about history, because you’re too busy parroting half-baked neoclassical theorems on “human nature”
Not what I said.
What is very interesting is that based off of existing historical and archaeological records, the Romans did have the capacity and academic know-how to harness steam power and theoretically create steam-powered mechanisms, which could have eventually translated into coal. So even that point is generally unsound. They could have, but they didn’t, with these contraptions remaining as academic theory or novelties such as water clocks.
The general materialist theory around this is that this is mostly because of the elite reliance on the slave economy, the slave economy’s gutting of the political will of the bourgeoisie, and the lack of translation between purely academic knowledge and trades knowledge. Basically, the empire was too physically large to sustain any kind of coherent industrial movement, and what movement may have occured would have been fought tooth and nail by an elite class who’s primary mode of production was the monopoly of slave labor.
Theorists like Marx see capitalism particularly as a revolutionary moment that is, on the whole, a positive development for humanity and labor, just that at some point these large systems will have to deal with its own contradictions, in particular the immiseration of the very workers that are the primary producers of value. That said, he did not recognize it as system without violence or the requirements of empire, simply that it created a class that could potentially, because of it’s access to and knowledge of industrial practices, succeed in a social revolution, unlike the slaves and peasants before them. And to some degree he was correct, and to other degrees he was incorrect. In general, Marx’s socio-economic theories hold empirically stronger than his socio- political theories, but I am generally not one to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
It is more theorists like Proudhon who see capitalism as a pure net negative, an immiseration and proletarianization of the skilled working tradesman without any real compensation or hope of social revolution. For him, fighting against the capitalist machine itself as it was developing was the primary battle, not letting it take hold and then advocating for a social revolution in an inevitable moment of crisis. And again, he has been proven correct to some degree and incorrect to another and his socio- economic theories, especially those that dovetail with Marx, have proven empirically stronger than his socio- political theories.
That being said, we don’t really live in the exact same capitalist model that Proudhon or Marx were describing. We are actually living in a socio- political and socio- economic order that adheres more closely to what Lenin predicted, where the old-school rentier landlords and financial barons are the ones that dictate the terms of industrial development, after reasserting control over the market, not the internal industrial capitalists themselves, with the majority of profits being ‘super-profits’ created by imperial dominance, funneled to an imperial core. It’s a strange set-up more reminiscent of feudalism, where finance capital flows freely, but people are tied to the land, a reactionary form of capitalism even by Adam Smith’s standards.
Anyways, tldr, that’s fucking stupid, ahistorical, and reductionist.
I mean, he wasn’t happy about it. He more or less saw the Russian revolution as the last stop off the train before it ran itself towards oblivion (he was kind of a mix of Marx and Proudhon in that way), because he thought that if Tsarist Russia had it’s traditional boot off of Germany, the German proletariat would become the real vanguard of the revolution, which could then take on the real enemy (the British). And then when that didn’t happen (failed) in 1918 and then again in 1923 (right before he died) he generally became much more pessimistic about seeing a way off the tracks, and it is this line of thinking that was most influential to Stalin, because while he believed Lenin’s theories and observations, because of the success of their revolution he also believed that with organization and sacrifice, they could still get off the tracks. And so they did, for a time, but they didn’t quite forsee the U.S. becoming what it became (even though Marx in his later letters to Engels did predict that if anywhere was the last place to experience a profit decline crisis it would be the U.S. because of how large and relatively uninhabited it is).
deleted by creator
The Romans weren’t around in 5000 BCE dumbass
Wow you win how many debate credits would you like
Sorry folks here like to have coherent discussions and dislike moving goal posts
Then setup better goalposts
Here’s your goalpost
Where did they move?
Ah, yes. Things that didn’t happen used as historical arguments.
This is a dead end, as it is not real.
One of the fundamental assumptions behind most eco-fascist rhetoric is that the amount of resources on Earth is insufficient for the current number of people or some arbitrary number of future people, and therefore that those resources could either be shared equally (and everybody will eventually starve) or a subset of humanity should get more of the resources and let the rest starve. I cannot stress enough that this is unequivocally false. The amount of resources and food that Earth is capable of supplying humanity far exceeds current and projected future populations.
It’s a problem of distribution as the West takes far, far more resources than the rest of the planet’s population. It’s also a problem of exploitation, because developing economies are pressured into growing crops for making money - like opium poppies - rather than for food agriculture. Human development and technological advances in fertilizers and seeds and so on created the ability for humanity to not need to starve. Capitalism created the network in which those resources are funneled to a global minority via markets.
Recommended reading on this is Late Victorian Holocausts, in which the authors describe how famines which killed tens of millions of people in impoverished countries in the late 19th century - so, firmly in the capitalist era - were not caused by a lack of food in total (in most cases), but rather by imperialist countries like Britain taking away their grain for domestic consumption and merchants in markets in countries like India marking up prices so severely that the poor could not possibly afford it. The same railroads that were lauded for their ability to distribute grain from areas of bountiful harvest to areas with bad harvest ended up taking that grain from developing countries to Europe while the rest starved. Amartya Sen: “Famine is the characteristic of some people not having enough to eat. It is not the characteristic of there not being enough food to eat.”
As @iridaniotter@hexbear.net said in the replies, the feudal mode of production was unable to change the climate to the same degree that the capitalist mode of production is able to, and was too inefficient compared to capitalism for the problem to necessarily be one of distribution and not total food production. Humans were generally victims of climate and environmental conditions, whereas now we can, to a significant degree, bend it to our will. The crime is that we do not use those powers to end starvation when it is now entirely within our means to do so, when that wasn’t (as) true before capitalism.
The feudal mode of production is inherently incapable of meaningfully changing the climate. It’s a moot point.
Capitalists do not destroy the environment because of malice, no one wakes up one day and decides they really wanna fuck up some coral or drive a species of frog to extinction
Capitalists destroy the environment because of a specific profit imperative that dominates their thinking and behavior, profits go up when costs go down, and the maintenance of the environment is an external cost
So the snuggly or non-snuggly nature of humans prior to capitalism is completely irrelevant
Have you met Amerikkkan chuds
I mean, non capitalist countries also destroy the environment
Yes actually. We know full well what humans were like in hunter gatherer tribes, because we still have such tribes living today.
I suggest you meet the Hadza. A living demonstration of how different human beings are depending on the system you place them in. When humans have neither competition with one another nor a lack of material abundance they become something quite different.
Your interpretation of humans as assholes comes from never having known anything other than capitalism. If you lived in a burning building and never knew any different environment you would also believe that it is natural for humans to endlessly cough.
Do give that thread a full watch, and read the last couple posts. It will change your attitude.
There are two massive problems with that line of thinking: the first is the fact that capitalism is fundamentally a continuation and escalation of what it originally replaced, many of the core concepts of it originated under mercantilism, and the fundamental inequity and ownership-based-rule stretches back through feudalism all the way into antiquity, for all that it’s had different flavors and social expectations along the way. The second is that capitalism is the hegemonic system now, so there’s no reason to rail against feudal proto-capitalism or the primitive accumulation of the Roman empire, because they are all dead and gone.
Hell, a not insignificant chunk of the European bourgeoisie are literally the failchildren of landed aristocracy, and most non-aristocratic “old money” families at this point got their start under mercantilism. If the old Roman patrician families were still around instead of having diminished into obscurity in the middle ages they’d be bourgeoisie too, and probably weirdo hyper-fascists like most aristocratic failchildren are.
Leftism is about claiming nothing meaningful ever changes or can get better. The more apathetic thought terminating cliches, the more leftist it is.