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
There are so many good arguments against capitalism, why make such a terrible one full of holes, lies, and fallacies?
Capitalism didn't invent slaves lol
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.
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.
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.
You aren't breaking anything with this basic view. Human society isn't monolithic; there have been, and will continue to be, many different forms of it.
Conquest and wars occur throughout time, but corporate firms, investment banks, stock markets, ownership and commodification of land, and other hallmarks of capitalism are more recent.
This lazy argument shows a defeated attitude that we should just accept things as they are, or worse, that it is in our nature to be terrible to one another, when history actually shows more evidence of cooperation than strife.
Not the whole of society. The problem with biology is that no matter how many nice people there are, there will always be someone willing to take advantage of them.
It's a good thing there were no genocides, slave grades, and constant wars before capitalism. Pheww
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.
Somebody let Spain know they're off the hook for all the colonizing, slavery and genocide since they hadn't invented capitalism yet!
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.
Not to undermine the argument, but plenty of other cultures without capitalism were horrific and did ridiculous wars for basically all of history.
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.
“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).
Surely Rome wasn't a warmongering, genocidal, capitalist-colonialist society with the rich elite hoarding untold wealth and trading in slaves 1500 years earlier, right?
The Roman mode of production wasn't capitalist exploitation of wage earners who sold their labor, but through their exploration of slaves in an agregarian system. There's some arguments to be made that capitalist systems start as early as 12th century Italy, but it becomes dominant in 1600s England and is able to radically transform that society.
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.
You see, kids, capitalism didn't start until the 16th Century. The world was in black and white until around the 1950s, then soon afterward boomers created racism, pollution and inflation. Then we got the Internet and began the Enlightened Age of Memes.
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