Mastodawn

It occurs to me that when someone says that #capitalism is just "human nature", they are actually saying that indigenous people all over the world are or were less than human.

Something that is an inevitable result of human nature should have arisen independently in many times and places, if all these peoples were human.

But what we see is that it arose from a relatively very small subset of people in a certain region at a particular time.

It had to be exported to the rest of the world and implemented *against great resistance*.

If capitalism is human nature this should not have been necessary. It would have been eagerly embraced. So obviously these other people must be more like domesticated animals that must be managed for their own good.

Tyler Steward Oct 19, 2023

@RD4Anarchy yes, well said. Capitalism also must relentlessly sell itself as the only possible way to organize human economy and society, in order to convince people that its obvious deprivations are inevitable and necessary, rather than a highly arbitrary choice we are collectively making, to our and the planet’s detriment.

RD Oct 19, 2023

https://kolektiva.social/@RD4Anarchy/110357393562342660

RD (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image Capital is served by various institutions (property rights and legal codes, corporations, the system of wage labor, law enforcement, military, other religions, education systems, media, white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, etc), by the billionaires and oligarchs who are its priests and the rulers and politicians who are their henchmen. As Albert Einstein wrote in Monthly Review, May 1949: "...private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights." As a result we have unwittingly internalized Capital's demands, to our great detriment. Capital's narrative is deeply embedded into every aspect of our lives. Note how this quote from the speech "The Three Evils of Society" by Martin Luther King Jr. assumes the Protestant work ethic is a good thing and not itself part of the implanted narrative that serves Capital. Instead of calling it out, MLK tried to distance it from capitalism. So while the second sentence of this quote is very true, the first sentence is an example of the deep conditioning of the narrative of capitalism and its precursors: "We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad." Even "Democratic Socialist" Bernie Sanders sadly equates dignity and security with wage slavery: "This is the United States. We are the richest country on the planet. One job should be enough to live with security and dignity." David Graeber, from “Debt: The First 5,000 Years”: "For me, this is exactly what's so pernicious about the morality of debt: the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money - and then tell us that it's only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve access to the resources required to pursue anything in life other than money. It introduces moral perversions on almost every level. ("Cancel all student loan debt? But that would be unfair to all those people who struggled for years to pay back their student loans!" Let me assure the reader that, as someone who struggled for years to pay back his student loans and finally did so, this argument makes about as much sense as saying it would be "unfair" to a mugging victim not to mug their neighbors too.) "The argument might perhaps make sense if one agreed with the underlying assumption - that work is by definition virtuous, since the ultimate measure of humanity's success as a species is its ability to increase the overall global output of goods and services by at least 5 percent per year. The problem is that it is becoming increasingly obvious that if we continue along these lines much longer, we're likely to destroy everything." As @HeavenlyPossum has commented: "capitalism depends on ignorance of history for its ideological survival". It is the intent of this project to do what we can to remove some of this ignorance, to share the debunking of some of the lies we've been told; to encourage *unlearning the lesson* that has been forced upon us. 28/30

kolektiva.social

whoosh Oct 19, 2023

@RD4Anarchy
re: "human nature",
Please permit me to suggest that what makes humans special is the freedom and rationality to *choose* .....
#Swedenborg

.... and the consciousness capable of discerning options and alternatives from which to choose ....

.... and a capacity for imagination, from which to formulate new options.

Nemo Oct 19, 2023

Matt Walsh openly believes this.

dog and the plate Oct 19, 2023

@RD4Anarchy a stronger version of this argument is that hierarchy is the human nature and capitalism is just the least destructive iteration of the hierarchies. Which is even more questionable considering what capitalism is doing to people and nature.

RD Oct 19, 2023

Yes, and I should be clear that I consider capitalism as part of a continuum, growing out of colonialism, which is itself part of a continuum of hierarchical power structures. The version of the argument that you're referring to of course depends on a great deal of intentional ignorance.

Vefhtagn Oct 19, 2023

it's coming from the book that have start this "religion" (wealth of nations, Adam Smith) ... That consider this a "fact".

It's a theory that have been destroyed by anthropologist and historian since decade....

(Yes, any other society, past or not already fagocited by capitalism is based on mutual assistance).

But because it's the basis of their faith, they will never admit that's a big Bullshit...

And it have been the justification for colonialism, slavery,and so on ....

(As usually, know your ennemy and their theory)

RD Oct 19, 2023

Indeed!

You might enjoy the thread I compiled about all this:

https://kolektiva.social/@RD4Anarchy/110357255122736031

RD (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image HOW DID WE GET HERE? (a thread of threads, quotes, and links) This is a collection of writings and research concerned with how we got where we are today, which is in fact the story of what has been done *to* us, and what has been *taken from us*. By "us" we're talking about "the 99%", "workers", "wage slaves", all non-owners of private property, "the poor", unhoused people, indigenous people, even plenty of people who swear by capitalism and identify as "capitalist" yet have no capital of their own and no serious hope of ever having any worth speaking of. In other words almost everyone except for the very few who have had the power to exploit us and shape our lives to serve their agenda. We're going to examine institutions and concepts that have deeply altered our world at all levels, both our external and internal realities. By "here" we are talking about climate crisis and myriad other environmental catastrophes resulting from hyper-excessive extraction, consumption and waste; a world of rampant inequality, exploitation and oppression, hunger and starvation, genocide and war; a world of fences, walls, gatekeepers, prisons, police, bullshit jobs and criminalized poverty; a world overrun with cars and preventable disease; a world of vanishing biodiversity and blooming fascism; a world where "democracy" results in being led by some of the worst of humanity; a world ruled by an imaginary but all-powerful and single-minded god: Capital. Our inspiration and structural framework for this survey is this quote from "The Prehistory of Private Property", an important work from political philosopher Karl Widerquist and anthropologist Grant S. McCall: "After hundreds of millennia in which all humans had direct access to the commons, it took only a few centuries for enclosure, colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization to cut off the vast majority of people on Earth from direct access to the means of economic production and therefore to rob them of the power to say no. It took only a few generations to convince most people that this situation was natural and inevitable. That false lesson needs to be unlearned." https://widerquist.com/books-3/#2b Also recommended: "Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy" https://widerquist.com/books-3/#4b #capitalism #colonialism #enclosure #PrivateProperty #state #police #inequality #anthropology #environment #ClimateCrisis #economics 1/30

kolektiva.social

RD Oct 19, 2023

@Vefhtagn ah, I see you already discovered it 👍

Vefhtagn Oct 19, 2023

@RD4Anarchy yes, I was reading it , and I agree with it at 100% ...(of what I have read, haven't finished it)

Juho Mäntysalo Oct 19, 2023

@Vefhtagn @RD4Anarchy

By the time of Adam Smith, capitalism had already been ongoing for 150 years. Further, Smith envisoned on his book the markets (which is not the same as capitalism!) as working in concert with the needs of society. This wasn't the case, and his later works (which people never quote) essentially demanded stopping the stunt.

Alas, it was too late.

(Also: Smith was writing against merchantilism, and the problems there-in. Not really a grand system, either.)

HeavenlyPossum Oct 19, 2023

Ellen Woods has a great line in “The Origin of Capitalism” about how lots of historians treat capitalism as a thing that doesn’t need to be explained. It’s always *imminent,* just waiting to happen as soon as obstacles are removed.

Violet Madder Oct 19, 2023

Yes. Precisely.

It goes hand in hand with the presumption that indigenous peoples were done some kind of "favor" when they were subjugated into this system.

HeavenlyPossum Oct 19, 2023

@violetmadder @RD4Anarchy

My favorite are the ancaps who will go to extraordinary length explaining the precise and exclusive mechanism by which property can be legitimately enclosed, and when you mention the dispossession of Native Americans (and the resulting illegitimacy of all property in the US, by their own rules), will respond with some variation of the Randian “those savages? they’re weren’t using the land productively enough!”

Violet Madder Oct 19, 2023

@HeavenlyPossum @RD4Anarchy

And then I have to restrain the visceral urge to tackle and throttle them.

I am not a violent person. I am not a violent person. Deeeeeep breaths. Oof.

Violet Madder Oct 19, 2023

@HeavenlyPossum @RD4Anarchy

I mean, just... please, please fucking learn to use your HEART and CONSCIENCE productively before you get everyone killed, you awful hubristic fools!

ShadSterling Oct 19, 2023

@RD4Anarchy We are Capital. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

Aiono Oct 19, 2023

@RD4Anarchy
Also, even if it's nature that doesn't mean it's right. A lot of things are natural but evil. When people commit crimes they usually do because of natural feelings. It doesn't justify the act.

jack the nonabrasive Oct 19, 2023

@RD4Anarchy You are in good company. This is, essentially, #CorneliusCastioriadis's argument against Marxist historical determinism in the first part of #TheImaginaryInstitutionOfSociety.

Ben Rosengart Oct 19, 2023

@RD4Anarchy @mekkaokereke That's a brilliant close-reading ... I will remember this.

Dial Tone, Busy Signal *biiip*Oct 20, 2023

@RD4Anarchy I think I've posted this before, but I always had a sense that something wasn't quite right around here (USA, the west, etc.) When I was younger, I thought most of the world's problems could be attributed to spiraling misunderstandings.
In the last couple of years, though, it's become clear to me that it's the concept of whiteness, western culture, and capitalism that cause all the problems.
The one thing that made it most clear to me was the Southern Strategy here in the US.

Dial Tone, Busy Signal *biiip*Oct 20, 2023

@RD4Anarchy for anyone that reads my comment above and thinks I'm nuts, you really owe it to yourself to look into it. The basic (probably oversimplified) idea is that the party/society does its best to make things harder for everyone, because the disadvantaged classes will suffer more. It's the opposite of the idea that a high tide raises all ships. A stormy sea will sink some "good" ships, but many more "bad" ones.

Dial Tone, Busy Signal *biiip*Oct 20, 2023

@RD4Anarchy I know this is hours ago by now, but I wanted to clarify something. The point was that the concept of whiteness is bad for everyone, even white people. This, however, is not me saying there's no white privilege. This murky concept manages to provide benefits for some AND dangers for all.