295
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
295 points (97.7% liked)
Today I Learned
17326 readers
1076 users here now
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Yup. Capitalism is built on a foundation of lies.
The other thing I think may just be straight up a pro-capitalist-propaganda myth is "homesteading." Honestly, do we have any evidence that that has ever happened in human history? It seems like every extample a Libertarian (with a capital "L") might come up with is actually an example of theft of land. From either indigenous peoples or from pre-capitalist land owners.
Money is just a representational tool for value. A service rendered might make you in-debted to the person and you will have to render a service in return to get out of it. No money is involved, but if a person rendered you a big service and you return the favor with a small service, it might make the other person less inclined to help you again in a big way.
The introduction of something that represents a value is a logical step when keeping track of debt. Be it salt, cows, labor or even money.
Gift economies are of course probably hotly debated topics. I'd love to see a multi-year experiment that allocates a large area to a group and lets them try out such an economy. I don't know how they will interface with the real world to get good (medicine, electricity, ...) or if it will just throw them back into the dark ages and they'll have to progress from there.
I'm not terribly sure what your response has to do with my comment in particular. I'm not sure why you responded to me and not the OP. I guess just because that first line of my comment agreed with OP?
Whatever the case, do you have a significant other? Kids? Parents? Is your relationship with any of them as transactional as what you're describing?
"Happy 18th birthday, Jimmy. I wanted to let you know that the total cost for services rendered in the course of your raising comes to," *hands Jimmy an invoice, "$227,261.63. Would you like to pay that in a lump sum or do you need to discuss a payment plan?"
It's understandable if you've spent your whole life in capitalism to not really be able to think outside of that particular box, but I recommend looking into it. I can't say I'm terribly well-read on the subject, but I think a book worth reading on the subject is Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics (which is available to read for free online.) If you want something a little more hard-core, there's Kropotkin's "The Conquest of Bread". Both of those will probably speak pretty well to the question of whether a gift economy can coexist with things like modern technology. (Spoiler: Those works definitely argue it can.)
You may be surprised to know that not everybody grows up in a nice family. You further be surprised to find out that some parents have children so that they can be taken care of later in life - I take care of you, you take care of me. There are children paying rent to their parents right this moment.
The further away the relationship, the more quid pro quo comes into play. The fact that there are some people who do not require some kind of compensation (love, hugs, material good, money, ...) for some actions, doesn't mean that won't require it for others. People can have unconditional love for another person and still demand payment or compensation from another.
This thread is specifically about one of the lies in question. And I gave another example. You don't seem to be arguing that those lies aren't indeed lies, so if I'm understanding your arguments correctly, what you're trying to get at is that neither "barter was a thing before money" and "homesteading is a thing that actually happens/happened" are "foundational" to pro-capitalist thought and "the foundation" of capitalist ideology is instead something along the lines that "quid pro quo and keeping score are human nature and money is just an abstraction thereof". Yes?
I'm saying that I find the existence of counterexamples (as well as the whole "gift economies were the norm before money" thing, and that capitalism has existed for a great minority of the time anatomically-modern humans have been around) a compelling reason to be skeptical of that stance.
Have you never had a friend group? Like that's a dead-ass simple 'study' of a gift economy. Sometimes someone pays for lunch, sometimes someone pays for beer, sometimes someone brings weed or bakes cookies or sings a song. Everyone helps everyone else out. Each according to their need, based on their ability. Or is that not something you're familiar with, because if not, you need better friends.
Yes, and then there’s the one who always receives gifts but never contributes. The free rider problem is present even at this tiny scale. Reputation takes care of it, generally, when the friend group decides to stop hanging out with the non-reciprocal individual.
I haven’t heard of any proposal that could scale up a reciprocal economy like this up to a city of thousands (let alone millions). The issue is Dunbar’s number: our brains simply cannot track relationships with thousands of people.
First part was good and got the point across. The personal attack at the end was unnecessary.
Capitalism is way further along the chain of economic system development.
It essentially builds upon coinage and debt systems to be able to issue credit for people to invest in land and equipment to increase productivity of workers.
Capitalism is not strictly necessary but it did speed up the productivity development without spreading the gains equally. Right now we have a great opportunity to take these productivity gains and split them equitably via wealth redistribution but people will need to vote left for that.
It's not capitalism itself that is bad it's mostly how it's being used and the built-in accumulation of money that translates to power that translates to political power that's the problem with it.
Capitalism as a force for good is a lie, it's a force for increasing productivity and investment and accumulation of wealth. Capitalism itself is just another tool to be used by the people for the people.
How is capitalism built on this "lie"?
Because they dont like it.