this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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You know capitalism is really new in the scale of human history right? It wasn't until the industrial revolution in the 18th century that the means of production could be privately owned which then allowed for further speculative capital (stocks, land value, etc) to be equated to power.
The people of the past weren't inherently stupid. Plenty of scientific and cultural progress was made prior to capitalism being our economic model.
What were most people doing before the industrial revolution? Farming.
Most were farmers because humans needed food, and food productivity was low before the age of industrialization. Not really sure what you are trying to argue other than it took a long time for enough progress was made to free humans to presue other things other than farming their land.
Capitalism incentivises rapid progress in all fields.
I'm not cheering for capitalism, just saying it takes advantage of the inherent greed of people to quickly speed innovation. There would be no industrial revolution without capitalism. At least not on the short scale of just a hundred years or two.
No, capitalism only incentivises profiting.
Except in the end you will get innovations of greed.
Wrong! Sadly, article is only in Russian.
Russia's industrial revolution did not happen in a bubble. They did not invent the technology that allowed the industrial revolution, they took advantage of others inventions to take a very inefficient rout to the revolution. They have enormous resources and a vast population... yet it was much smaller capitalist nations that advanced much faster.
Capitalism's industrial revolution did not happen in a bubble. It did not invent science that allowed the industrial revolution, it took advantage of existing discoveries to take a very dehumanizing route to wrong destination.
Also USSR was at least 15 nations.
Yes capitalism did not make all scientific discoveries but it did use them to make more discoveries at a vastly faster rate.
If you ignore fact that almost all fundamental research was done or paid by goverment. Where is private CERN? Private ISS? Heck, where computers would be if not for brittish, american and soviet state research programs? Even companies like Intel were created by goverment funding.
How many civilian contractors were hired by CERN and others and how many bidders did they take before deciding which to take. Did scientists volunteer or were they paid by grants. Where did the government funding come from? Taxes from citizen's income. How much of the technology used in these projects was built on tech invented by public/private companies?
Russia wasnt communist. They were a tsardom that masqueraded as socialism.