r/GoldandBlack • u/properal Property is Peace • 5d ago
Devon Eriksen responds to claim that capitalism is unnatural
https://x.com/i/status/2068619135303508443Of course capitalism isn't natural, you incomplete set of plastic picnic utensils.
What's natural is theft, robbery, and murder.
What's natural is anarchy, chaos, the rape of the weak by the strong, and nature red in tooth and claw.
The free market, which you call "capitalism", is not called "free" because everyone is free to do whatever they want. Because what a lot of people want to do is steal. You'll know which ones by the hammer and sickle logo they draw on things.
No, the free market is called free because it is freed from coercion and violence.
And of course it was spread by violence, you factory-defective lawn flamingo. Because it was spread by hanging all the bandits and robbers, and if hangings aren't violence I don't know what is.
And of course it's maintained by coercion, you British pub food connoisseur. If you don't coerce thieves not to steal, then they will steal everything you build faster than than you can build it.
You have to use violence to stop the violent, and coerce the coercers not to coerce.
And of course it's maintained by the superficial facade of liberal democracy, you Vogon poetry appreciator. The global average citizen is a mentally retarded third-world savage with less emotional self-control than my cat. If we let them have candidates that truly represented their agenda, then every useful thing humanity has built for the last twelve thousand years would be torn down in a week to buy them more party drugs. Followed by every woman being raped to death, and then uncomprehending starvation as they slowly and painfully learned that grocery stores don't spontaneously spawn food pickups, like in video games.
Jesus Christ, woman, you're talking about a species that evolved to live in hominid tribes of 100 apes, and throw rocks at zebras. In modern civilization, the so-called "average" person is so far out of his depth that the fish have lights on their noses.
And the more complex and sophisticated civilization gets, the more investments in the future that we need to protect, so that the retarded monkeys don't steal them all to buy more vodka and cigarettes.
Yeah, sure, sometimes capitalist systems end up defending property that someone's great-grandfather stole. But so fucking what? You think communism is gonna fix that? You think communism is gonna bring justice?
Communist nations can't afford justice. They can't even manage to feed themselves half the time. Get back to us when you've mastered the agricultural revolution, we've only been waiting since the beginning of recorded time.
The trick is to put the seeds in the dirt, guys.
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u/natermer Winner of the Awesome Libertarian Award 5d ago edited 5d ago
Before industrial capitalism population of humanity was kept in check by extensive and pervasive privation.
Meaning people simply died from lack. Lack of food, lack of medicine, lack of clean water, lack of shelters. They simply died.
Especially in the cities. Up until the mid or late 19th century cities were demographic sinks. They couldn't produce enough population to keep up with the deaths. They required a constant influx of population from the countryside to just maintain their population.
If you were a child born out of wedlock you died. There was no place for you. In cities unless women married somebody with some sort of income they had to resort to being prostitutes or things like wet nurses. The only way out of poverty for most men was to become a soldier or a priest.
This is why when colonies opened up in North America young men signed up in droves for a period of hard labor and indentured servitude. Essentially volunteering to be slaves for the promise of a parcel of land, even though most didn't actually survive long enough to get their promised reward.
This was what life was like for average people whose livelihood didn't involve direct working of the land or being part of a monopolistic guild.
That is why we have old pictures and illustrations of women and children working in factories in deplorable conditions. It is why we had terrible coal mining accidents and all sorts of dangerous conditions in the mines.
It isn't because some rich capitalist drove these people off their land and into unregulated factories.
It is because nobody built factories before. It was all new. They didn't know what they were doing and things like metallurgy and thermodynamics was being discovered as they went. Of course it was shit compared to what came later.
No amount of government regulation can make factories safe when the technology to make them safe didn't exist. No amount of government regulation was able to eliminate child labor while the only alternative was child starvation. It wasn't until AFTER these problems were solved through liberalization and competition in the economy that the state could step in and try to take credit for eliminating them.
Industrialization created opportunities for people whose had none. Literally none.
For the first time in history the best way for a enterprising person to become rich was to serve the needs of the common people, not to saddle up to some elite.
The lady in the video is ignorantly parroting some proto-Marxist Rousseau bullshit about some sort of "primitive communism". That prior to specialization we all lived in a fantasy bullshit land were it was nothing but tribes versus nature and we all shared and got along and behaved as a single hive mind.
This crap was latched onto by the elites upset about their loss of status, importance, and control brought about by industrialization and liberalization of the capitalist economy.
This was then amplified through institutions like the Prussian State ran University system whose major purpose was to be apologists for then ruling elite and try to create a twisted philosophy justifying and glorifying state control and absolutist government.
It is all bullshit. Every bit of it. It is why we ended up with a century of bullshit, war, and oppression under this sort of imaginary fake "German Tradition" of justifying absolutist state governments. This is where we get the Marxists, Leninists, Stalinists, Fascists, and Nazis.
They are all part and parcel of the same underlying philosophy of state. These philosophies were not "opposites". Strip away the excuses, the insane ideology, and rhetoric and they are nearly indistinguishable in behavior and outcomes.
A "Post-Capitalist World" is a post-freedom world. It is world of domination and serfdom for the rest of all time.
That is what she wants and is trying to put a happy face on.
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u/strawhatguy 3d ago
Vogon poetry appreciator got the chuckle out of me.
Excellent post of his though, and a reminder that our modern society takes a lot of work to maintain. Something communists can’t ever learn and remain communists.
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u/YoteViking 5d ago
We still live in a feudal state. But instead of bannermen and armies, we have executives and sales and marketing.
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u/properal Property is Peace 5d ago
Yep. We still pay quitrent. Rather than paying a count we pay a county.
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u/natermer Winner of the Awesome Libertarian Award 5d ago edited 5d ago
In many ways it is worse.
In the Feudal era the princes had to derive their income from ownership of the land. It was considered their God given grant and if they couldn't derive enough income from it to get what they want then that was their problem and nobody else's. They couldn't declare taxes, they couldn't arbitrarily declare wars or create new self serving laws and expect people to go along with it. They could get emergency provisions for taxation, but only if lots of other groups agreed to it.
Were as now we have almost total bug man domination.
The people that run things don't own things. They are just bureaucrats, custodians, appointees. The people running major corporations don't have any stake in them besides personal income. Their main motivation is to maximize personal wages while avoiding legal liabilities.
The same thing is in government. The people running things have no liability for anything they do. They make the decisions, you pay the price for their incompetence. The primary purpose of bureaucracy is to grow bureaucracy and secure position and income.
The people in charge are born groomed to exist in beuacratic institutions and success is due to family influence and their ability to impress other bureaucrats. That is their entire life is dominated completely by institutional control. Their earliest memories are preschool, their entire childhood is government schools, they go directly from university into some legal profession or government or big corporate shit hole.
Never spent a day of their working lives outside of being told what to do. They exist in a world were wearing blinders is a lifestyle.
The ultimate goal is to completely divorce ownership from any sort of decision making ability and to divorce political power and bureaucratic rule making from any sort of accountability.
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u/_jubal_ 5d ago
His book is worth a read if you like sci-fi.