Arcane Capitalism: Primitive socialism, Primitive capital, Private ownership, Means of production, Market capitalism, Class discrimination, and Petite bourgeoisie (smaller capitalists)

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Arcane Capitalism: Primitive capital, Private ownership, Class discrimination and Petite bourgeoisie (Video)

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

“The Pyramid of Capitalist System is a common name of a 1911 American cartoon caricature critical of capitalism, copied from a Russian flyer of c. 1901. The graphic focus is on stratification by social class and economic inequality. The work has been described as “famous”, “well-known and widely reproduced”. A number of derivative works exist. The picture shows a literal “social pyramid” or hierarchy, with the wealthy few on the top, and the impoverished masses at the bottom. Crowned with a money bag representing capitalism, the top layer, “we rule you”, is occupied by the royalty and state leaders. Underneath them are the clergy (“we fool you”), followed by the military (“we shoot at you”), and the bourgeoisie (“we eat for you”). The bottom of the pyramid is held up by the workers and the peasants (“we work for all… we feed all”). The basic message of the image is a critique of the capitalist system, depicting a hierarchy of power and wealth. It illustrates a working class supporting all others, and if it would withdraw their support from the system it could topple the existing social order. This type of criticism of capitalism is attributed to the French socialist Louis Blanc.” ref

Arcane = complicated and therefore understood or known by only a few people

To me, societies start with primitive anarchism and socialism at least 100,000 years ago and are seen in animist-only thinking that is now largely limited to southern Africa today. Then they lose systematic anarchism possibly by 50,000 to 40,000 years ago but keeps socialism/primitive communism with the emergence of totemism largely limited to Europe and then spreading out from there. And to me, arcane/primitive capitalism emerges at or around 7,000 to 5,000 years ago in central Europe especially southern Germany or surrounding areas (Czecho-Slovakia and Austria), and then spread out from there.

7,522-6,522 years ago Linear Pottery culture which I think relates to Arcane Capitalism’s origins

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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7,522-6,522 years ago Linear Pottery culture, sometimes fortified or palisade settlements and weapon-traumatized bones also found, all which I think relates to Arcane Capitalism’s origins.

Early Pottery People movements and its eventual emergence of Elites, Private property, and the Private ownership of the means of production, (private accumulation of capital) which are seen as characteristics that distinguish capitalism from socialism.

Private property creates monopoly power, harming allocative efficiency, unlike the Common ownership of property helping allocative efficiency. ref

“An earlier view saw the Linear Pottery Culture as living a “peaceful, unfortified lifestyle”. Since then, settlements with palisades and weapon-traumatized bones have been discovered, such as at Herxheim, which, whether the site of a massacre or of a martial ritual, demonstrates, “…systematic violence between groups”. Most of the known settlements, however, left no trace of violence.” ref

Linear Pottery Culture (Linearbandkeramik) and Violence

“There seems to be considerable evidence that relationships between the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in Europe and the LBK migrants were not entirely peaceful. Evidence for violence exists at many LBK village sites. Massacres of whole villages and portions of villages appear to be in evidence at sites such as Talheim, Schletz-Asparn, Herxheim, and Vaihingen. Mutilated remains suggesting cannibalism have been noted at Eilsleben and Ober-Hogern. The westernmost area appears to have the most evidence for violence, with about one-third of the burials showing evidence of traumatic injuries.” ref

“Further, there is a fairly high number of LBK villages that evidence some kind of fortification efforts: an enclosing wall, a variety of ditch forms, complex gates. Whether this resulted from direct competition between local hunter-gatherers and competing LBK groups is under investigation; this kind of evidence can only be partly helpful. However, the presence of violence on Neolithic sites in Europe is under some amount of debate. Some scholars have dismissed the notions of violence, arguing that the burials and the traumatic injuries are evidence of ritual behaviors, not inter-group warfare. Some stable isotope studies have noted that some mass burials are of non-local people; some evidence of enslavement has also been noted.” ref

“Although no significant population transfers were associated with the start of the Linear Pottery Culture, population diffusion along the wetlands of the mature civilization (about 5200 BCE) had leveled the high percentage of the rare gene sequence mentioned above by the late Linear Pottery Culture. The population was much greater by then, a phenomenon termed the Neolithic demographic transition (NDT). According to Bocquet-Appel beginning from a stable population of “small connected groups exchanging migrants” among the “hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists,” the Linear Pottery Culture experienced an increase in birth rate caused by a “reduction in the length of the birth interval.” ref

“The author hypothesizes a decrease in the weaning period made possible by the division of labor. At the end of the Linear Pottery Culture, the NDT was over and the population growth disappeared due to an increase in the mortality rate, caused, the author speculates, by new pathogens passed along by increased social contact. Investigation of the Neolithic skeletons found in the Talheim Death Pit suggests that prehistoric men from neighboring tribes were prepared to fight and kill each other in order to capture and secure women. The mass grave at Talheim in southern Germany is one of the earliest known sites in the archaeological record that shows evidence of organized violence in Early Neolithic Europe, among various Linear Pottery Culture tribes.” ref

Primitive socialism

“Primitive socialist accumulation, sometimes referred to as the socialist accumulation, was a concept put forth in the early Soviet Union during the period of the New Economic Policy. It was developed as a counterpart to the process of the primitive accumulation of capital that took place during the early stages and development of capitalist economies. Because the Soviet economy was underdeveloped and largely agrarian in nature, the Soviet Union would have to be the agent of primitive capital accumulation to rapidly develop the economy. The concept was proposed originally as a means to industrialize the Russian economy through extracting surplus from the peasantry to finance the industrial sector.

“The major proponent of the concept was Yevgeni Preobrazhensky in his 1926 work The New Economics which was based on his 1924 lecture in the Communist Academy, titled The Fundamental Law of Socialist Accumulation. The concept was proposed during the period of the New Economic Policy. Its main principle is that the state sector of the economy of the transitional period has to appropriate the peasant‘s surplus product to accumulate resources necessary for the growth of the industry. To this end, the major mechanisms were the foreign trade monopoly held by the state and price control in favor of industry which in effect caused price scissors.” ref 

“This theory was criticized politically and associated with Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition, but it was in fact put into practice by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s as when Stalin said in his speech to The Captains of Industry that the Soviet Union had to accomplish in a decade what England had taken centuries to do in terms of economic development in order to be prepared for an invasion from the West.” ref

“Beyond publications and policy debates, the application of this theory affected the working class as well, as more surplus was extracted from them for industrial capital investment. Real wages for both regular workers and managers plummeted despite the growing wage differential. Piece work production relations were introduced wholesale. The Soviet penal policy also tightened, causing a significant growth of inmates in the Gulag. It was not until after Stalin’s death that a minimum wage was introduced, reductions to piece work production relations were made and mass rehabilitations resulted in the dissolution of most of the Gulag.” ref

“Pre-Marxist communism, While Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels defined communism as a political movement, there were already similar ideas in the past which one could call communist experiments. Marx himself saw primitive communism as the original hunter-gatherer state of humankind. Marx theorized that only after humanity was capable of producing surplus did private property develop.” ref 

“Karl Marx and other early communist theorists believed that hunter-gatherer societies as were found in the Paleolithic through to horticultural societies as found in the Chalcolithic were essentially egalitarian and he, therefore, termed their ideology to be primitive communism. Since Marx, sociologists and archaeologists have developed the idea of and research on primitive communism. According to Harry W. Laidler, one of the first writers to espouse a belief in the primitive communism of the past was the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca who stated, “How happy was the primitive age when the bounties of nature lay in common…They held all nature in common which gave them secure possession of the public wealth.” ref 

“Because of this he believed that such primitive societies were the richest as there was no poverty. Due to the strong evidence of an egalitarian society, lack of hierarchy, and lack of economic inequality, historian Murray Bookchin has argued that Çatalhöyük was an early example of anarcho-communism, and so an example of primitive communism in a proto-city. It has been argued that the Indus Valley Civilisation is an example of a primitive communist society, due to its perceived lack of conflict and social hierarchies. Others argue that such an assessment of the Indus Valley civilization is not correct.” ref

“The idea of a classless and stateless society based on communal ownership of property and wealth also stretches far back in Western thought long before The Communist Manifesto. There are scholars who have traced communist ideas back to ancient times, particularly in the work of Pythagoras and Plato. Followers of Pythagoras, for instance, lived in one building and held their property in common because the philosopher taught the absolute equality of property with all worldly possessions being brought into a common store.” ref

“It is argued that Plato’s Republic described in great detail a communist-dominated society wherein power is delegated in the hands of intelligent philosophers or military guardian class and rejected the concept of family and private property. In a social order divided into warrior-kings and the Homeric demos of craftsmen and peasants, Plato conceived an ideal Greek city-state without any form of capitalism and commercialism with business enterprise, political plurality, and working-class unrest considered as evils that must be abolished.” ref 

“While it is a matter of debate as to the extent Plato was a precursor of communist thinking, his utopian speculations are shared by other utopian thinkers later on. An important feature that distinguishes Plato’s ideal society in the Republic is that the ban on private property applies only to the superior classes (rulers and warriors), not to the general public.” ref

“Peter Kropotkin argued that the elements of mutual aid and mutual defense expressed in the medieval commune of the middle ages and its guild system were the same sentiments of collective self-defense apparent in modern anarchism, communism, and socialism. From the High Middle Ages in Europe, various groups supporting Christian and religious communism were occasionally adopted by reformist Christian sects. An early 12th century proto-Protestant group originating in Lyon known as the Waldensians held their property in common in accordance with the Book of Acts, but were persecuted by the Catholic Church and retreated to Piedmont.” ref

“Around 1300 the Apostolic Brethren in northern Italy were taken over by Fra Dolcino who formed a sect known as the Dulcinians which advocated ending feudalism, dissolving hierarchies in the church, and holding all property in common. The Peasants’ Revolt in England has been an inspiration for “the medieval ideal of primitive communism”, with the priest John Ball of the revolt being an inspirational figure to later revolutionaries and having allegedly declared, “things cannot go well in England, nor ever will, until all goods are held in common.” ref

“Biblical scholars have argued that the mode of production seen in early Hebrew society was a communitarian domestic one that was akin to primitive communism. The early Church Fathers, like their non-Abrahamic predecessors, maintained that human society had declined to its current state from a now lost egalitarian social order. There are those who view that the early Christian Church, such as that one described in the Acts of the Apostles (specifically Acts 2:44-45 and Acts 4:32-45) was an early form of communism. The view is that communism was just Christianity in practice and Jesus Christ was himself a communist.” ref 

“This link was highlighted in one of Marx’s early writings which stated: “As Christ is the intermediary unto whom man unburdens all his divinity, all his religious bonds, so the state is the mediator unto which he transfers all his Godlessness, all his human liberty”. Furthermore, the Marxist ethos that aims for unity reflects the Christian universalist teaching that humankind is one and that there is only one god who does not discriminate among people. Later historians have supported the reading of early church communities as communistic in structure. Pre-Marxist communism was also present in the attempts to establish communistic societies such as those made by the ancient Jewish sects the Essenes and by the Judean Desert sect.” ref

“Thomas Müntzer led a large Anabaptist communist movement during the German Peasants’ War. Engels’ analysis of Thomas Müntzer work in and the wider German Peasants’ War lead Marx and Engels to conclude that the communist revolution, when it occurred, would be led not by a peasant army but by an urban proletariat. In the 16th century, English writer Sir Thomas More portrayed a society based on common ownership of property in his treatise Utopia, whose leaders administered it through the application of reason.” ref

“Several groupings in the English Civil War supported this idea, but especially the Diggers who espoused communistic and agrarian ideals. Oliver Cromwell and the Grandees’ attitude to these groups was at best ambivalent and often hostile. Engels considered the Levellers of the English Civil War as a group representing the proletariat fighting for a utopian socialist society. Though later commentators have viewed the Levellers as a bourgeois group that did not seek a socialist society. During the Age of Enlightenment in 18th century France, some liberal writers increasingly began to criticize the institution of private property even to the extent they demanded its abolition. Such writings came from thinkers such as the deeply religious philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” ref 

“In his hugely influential The Social Contract (1762) Rousseau outlined the basis for a political order based on popular sovereignty rather than the rule of monarchs, and in his Discourse on Inequality (1755) inveighed against the corrupting effects of private property claiming that the invention of private property had led to the,” crimes, wars, murders, and suffering” that plagued civilization. Raised a Calvinist, Rousseau was influenced by the Jansenist movement within the Roman Catholic Church. The Jansenist movement originated from the most orthodox Roman Catholic bishops who tried to reform the Roman Catholic Church in the 17th century to stop secularization and Protestantism. One of the main Jansenist aims was democratizing to stop the aristocratic corruption at the top of the Church hierarchy.” ref

“Victor d’Hupay’s 1779 work Project for a Philosophical Community described a plan for a communal experiment in Marseille where all private property was banned. d’Hupay referred to himself as a communiste, the French form of the word “communist”, in a 1782 letter, the first recorded instance of that term. The Shakers of the 18th century under Joseph Meacham developed and practiced their own form of communalism, as a sort of religious communism, where property had been made a “consecrated whole” in each Shaker community. Many Pre-Marx socialists lived, developed, and published their works and theories during this period from the late 18th century to the mid 19th century, including: Charles Fourier, Louis Blanqui, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Pierre Leroux, Thomas Hodgskin, Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, Wilhelm Weitling, and Étienne Cabet. Utopian socialist writers such as Robert Owen are also sometimes regarded as communists.” ref

“The currents of thought in French philosophy from the Enlightenment from Rousseau and d’Hupay proved influential during the French Revolution of 1789 in which various anti-monarchists, particularly the Jacobins, supported the idea of redistributing wealth equally among the people, including Jean-Paul Marat and Francois Babeuf. The latter was involved in the Conspiracy of the Equals of 1796 intending to establish a revolutionary regime based on communal ownership, egalitarianism, and the redistribution of property. Babeuf was directly influenced by Morelly’s anti-property utopian novel The Code of Nature and quoted it extensively, although he was under the erroneous impression it was written by Diderot.” ref

“Also during the revolution the publisher Nicholas Bonneville, the founder of the Parisian revolutionary Social Club used his printing press to spread the communist treatises of Restif and Sylvain Maréchal. Maréchal, who later joined Babeuf’s conspiracy, would state it his Manifesto of the Equals (1796), “we aim at something more sublime and more just, the COMMON GOOD or the COMMUNITY OF GOODS” and “The French Revolution is just a precursor of another revolution, far greater, far more solemn, which will be the last.” Restif also continued to write and publish books on the topic of communism throughout the Revolution. Accordingly, through their egalitarian programs and agitation Restif, Maréchal, and Babeuf became the progenitors of modern communism.” ref 

“Babeuf’s plot was detected, however, and he and several others involved were arrested and executed. Because of his views and methods, Babeuf has been described as an anarchist, communist, and a socialist by later scholars. The word “communism” was first used in English by Goodwyn Barmby in a conversation with those he described as the “disciples of Babeuf”. Despite the setback of the loss of Babeuf, the example of the French Revolutionary regime and Babeuf’s doomed insurrection was an inspiration for French socialist thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc, Charles Fourier, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon, the founder of modern anarchism and libertarian socialism would later famously declare “property is theft!” a phrase first invented by the French revolutionary Brissot de Warville.” ref

“Maximilien Robespierre and his Reign of Terror, aimed at exterminating the monarchy, nobility, clergy, and conservatives, was admired among some anarchists, communists, and socialists. In his turn, Robespierre was a great admirer of Voltaire and Rousseau. By the 1830s and 1840s in France, the egalitarian concepts of communism and the related ideas of socialism had become widely popular in revolutionary circles thanks to the writings of social critics and philosophers such as Pierre Leroux and Théodore Dézamy, whose critiques of bourgeoisie liberalism and individualism led to a widespread intellectual rejection of laissez-faire capitalism on economic, philosophical and moral grounds.” ref 

“According to Leroux writing in 1832, “To recognize no other aim than individualism is to deliver the lower classes to brutal exploitation. The proletariat is no more than a revival of antique slavery.” He also asserted that private ownership of the means of production allowed for the exploitation of the lower classes and that private property was a concept divorced from human dignity. It was only in the year 1840 that proponents of common ownership in France, including the socialists Théodore Dézamy, Étienne Cabet, and Jean-Jacques Pillot began to widely adopt the word “communism” as a term for their belief system. Those inspired by Étienne Cabet created the Icarian movement setting up communities based on non-religious communal ownership in various states across the US, the last of these communities located a few miles outside Corning, Iowa, disbanded voluntarily in 1898.” ref

“The participants of the Taiping Rebellion, who founded the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, are viewed by the Chinese Communist Party as proto-communists. Marx referred to the communist tendencies in the Taiping Rebellion as “Chinese socialism”. The Communards and the Paris Commune are often seen as proto-communists, and had a significant influence on the ideas of Karl Marx, who described it as an example of the “dictatorship of the proletariat“. Marx saw communism as the original state of mankind from which it rose through classical society and then feudalism to its current state of capitalism. He proposed that the next step in social evolution would be a return to communism. In its contemporary form, communism grew out of the workers’ movement of 19th-century Europe. As the Industrial Revolution advanced, socialist critics, blamed capitalism for creating a class of poor, urban factory workers who toiled under harsh conditions and for widening the gulf between rich and poor.” ref

Primitive communism

“Primitive communism is a way of describing the gift economies of hunter-gatherers throughout history, where resources and property hunted or gathered are shared with all members of a group in accordance with individual needs. In political sociology and anthropology, it is also a concept (often credited to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels) that describes hunter-gatherer societies as traditionally being based on egalitarian social relations and common ownership. A primary inspiration for both Marx and Engels were Lewis H. Morgan‘s descriptions of “communism in living” as practiced by the Haudenosaunee of North America. In Marx’s model of socioeconomic structures, societies with primitive communism had no hierarchical social class structures or capital accumulation.” ref 

Americas Pre-Columbian era Primitive Socialism/Communism

“Lewis Henry Morgan‘s descriptions of “communism in living” as practiced by the Haudenosaunee of North America, through research enabled by and coauthored with Ely S. Parker, were viewed as a form of pre-marxist communism. Morgan’s works were a primary inspiration for Marx and Engel’s description of primitive communism, and has led to some believing that early communist-like societies also existed outside of Europe, in Native American society and other pre-Colonized societies in the Western hemisphere. Though the belief of primitive communism as based on Morgan’s work is flawed due to Morgan’s misunderstandings of Haudenosaunee society and his, since proven wrong, theory of social evolution. This, and subsequent more accurate research, has led to the society of the Haudenosaunee to be of interest in communist and anarchist analysis. Particularly aspects where land was not treated as a commodity, communal ownership, and near non-existent rates of crime.” ref

“Primitive communism, meaning societies that practiced economic cooperation among the members of their community, where almost every member of a community had their own contribution to society, and land and natural resources would often be shared peacefully among the community. Some such communities in North America and South America still existed well into the 20th century. Historian Barry Pritzker lists the Acoma, Cochiti, and Isleta Puebloans as living in socialist-like societies. It is assumed modern egalitarianism seen in Pueblo communities stems from this historic socio-economic structure. David Graeber has also commented that the Inuit have practiced communism and fended off unjust hierarchy for “thousands of years”. The Chachapoya culture indicated an egalitarian non-hierarchical society through a lack of archaeological evidence and a lack of power expressing architecture that would be expected for societal leaders such as royalty or aristocracy.” ref

“The original idea of primitive communism is rooted in the idea of the noble savage present in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the early anthropology work of Morgan and Ely S. Parker. Engels was the first to write about primitive communism in detail, with the 1884 publication of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Engels categorized primitive communist societies into two phases: the “wild” (hunter-gatherer) phase which lacked a permanent superstructure and had close relationships with the natural world, and the “barbarian” phase which held a superstructure like that of the ancient Germanic populations beyond the borders of the Roman Empire and the Indigenous peoples of North America before colonization by Europeans, being intra-communally egalitarian and matrilineal within the community. Marx and Engels used the term more broadly than Marxists did later, and applied it not only to hunter-gatherers but also to some communities that engaged in subsistence agriculture.” ref 

“There is also no agreement among later scholars, including Marxists, on the historical extent, or longevity, of primitive communism. Marx and Engels also noted how capitalist accumulation latched itself onto social organizations of primitive communism. For instance, in private correspondence the same year that The Origin of the Family was published, Engels attacked European colonialism, describing the Dutch regime in Java directly organizing agricultural production and profiting from it, “on the basis of the old communistic village communities”. He added that cases like the Dutch East Indies, British India, and the Russian Empire showed “how today primitive communism furnishes … the finest and broadest basis of exploitation.” ref

“Anarchists, including Peter Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus, believed that societies that exemplified primitive communism were also examples of anarchist society before industrialisation. An example of this is Kropotkin’s anthropological work on anarchism and gift economies, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which uses a study of the San people of southern Africa for its thesis. There was little development in the research of “primitive communism” among Marxist scholars beyond Engels’ study until the 20th and 21st centuries when Ernest Mandel, Rosa Luxemburg, Ian Hodder, Marija Gimbutas, and others took up and developed upon the original theses.” ref

“Non-Marxist scholars of prehistory and early history did not take the term seriously, although it was occasionally engaged with and often dismissed. The term primitive communism first appeared in Russian scholarship in the late 19th century, with references to primitive communism existing in ancient Crete. However, it was not researched in any depth until the 20th century, with work such as that of the ethnographer Dmitry Konstantinovich Zelenin, who looked at non-hunter-gatherer societies within the Soviet Union to identify remnants of primitive communism within their societies.” ref

“The belief of primitive communism as based on Morgan’s work is flawed due to Morgan’s misunderstandings of Haudenosaunee society and his since-proven-wrong theory of social evolution. Subsequent and more accurate research has focused on hunter-gatherer societies and aspects of such societies in relation to land ownership, communal ownership, and criminality and justice. A newer definition of primitive communism could be summarized as societies that practice economic cooperation among the members of their community, where almost every member of a community has their own contribution to society and land and natural resources are often shared peacefully among the community.” ref

“From the 20th century onward, sociologists and archaeologists have looked at the application of the term of primitive communism to hunter-gatherer societies of the paleolithic through to horticultural societies of the Chalcolithic, including Paleo-American societies from the lithic stage through the archaic period. Soviet archaeologists, influenced by Morgan’s and Engels’ works, interpreted the various paleolithic cultures that created Venus figures, many of which were found in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, as evidence of the societies being primitive communist and matriarchal in nature. The psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich concluded in 1931 the existence of an early communism from the information in Bronisław Malinowski‘s work. However, Malinowski and the philosopher Erich Fromm did not consider this conclusion to be compelling. Ernest Borneman supported Reich’s ideas in his 1975 work Das Patriarchat.” ref

Primitive Communist Societies

“In a primitive communist society, the productive forces would have consisted of all able-bodied persons engaged in obtaining food and resources from the land, and everyone would share in what was produced by hunting and gathering. There would be no private property, which is distinguished from personal property such as articles of clothing and similar personal items, because primitive society produced no surplus; what was produced was quickly consumed and this was because there existed no division of labor, hence people were forced to work together. The few things that existed for any length of time – the means of production (tools and land), housing – were held communally. In Engels’ view, in association with matrilocal residence and matrilineal descent, reproductive labor was shared. There would have also been a lack of state.” ref

“Domestication of animals and plants following the Neolithic Revolution through herding and agriculture, and the subsequent urban revolution, were seen as the turning point from primitive communism to class society, as this transition was followed by the appearance of private ownership and slavery, with the inequality that those entail. In addition, parts of the population began to specialize in different activities, such as manufacturing, culture, philosophy, and science which lead in part to social stratification and the development of social classes. Egalitarian and communist-like hunter-gatherer societies have been studied and described by many well-known social anthropologists including James Woodburn, Richard Borshay Lee, Alan Barnard, and Jerome Lewis.” ref 

“Anthropologists such as Christopher Boehm, Chris Knight, and Lewis offer theoretical accounts to explain how communistic, assertively egalitarian social arrangements might have emerged in the prehistoric past. Despite differences in emphasis, these and other anthropologists follow Engels in arguing that evolutionary change—resistance to primate-style sexual and political dominance—culminated eventually in a revolutionary transition. Lee criticizes the mainstream and dominant culture‘s long-time bias against the idea of primitive communism, deriding “Bourgeois ideology [that] would have us believe that primitive communism doesn’t exist. In popular consciousness, it is lumped with romanticism, exoticism: the noble savage.” ref

“Papers have argued that the depiction of hunter-gatherers as egalitarian is misleading. According to one paper published in Current Anthropology, while levels of inequality were low, they were still present, with the average hunter-gatherer group having a Gini coefficient of 0.25 (for comparison, this was attained by the nation of Denmark in 2007). This argument is in part supported by Alain Testart and others, who have said that a society without property is not free from problems of exploitation, domination, or wars. Marx and Engels, however, did not argue that communism brought about equality, as according to them equality was a concept without connection in physical reality. Testart does support Engels’ observations that societies without surplus are economically egalitarian and conversely that societies with a surplus are unequal.” ref

“Arnold Petersen has used the existence of primitive communism to argue against the idea that communism goes against human nature. Hikmet Kıvılcımlı in his The Thesis of History argued that in pre-capitalist societies, the main dynamic of historical change “was not class struggle within society but rather the strong collective action” of egalitarian and collectivist values of “primitive socialist society”. Biblical scholars have also argued that the mode of production seen in early Hebrew society was a communitarian domestic one that was akin to primitive communism. Claude Meillassoux has commented on how the mode of production seen in many primitive societies is a communistic domestic one.” ref

“Due to the strong evidence of an egalitarian society, lack of hierarchy, and lack of economic inequality, historian Murray Bookchin has argued that Çatalhöyük was an early example of anarcho-communism, and so an example of primitive communism in a proto-city. However, still, others use Çatalhöyük a very large Neolithic and Chalcolithic proto-city settlement in southern Anatolia/Turkey, which existed from approximately 7500 to 6400 BCE or 9,522-8,400 years ago, as an example that refutes the concept of primitive communism. Similarly, it has been argued that the Indus Valley Civilisation is an example of a primitive communist society due to its perceived lack of conflict and social hierarchies. Daniel Miller and others argue that such an assessment of the Indus Valley civilization is not correct.” ref

“The Marxist archaeologist V. Gordon Childe carried out excavations in Scotland from the 1920s and concluded that there was a neolithic classless society that reached as far as the Orkney Islands. This has been supported by Perry Anderson, who argued that primitive communism was prevalent in pre-Roman western Europe. Descriptions of such societies are also present in the works of classical authors. The Indian communist politician Shripad Amrit Dange considered ancient Indian society to be of a primitive communist nature. Other communists within India have also labeled the societies of current indigenous groups, such as the Adivasi, as examples of primitive communism. In Alfred Radcliffe-Brown‘s study of the Andamanese at the beginning of the 20th century, he comments that they have “customs which result in an approach to communism” and “their domestic policy may be described as communism.” ref

“Alexander Mikhailovich Zolotarev, in his 1960 work on the development of religious cult communities from tribal communities in the Balkans, spoke of the primitive communism of the “archaic form of the tribal system”. Rolf Jensen in the 1980s conducted a historical study of Wolof society in west Africa looking at the development of class antagonisms from a primitive communist society. Also in the 1980s, Bourgeault looked at the forceful transition of indigenous societies in Canada from their traditional structures, which were anarchist and communistic in nature, into capitalist exploitation due to encroaching imperialism and colonialism. Such an area of interest has been a common topic of research for many fields beyond just Marxist scholars.” ref 

“Some anthropologists, such as John H. Moore, have continued to argue that societies such as those of Native Americans constitute primitive communist societies, whilst acknowledging and incorporating the research showing the complexity and diversity in native American societies. James Connolly believed that “Gaelic primitive communism” existed in remnants in Irish society after it “had almost entirely disappeared” from much of western Europe. The agrarian communes of the rundale system in Ireland have subsequently been assessed using a framework of primitive communism, where the system fits Marx and Engels’ definition. Soviet theorists and anthropologists, such as Lev Sternberg, considered some of the indigenous groups of Siberia and the Russian far east (such as the Nivkh) to be primitive communists in nature.” ref

Primitive Communism Criticism

“Criticism of the idea of primitive communism relates to definitions of property, where anthropologists such as Margaret Mead argue that private property exists in hunter-gatherer and other “primitive societies” but provide examples that Marx and subsequent theorists label as personal property, not private property. The idea has also been critiqued by other anthropologists for being based on Morgan’s evolutionary model of society and for romanticising non‐Western societies. Western and non-Western Scholars have criticized applying models that are too ethnocentrically European to non-European societies.” ref 

“Western scholars, including Leacock, have also criticized the ethnocentric point of view and biases in previous ethnographic research into hunter-gatherer societies. This is similar to criticism of adhering to stadialism in analyzing cultures. Feminist scholars have criticized the idea of the lack of subjugation of women as suggested from the works of Engels, while Marxist feminists have been critical of and have reassessed Engels’ ideas and suggestions in The Origin of the Family related to the development of women’s subjugation in the transition from primitive communism to class society. The Marxian economist Ernest Mandel criticized the research of Soviet scholars on primitive communism due to the influence of “Soviet-Marxist ideology” in their social sciences work.” ref

“David Graeber and David Wengrow‘s The Dawn of Everything challenges the notion that humans ever lived in precarious, small-scale societies with little or no surplus. While they provide examples of sharing egalitarian societies in pre-history they claim that a huge variety of complex societies (some with large cities) existed long before the supposed agricultural and then urban revolutions proposed by V. Gordon Childe. Graeber and Wengrow’s understanding of hunter-gatherer societies has, however, been questioned by other anthropologists. The use of the term “communism” to describe these societies has been questioned when put in comparison with a future post-industrial communism, particularly in relation to the difference in scale from small communal groups to the size of modern nation-states.” ref

The use of the term “primitive” can be taken wrong…

“Primitive” in recent anthropological and social studies has begun to fall out of use due to racial stereotypes surrounding the ideas of what is primitive. Such a move has been supported by indigenous peoples who have faced racial stereotyping and violence due to being viewed as “primitive”. Due to this, the term “primitive communism” may be replaced by terms such as Pre-Marxist communism. Alain Testart and others have said that anthropologists should be careful when using research on current hunter-gatherer societies to determine the structure of societies in the paleolithic, where viewing current hunter-gatherer communities as “the most ancient of so-called primitive societies” is likely due to appearances and perceptions and does not reflect the progress and development that such societies have undergone in the past 10,000 years. There have been Marxist historians criticized for their comments on the “primitivism” and “barbarism” of societies prior to their contact with European empires, such as the comments of Endre Sík. Such views on “primitivism” and “barbarism” are also prevalent in the works of their non-Marxist contemporaries. Marxist anthropologists have criticized and denounced Soviet anthropologists and historians for declaring indigenous communities they were studying for primitive communism as “degenerate.” ref

Primitive Accumulation of Capital

“In Marxian economics and preceding theories, the problem of primitive accumulation (also called previous accumulation, original accumulation) of capital concerns the origin of capital, and therefore of how class distinctions between possessors and non-possessors came to be. Adam Smith‘s account of primitive-original accumulation depicted a peaceful process, in which some workers labored more diligently than others and gradually built up wealth, eventually leaving the less diligent workers to accept living wages for their labor. Karl Marx rejected this account as “childish” for its omission of violence, war, enslavement, and colonialism in the historical accumulation of land and wealth. Marxist Scholar David Harvey explains Marx’s primitive accumulation as a process that principally “entailed taking land, say, enclosing it, and expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and then releasing the land into the privatized mainstream of capital accumulation.” ref 

“The concept was initially referred to in various different ways, and the expression of an “accumulation” at the origin of capitalism began to appear with Adam Smith. Smith, writing The Wealth of Nations in his native English, spoke of a “previous” accumulation; Karl Marx, writing Das Kapital in German, reprised Smith’s expression, by translating it to German as ursprünglich (“original, initial”); Marx’s translators, in turn, rendered it into English as primitive. James Steuart, with his 1767 work, is considered by some scholars as the greatest classical theorist of primitive accumulation.” ref

The myths of political economy

“In disinterring the origins of capital, Marx felt the need to dispel what he felt were religious myths and fairy-tales about the origins of capitalism. Marx wrote: 

This primitive accumulation plays in political economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone-by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. (…) Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labor, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work. Such childishness is every day preached to us in the defense of property.— Capital, Volume I, chapter 26″ ref 

“What has to be explained is how the capitalist relations of production are historically established. In other words, how it comes about that means of production get to be privately owned and traded in, and how the capitalists can find workers on the labor market ready and willing to work for them, because they have no other means of livelihood; also referred to as the “Reserve Army of Labor.” ref

The link between primitive accumulation and colonialism

“At the same time as local obstacles to investment in manufactures are being overcome, and a unified national market is developing with a nationalist ideology, Marx sees a strong impulse to business development coming from world trade: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China, &c.” ref

“The different moments of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.— Capital, Volume I, chapter 31, emphasis added.” ref

Primitive Accumulation and Privatization

“According to Marx, the whole purpose of primitive accumulation is to privatize the means of production, so that the exploiting owners can make money from the surplus labor of those who, lacking other means, must work for them. Marx says that primitive accumulation means the expropriation of the direct producers, and more specifically “the dissolution of private property based on the labor of its owner… Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent laboring individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor” (emphasis added).” ref

The social relations of capitalism

“In the last chapter of Capital, Volume I, Marx described the social conditions he thought necessary for capitalism with a comment about Edward Gibbon Wakefield‘s theory of colonization:

Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative – the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3,000 persons of the working-class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, ‘Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.’ Unhappy Mr. Peel, who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!” ref

“This is indicative of Marx’s more general fascination with settler colonialism, and his interest in how “free” lands—or, more accurately, lands seized from indigenous people—could disrupt capitalist social relations.” ref

Ongoing primitive accumulation

“Orthodox” Marxists see primitive accumulation as something that happened in the late Middle Ages and finished long ago, when the capitalist industry started. They see primitive accumulation as a process happening in the transition from the feudal “stage” to the capitalist “stage”. However, this can be seen as a misrepresentation of both Marx’s ideas and historical reality, since feudal-type economies exist in various parts of the world, even in the 21st century. Marx’s story of primitive accumulation is best seen as a special case of the general principle of capitalist market expansion. In part, trade grows incrementally, but usually, the establishment of capitalist relations of production involves force and violence; transforming property relations means that assets previously owned by some people are no longer owned by them, but by other people, and making people part with their assets in this way involves coercion. This is an ongoing process of expropriation, Proletarianization, and Urbanization.” ref

“In his preface to Das Kapital Vol. 1, Marx compares the situation of England and Germany and points out that less developed countries also face a process of primitive accumulation. Marx comments that “if, however, the German reader shrugs his shoulders at the condition of the English industrial and agricultural laborers, or in optimist fashion comforts himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad, I must plainly tell him, “De te fabula narratur! (the tale is told of you!)”.Marx was referring here to the expansion of the capitalist mode of production (not the expansion of world trade), through expropriation processes. He continues, “Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonism that results from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” ref

David Harvey’s theory of accumulation by dispossession

“David Harvey expands the concept of “primitive accumulation” to create a new concept, “accumulation by dispossession“, in his 2003 book, The New Imperialism. Like Mandel, Harvey claims that the word “primitive” leads to a misunderstanding in the history of capitalism: that the original, “primitive” phase of capitalism is somehow a transitory phase that need not be repeated once commenced. Instead, Harvey maintains that primitive accumulation (“accumulation by dispossession”) is a continuing process within the process of capital accumulation on a world scale. Because the central Marxian notion of crisis via “over-accumulation” is assumed to be a constant factor in the process of capital accumulation, the process of “accumulation by dispossession” acts as a possible safety valve that may temporarily ease the crisis. This is achieved by simply lowering the prices of consumer commodities (thus pushing up the propensity for general consumption), which in turn is made possible by the considerable reduction in the price of production inputs. Should the magnitude of the reduction in the price of inputs outweigh the reduction in the price of consumer goods, it can be said that the rate of profit will, for the time being, increase.” ref 

“Thus: Access to cheaper inputs is, therefore, just as important as access to widening markets in keeping profitable opportunities open. The implication is that non-capitalist territories should be forced open not only to trade (which could be helpful) but also to permit capital to invest in profitable ventures using cheaper labor power, raw materials, low-cost land, and the like. The general thrust of any capitalist logic of power is not that territories should be held back from capitalist development, but that they should be continuously opened up.— David Harvey, The New Imperialism, p. 139.” ref 

“Harvey’s theoretical extension encompasses more recent economic dimensions such as intellectual property rights, privatization, and predation and exploitation of nature and folklore. Privatization of public services puts enormous profit into capitalists’ hands. If it belonged to the public sector, that profit would not have existed. In that sense, the profit is created by the dispossession of peoples or nations. Destructive industrial use of the environment is similar because the environment “naturally” belongs to everyone, or to no one: factually, it “belongs” to whoever lives there. Multinational pharmaceutical companies collect information about how herb or other natural medicine is used among natives in a less-developed country, do some R&D to find the material that make those natural medicines effective, and patent the findings.” ref 

“By doing so, multinational pharmaceutical companies can now sell the medicine to the natives who are the original source of the knowledge that made the production of medicine possible. That is, dispossession of folklore (knowledge, wisdom, practice) through intellectual property rights. David Harvey also argues that accumulation by dispossession is a temporal or partial solution to over-accumulation. Because accumulation by dispossession makes raw materials cheaper, the profit rate can at least temporarily go up. Harvey’s interpretation has been criticized by Brass, who disputes the view that what is described as present-day primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession, entails proletarianization. 

“Because the latter is equated by Harvey with the separation of the direct producer (mostly smallholders) from the means of production (land), Harvey assumes this results in the formation of a workforce that is free. By contrast, Brass points out that in many instances the process of depeasantization leads to workers who are unfree, because they are unable personally to commodify or recommodify their labor-power, by selling it to the highest bidder.” ref

Schumpeter’s critique of Marx’s theory

“The economist Joseph Schumpeter disagreed with the Marxist explanation of the origin of capital, because Schumpeter did not believe in exploitation. In liberal economic theory, the market returns to each person the exact value she added into it; capitalists are just people who are very adept at saving and whose contributions are especially magnificent, and they do not take anything away from other people or the environment. Liberals believe that capitalism has no internal flaws or contradictions; only outside threats. To liberals, the idea of the necessity of violent primitive accumulation to capital is particularly incendiary. Schumpeter wrote rather testily:
[The problem of Original Accumulation] presented itself first to those authors, chiefly to Marx and the Marxists, who held an exploitation theory of interest and had, therefore, to face the question of how exploiters secured control of an initial stock of ‘capital’ (however defined) with which to exploit – a question which that theory per se is incapable of answering, and which may obviously be answered in a manner highly uncongenial to the idea of exploitation.— Joseph Schumpeter, Business Cycles, Vol. 1, New York; McGraw-Hill, 1939, p. 229.” ref

“Schumpeter argued that imperialism was not a necessary jump-start for capitalism, nor is it needed to bolster capitalism, because imperialism pre-existed capitalism. Schumpeter believed that, whatever the empirical evidence, capitalist world trade could in principle just expand peacefully. If imperialism occurred, Schumpeter asserted, it has nothing to do with the intrinsic nature of capitalism itself, or with capitalist market expansion. The distinction between Schumpeter and Marx here is subtle. Marx claimed that capitalism requires violence and imperialism—first, to kick-start capitalism with a pile of booty and to dispossess a population to induce them to enter into capitalist relations as workers, and then to surmount the otherwise-fatal contradictions generated within capitalist relations over time. Schumpeter’s view was that imperialism is an atavistic impulse pursued by a state independent of the interests of the economic ruling class.” ref

“Imperialism is the object-less disposition of a state to expansion by force without assigned limits… Modern Imperialism is one of the heirlooms of the absolute monarchical state. The “inner logic” of capitalism would have never evolved it. Its sources come from the policy of the princes and the customs of a pre-capitalist milieu. But even an export monopoly is not imperialism and it would never have developed to imperialism in the hands of the pacific bourgeoisie. This happened only because the war machine, its social atmosphere, and the martial will were inherited and because a martially oriented class (i.e., the nobility) maintained itself in a ruling position with which of all the varied interests of the bourgeoisie the martial ones could ally themselves. This alliance keeps alive fighting instincts and ideas of domination. It led to social relations that perhaps ultimately are to be explained by relations of production but not by the productive relations of capitalism alone.— Joseph A. Schumpeter, The Sociology of Imperialism (1918).” ref

Capital Accumulation

“Capital accumulation (also termed the accumulation of capital) is the dynamic that motivates the pursuit of profit, involving the investment of money or any financial asset with the goal of increasing the initial monetary value of said asset as a financial return whether in the form of profit, rent, interest, royalties or capital gains. The aim of capital accumulation is to create new fixed and working capitals, broaden and modernize the existing ones, grow the material basis of social-cultural activities, as well as constituting the necessary resource for reserve and insurance. The process of capital accumulation forms the basis of capitalism, and is one of the defining characteristics of a capitalist economic system.” ref 

“The definition of capital accumulation is subject to controversy and ambiguities, because it could refer to:

• a net addition to existing wealth
• a redistribution of wealth.” ref

“Most often, capital accumulation involves both a net addition and a redistribution of wealth, which may raise the question of who really benefits from it most. If more wealth is produced than there was before, a society becomes richer; the total stock of wealth increases. But if some accumulate capital only at the expense of others, wealth is merely shifted from A to B. It is also possible that some accumulate capital much faster than others. When one person is enriched at the expense of another in circumstances that the law sees as unjust it is called unjust enrichment. In principle, it is possible that a few people or organizations accumulate capital and grow richer, although the total stock of wealth of society decreases.” ref

“In economics and accounting, capital accumulation is often equated with an investment of profit income or savings, especially in real capital goods. The concentration and centralization of capital are two of the results of such accumulation.” ref

“Capital accumulation refers ordinarily to:

• real investment in tangible means of production, such as acquisitions, research, and development, etc. that can increase the capital flow.
• investment in financial assets represented on paper, yielding profit, interest, rent, royalties, fees, or capital gains.
• investment in non-productive physical assets such as residential real estate or works of art that appreciate in value.” ref

“And by extension to:

• human capital, i.e., new education and training increasing the skills of the (potential) labor force which can increase earnings from work.
• social capital, i.e. the wealth and productive capacity that the people in a society hold in common, rather than as individuals or corporations.
• etc.” ref

“Both non-financial and financial capital accumulation is usually needed for economic growth, since additional production usually requires additional funds to enlarge the scale of production. Smarter and more productive organization of production can also increase production without increased capital. Capital can be created without increased investment by inventions or improved organization that increase productivity, discoveries of new assets (oil, gold, minerals, etc.), the sale of property, etc. In modern macroeconomics and econometrics the term capital formation is often used in preference to “accumulation”, though the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) refers nowadays to “accumulation”. The term is occasionally used in national accounts.” ref

“Marx borrowed the idea of capital accumulation or the concentration of capital from early socialist writers such as Charles Fourier, Louis Blanc, Victor Considerant, and Constantin Pecqueur. In Karl Marx‘s economic theory, capital accumulation is the operation whereby profits are reinvested into the economy, increasing the total quantity of capital. Capital was understood by Marx to be expanding value, that is, in other terms, as a sum of capital, usually expressed in money, that is transformed through human labor into a larger value and extracted as profits. Here, capital is defined essentially as economic or commercial asset value that is used by capitalists to obtain additional value (surplus-value). This requires property relations that enable objects of value to be appropriated and owned, and trading rights to be established.” ref

Over-accumulation and crisis

“The Marxist analysis of capital accumulation and the development of capitalism identifies systemic issues with the process that arise with expansion of the productive forces. A crisis of overaccumulation of capital occurs when the rate of profit is greater than the rate of new profitable investment outlets in the economy, arising from increasing productivity from a rising organic composition of capital (higher capital input to labor input ratio). This depresses the wage bill, leading to stagnant wages and high rates of unemployment for the working class while excess profits search for new profitable investment opportunities. Marx believed that this cyclical process would be the fundamental cause for the dissolution of capitalism and its replacement by socialism, which would operate according to a different economic dynamic.” ref

“In Marxist thought, socialism would succeed capitalism as the dominant mode of production when the accumulation of capital can no longer sustain itself due to falling rates of profit in real production relative to increasing productivity. A socialist economy would not base production on the accumulation of capital, instead basing production on the criteria of satisfying human needs and directly producing use-values. This concept is encapsulated in the principle of production for use.” ref

Concentration and centralization

“According to Marx, capital has the tendency for concentration and centralization in the hands of richest capitalists. Marx explains:

It is the concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, the transformation of many small into few large capitals…. Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many…. The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities demands, caeteris paribus, on the productiveness of labor, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production that Modern Industry has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages…. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish.” ref

Rate of accumulation

“In Marxian economics, the rate of accumulation is defined as (1) the value of the real net increase in the stock of capital in an accounting period, (2) the proportion of realized surplus-value or profit-income which is reinvested, rather than consumed. This rate can be expressed by means of various ratios between the original capital outlay, the realized turnover, surplus-value or profit, and reinvestment’s (see, e.g., the writings of the economist Michał Kalecki). Other things being equal, the greater the amount of profit-income that is disbursed as personal earnings and used for consumption purposes, the lower the savings rate and the lower the rate of accumulation is likely to be. However, earnings spent on consumption can also stimulate market demand and higher investment. This is the cause of endless controversies in economic theory about “how much to spend, and how much to save.” ref

“In a boom period of capitalism, the growth of investments is cumulative, i.e. one investment leads to another, leading to a constantly expanding market, an expanding labor force, and an increase in the standard of living for the majority of the people. In a stagnating, decadent capitalism, the accumulation process is increasingly oriented towards investment on military and security forces, real estate, financial speculation, and luxury consumption. In that case, income from value-adding production will decline in favor of interest, rent, and tax income, with as a corollary an increase in the level of permanent unemployment.” ref

“As a rule, the larger the total sum of capital invested, the higher the return on investment will be. The more capital one owns, the more capital one can also borrow and reinvest at a higher rate of profit or interest. The inverse is also true, and this is one factor in the widening gap between the rich and the poor. Ernest Mandel emphasized that the rhythm of capital accumulation and growth depended critically on (1) the division of a society’s social product between necessary product and surplus product, and (2) the division of the surplus product between investment and consumption. In turn, this allocation pattern reflected the outcome of competition among capitalists, competition between capitalists and workers, and competition between workers. The pattern of capital accumulation can therefore never be simply explained by commercial factors, it also involved social factors and power relationships.” ref

Circuit of capital accumulation from production

“Strictly speaking, capital has accumulated only when realized profit income has been reinvested in capital assets. But the process of capital accumulation in production has, as suggested in the first volume of Marx’s Das Kapital, at least seven distinct but linked moments:

• The initial investment of capital (which could be borrowed capital) in means of production and labor power.
• The command over surplus labor and its appropriation.
• The valorization (increase in value) of capital through production of new outputs.
• The appropriation of the new output produced by employees, containing the added value.
• The realization of surplus-value through output sales.
• The appropriation of realized surplus-value as (profit) income after deduction of costs.
• The reinvestment of profit income in production.” ref

“All of these moments do not refer simply to an economic or commercial process. Rather, they assume the existence of legal, social, cultural, and economic power conditions, without which creation, distribution, and circulation of the new wealth could not occur. This becomes especially clear when the attempt is made to create a market where none exists, or where people refuse to trade. In fact, Marx argues that the original or primitive accumulation of capital often occurs through violence, plunder, slavery, robbery, extortion, and theft. He argues that the capitalist mode of production requires that people be forced to work in value-adding production for someone else, and for this purpose, they must be cut off from sources of income other than selling their labor power.” ref

Simple and expanded reproduction

“In volume 2 of Das Kapital, Marx continues the story and shows that, with the aid of bank credit, capital in search of growth can more or less smoothly mutate from one form to another, alternately taking the form of money capital (liquid deposits, securities, etc.), commodity capital (tradeable products, real estate etc.), or production capital (means of production and labor power). His discussion of the simple and expanded reproduction of the conditions of production offers a more sophisticated model of the parameters of the accumulation process as a whole. At simple reproduction, a sufficient amount is produced to sustain society at the given living standard; the stock of capital stays constant.” ref 

“At expanded reproduction, more product-value is produced than is necessary to sustain society at a given living standard (a surplus product); the additional product-value is available for investments which enlarge the scale and variety of production. The bourgeois claim there is no economic law according to which capital is necessarily re-invested in the expansion of production, that such depends on anticipated profitability, market expectations, and perceptions of investment risk. Such statements only explain the subjective experiences of investors and ignore the objective realities which would influence such opinions. As Marx states in Vol.2, simple reproduction only exists if the variable and surplus capital realized by Dept. 1—producers of means of production—exactly equals that of the constant capital of Dept. 2, producers of articles of consumption (pg 524).” ref 

“Such equilibrium rests on various assumptions, such as a constant labor supply (no population growth). Accumulation does not imply a necessary change in total magnitude of value produced but can simply refer to a change in the composition of an industry (pg. 514). Ernest Mandel introduced the additional concept of contracted economic reproduction, i.e. reduced accumulation where business operating at a loss outnumbers growing business, or economic reproduction on a decreasing scale, for example, due to wars, natural disasters or devalorisation.” ref

“Balanced economic growth requires that different factors in the accumulation process expand in appropriate proportions. But markets themselves cannot spontaneously create that balance, in fact, what drives business activity is precisely the imbalances between supply and demand: inequality is the motor of growth. This partly explains why the worldwide pattern of economic growth is very uneven and unequal, even although markets have existed almost everywhere for a very long time. Some people argue that it also explains government regulation of market trade and protectionism.” ref

“According to Marx, capital accumulation has a double origin, namely in trade and in expropriation, both of a legal or illegal kind. The reason is that a stock of capital can be increased through a process of exchange or “trading up” but also through directly taking an asset or resource from someone else, without compensation. David Harvey calls this accumulation by dispossession. Marx does not discuss gifts and grants as a source of capital accumulation, nor does he analyze taxation in detail (he could not, as he died even before completing his major book, Das Kapital). Nowadays the tax take is often so large (i.e., 25-40% of GDP) that some authors refer to state capitalism. This gives rise to a proliferation of tax havens to evade tax liability.” ref

“The continuation and progress of capital accumulation depends on the removal of obstacles to the expansion of trade, and this has historically often been a violent process. As markets expand, more and more new opportunities develop for accumulating capital, because more and more types of goods and services can be traded in. But capital accumulation may also confront resistance, when people refuse to sell, or refuse to buy (for example a strike by investors or workers, or consumer resistance).” ref

Means of production

“The means of production is a term which can encompass anything (such as: land, labor, or capital) which can be used to produce products (such as: goods or services); however, it can also be used with narrower meanings, such as anything that is used to produce products. It can also be used as an abbreviation of the “means of production and distribution” which additionally includes the logistical distribution and delivery of products, generally through distributors, or as an abbreviation of the “means of production, distribution, and exchange” which further includes the exchange of distributed products, generally to consumers. The means of production can refer to both tangible aspects, such as physical raw materials, tools, or labor, and non-tangible aspects such as domestic labor or knowledge that contributes to production. This concept is used throughout fields of study including politics, economics, and sociology to discuss, broadly, the relationship between anything that can have productive use, its ownership, and the constituent social parts needed to produce it.” ref 

“From the perspective of a firm, a firm uses its capital goods,[4] which are also known as tangible assets as they are physical in nature. Unfinished goods are transformed into products and services in the production process. Even if capital goods are not traded on the market as consumer goods, they can be valued as long as capital goods are produced commodities, which are required for production. The total values of capital goods constitute the capital value. The social means of production are capital goods and assets that require organized collective labor effort, as opposed to individual effort, to operate on. The ownership and organization of the social means of production is a key factor in categorizing and defining different types of economic systems.” ref

“The means of production includes two broad categories of objects: instruments of labor (tools, factories, infrastructure, etc.) and subjects of labor (natural resources and raw materials). People operate on the subjects of labor using the instruments of labor to create a product; or stated another way, labor acting on the means of production creates a good. In an agrarian society the principal means of production is the soil and the shovel. In an industrial society the means of production become social means of production and include factories and mines. In a knowledge economy, computers and networks are means of production. In a broad sense, the “means of production” also includes the “means of distribution” such as stores, the internet, and railroads (Infrastructural capital). The means of production of the firm may depreciate, which means there is a loss in the economic value of capital goods or tangible assets (e.g. machinery, factory equipment) due to wear and tear, and aging. This is known as the depreciation of capital goods.” ref

“The analysis of the technological sophistication of the means of production and how they are owned is a central component in the Marxist theoretical framework of historical materialism and in Marx critique of political economy, and later in Marxian economics. In Marx’s work and subsequent developments in Marxist theory, the process of socioeconomic evolution is based on the premise of technological improvements in the means of production. As the level of technology improves with respect to productive capabilities, existing forms of social relations become superfluous and unnecessary, creating contradictions between the level of technology in the means of production on the one hand and the organization of society and its economy on the other.” ref

“In relation to technological improvements in means of production, new technologies and scientific breakthroughs can rearrange the market structure, create massive economic impact and disrupt the profit pool in the economy. Further impact of disruptive technologies may lead to certain forms of labor power economically unnecessary and uncompetitive and even widening income inequality. These contradictions manifest themselves in the form of class conflicts, which develop to a point where the existing mode of production becomes unsustainable, either collapsing or being overthrown in a social revolution. The contradictions are resolved by the emergence of a new mode of production based on a different set of social relations including, most notably, different patterns of ownership for the means of production.” ref

“Ownership of the means of production and control over the surplus product generated by their operation is the fundamental factor in delineating different modes of production. Capitalism is defined as private ownership and control over the means of production, where the surplus product becomes a source of unearned income for its owners. Under this system, profit-seeking individuals or organizations undertake a majority of economic activities. However, capitalism does not indicate all material means of production are privately owned as partial economies are publicly owned. By contrast, socialism is defined as social ownership of the means of production so that the surplus product accrues to society at large.” ref

Determinant of class

“Marx’s theory of class defines classes in their relation to their ownership and control of the means of production. In a capitalist society, the bourgeoisie, or the capitalist class, is the class that owns the means of production and derives a passive income from their operation. Examples of the capitalist class include business owners, shareholders, and the minority of people who own factories, machinery, and lands. Countries considered as the capitalist countries include Australia, Canada, and other nations which hold a free market economy. In modern society, small business owners, minority shareholders, and other smaller capitalists are considered as Petite bourgeoisie according to Marx’s theory, which is distinct from bourgeoisie and proletariat as they can buy the labor of others but also work along with employees. In contrast, the proletariat, or working class, comprises the majority of the population that lacks access to the means of production and are therefore induced to sell their labor power for a wage or salary to gain access to necessities, goods, and services.” ref

“According to Marx, wages and salaries are considered as the price of labor power, related to working hours or outputs produced by the labor force. At the company level, an employee does not control and own the means of production in a capitalist mode of production. Instead, an employee is performing specific duties under a contract of employment, working for wages or salaries. As for firms and profit-seeking organizations, from a personnel economics perspective, to maximize efficiency and productivity there must be an equilibrium between labor markets and product markets. In human resource practices, compensation structure tend to shift towards pay-for-performance bonus or incentive pay rather than base salary to attract the right workers, even if conflicts of interest exist in an employer-worker relationship.” ref

“To the question of why classes exist in human societies in the first place, Karl Marx offered a historical and scientific explanation that it was the cultural practice of ownership of the means of production that gives rise to them. This explanation differs dramatically from other explanations based on “differences in ability” between individuals or on religious or political affiliations giving rise to castes. This explanation is consistent with the bulk of Marxist theory in which Politics and Religion are seen as mere outgrowths (superstructures) of the basic underlying economic reality of a people.” ref

“Factors of production are defined by German economist Karl Marx in his book Das Kapital as labor, subjects of labor, and instruments of labor: the term is equivalent to means of production plus labor. The factors of production are often listed in economic writings derived from the classical school as “land, labor and capital”. Marx sometimes used the term “productive forces” equivalently with “factors of production“; in Kapital, he uses “factors of production”, in his famous Preface to his Critique of Political Economy: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, he uses “productive forces” (that may depend on the translation).” ref

“Production relations (German: Produktionsverhältnis) are the relations humans enter into with each other in using the means of production to produce. Examples of such relations are employer/employee, buyer/seller, the technical division of labor in a factory, and property relations.” ref

“Mode of production (German: Produktionsweise) means the dominant way in which production is organized in society. For instance, “capitalism” is the name for the capitalist mode of production in which the means of production are owned privately by a small class (the bourgeoisie) who profits off the labor of the working class (the proletariat). Communism is a mode of production in which the means of production are not owned by anyone, but shared in common, without class-based exploitation. Besides capitalism and communism, there is another mode of production which is called a Mixed Economic System. In a mixed economy, private ownership of capital goods are protected and a certain level of the market economy is allowed. However, the government has the right to intervene the market and economic activities for social objectives. Different from the pure capitalism, the government regulation exists to control particular means of production over the private business sector. Different from communism, the majority of means of production are privately owned rather than shared in common.” ref

History of capitalism

“The history of capitalism is diverse. The concept of capitalism has many debated roots, but fully fledged capitalism is generally thought by scholars to have emerged in Northwestern Europe, especially in Great Britain and the Netherlands. Over the following centuries, capital accumulated by a variety of methods, at a variety of scales, and became associated with much variation in the concentration of wealth and economic power. Capitalism gradually became the dominant economic system throughout the world. Much of the history of the past 500 years is concerned with the development of capitalism in its various forms.” ref 

“The processes by which capitalism emerged, evolved, and spread are the subject of extensive research and debate among historians. Debates sometimes focus on how to bring substantive historical data to bear on key questions. Key parameters of debate include: the extent to which capitalism is a natural human behavior, versus the extent to which it arises from specific historical circumstances; whether its origins lie in towns and trade or in rural property relations; the role of class conflict; the role of the state; the extent to which capitalism is a distinctively European innovation; its relationship with European imperialism; whether technological change is a driver or merely a secondary byproduct of capitalism; and whether or not it is the most beneficial way to organize human societies.” ref

“The historiography of capitalism can be divided into two broad schools. One is associated with economic liberalism, with the 18th-century economist Adam Smith as a foundational figure. The other is associated with Marxism, drawing particular inspiration from the 19th-century economist Karl Marx. Liberals view capitalism as an expression of natural human behaviors that have been in evidence for millennia and the most beneficial way of promoting human well-being. They see capitalism as originating in trade and commerce, and freeing people to exercise their entrepreneurial natures. Marxists view capitalism as a unique mode of production involving the bourgeoise and proletariat that emerged as a result of the fall of feudalism and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This rejects the notion that capitalism has existed for millennia and is a part of human nature.” ref

“The origins of capitalism have been much debated (and depend partly on how capitalism is defined). The traditional account, originating in classical 18th-century liberal economic thought and still often articulated, is the ‘commercialization model’. This sees capitalism originating in trade. In this reading, capitalism emerged from earlier trade once merchants had acquired sufficient wealth (referred to as ‘primitive capital‘) to begin investing in increasingly productive technology. This account tends to see capitalism as a continuation of trade, arising when people’s natural entrepreneurialism was freed from the constraints of feudalism, partly by urbanisation. Thus it traces capitalism to early forms of merchant capitalism practiced in Western Europe during the Middle Ages.” ref

“A competitor to the ‘commercialization model’ is the ‘agrarian model’, which explains the rise of capitalism by unique circumstances in English agrarianism. The evidence it cites is that traditional mercantilism focused on moving goods from markets where they were cheap to markets where they were expensive rather than investing in production, and that many cultures (including the early modern Dutch Republic) saw urbanisation and the amassing of wealth by merchants without the emergence of capitalist production. The agrarian argument developed particularly through Karl Polanyi‘s The Great Transformation (1944), Maurice Dobb‘s Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946), and Robert Brenner‘s research in the 1970s, the discussion of which is known as the Brenner Debate.” ref 

“In the wake of the Norman Conquest, the English state was unusually centralized. This gave aristocrats relatively limited powers to extract wealth directly from their feudal underlings through political means (not least the threat of violence). England’s centralization also meant that an unusual number of English farmers were not peasants (with their own land and thus direct access to subsistence) but tenants (renting their land). These circumstances produced a market in leases. Landlords, lacking other ways to extract wealth, were motivated to rent to tenants who could pay the most, while tenants, lacking security of tenure, were motivated to farm as productively as possible to win leases in a competitive market.” ref 

“This led to a cascade of effects whereby successful tenant farmers became agrarian capitalists; unsuccessful ones became wage-laborers, required to sell their labor in order to live; and landlords promoted the privatization and renting out of common land, not least through the enclosures. In this reading, ‘it was not merchants or manufacturers who drove the process that propelled the early development of capitalism. The transformation of social property relations was firmly rooted in the countryside, and the transformation of England’s trade and industry was a result more than a cause of England’s transition to capitalism.” ref

21st-century scholarship

“The 21st century has seen renewed interest in the history of capitalism, and “History of Capitalism” has become a field in its own right, with courses in history departments. In the 2000s, Harvard University founded the Program on the Study of U.S. Capitalism; Cornell University established the History of Capitalism Initiative, and Columbia University Press launched a monograph series titled Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism. This field includes topics such as insurance, banking and regulation, the political dimension, and the impact on the middle classes, the poor, and women and minorities.” ref 

“These initiatives incorporate formerly neglected questions of race, gender, and sexuality into the history of capitalism. They have grown in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the associated Great Recession. Some other academic institutions, such as the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism, reject the notion that race, gender, or sexuality have any significant relationship to capitalism at all and instead seek to show that laissez-faire capitalism, in particular, provides the best and most numerous economic opportunities for all people.” ref

“According to some historians, the modern capitalist system originated in the “crisis of the Late Middle Ages“, a conflict between the land-owning aristocracy and the agricultural producers, or serfs. Manorial arrangements inhibited the development of capitalism in a number of ways. Serfs had obligations to produce for lords and therefore had no interest in technological innovation; they also had no interest in cooperating with one another because they produced to sustain their own families. The lords who owned the land relied on force to guarantee that they received sufficient food. Because lords were not producing to sell on the market, there was no competitive pressure for them to innovate. Finally, because lords expanded their power and wealth through military means, they spent their wealth on military equipment or on conspicuous consumption that helped foster alliances with other lords; they had no incentive to invest in developing new productive technologies.” ref

“The demographic crisis of the 14th century upset this arrangement. This crisis had several causes: agricultural productivity reached its technological limitations and stopped growing, bad weather led to the Great Famine of 1315–1317, and the Black Death of 1348–1350 led to a population crash. These factors led to a decline in agricultural production. In response, feudal lords sought to expand agricultural production by extending their domains through warfare; therefore they demanded more tribute from their serfs to pay for military expenses. In England, many serfs rebelled. Some moved to towns, some bought land, and some entered into favorable contracts to rent lands from lords who needed to repopulate their estates.” ref

“The collapse of the manorial system in England enlarged the class of tenant farmers with more freedom to market their goods and thus more incentive to invest in new technologies. Lords who did not want to rely on renters could buy out or evict tenant farmers, but then had to hire free labor to work their estates, giving them an incentive to invest in two kinds of commodity owners. One kind was those who had money, the means of production, and subsistence, who were eager to valorize the sum of value they had appropriated by buying the labor power of others. The other kind was free workers, who sold their own labor. The workers neither formed part of the means of production nor owned the means of production that transformed land and even money into what we now call “capital”. Marx labeled this period the “pre-history of capitalism.” ref

“In effect, feudalism began to lay some of the foundations necessary for the development of mercantilism, a precursor of capitalism. Feudalism lasted from the medieval period through the 16th century. Feudal manors were almost entirely self-sufficient, and therefore limited the role of the market. This stifled any incipient tendency towards capitalism. However, the relatively sudden emergence of new technologies and discoveries, particularly in agriculture and exploration, facilitated the growth of capitalism. The most important development at the end of feudalism was the emergence of what Robert Degan calls “the dichotomy between wage earners and capitalist merchants”. The competitive nature meant there are always winners and losers, and this became clear as feudalism evolved into mercantilism, an economic system characterized by the private or corporate ownership of capital goods, investments determined by private decisions, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods determined mainly by competition in a free market.” ref

“England in the 16th century was already a centralized state, in which much of the feudal order of Medieval Europe had been swept away. This centralization was strengthened by a good system of roads and a disproportionately large capital city, London. The capital acted as a central market for the entire country, creating a large internal market for goods, in contrast to the fragmented feudal holdings that prevailed in most parts of the Continent. The economic foundations of the agricultural system were also beginning to diverge substantially; the manorial system had broken down by this time, and land began to be concentrated in the hands of fewer landlords with increasingly large estates.” ref 

“The system put pressure on both the landlords and the tenants to increase agricultural productivity to create profit. The weakened coercive power of the aristocracy to extract peasant surpluses encouraged them to try out better methods. The tenants also had an incentive to improve their methods to succeed in an increasingly competitive labor market. Land rents had moved away from the previous stagnant system of custom and feudal obligation, and were becoming directly subject to economic market forces.” ref

“An important aspect of this process of change was the enclosure of the common land previously held in the open field system where peasants had traditional rights, such as mowing meadows for hay and grazing livestock. Once enclosed, these uses of the land became restricted to the owner, and it ceased to be land for commons. The process of enclosure began to be a widespread feature of the English agricultural landscape during the 16th century. By the 19th century, unenclosed commons had become largely restricted to rough pasture in mountainous areas and to relatively small parts of the lowlands.” ref

Marxist and neo-Marxist historians argue that rich landowners used their control of state processes to appropriate public land for their private benefit. This created a landless working class that provided the labor required in the new industries developing in the north of England. For example: “In agriculture, the years between 1760 and 1820 are the years of wholesale enclosure in which, in village after village, common rights are lost”. “Enclosure (when all the sophistications are allowed for) was a plain enough case of class robbery”. Anthropologist Jason Hickel notes that this process of enclosure led to myriad peasant revolts, among them Kett’s Rebellion and the Midland Revolt, which culminated in violent repression and executions.” ref

“Other scholars argue that the better-off members of the European peasantry encouraged and participated actively in enclosure, seeking to end the perpetual poverty of subsistence farming. “We should be careful not to ascribe to [enclosure] developments that were the consequence of a much broader and more complex process of historical change.” “[T]he impact of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century enclosure has been grossly exaggerated….” ref

Petite bourgeoisie (small capitalists)

“Petite bourgeoisie (French pronunciation: literally ‘small bourgeoisie‘; also Anglicised as petty bourgeoisie) is a French term (sometimes derogatory) referring to a social class composed of semi-autonomous peasantry and small-scale merchants whose politico-economic ideological stance in times of socioeconomic stability is determined by reflecting that of a haute bourgeoisie (‘high’ bourgeoisie) with which the petite bourgeoisie seeks to identify itself and whose bourgeois morality it strives to imitate. The term is politico-economic and references historical materialism. It originally denoted a sub-stratum of the middle classes in the 18th and early-19th centuries. In the mid-19th century, the German economist Karl Marx and other Marxist theorists used the term petite bourgeoisie to identify the socio-economic stratum of the bourgeoisie that consists of small shopkeepers and self-employed artisans.” ref 

“The petite bourgeoisie is economically distinct from the proletariat and the Lumpenproletariat social-class strata who rely entirely on the sale of their labor-power for survival. It is also distinct from the capitalist class haute bourgeoisie (‘high’ bourgeoisie) that owns the means of production and thus can buy the labor-power of the proletariat and Lumpenproletariat to work the means of production. Although members of the petite bourgeoisie can buy the labor of others, they typically work alongside their employees, unlike the haute bourgeoisie. The petite bourgeoisie is little-defined in Marx’s own work, with only the words ‘smaller capitalists’ used in The Communist Manifesto.” ref

“Historically, Karl Marx predicted that the petite bourgeoisie was to lose in the course of economic development. Following this, R. J. B. Bosworth suggested that it was to become the political mainstay of fascism, which represented in political form a terroristic response to their inevitable loss of power (economic, political, and social) to the haute bourgeoisie. Wilhelm Reich also highlighted the principal support of the rise of fascism in Germany given by the petite bourgeoisie and middle class in The Mass Psychology of Fascism.” ref 

“He claimed that the middle classes were a hotbed for political reaction due to their reliance on the patriarchal family (according to Reich, small businesses are often self-exploiting enterprises of families headed by the father, whose morality binds the family together in their somewhat precarious economic position) and the sexual repression that underlies it. This was disputed by historian Richard Pipes who wrote, in the case of the Nazi Party, that while at first limited to this group, by the end of the 1920s workers joined the party en masse and were the largest occupational group in the party by 1934.” ref

“Søren Kierkegaard wrote that “the petty bourgeois is spiritless[.] … Devoid of imagination, as the petty bourgeois always is, he lives within a certain orbit of trivial experiences as to how things come about, what is possible, what usually happens, no matter whether he is a tapster or a prime minister. This is the way the petty bourgeois has lost himself and God”. According to him, the petite bourgeoisie exemplifies a spiritual emptiness that is rooted in an overemphasis on the worldly, rather than the inwardness of the self. However, Kierkegaard’s indictment relies less on a class analysis of the petite bourgeoisie than on the perception of a worldview which was common in his middle-class milieu.” ref

“In fact, though there have been many depictions of the petite bourgeoisie in literature as well as in cartoons, based on an image of their overly conventional practicality, the realities of the petite bourgeoisie throughout the 19th century were more complex. All the same, writers have been concerned with petite bourgeois morality and behavior and have portrayed them as undesirable characters. Henrik Ibsen‘s An Enemy of the People was a play written in direct response to the reception of another one of his plays for making “indecent” references to syphilis and in general his work was considered scandalous in its disregard for the morality of the period. Later, Bertolt Brecht‘s concern with Nazism and his Marxist politics got him interested in exploring the petite bourgeois mind and this interest led him to represent the petite bourgeoisie repeatedly throughout his work (one was even titled The Seven Deadly Sins of the Petite Bourgeoisie).” ref

“In his book Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play, is a 2012 book-length defense of the anarchist perspective, written by anthropologist James C. Scott and published by Princeton University Press. James C. Scott dedicates an entire chapter to describing some features of the petite bourgeoisie. First, he points out the contempt of this class by Marxists due to the ambiguity of their political position. He further points out that this position of contempt or distaste encompasses both the socialist bloc and large capitalist democracies, due to the difficulty of monitoring, taxing, and policing of this class. This difficulty results from the complexity, variety, and mobility of activities taken on by this class. He points out the petite bourgeoisie has existed for most of civilized history.” ref 

“He also states that even those who are not part of the class have to some degree desired to become small property owners, due to the conferred autonomy and social standing. He continues that the desire to keep, restore land has been the leitmotif of most radically egalitarian mass movements. He argues that the petite bourgeoisie have an indispensable economic role in terms of invention and innovation, citing as an example software startups that develop ideas that are then usually bought by larger firms. He also points out that small shopkeepers provide several “unpaid” social services such as:

… informal social work, public safety, the aesthetic pleasures of an animated and interesting streetscape, a large variety of social experiences and personalized services, acquaintance networks, informal neighborhood news and gossip, a building block of social solidarity and public action, and (in the case of the smallholding peasantry) good steward-ship of the land.” ref

Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play – 4.5 out of 5 on Amazon  

“A spirited defense of the anarchist approach to life: James Scott taught us what’s wrong with seeing like a state. Now, in his most accessible and personal book to date, the acclaimed social scientist makes the case for seeing like an anarchist. Inspired by the core anarchist faith in the possibilities of voluntary cooperation without hierarchy, Two Cheers for Anarchism is an engaging, high-spirited, and often very funny defense of an anarchist way of seeing―one that provides a unique and powerful perspective on everything from everyday social and political interactions to mass protests and revolutions. Through a wide-ranging series of memorable anecdotes and examples, the book describes an anarchist sensibility that celebrates the local knowledge, common sense, and creativity of ordinary people. The result is a kind of handbook on constructive anarchism that challenges us to radically reconsider the value of hierarchy in public and private life, from schools and workplaces to retirement homes and government itself.” ref

“Beginning with what Scott calls “the law of anarchist calisthenics,” an argument for law-breaking inspired by an East German pedestrian crossing, each chapter opens with a story that captures an essential anarchist truth. In the course of telling these stories, Scott touches on a wide variety of subjects: public disorder and riots, desertion, poaching, vernacular knowledge, assembly-line production, globalization, the petty bourgeoisie, school testing, playgrounds, and the practice of historical explanation. Far from a dogmatic manifesto, Two Cheers for Anarchism celebrates the anarchist confidence in the inventiveness and judgment of people who are free to exercise their creative and moral capacities.” ref

Merchant capitalism and mercantilism

“Some economic historians use the term merchant capitalism to refer to the earliest phase in the development of capitalism as an economic and social system. However, others argue that mercantilism, which has flourished widely in the world without the emergence of systems like modern capitalism, is not actually capitalist as such. Merchant capitalism is distinguished from more fully developed capitalism by its focus on simply moving goods from a market where they are cheap to a market where they are expensive (rather than influencing the mode of the production of those goods), the lack of industrialization, and of commercial finance.” ref

“Merchant houses were backed by relatively small private financiers acting as intermediaries between simple commodity producers and by exchanging debt with each other. Thus, merchant capitalism preceded the capitalist mode of production as a form of capital accumulation. A process of primitive accumulation of capital, upon which commercial finance operations could be based and making application of mass wage labor and industrialization possible, was the necessary precondition for the transformation of merchant capitalism into industrial capitalism.” ref

“Early forms of merchant capitalism developed in the 9th century, during the Islamic Golden Age, while in medieval Europe from the 12th century. In Europe, merchant capitalism became a significant economic force in the 16th century. The mercantile era drew to a close around 1800, giving way to industrial capitalism. However, merchant capitalism remained entrenched in some parts of the West well into the 19th century, notably the Southern United States, where the plantation system constrained the development of industrial capitalism (limiting markets for consumer goods) whose political manifestations prevented Northern legislators from passing broad economic packages (e.g. monetary and banking reform, a transcontinental railroad, and incentives for settlement of the American west) to integrate the states’ economies and spur the growth of industrial capitalism.” ref

People need to realize that the end of capitalism will not be a one-time event, nor will the revolution be a one-time event. Keep doing what is needed, inspire others. Solidarity to save the world!

What kinds of capitalist systems exist?

• 1. Mercantilism
• 2. Free market capitalism
• 3. Social market capitalism
• 4. Corporate capitalism
• 5. Mixed economy
• 6. Savage capitalism
• 7. Anarcho-capitalism

“While trade has existed since early in human history, it was not capitalism. The earliest recorded activity of long-distance profit-seeking merchants can be traced to the Old Assyrian merchants active in Mesopotamia the 2nd millennium BCE or around 4,000 years ago. The Roman Empire developed more advanced forms of commerce, and similarly, widespread networks existed in Islamic nations. However, capitalism took shape in Europe in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Modern capitalism only fully emerged in the early modern period between the 16th and 18th centuries, with the establishment of mercantilism or merchant capitalism. Early evidence for mercantilistic practices appears in early modern Venice, Genoa, and Pisa over the Mediterranean trade in bullion. The region of mercantilism’s real birth, however, was the Atlantic Ocean.” ref 

“An early emergence of commerce occurred on monastic estates in Italy and France and in the independent city republics of Italy during the late Middle Ages. Innovations in banking, insurance, accountancy, and various production and commercial practices linked closely to a ‘spirit’ of frugality, reinvestment, and city life, promoted attitudes that sociologists have tended to associate only with northern Europe, Protestantism, and a much later age. The city republics maintained their political independence from Empire and Church, traded with North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and introduced Eastern practices. They were also considerably different from the absolutist monarchies of Spain and France, and were strongly attached to civic liberty.” ref

“England began a large-scale and integrative approach to mercantilism during the Elizabethan Era. An early statement on national balance of trade appeared in Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England, 1549: “We must always take heed that we buy no more from strangers than we sell them, for so should we impoverish ourselves and enrich them.” The period featured various but often disjointed efforts by the court of Queen Elizabeth to develop a naval and merchant fleet capable of challenging the Spanish stranglehold on trade and of expanding the growth of bullion at home. Elizabeth promoted the Trade and Navigation Acts in Parliament and issued orders to her navy for the protection and promotion of English shipping.” ref

“These efforts organized national resources sufficiently in the defense of England against the far larger and more powerful Spanish Empire, and in turn paved the foundation for establishing a global empire in the 19th century. The authors noted most for establishing the English mercantilist system include Gerard de Malynes and Thomas Mun, who first articulated the Elizabethan System. The latter’s England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade, or the Balance of our Forraign Trade is The Rule of Our Treasure gave a systematic and coherent explanation of the concept of balance of trade. It was written in the 1620s and published in 1664. Mercantile doctrines were further developed by Josiah Child. Numerous French authors helped to cement French policy around mercantilism in the 17th century. French mercantilism was best articulated by Jean-Baptiste Colbert (in office, 1665–1683), although his policies were greatly liberalized under Napoleon.” ref

“Under mercantilism, European merchants, backed by state controls, subsidies, and monopolies, made most of their profits from buying and selling goods. In the words of Francis Bacon, the purpose of mercantilism was “the opening and well-balancing of trade; the cherishing of manufacturers; the banishing of idleness; the repressing of waste and excess by sumptuary laws; the improvement and husbanding of the soil; the regulation of prices…” Similar practices of economic regimentation had begun earlier in medieval towns. However, under mercantilism, given the contemporaneous rise of absolutism, the state superseded the local guilds as the regulator of the economy.” ref

“Among the major tenets of mercantilist theory was bullionism, a doctrine stressing the importance of accumulating precious metals. Mercantilists argued that a state should export more goods than it imported so that foreigners would have to pay the difference in precious metals. Mercantilists asserted that only raw materials that could not be extracted at home should be imported. They promoted the idea that government subsidies, such as granting monopolies and protective tariffs, were necessary to encourage home production of manufactured goods.” ref

“Proponents of mercantilism emphasized state power and overseas conquest as the principal aim of economic policy. If a state could not supply its own raw materials, according to the mercantilists, it should acquire colonies from which they could be extracted. Colonies constituted not only sources of raw materials but also markets for finished products. Because it was not in the interests of the state to allow competition, to help the mercantilists, colonies should be prevented from engaging in manufacturing and trading with foreign powers.” ref

“Mercantilism was a system of trade for profit, although commodities were still largely produced by non-capitalist production methods. Noting the various pre-capitalist features of mercantilism, Karl Polanyi argued that “mercantilism, with all its tendency toward commercialization, never attacked the safeguards which protected [the] two basic elements of production – labor and land – from becoming the elements of commerce.” Thus mercantilist regulation was more akin to feudalism than capitalism. According to Polanyi, “not until 1834 was a competitive labor market established in England, hence industrial capitalism as a social system cannot be said to have existed before that date.” ref

“Mercantilism declined in Great Britain in the mid-18th century, when a new group of economic theorists, led by Adam Smith, challenged fundamental mercantilist doctrines, such as that the world’s wealth remained constant and that a state could only increase its wealth at the expense of another state. However, mercantilism continued in less developed economies, such as Prussia and Russia, with their much younger manufacturing bases.” ref

“The mid-18th century gave rise to industrial capitalism, made possible by (1) the accumulation of vast amounts of capital under the merchant phase of capitalism and its investment in machinery, and (2) the fact that the enclosures meant that Britain had a large population of people with no access to subsistence agriculture, who needed to buy basic commodities via the market, ensuring a mass consumer market. Industrial capitalism, which Marx dated from the last third of the 18th century, marked the development of the factory system of manufacturing, characterized by a complex division of labor between and within work processes and the routinization of work tasks. Industrial capitalism finally established the global domination of the capitalist mode of production.” ref

“During the resulting Industrial Revolution, the industrialist replaced the merchant as a dominant actor in the capitalist system, which led to the decline of the traditional handicraft skills of artisans, guilds, and journeymen. Also during this period, capitalism transformed relations between the British landowning gentry and peasants, giving rise to the production of cash crops for the market rather than for subsistence on a feudal manor. The surplus generated by the rise of commercial agriculture encouraged increased mechanization of agriculture.” ref

Ref

“ABSTRACT: N.S.B. Gras, the father of Business History in the United States, argued that the era of mercantile capitalism was defined by the figure of the “sedentary merchant,” who managed his business from home, using correspondence and intermediaries, in contrast to the earlier “traveling merchant,” who accompanied his own goods to trade fairs. Taking this concept as its point of departure, this essay focuses on the predominantly Italian merchants who controlled the long‐distance East‐West trade of the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages and Renaissance.  Until the opening of the Atlantic trade, the Mediterranean was Europe’s most important commercial zone and its trade enriched European civilization and its merchants developed the most important premodern mercantile innovations, from maritime insurance contracts and partnership agreements to the bill of exchange and double‐entry bookkeeping. Emerging from literate and numerate cultures, these merchants left behind an abundance of records that allows us to understand how their companies, especially the largest of them, were organized and managed. These techniques can also be put in the context of premodern attitudes toward commerce and the era’s commercial‐political relations. The Commercial Revolution anticipated the Industrial Revolution by over half a millennium and laid the groundwork for today’s world of global business.” Ref

“CONCLUSION It has lately become fashionable to suggest that the West’s clear economic advantage over the East is a relatively recent phenomenon, with Europe overtaking China only in the mid‐ eighteenth century (Pomeranz 2000), even though earlier periods, like the fourteenth century, 26 have been more persuasively presented on the basis of economic data (Maddison 2006). But the most commercially advanced regions of Europe, like the urban centers of Flanders and North‐Central Italy, were extreme outliers much earlier, both globally and within Europe itself. Italy’s was the leading world economy ca. 1300 and, even with a steady and long decline from then to the 1880s (Malanima 2011), England’s did not overtake it (in terms of real wages) until the eighteenth century (Malanima 2013). Although the Industrial Revolution allowed for unprecedented prosperity and brought about modern economic growth (Hartwell 1971), Michael Mitterauer (2010) is right that Europe was set on its “special path (Sonderweg)” in the Middle Ages, but his search for causes—from the cultivation of rye to the centralization of the Papal church—largely overlooks the patent cause of Europe’s distinct late medieval prosperity, which spurred revolutionary advancements in shipping, communications, and manufacturing: the long‐distance trade of merchants. Indeed, to speak of the makers of global business must be, first of all, to speak of merchants.   In this chapter, with its focus on the Mediterranean trade of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, we have shown how the merchant—Gras’s “sedentary merchant”, freed from the harsh demands of travel by his mastery of information and by the seismic innovations of the medieval “commercial revolution”—emerged as a truly global figure. Then, as now, merchants pooled capital and shared risk to enrich themselves and their polities, utilizing the infrastructure and markets that they helped to make, and creating new legal and financial instruments to facilitate their ventures. Premodern merchants bequeathed to the businessmen of later centuries essential techniques of trade and bookkeeping, but also their commercial ethos, their institutions, and the very riches for which they competed and often risked their 27 lives. It is not by chance that the politico‐economic system that followed is called the mercantile system, as in Adam Smith’s (1976: 396‐417) pejorative usage, or simply mercantilism, for, broadly understood, it held that the competition for trade lay at the essential core of state power (Reinert 2013). The violent Genoese‐Venetian struggle for the Mediterranean trade, the aggressive emulation of Italian banking practices in the Low Countries, and so on, are forerunners of the mercantilist age and, indeed, of the perpetual competition, diversity of forms (political and economic), and innovation that has marked the development of the West. Let us conclude with an example, from the Low Countries instead of Italy, which encapsulates much of what had already been said: Bruges, the quintessential merchants’ city, spatially positioned to benefit from the decline of the Champagne fairs and from regional advances in textile manufacturing, was by 1350 a center a trade, finance, and industry: politically responsive to mercantile interests, densely urbanized, concentrating and exploiting the resources of the surrounding countryside, attracting skilled craftsmen as immigrants, hosting large merchant colonies (of Italians and German Hanse traders, of course, but of many others as well), and importing and exporting commodities and luxury goods in a trade covering the known world and extending beyond it, the Flemish seaport was also a center for deposit banking and credit creation, and a clearing house for commercial information (De Roover 1948; van Houtte 1982). To see one of the European merchant metropolises of the late Middle Ages or Renaissance—to see a city like Bruges or like Venice—was, we may say with crystalline hindsight, to glimpse the very future of the global business.” Ref

The etymology of the terms capitalist and capitalism

“The term “capitalist”, meaning an owner of capital, appears earlier than the term “capitalism” and dates to the mid-17th century. “Capitalism” is derived from capital, which evolved from capitale, a late Latin word based on caput, meaning “head”—which is also the origin of “chattel” and “cattle” in the sense of movable property (only much later to refer only to livestock). Capitale emerged in the 12th to 13th centuries to refer to funds, stock of merchandise, sum of money, or money carrying interest. By 1283, it was used in the sense of the capital assets of a trading firm and was often interchanged with other words—wealth, money, funds, goods, assets, property, and so on.” ref

“The Hollantse (German: holländische) Mercurius uses “capitalists” in 1633 and 1654 to refer to owners of capital.  In French, Étienne Clavier referred to capitalistes in 1788, six years before its first recorded English usage by Arthur Young in his work Travels in France (1792). In his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), David Ricardo referred to “the capitalist” many times. English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge used “capitalist” in his work Table Talk (1823). Pierre-Joseph Proudhon used the term in his first work, What is Property? (1840), to refer to the owners of capital. Benjamin Disraeli used the term in his 1845 work Sybil.” ref

“The initial use of the term “capitalism” in its modern sense is attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 (“What I call ‘capitalism’ that is to say the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others”) and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1861 (“Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labor”).  Karl Marx frequently referred to the “capital” and to the “capitalist mode of production” in Das kapital (1867). Marx did however not use the form capitalism, but instead used capital, capitalist, and capitalist mode of production, which appear frequently.” ref

“In the English language, the term “capitalism” first appears, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), in 1854, in the novel The Newcomes by novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, where the word meant “having ownership of capital”. Also according to the OED, Carl Adolph Douai, a German American socialist and abolitionist, used the term “private capitalism” in 1863.” ref

The etymology of the term capital

capital (adj.)

“In the early 13 century, “of or pertaining to the head,” from Old French capital, from Latin capitalis “of the head,” hence “capital, chief, first,” from caput (genitive capitis) “head” (from PIE root *kaput- “head” relating to chiefdom or tribal kingship). Meaning “main, principal, chief, dominant, first in importance” is from early 15 century in English. The modern informal sense of “excellent, first-rate” is by 1754 (as an exclamation of approval, OED’s first example is 1875), perhaps from earlier use of the word in reference to ships, “first-rate, powerful enough to be in the line of battle,” attested from 1650s, fallen into disuse after 1918. Related: Capitally. A capital letter “upper-case latter,” of larger face and differing more or less in form (late 14 century) is so-called because it stands at the “head” of a sentence or word. Capital gain is recorded from 1921. Capital goods is recorded from 1899. A capital crime or offense (1520s) is one that involves the penalty of death and thus affects the life or “head” (capital had a sense of “deadly, mortal” from late 14c. in English, as it did earlier in Latin). The felt connection between “head” and “life, mortality” also existed in Old English: as in heafodgilt “deadly sin, capital offense,” heafdes þolian “to forfeit life.” Capital punishment was in Blackstone (1765) and classical Latin capitis poena.”  ref

capital (n.1)

“In the early 15 century, “a capital letter,” from capital (adj.). The meaning “city or town which is the official seat of government” is first recorded 1660s (the Old English word was heafodstol; Middle English had hevedburgh). For the financial sense see capital (n.2).”  ref

capital (n.2)

“In the 1610s, “a person’s wealth,” from Medieval Latin capitale “stock, property,” noun use of neuter of Latin capitalis “capital, chief, first” (see capital (adj.). From 1640s as “the wealth employed in carrying on a particular business,” then, in a broader sense in political economy, “that part of the produce of industry which is available for further production” (1793). [The term capital] made its first appearance in medieval Latin as an adjective capitalis (from caput, head) modifying the word pars, to designate the principal sum of a money loan. The principal part of a loan was contrasted with the “usury”—later called interest—the payment made to the lender in addition to the return of the sum lent. This usage, unknown to classical Latin, had become common by the thirteenth century and possibly had begun as early as 1100 CE, in the first chartered towns of Europe. [Frank A. Fetter, “Reformulation of the Concepts of Capital and Income in Economics and Accounting,” 1937, in “Capital, Interest, & Rent,” 1977] Also see cattle, and compare sense development of fee, and pecuniary. Middle English had chief money “principal fund” (mid-14c.). The noun use of the adjective in classical Latin meant “a capital crime.”  ref

capital (n.3)

“Head of a column or pillar,” late 13 century, from Anglo-French capitel, Old French chapitel (Modern French chapiteau), or directly from Latin capitellum “head of a column or pillar,” literally “little head,” diminutive of caput “head” (from PIE root *kaput- “head”).”  ref

Entries linking to Capital

cattle (n.)

“In the mid-13 century, “property” of any kind, including money, land, income; from Anglo-French catel “property” (Old North French catel, Old French chatel), from Medieval Latin capitale “property, stock,” noun use of neuter of Latin adjective capitalis “principal, chief,” literally “of the head,” from caput (genitive capitis) “head” (from PIE root *kaput- “head”). Compare sense development of fee, pecuniary. In later Middle English especially “movable property, livestock” (early 14 century), including horses, sheep, asses, etc.; it began to be limited to “cows and bulls” from the late 16 century.”  ref

fee (n.)

“Middle English, representing the merger or mutual influence of two words, one from Old English, one from an Old French form of the same Germanic word, and both ultimately from a PIE root meaning “cattle.” The Old English word is feoh “livestock, cattle; movable property; possessions in livestock, goods, or money; riches, treasure, wealth; money as a medium of exchange or payment,” from Proto-Germanic *fehu (source also of Old Saxon fehu, Old High German fihu, German Vieh “cattle,” Gothic faihu “money, fortune”). This is from PIE *peku- “cattle” (source also of Sanskrit pasu, Lithuanian pekus “cattle;” Latin pecu “cattle,” pecunia “money, property”).”  ref

“The other word is Anglo-French fee, from Old French fieu, a variant of fief “possession, holding, domain; feudal duties, payment” (see fief), which apparently is a Germanic compound in which the first element is cognate with Old English feoh. Via Anglo-French come the legal senses “estate in land or tenements held on condition of feudal homage; land, property, possession” (c. 1300). Hence fee-simple (late 14 century) “absolute ownership,” as opposed to fee-tail (early 15 century) “entailed ownership,” inheritance limited to some particular class of heirs (the second element from Old French taillir “to cut, to limit”).”  ref

The feudal sense was extended from landholdings to inheritable offices of service to a feudal lord (late 14c.; in Anglo-French late 13 century), for example, forester of fe “a forester by heritable right.” As these often were offices of profit, the word came to be used for “remuneration for service in office” (late 14 century), hence, “payment for (any kind of) work or services” (late 14 century). From the late 14 century as “a sum paid for a privilege” (originally admission to a guild); to the early 15 century as “money payment or charge exacted for a license, etc.”  ref

The etymology of the term Cattle

“Cattle did not originate as the term for bovine animals. It was borrowed from Anglo-Norman catel, itself from medieval Latin capitale ‘principal sum of money, capital’, itself derived in turn from Latin caput ‘head’. Cattle originally meant movable personal property, especially livestock of any kind, as opposed to real property (the land, which also included wild or small free-roaming animals such as chickens—they were sold as part of the land). The word is a variant of chattel (a unit of personal property) and closely related to capital in the economic sense. The term replaced earlier Old English feoh ‘cattle, property’, which survives today as fee (cf. German: Vieh, Dutch: vee, Gothic: faihu).” ref

“The word cow came via Anglo-Saxon cū (plural cȳ), from Common Indo-European gʷōus (genitive gʷowés) ‘a bovine animal’, cf. Persian: gâv, Sanskrit: go-, Welsh: buwch. The plural cȳ became ki or kie in Middle English, and an additional plural ending was often added, giving kine, kien, but also kies, kuin and others. This is the origin of the now archaic English plural, kine. The Scots language singular is coo or cou, and the plural is kye.” ref

“In older English sources such as the King James Version of the Bible, cattle refers to livestock, as opposed to deer which refers to wildlife. Wild cattle may refer to feral cattle or to undomesticated species of the genus Bos. Today, when used without any other qualifier, the modern meaning of cattle is usually restricted to domesticated bovines.” ref

So What Is Capitalism?

“Capitalism is an economic system in which private individuals or businesses own capital goods. The production of goods and services is based on supply and demand in the general market—known as a market economy—rather than through central planning—known as a planned economy or command economy. The purest form of capitalism is free market or laissez-faire capitalism. Here, private individuals are unrestrained. They may determine where to invest, what to produce or sell, and at which prices to exchange goods and services. The laissez-faire marketplace operates without checks or controls. Today, most countries practice a mixed capitalist system that includes some degree of government regulation of business and ownership of select industries.” ref 

• “Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private ownership of the means of production, especially in the industrial sector.
• Capitalism depends on the enforcement of private property rights, which provide incentives for investment in and productive use of productive capital.
• Capitalism developed historically out of previous systems of feudalism and mercantilism in Europe, and dramatically expanded industrialization and the large-scale availability of mass-market consumer goods.
• Pure capitalism can be contrasted with pure socialism (where all means of production are collective or state-owned) and mixed economies (which lie on a continuum between pure capitalism and pure socialism).
• The real-world practice of capitalism typically involves some degree of so-called “crony capitalism” due to demands from business for favorable government intervention and governments’ incentive to intervene in the economy.” ref

Capital accumulation as social relation

“Accumulation of capital” sometimes also refers in Marxist writings to the reproduction of capitalist social relations (institutions) on a larger scale over time, i.e., the expansion of the size of the proletariat and of the wealth owned by the bourgeoisie. This interpretation emphasizes that capital ownership, predicated on command over labor, is a social relation: the growth of capital implies the growth of the working class (a “law of accumulation“).” ref 

“In the first volume of Das Kapital Marx had illustrated this idea with reference to Edward Gibbon Wakefield‘s theory of colonization:

“…Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3,000 persons of the working-class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.” Unhappy Mr. Peel, who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!”— Das Kapital, vol. 1, ch. 33” ref

“In the third volume of Das Kapital, Marx refers to the “fetishism of capital” reaching its highest point with interest-bearing capital, because now capital seems to grow of its own accord without anybody doing anything. In this case,

“The relations of capital assume their most externalised and most fetish-like form in interest-bearing capital. We have here {\displaystyle M-M’}, money creating more money, self-expanding value, without the process that effectuates these two extremes. In merchant’s capital, {\displaystyle M-C-M’}, there is at least the general form of the capitalistic movement, although it confines itself solely to the sphere of circulation, so that profit appears merely as profit derived from alienation; but it is at least seen to be the product of a social relation, not the product of a mere thing. (…) This is obliterated in {\displaystyle M-M’}, the form of interest-bearing capital. (…) The thing (money, commodity, value) is now capital even as a mere thing, and capital appears as a mere thing. The result of the entire process of reproduction appears as a property inherent in the thing itself. It depends on the owner of the money, i.e., of the commodity in its continually exchangeable form, whether he wants to spend it as money or loan it out as capital. In interest-bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish, self-expanding value, money generating money, are brought out in their pure state and in this form it no longer bears the birth-marks of its origin. The social relation is consummated in the relation of a thing, of money, to itself.—Instead of the actual transformation of money into capital, we see here only form without content.”— “Das Kapital”, vol.3, ch. 24” ref

“In Karl Marx‘s critique of political economy and subsequent Marxian analyses, the capitalist mode of production (German: Produktionsweise) refers to the systems of organizing production and distribution within capitalist societies. Private money-making in various forms (renting, banking, merchant trade, production for profit, and so on) preceded the development of the capitalist mode of production as such. The capitalist mode of production proper, based on wage-labor and private-ownership of the means of production and on industrial technology, began to grow rapidly in Western Europe from the Industrial Revolution, later extending to most of the world. The capitalist mode of production is characterized by private ownership of the means of production, extraction of surplus value by the owning class for the purpose of capital accumulation, wage-based labor, and—at least as far as commodities are concerned—being market-based.” ref 

“A “mode of production” (German: Produktionsweise) means simply “the distinctive way of producing”, which could be defined in terms of how it is socially organized and what kinds of technologies and tools are used. Under the capitalist mode of production:

• Both the inputs and outputs of production are mainly privately owned, priced goods and services purchased in the market.
• Production is carried out for exchange and circulation in the market, aiming to obtain a net profit income from it.
• The owners of the means of production (capitalists) constitute the dominant class (bourgeoisie) who derive its income from the exploitation of the surplus value. Surplus value is a term within the Marxian theory which reveals the workers’ unpaid work.
• A defining feature of capitalism is the dependency on wage-labor for a large segment of the population; specifically, the working class, that is a segment of the proletariat, which does not own means of production (type of capital) and are compelled to sell to the owners of the means of production their labor power in order to produce and thus have an income to provide for themselves and their families the necessities of life.” ref

“The capitalist mode of production may exist within societies with differing political systems (e.g. liberal democracy, social democracy, fascism, Communist state, and Czarism) and alongside different social structures such as tribalism, the caste system, an agrarian-based peasant society, urban industrial society, and post-industrialism. Although capitalism has existed in the form of merchant activity, banking, renting land, and small-scale manufactures in previous stages of history, it was usually a relatively minor activity and secondary to the dominant forms of social organization and production with the prevailing property system keeping commerce within clear limits.” ref

“Capitalist society is epitomized by the so-called circuit of commodity production, M-C-M’ and by renting money for that purpose where the aggregate of market actors determine the money price M, of the input labor and commodities and M’ the struck price of C, the produced market commodity. It is centered on the process M → M’, “making money” and the exchange of value that occurs at that point. M’ > M is the condition of rationality in the capitalist system and a necessary condition for the next cycle of accumulation/production. For this reason, Capitalism is “production for exchange” driven by the desire for personal accumulation of money receipts in such exchanges, mediated by free markets.” ref 

“The markets themselves are driven by the needs and wants of consumers and those of society as a whole in the form of the bourgeois state. These wants and needs would (in the socialist or communist society envisioned by Marx, Engels, and others) be the driving force, it would be “production for use“. Contemporary mainstream (bourgeois) economics, particularly that associated with the right, holds that an “invisible hand“, through little more than the freedom of the market, is able to match social production to these needs and desires.” ref

“Capitalism” as this money-making activity has existed in the shape of merchants and money-lenders who acted as intermediaries between consumers and producers engaging in simple commodity production (hence the reference to “merchant capitalism“) since the beginnings of civilization. What is specific about the “capitalist mode of production” is that most of the inputs and outputs of production are supplied through the market (i.e. they are commodities) and essentially all production is in this mode. For example, in flourishing feudalism most or all of the factors of production including labor are owned by the feudal ruling class outright and the products may also be consumed without a market of any kind, it is production for use within the feudal social unit and for limited trade.” ref

“This has the important consequence that the whole organization of the production process is reshaped and reorganized to conform with economic rationality as bounded by capitalism, which is expressed in price relationships between inputs and outputs (wages, non-labor factor costs, sales, profits) rather than the larger rational context faced by society overall. That is, the whole process is organized and reshaped in order to conform to “commercial logic”. Another way of saying this is that capital accumulation defines economic rationality in capitalist production. In the flourishing period of capitalism, these are not operating at cross purposes and thus capitalism acts as a progressive force (e.g. against feudalism). In the final stages, capitalism as a mode of production achieves complete domination on a planetary basis and has nothing to overcome but itself, the final (for it, capitalism, viewed as a Hegelian process, not for historical development per se) negating of the negation posited by orthodox Marxism.” ref

“In this context, Marx refers to a transition from the “formal subsumption” of production under the power of capital to the “real subsumption” of production under the power of capital. In what he calls the “specifically capitalist mode of production”, both the technology worked with and the social organization of labor have been completely refashioned and reshaped in a commercial (profit and market-oriented) way—the “old ways of producing” (for example, crafts and cottage industries) had been completely displaced by the then new industrialism. Some historians, such as Jairus Banaji and Nicholas Vrousalis have argued that capitalist relations of production predate the capitalist mode of production.” ref

“In general, capitalism as an economic system and mode of production can be summarized by the following:

• Capital accumulation: production for profit and accumulation as the implicit purpose of all or most of production, constriction, or elimination of production formerly carried out on a common social or private household basis.
• Commodity production: production for exchange on a market; to maximize exchange-value instead of use-value.
• Private ownership of the means of production: ownership of the means of production by a class of capital owners, either individually, collectively (see corporation), or through a state that serves the interests of the capitalist class (see state capitalism).
• Primacy of wage labor: near universality of wage labor, whether so-called or not, with coerced work for the masses in excess of what they would need to sustain themselves and a complete saturation of bourgeois values at all levels of society from the base reshaping and reorganization described above.” ref

“Marx argued that capital existed incipiently on a small scale for centuries in the form of merchant, renting, and lending activities and occasionally also as small-scale industry with some wage labor (Marx was also well aware that wage labor existed for centuries on a modest scale before the advent of capitalist industry). Simple commodity exchange and consequently simple commodity production, which form the initial basis for the growth of capital from trade, have a very long history. The “capitalistic era” according to Marx dates from the 16th century, i.e. it began with merchant capitalism and relatively small urban workshops.” ref

“For the capitalist mode of production to emerge as a distinctive mode of production dominating the whole production process of society, many different social, economic, cultural, technical, and legal-political conditions had to come together. For most of human history, these did not come together. Capital existed and commercial trade existed, but it did not lead to industrialization and large-scale capitalist industry. That required a whole series of new conditions, namely specific technologies of mass production, the ability to independently and privately own and trade in means of production, a class of workers compelled to sell their labor power for a living, a legal framework promoting commerce, a physical infrastructure making the circulation of goods on a large scale possible, security for private accumulation and so on.” ref 

“In many Third World countries, many of these conditions do not exist even today even though there is plenty of capital and labor available—the obstacles for the development of capitalist markets are less a technical matter and more a social, cultural, and political problem. A society, a region, or nation is “capitalist” if the predominant source of incomes and products being distributed is capitalist activity—even so, this does not yet mean necessarily that the capitalist mode of production is dominant in that society.” ref

Defining structural criteria

“Marx never provided a complete definition of the capitalist mode of production as a short summary, although in his manuscripts he sometimes attempted one.” ref

“In a sense, it is Marx’s three-volume work Capital (1867–1894; sometimes known by its German title, Das Kapital), as a whole that provides his “definition” of the capitalist mode of production. Nevertheless, it is possible to summarise the essential defining characteristics of the capitalist mode of production as follows:

• The means of production (or capital goods) and the means of consumption (or consumer goods) are mainly produced for market sale; output is produced with the intention of sale in an open market; and only through sale of output can the owner of capital claim part of the surplus-product of human labour and realize profits. Equally, the inputs of production are supplied through the market as commodities. The prices of both inputs and outputs are mainly governed by the market laws of supply and demand (and ultimately by the law of value). In short, a capitalist must use money to fuel both the means of production and labor in order to make commodities. These commodities are then sold to the market for a profit. The profit once again becomes part of a larger amount of capital which the capitalist reinvests to make more commodities and ultimately more and more capital.
• Private ownership of the means of production (“private enterprise”) as effective private control and/or legally enforced ownership, with the consequence that investment and management decisions are made by private owners of capital who act autonomously from each other and—because of business secrecy and the constraints of competition—do not co-ordinate their activities according to collective, conscious planning. Enterprises are able to set their own output prices within the framework of the forces of supply and demand manifested through the market and the development of production technology is guided by profitability criteria.
• The corollary of that is wage labor (“employment”) by the direct producers, who are compelled to sell their labor power because they lack access to alternative means of subsistence (other than being self-employed or employers of labor, if only they could acquire sufficient funds) and can obtain means of consumption only through market transactions. These wage earners are mostly “free” in a double sense: they are “freed” from ownership of productive assets and they are free to choose their employer.
• Being carried out for market on the basis of a proliferation of fragmented decision-making processes by owners and managers of private capital, social production is mediated by competition for asset-ownership, political or economic influence, costs, sales, prices and profits. Competition occurs between owners of capital for profits, assets and markets; between owners of capital and workers over wages and conditions; and between workers themselves over employment opportunities and civil rights.
• The overall aim of capitalist production under competitive pressure is (a) to maximize net profit income (or realize a net superprofit) as much as possible through cutting production costs, increasing sales and monopolisation of markets and supply; (b) capital accumulation, to acquire productive and non-productive assets; and (c) to privatize both the supply of goods and services and their consumption. The larger portion of the surplus product of labor must usually be reinvested in production since output growth and accumulation of capital mutually depend on each other.
• Out of preceding characteristics of the capitalist mode of production, the basic class structure of this mode of production society emerges: a class of owners and managers of private capital assets in industries and on the land, a class of wage and salary earners, a permanent reserve army of labor consisting of unemployed people and various intermediate classes such as the self-employed (small business and farmers) and the “new middle classes” (educated or skilled professionals on higher salaries).
• The finance of the capitalist state is heavily dependent on levying taxes from the population and on credit—that is, the capitalist state normally lacks any autonomous economic basis (such as state-owned industries or landholdings) that would guarantee sufficient income to sustain state activities. The capitalist state defines a legal framework for commerce, civil society and politics, which specifies public and private rights and duties as well as legitimate property relations.
• Capitalist development, occurring on private initiative in a socially unco-ordinated and unplanned way, features periodic crises of over-production (or excess capacity). This means that a critical fraction of output cannot be sold at all, or cannot be sold at prices realizing the previously ruling rate of profit. The other side of over-production is the over-accumulation of productive capital: more capital is invested in production than can obtain a normal profit. The consequence is a recession (a reduced economic growth rate) or in severe cases, a depression (negative real growth, i.e. an absolute decline in output). As a corollary, mass unemployment occurs. In the history of capitalist development since 1820, there have been more than 20 of such crises—nowadays the under-utilization of installed productive capacity is a permanent characteristic of capitalist production (average capacity utilization rates nowadays normally range from about 60% to 85%).” ref

“In examining particular manifestations of the capitalist mode of production in particular regions and epochs, it is possible to find exceptions to these main defining criteria, but the exceptions prove the rule in the sense that over time the exceptional circumstances tend to disappear.” ref

“But Damien, I have very mixed feelings about socialism.”

My response, Me too, and then I remember the injustices of capitalism and go with the ethics of people before profit thus I am a socialist anarchist.

I don’t agree that all cops are bastards as many anarchists do. I say there are bigotry people everywhere but with the police, we give bigotry a gun and then are bigoted in both who the harass, harm, and kill in a way that bigotry seems apparent. So it is a system of bigotry power.

People always look down on me with no good reason at all, my life is to acknowledge it and do what is right. I live by a moto do the needful. May my words be sweetened with kindness and compassion and may my heart forever stay safe and warm in the arms of kindness.

I am not the thing abuse made, I am will to power!

Counselors often manipulate thinking in people and it’s a good thing if it is client-centered and not on so nonclient power. I have both skills and training in counseling, intervention, addiction, teaching, psychology, sociology, multiculturalism, and religious history.

I wish capitalism would end. We all deserve more wealth equally.

Almost 50% of sociopaths were extremely abused as kids. So don’t tell me abuse did not affect you so it is okay to hit children. NO. it is not! Violence teaches violence just as kindness teaches kindness and it’s up to us all to make the wise choice for humanity.

It is generally only the wise who challenge their own ideas with the same rage they offer all ideas not theirs and the fool that protects their ideas from the scrutiny deserving all claims of truth.

I am a proud socialist and don’t take it as a put-down to be called a communist. But I am an anarcho-Humanist and we do not see any destination except are you a good person or not as our highest concern. Thus never call people comrade, neither do I add separation of gender either.

I have this thing I do that many too often seem to hate called: Whatever I want not caring one shit if it bothers the rich, the elite of the world, bigots, or others that harm humanity, and, feel little need if any to help. Shame on any who have the means to help and don’t.

I am Anti-Classist, all of humanity is my people.

I am Anti-Classist?

I am an anti-classist more than just a socialist or anarchist, though I think they both, even if varied in such types of political theorizing would agree that classism is a major problem. I see this vile problem of classism in almost all other social problems, it is a ever-continuing hidden harm, too many seem to accept, ignore, deny, or don’t care, as well as some in society sadly seem to welcome it. To me, classism is a scourge on humanity everywhere all the time. I despise classism and its harm to true humanity flourishing.

What Is Classism?

“Classism is differential treatment based on social class or perceived social class. Classism is the systematic oppression of subordinated class groups to advantage and strengthen the dominant class groups. It’s the systematic assignment of characteristics of worth and ability based on social class.” ref

“That includes: individual attitudes and behaviors; systems of policies and practices that are set up to benefit the upper classes at the expense of the lower classes, resulting in drastic income and wealth inequality; the rationale that supports these systems and this unequal valuing; and the culture that perpetuates them.” ref

“Classism is held in place by a system of beliefs and cultural attitudes that ranks people according to economic status, family lineage, job status, level of education, and other divisions.” ref

“Class discrimination, also known as classism, is prejudice or discrimination on the basis of social class. It includes individual attitudes, behaviors, systems of policies, and practices that are set up to benefit the upper class at the expense of the lower class.” ref

“Social class refers to the grouping of individuals in a hierarchy based on wealth, income, education, occupation, and social network.” ref

“Class structures existed in a simplified form in pre-agricultural societies, but it has evolved into a more complex and established structure following the establishment of permanent agriculture-based civilizations with a food surplus.” ref

Classism Definitions:

“Class: Relative social rank in terms of income, wealth, status, and/or power.” ref

“Classism: The institutional, cultural, and individual set of practices and beliefs that assign differential value to people according to their socio-economic class; and an economic system that creates excessive inequality and causes basic human needs to go unmet.” ref

“Class Identity: A label for one category of class experience, such as ruling class, owning class, middle class, working-class, and lower class.” ref

“Ruling Class: The stratum of people who hold positions of power in major institutions of the society.” ref

“Owning Class/Rich: The stratum of families who own income-producing assets sufficient to make paid employment unnecessary.” ref

“Middle Class: The stratum of families for whom breadwinners’ higher education and/or specialized skills brings higher income and more security than those of working-class people.” ref

“Upper-Middle Class: The portion of the middle class with higher incomes due to professional jobs and/or investment income.” ref

“Lower-Middle Class: The portion of the middle class with lower and less stable incomes due to lower-skilled or unstable employment.” ref

“Working Class: The stratum of families whose income depends on hourly wages for labor.” ref

“Lower Class/Poor: The stratum of families with incomes insufficient to meet basic human needs.” ref

“Individual Classism: This term refers to classism on a personal or individual level, either in behavior or attitudes, either conscious and intentional or unconscious and unintentional.” ref

“Institutional Classism: This term refers to the ways in which conscious or unconscious classism is manifest in the various institutions of our society.” ref

“Cultural Classism: This term refers to the ways in which classism is manifest through our cultural norms and practices. It can often be found in the ideology behind something.” ref

“Internalized Classism: Acceptance and justification of classism by working-class and poor people, such as feelings of inferiority to higher-class people, feelings of superiority to people lower on the class spectrum than oneself, hostility and blame toward other working-class or poor people, and beliefs that classist institutions are fair.” ref

“Privilege: One of the many tangible or intangible unearned advantages of higher-class status.” ref

“Classism started to be practiced around the 18th century. Segregation into classes was accomplished through observable traits (such as race or profession) that were accorded varying status and privileges. Feudal classification systems might include merchant, serf, peasant, warrior, priestly, and noble classes. Rankings were far from invariant with the merchant class in Europe outranking the peasantry while merchants were explicitly inferior to peasants during the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan. Modern classism, with less rigid class structures, is harder to identify. In a professional association posting, psychologist Thomas Fuller-Rowell states, “Experiences of [class] discrimination are often subtle rather than blatant, and the exact reason for unfair treatment is often not clear to the victim.” ref

Classism or Class discrimination, Intersections with Other Systems of Oppression

“Socioeconomic, racial/ethnic and gender inequalities in academic achievement have been widely reported in the United States, but how these three axes of inequality intersect to determine academic and non-academic outcomes among school-aged children is not well understood. The term classism can refer to personal prejudice against lower classes as well as to institutional classism, just as the term racism can refer either strictly to personal prejudice or to institutional racism.” ref

“The latter has been defined as “the ways in which conscious or unconscious classism is manifest in the various institutions of our society. As with social classes, the difference in social status between people determines how they behave toward each other and the prejudices they likely hold toward each other. People of higher status do not generally mix with lower-status people and often are able to control other people’s activities by influencing laws and social standards.” ref

“The term “interpersonal” is sometimes used in place of “personal” as in “institutional classism (versus) interpersonal classism” and terms such as “attitude” or “attitudinal” may replace “interpersonal” as contrasting with institutional classism as in the Association of Magazine Media’s definition of classism as “any attitude or institutional practice which subordinates people due to income, occupation, education and/or their economic condition.” ref

“Classism is also sometimes broken down into more than two categories as in “personal, institutional and cultural” classism. It is common knowledge in sociolinguistics that meta-social language abounds in lower registers, thus the slang for various classes or racial castes.” ref

“Class discrimination can be seen in many different forms of media such as television shows, films, and social media. Classism is also systemic, and its implications can go unnoticed in the media that is consumed by society. Class discrimination in the media displays the knowledge of what people feel and think about classism. When seeing class discrimination in films and television shows, people are influenced and believe that is how things are in real life, for whatever class is being displayed.” ref

“Children can be exposed to class discrimination through movies, with a large pool of high-grossing G-rated movies portraying classism in various contexts. Children may develop biases at a young age that shape their beliefs throughout their lifetime, which would demonstrate the issues with class discrimination being prevalent in the media. Media is a big influence on the world today, with that something such as classism is can be seen in many different lights. Media plays an important role in how certain groups of people are perceived, which can make certain biases stronger.” ref

“Usually, the lower-income people are displayed in the media as dirty, lack of education and manners, and homeless. People can use the media to learn more about different social classes or use the media, such as social media to influence others on what they believe. In some cases, people who are in a social class that is portrayed negatively by the media can be affected in school and social life as “[t]eenagers who grew up in poverty reported higher levels of discrimination, and the poorer the teens were, the more they experienced discrimination.” ref

“Class” is a subject of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and social historians. However, there is not a consensus on a definition of “class” and the term has a wide range of sometimes conflicting meanings. Some people argue that due to social mobility, class boundaries do not exist. In common parlance, the term “social class” is usually synonymous with “socio-economic class”, defined as “people having the same social, economic, cultural, political or educational status”, e.g., “the working class“; “an emerging professional class”. However, academics distinguish social class and socioeconomic status, using the former to refer to one’s relatively stable sociocultural background and the latter to refer to one’s current social and economic situation which is consequently more changeable over time.” ref

“The precise measurements of what determines social class in society have varied over time. Karl Marx thought “class” was defined by one’s relationship to the means of production (their relations of production). His understanding of classes in modern capitalist society is that the proletariat work but do not own the means of production, and the bourgeoisie, those who invest and live off the surplus generated by the proletariat’s operation of the means of production, do not work at all. This contrasts with the view of the sociologist Max Weber, who argued “class” is determined by economic position, in contrast to “social status” or “Stand” which is determined by social prestige rather than simply just relations of production. The term “class” is etymologically derived from the Latin classis, which was used by census takers to categorize citizens by wealth in order to determine military service obligations.” ref

“In the late 18th century, the term “class” began to replace classifications such as estates, rank, and orders as the primary means of organizing society into hierarchical divisions. This corresponded to a general decrease in significance ascribed to hereditary characteristics and an increase in the significance of wealth and income as indicators of position in the social hierarchy.” ref

Consequences of class position

“A person’s socioeconomic class has wide-ranging effects. It can impact the schools they are able to attend, their health, the jobs open to them, when they exit the labor market, whom they may marry, and their treatment by police and the courts.” ref

“Angus Deaton and Anne Case have analyzed the mortality rates related to the group of white, middle-aged Americans between the ages of 45 and 54 and its relation to class. There has been a growing number of suicides and deaths by substance abuse in this particular group of middle-class Americans. This group also has been recorded to have an increase in reports of chronic pain and poor general health. Deaton and Case came to the conclusion from these observations that because of the constant stress that these white, middle-aged Americans feel fighting poverty and wavering between the middle and lower classes, these strains have taken a toll on these people and affected their whole bodies.” ref

“Social classifications can also determine the sporting activities that such classes take part in. It is suggested that those of an upper social class are more likely to take part in sporting activities, whereas those of a lower social background are less likely to participate in sport. However, upper-class people tend to not take part in certain sports that have been commonly known to be linked with the lower class.” ref

“A person’s social class has a significant impact on their educational opportunities. Not only are upper-class parents able to send their children to exclusive schools that are perceived to be better, but in many places, state-supported schools for children of the upper class are of a much higher quality than those the state provides for children of the lower classes. This lack of good schools is one factor that perpetuates the class divide across generations.” ref

“A person’s social class has a significant impact on their physical health, their ability to receive adequate medical care and nutrition, and their life expectancy. Lower-class people experience a wide array of health problems as a result of their economic status. They are unable to use health care as often and when they do it is of lower quality, even though they generally tend to experience a much higher rate of health issues. Lower-class families have higher rates of infant mortality, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and disabling physical injuries. Additionally, poor people tend to work in much more hazardous conditions, yet generally have much less (if any) health insurance provided for them, as compared to middle- and upper-class workers.” ref

“The conditions at a person’s job vary greatly depending on class. Those in the upper-middle class and middle class enjoy greater freedoms in their occupations. They are usually more respected, enjoy more diversity, and are able to exhibit some authority. Those in lower classes tend to feel more alienated and have lower work satisfaction overall. The physical conditions of the workplace differ greatly between classes. While middle-class workers may “suffer alienating conditions” or “lack of job satisfaction”, blue-collar workers are more apt to suffer alienating, often routine, work with obvious physical health hazards, injury, and even death.” ref

“In the UK, a 2015 government study by the Social Mobility Commission suggested the existence of a “glass floor” in British society preventing those who are less able, but who come from wealthier backgrounds, from slipping down the social ladder. The report proposed a 35% greater likelihood of less able, better-off children becoming high earners than bright poor children.” ref

Class conflict

Further information: Class conflict

“Class conflict, frequently referred to as “class warfare” or “class struggle”, is the tension or antagonism which exists in society due to competing for socioeconomic interests and desires between people of different classes. And for Marx, the history of class society was a history of class conflict.” ref

“Marx pointed to the successful rise of the bourgeoisie and the necessity of revolutionary violence—a heightened form of class conflict—in securing the bourgeois rights that supported the capitalist economy. Marx believed that the exploitation and poverty inherent in capitalism were a pre-existing form of class conflict. Marx believed that wage laborers would need to revolt to bring about a more equitable distribution of wealth and political power.” ref

Classless society

Further information: Classless society

“A “classless” society is one in which no one is born into a social class. Distinctions of wealth, income, education, culture, or social network might arise and would only be determined by individual experience and achievement in such a society. Since these distinctions are difficult to avoid, advocates of a classless society (such as anarchists and communists) propose various means to achieve and maintain it and attach varying degrees of importance to it as an end in their overall programs/philosophy.” ref

Relationship between ethnicity and class

Further information: Racial inequality

“Race and other large-scale groupings can also influence class standing. The association of particular ethnic groups with class statuses is common in many societies, and is linked with race as well. Class and ethnicity can impact a persons, or communities, Socioeconomic standing, which in turn influences everything including job availability and the quality of available health and education.” ref

As a result of conquest or internal ethnic differentiation, a ruling class is often ethnically homogenous and particular races or ethnic groups in some societies are legally or customarily restricted to occupying particular class positions. Which ethnicities are considered as belonging to high or low classes varies from society to society.” ref

“In modern societies, strict legal links between ethnicity and class have been drawn, such as the caste system in Africa, apartheid, the position of the Burakumin in Japanese society, and the casta system in Latin America.” ref

Process of Class Stratification

“Class stratification is a form of social stratification in which a society is separated into parties whose members have different access to resources and power. An economic, natural, cultural, religious, interests and ideal rift usually exists between different classes.” ref

“In the early stages of class stratification, the majority of members in a given society have similar access to wealth and power, with only a few members displaying noticeably more or less wealth than the rest.” ref

“As time goes on, the largest share of wealth and status can begin to concentrate around a small number of the population. When wealth continues to concentrate, pockets of society with significantly less wealth may develop, until a sharp imbalance between rich and poor is created. As members of a society spread out from one another economically, classes are created.” ref

“When a physical gap is added, a cultural rift between the classes comes into existence, an example being the perception of the well-mannered, “cultured” behavior of the rich, versus the “uncivilized” behavior of the poor. With the cultural divide, chances for classes to intermingle become less and less likely, and mythos becomes more and more common between them (i.e. “the wrong side of the railroad tracks”). The lower class loses more of its influence and wealth as the upper class gains more influence and wealth, further dividing the classes from one another.” ref

Class Schema

“Social class is usually regarded as being conceived of as sets of positions rather than as individuals who happen to fill them at any particular time. Class structure is the “empty spaces” that persons occupy without altering the shape of the class structure.” ref

“Erik Olin Wright produced class schemata, in attempts to retain a Marxist approach to class analysis. In Wright’s first schema he states that in capitalism simple production exists alongside the capitalist mode of production. In this schema the bourgeoisie, the self-employed working who engage in simple production are one class. In the model there are two distinctive classes, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie owns the means of production, and the proletariat are the exploited workers. Both of these classes can be broken down into six classes that make up Wright’s first schema.” ref

“The supervisors and managers are in a contradictory class because they dominate over the proletariat and yet they are still dominated by the bourgeoisie. The small employers are both petty bourgeois and bourgeois; and the semi-autonomous employees while they do not own the means of production, they benefit from having more autonomy over their work than the normal proletariat. These classes are based upon exploitation and domination. Exploitation exists between those who own the means of production and those who do not. Domination is measured according to the amount of autonomy that can be exercised by the workers and to which extent they are supervised.” ref

“Wright’s second schema involve a 12-class schema and is based upon exploitation. In the second schemata exploitation has three dimensions: ownership of the means of production, ownership of organization assets that permit control and coordination of technical processes of production, and ownership of skills or credentials.” ref

“John Goldthorpe‘s class schema is to differentiate positions within labor markets and production units, or more specifically to differentiate such positions in terms of the employment relations that they entail. Goldthorpe schema distinguishes the employers, the self-employed, and employees. Within the group of employees eleven classes are defined on the basis of the employment relationship they enjoy. The aim of the schema is to group occupational title/employment relations, and the employment relationships joined by given combinations may differ cross-nationally.” ref

“As the theories relate to class stratification the common characteristic shared by the actors involve the position they occupy in relations defined by labor markets and productive processes. Class has often been defined as the significant determinant of life chances. The deliberate acts of individual actors are undertaken from a position of social power which is determined by class membership. The resources an individual possesses and the constraints they face and the course of action they take leads to having a higher probability of being undertaken than others. These processes lead to class position becoming a powerful predictor of many kinds of behavior.” ref

Class and Race

“It can be argued that segregation between black and white ethnic groups is so strong in some countries that they are different classes, and thus that segregation is a form of class stratification. Although there is a definite divide in some countries between races, those countries will also have poor people of the “upper class” ethnicity.” ref

I am still learning every day. I am a teacher/learner and always hope to be. I learn from everything, I never limit my knowledge of wisdom out of fear, do you? A closed mind will not win a battle of free thought…

Reason is my only master and may we all master Reason.

People to me many years ago, Damien you must look and act more normal or you will not ever get famous because people don’t generally like freaks. I said you do get I am an activist, right, an anarchist-socialist anticapitalist that has offered all I could to help?

Damien, how do you see a difference between rationalism and skepticism?

My response, Well, a skeptic uses skepticism and I only appeal to reason to aid all thinking and if reason demands I change my thinking, guess what? I do, full stop, but can you justify the same claim?

Religious people are safe on my posts. I only attack ideas or bad behavior, not people.

In paganism alcohol or the effects of alcohol were often thought of as relating to a goddess or a god.

The wise see knowledge everywhere.

We rise by helping each other. Simply I am my best caring for myself and others or my worst is when I have devalued my humanity by not caring for myself and others.

I wonder if the people who claim there is no universal morality will not find many reasons to try and justify this as if there was someone threatening their life. I would assume many magically would be the strongest universal rights champions on the planet at that moment.

Only the unjust, are truly comfortable with the oppression and harm of others. If you think society is great, wow do I have some news for you.

I never get anxious in challenges because as a free thinker I am hoping we discern the truth together. I am a truth seeker, she is my seductress, lover, and friend. I know that we will find out what sounds like justified truth in the end because “reality” is not pretend.

I have never met any Idea, I won’t challenge or change if needed, or if required by reason.

So the problem is not socialist or communist it is still the evil of capitalism infecting the good communist order. And for some to not grasp this is odd to me. And all the crime laid on socialists is often the crime of greed and power. Like asking to rule for life as seen in communist-controlled countries.

What real need do you think I have to protect the feelings of bigots? If you have a desire to content this and offer some valid justification do it now.

It’s not a question if everyone at some point is foolish. So it may happen but why champion it, right, one would be a willing fool to do so, right? Behavior that you think can happen with others and have no potential shared experience? Some things simply are pre-confining.

To me, I see the universal nature of good. It is so natural even bad people understand what is good.

Any claim of reality that is not real is to lie and that makes it pseudoscience, that fact one is not moral enough to not lie but push nontruth at truth and still considers this action as good is using pseudo-morality, and as the try to plage these lies in a historical concept it is pseudo-history.

But Damien, Rats. Even fungi & bacteria have hierarchies.

You mean we see behaviors that we assume are hierarchies and the issue is what is the meaning in the term use is it universal no matter the domain and even if it was a common action that is not saying it is good. “Denial” is very common and not generally good.

“The common” is not the true judge of “good!”

What religion explains all that science found out by actually looking or will now change to these facts updating the earlier inaccuracies any may have had.

The truth only needs reason it is lies that seem to need champions…

I find people odd that feel confident when they only have unanalyzed ideas but still doubt researched facts.

It seems sometimes people want to try and portray me as a “mentally unwell villain” but betray the goodness in their own honor in trying to do so. I strive for a life of kindness even with my enemies as all our shared humanity is so worth it. I only want to offer my life to help.

“Why should anyone have the right to tell me or anyone else that we can’t work if we can’t find an employer willing to take a chance on us at a mandatory $15hr take the government out of it let labor negotiate its own wages.” – Capitalist

My response, I don’t tell people not to work I remind them on what wage slavery is and how unethical capitalism is.

“Capitalism is the most ethical economic system ever devised in the history of the world Capitalism has brought more people out of abject poverty and faster than anyone ever dared to imagine possible do some research get your facts straight before you fall for even more bullshit.” – Capitalist

My response, Before or after slavery are we talking about or how about workers having to fight for every “human rights” workers have today from criminal employers in this capitalism you are supporting. Please get me an article quote claiming capitalism as ethical?

“Do you want to deal with the truth or at least as much of it as you can get your examine on or do you want to continue to occupy and defend that same old tired little slice of reality.” – Capitalist

My response, Please, provide a direct quote from an academic source that states capitalism is ethical?

“I would be absolutely happy to point you in the direction of a required reading list if you are genuinely interested in learning.” – Capitalist

My response, You made a claim and thus you are a holder of the burden of proof and if you decide not to then that tells me something.

“I’m asking you if you’re up for it?” – Capitalist

My response, Are you a good person?

“I’m currently in transit, I’ll get back to you shortly, and never trust anyone who tells you they’re a good person.” – Capitalist

My response, Cool, get it to me, when you can. Drive safe.

Too many in the world seem to live just to hate and it is gross and shameful. Change now!

ref

I am for the emancipation of humanity.  I want others to take what I learned and go learn more. Go then and teach more. I am not a leader that wants to make followers, rather I want to create leaders that go out and do the same, creating more leaders. I would rather be known for my humanity, not my hate.

“I will also add that it is anarchists who spend much of their time fighting fascism and the rise of fascism that liberals are scared of while they placate it. When climate change ruins the world we live in even more it will be the anarchists growing community gardens and feeding their neighbors who will be looked to and because it is in the nature of anarchists, they will help… even if you were derisive on Twitter.

Given the opportunity, people will take care of each other and in fact, when capitalists finally destroy the order of the states they have created we will be forced into this and many anarchists are preparing now. When they defend these things they believe that without rulers we will be lawless and chaotic but that is the opposite of how people are. It’s those with power who separate us to their ends. It’s those who rule over us who want you to think ill of your fellow humans.

People defend the existence of a state because  1. They don’t really understand it except through government  2. They think we need rulers to tell us what to do and keep us in line The thing is, removal of a state doesn’t equal removal of order and we don’t need rulers.

It is remarkable to me how people will never examine the system we live in with any kind of critical lens but as soon as someone advocates for something different they suddenly become an expert in human nature, political philosophy, and all that is possible for the world.

Anarchism will work on a societal level precisely because it is a system that relies on cooperation and doesn’t glorify competition as a means of innovation, and it promotes the participation of the majority of citizens and without pitting them against one another.

So I know that people have trouble imagining a better world than the one we live in but honestly calling someone a utopist or a utopian because they actually believe things can get better isn’t the condemnation so many people think it is. And, finally, I paid for an IWW membership. Onto trying to organize my workplace and industry.” – Cory Johnston ☭ Ⓐ @Skepticallefty·

ref

Something Weird Happened to Men 7,000 Years Ago, And We Finally Know Why

“Around 7,000 years ago – all the way back in the Neolithic – something really peculiar happened to human genetic diversity. Over the next 2,000 years, and seen across Africa, Europe, and Asia, the genetic diversity of the Y chromosome collapsed, becoming as though there was only one man for every 17 women.” ref

“Now, through computer modeling, researchers believe they have found the cause of this mysterious phenomenon: fighting between patrilineal clans. Drops in genetic diversity among humans are not unheard of, inferred based on genetic patterns in modern humans. But these usually affect entire populations, probably as the result of a disaster or other event that shrinks the population and therefore the gene pool.” ref

“But the Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck, as it is known, has been something of a puzzle since its discovery in 2015. This is because it was only observed on the genes on the Y chromosome that get passed down from father to son – which means it only affected men.” ref

“This points to a social, rather than an environmental, cause, and given the social restructures between 12,000 and 8,000 years ago as humans shifted to more agrarian cultures with patrilineal structures, this may have had something to do with it. In fact, a drop in genetic diversity doesn’t mean that there was necessarily a drop in population. The number of men could very well have stayed the same, while the pool of men who produced offspring declined.” ref

Why Do Genes Suggest Most Men Died Off 7,000 Years Ago?

“Modern men’s genes suggest that something peculiar happened 5,000 to 7,000 years ago: Most of the male population across Asia, Europe, and Africa seems to have died off, leaving behind just one man for every 17 women.” ref

“This so-called population “bottleneck” was first proposed in 2015, and since then, researchers have been trying to figure out what could’ve caused it. One hypothesis held that the drop-off in the male population occurred due to ecological or climatic factors that mainly affected male offspring, while another idea suggested that the die-off happened because some males had more power in society, and thus produced more children.” ref

“Now, a new paper, published May 25 in the journal Nature Communications, offers yet another explanation: People living in patrilineal clans (consisting of males from the same descent) might have fought with each other, wiping out entire male lineages at a time. [Image Gallery: Our Closest Human Ancestor]” ref

“That ratio of 17 females for every one male “struck us as being very extreme, and there must be another explanation,” said senior study author Marcus Feldman, a population geneticist at Stanford University in California. According to their new explanation, the male population didn’t take a nosedive, but rather the diversity of the Y chromosome decreased due to the way people lived and fought with each other. In other words, there weren’t actually fewer males, just less diversity among the males.” ref

“Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes that carry most of our genes. Of these, the 23rd pair is what determines our sex: Whereas females have two X chromosomes, males have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome.” ref

“Because offspring inherit one chromosome from each parent, genes usually get shuffled around, increasing the diversity across species. But the Y chromosome, having no female counterpart, doesn’t get shuffled, so it stays pretty much the same from grandfather to father to son (save for any mutations that occur, which explains why the Y chromosome does differ among males).” ref

War might’ve caused the Y chromosome bottleneck

“To test their theory, the researchers conducted 18 simulations in which they created different scenarios for the bottleneck that included factors such as Y chromosome mutations, competition between groups, and death. Their simulations showed that warfare between patrilineal clans could have caused this so-called “Y chromosome bottleneck,” because the members of each patrilineal clan would have very similar Y chromosomes to each other. So, if one clan killed off another, it would also slash the chance of that family’s Y chromosome moving on to offspring.” ref

“In the researchers’ simulations in which patrilineal clans didn’t exist, however, the bottleneck didn’t occur.” ref

“What’s more, there was no such bottleneck in the women of the time, as is shown by mitochondrial DNA — a type of DNA that’s passed down only from mother to child. “In that same group, the women could have come from anywhere,” Feldman told Live Science. “They would’ve been brought into the group from either the victories that they had over other groups, or they could’ve been females who were residing in that area before.” ref

“As an example, he added, if you look at colonization throughout history, people generally “killed all the men and kept the women for themselves.” ref

“Monika Karmin, a population geneticist at the University of Tartu in Estonia who was not part of the new study, told Live Science that the “beauty of their study” is the way the researchers framed their hypothesis and demonstrated that “fighting clans are indeed likely to cause a drastic drop in male genetic diversity. [Gallery: Ancient Chinese Warriors Protect Secret Tomb]” ref

“However, we do have to keep in mind that there is very little information on the actual societal organization from that time,” said Karmin, who was the lead author of the 2015 study that first proposed the bottleneck. So, there could have been other “sociocultural” forces at play, she said.” ref

“The researchers did “careful computer simulations, whereas the previous papers had not,” said Chris Tyler-Smith, an evolutionary geneticist at the Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom who was not involved with the study. “The assumption that [the cause of the bottleneck] was warfare is a reasonable one,” especially given the time period, he added.” ref

“People were still living in small clans doing small-scale farming 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, a time right before people moved into larger societies and built large cities. It was a “transition between early farming using stone tools and later farming in societies using metal tools,” Tyler-Smith told Live Science.” ref

“But after this bottleneck, “you see the start of societal organizations and the shift from small-scale societies to having cities and organizations of people into groups that are not so intent on maintaining the Y chromosome lineage,” Feldman said. During this time, the male population bounced back, he added.” ref

“Normally, researchers focus on behavior that may have a genetic basis but not on behavior that influences genes, Feldman said. The new finding is “an example of what a cultural preference can do in changing the level of genetic variation.” ref

Kings and the Monarchy

“The etymology of the term capital as it relates to Kings and the Monarchy, “In the early 13 century, “of or pertaining to the head,” from Old French capital, from Latin capitalis “of the head,” hence “capital, chief, first,” from caput (genitive capitis) “head” (from PIE root *kaput- “head” relating to chiefdom or tribal kingship). Meaning “main, principal, chief, dominant, first in importance” is from the early 15 century in English.”  ref 

“A monarchy is a form of government in which a person, the monarch, is head of state for life or until abdication. The political legitimacy and authority of the monarch may vary from restricted and largely symbolic (constitutional monarchy), to fully autocratic (absolute monarchy), and can expand across the domains of the executive, legislative, and judicial. The succession of monarchs is in most cases hereditary, often building dynastic periods. However, elective and self-proclaimed monarchies are possible. Aristocrats, though not inherent to monarchies, often serve as the pool of persons to draw the monarch from and fill the constituting institutions (e.g. diet and court), giving many monarchies oligarchic elements. Monarchies pre-date polities like nation states and even territorial states. A nation or constitution is not necessary in a monarchy since a person, the monarch, binds the separate territories and political legitimacy (e.g. in personal union) together.” ref 

“Monarchs can carry various titles such as emperor, empress, king, queen, raja, khan, tsar, sultan, shah, or pharaoh. Monarchies can form federations, personal unions, and realms with vassals through personal association with the monarch, which is a common reason for monarchs carrying several titles. The word “monarch” (Late Latin: monarchia) comes from the Ancient Greek word μονάρχης (monárkhēs), derived from μόνος (mónos, “one, single”) and ἄρχω (árkhō, “to rule”): compare ἄρχων (árkhōn, “ruler, chief”). It referred to a single at least nominally absolute ruler. Monarchy, especially absolute monarchy, is sometimes linked to religious aspects; many monarchs once claimed the right to rule by the will of a deity (Divine Right of Kings, Mandate of Heaven), or a special connection to a deity (sacred king), or even purported to be divine kings, or incarnations of deities themselves (imperial cult). Many European monarchs have been styled Fidei defensor (Defender of the Faith); some hold official positions relating to the state religion or established church.” ref 

“A similar form of societal hierarchy to monarchs is known as chiefdom or tribal kingship is prehistoric. Chiefdoms provided the concept of state formation, which started with civilizations such as Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, and the Indus Valley Civilization. In some parts of the world, chiefdoms became monarchies. Some of the oldest recorded and evidenced monarchies were Narmer, Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt c. 3100 BCE or 5,122 years ago, and Enmebaragesi, a Sumerian King of Kish c. 2600 BCE or 4,622 years ago. From the earliest records, monarchs could be directly hereditary, while others were elected from among eligible members. With the Egyptian, Indian, Mesopotamian, Sudanic, reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion, and others, the monarch held sacral functions directly connected to sacrifice and was sometimes identified with having divine ancestry, possibly establishing a notion of the divine right of kings.” ref 

Questions of how capitalism supplanted feudalism

‘Feudalism’ can be a misleading term. Really, it refers to situations of weak political centralisation, parcellized sovereignty and low population density that were uncommon historically and were arguably limited only to parts of Europe and Japan. But people often use it as a shorthand term for more or less any kind of agrarian society. Feudalism or serfdom are only two among many of the forms that past agrarian societies took, and they occupy pretty much the least appealing part of the spectrum.” ref 

“The varna categories – priest, king, farmer, servant – are outlined in a famous passage from the Rig Veda:

When they divided The Man, into how many parts did they apportion him? What do they call his mouth, his two arms and thighs and feet? His mouth became the brahman [priest]; his arms were made into the rajanya [king/warrior]; his thighs the vaishyas [farmers/’people’]; and from his feet the shudra [servants] were born.” ref

“The Rigveda or Rig Veda is around 1500 to 1900 BCE or older and is an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns (sūktas). It is one of the four sacred canonical Hindu texts (śruti) known as the Vedas. The Rigveda is the oldest known Vedic Sanskrit text. Its early layers are among the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language. Philological estimates tend to date the bulk of the text to the second half of the second millennium. Being composed in an early Indo-Aryan language, the hymns must post-date the Indo-Iranian separation, dated to roughly 2000 BCE or 4,022 years ago.” ref 

“When we look at how the varna categories were actually filled in Indian society historically there are various ambiguities, most importantly for my present purposes around the vaishya category, which rather than being a category heavily populated by a mass of farmers, in fact, is sparsely populated by merchant castes, with farmers mostly occupying the shudra category.” ref

“An agrarian society, or agricultural society, is any community whose economy is based on producing and maintaining crops and farmland. Another way to define an agrarian society is by seeing how much of a nation’s total production is in agriculture. In an agrarian society, cultivating the land is the primary source of wealth. Such a society may acknowledge other means of livelihood and work habits but stresses the importance of agriculture and farming. Agrarian societies have existed in various parts of the world as far back as 10,000 years ago and continue to exist today. They have been the most common form of socio-economic organization for most of recorded human history.” ref 

“Agrarian societies were preceded by hunters and gatherers and horticultural societies and transition into industrial society. The transition to agriculture, called the Neolithic Revolution, has taken place independently multiple times. Horticulture and agriculture as types of subsistence developed among humans somewhere between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East. The reasons for the development of agriculture are debated but may have included climate change, and the accumulation of food surplus for competitive gift-giving. Most certainly there was a gradual transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural economies after a lengthy period when some crops were deliberately planted and other foods were gathered from the wild. In addition to the emergence of farming in the Fertile Crescent, agriculture appeared in: by at least 6,800 BCE 8,822 years ago. in East Asia (rice) and, later, in Central and South America (maize and squash). Small-scale agriculture also likely arose independently in early Neolithic contexts in India (rice) and Southeast Asia (taro). However, full dependency on domestic crops and animals, when wild resources contributed a nutritionally insignificant component to the diet, did not occur until the Bronze Age.” ref 

“Agriculture allows a much greater density of population than can be supported by hunting and gathering and allows for the accumulation of excess product to keep for winter use or to sell for profit. The ability of farmers to feed large numbers of people whose activities have nothing to do with material production was the crucial factor in the rise of surplus, specialization, advanced technology, hierarchical social structures, inequality, and standing armies. Agrarian societies thus support the emergence of a more complex social structure. Agrarian societies transition into industrial societies when less than half of their population is directly engaged in agricultural production. Such societies started appearing because of the Commercial and Industrial Revolution which can be seen beginning in the Mediterranean city-states of 1000-1500 CE.” ref

“In agrarian societies, some of the simple correlations between social complexity and the environment begin to disappear. One view is that humans with this technology have moved a large step toward controlling their environments, are less dependent on them, and hence show fewer correlations between environment and technology-related traits. A rather different view is that as societies become larger and the movement of goods and people cheaper, they incorporate an increasing range of environmental variation within their borders and trade system.” ref

“Agrarianism is a political and social philosophy that has promoted subsistence agriculture, smallholdings, egalitarianism, with agrarian political parties normally supporting the rights and sustainability of small farmers and poor peasants against the wealthy in society. In highly developed and industrial nations or regions it can denote use of financial and social incentives for self-sustainability, more community involvement in food production (such as allotment gardens), and smart growth that avoids urban sprawl and, many of its advocates contend, risks of human overpopulation; when overpopulation occurs the available resources become too limited for the entire population to survive comfortably or at all in the long term. Agrarian socialism is a form of agrarianism that is anti-capitalist in nature and seeks to introduce socialist economic systems in their stead.” ref 

“The varna categories replicate a basic structure common to numerous non-industrial agrarian societies (see, for example, David Priestland’s Merchant, Soldier, Sage or Ernest Gellner’s Plough, Sword and Book), which roughly speaking is:

• king/warrior/noble
• priest
• merchant
• farmer
• servant/client/slave/outcast

Of course, these groups interact with each other materially in various ways. In India, as in all societies, material transactions are freighted with numerous social meanings – but perhaps in India more than in most societies.” ref

“So each of the four varna categories has a characteristic transactional strategy associated with it. The king adopts the ‘maximal’ strategy of both giving and receiving extensively (as benefactor and tribute-taker). The priest adopts the ‘optimal’ strategy of giving but not receiving (seeking purity by passing on inauspiciousness and not receiving it). The vaishya (let’s keep it ambiguous for now who the vaishya actually is) adopts the ‘minimal’ strategy, neither receiving nor giving. The shudra (farmer/servant) adopts the ‘pessimal’ strategy of receiving but not giving, putting them at the bottom of the social pile.” ref

“Each of the four varna categories also has a characteristic ‘alter ego’, which represents a possibly disreputable version of themselves who in a sense stands outside acceptable society. The alter ego of the king is the bandit, who takes tribute by predatory violence. The king distinguishes himself from the bandit by two possible strategies. One is by legitimating his rule with respect to some kind of sacred authority (hence the close associations between kings and churches or priests), being a generous benefactor of temple building etc. The other is by being a ‘good king’ who protects and nurtures the people. In agrarian societies, this amounts to a kind of protection racket, in which the king’s tribute-taking from ordinary people in order to endow his temples and generally act in a kingly manner is at least orderly and regularised, and he offers protection from the arbitrary violence of the bandit. But kings need a lot of tribute for their projects, so it’s easy for their exactions to become itself a kind of banditry and to be seen as such. Hence the numerous Robin Hood style myths – Good King Richard, Bad King John etc.” ref

“The alter ego of the priest is the renouncer – archetypically the penniless holy wo/man, the ascetic or the hermit who gives everything away and begs only enough to keep from starving. From this position almost outside society, they can critique its worldliness and corruption and attain great spiritual purity. The alter ego of the vaishya as farmer is also the renouncer, who aspires to agrarian self-reliance. They don’t need many external inputs to furnish their household, nor do they need to go often to market. The strategy of the self-reliant ascetic, standing somewhat outside society is available to them.” ref

“On the face of it, the vaishya as merchant can’t adopt the minimal transactional strategy – after all, they’re buying and selling stuff the whole time. Potentially, and often actually, this is highly compromising to their social status. The ways around it are to act as if trade in mere objects is a trivial matter in which the merchant is not existentially implicated, allowing the cultivation of higher spiritual virtues (Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism would be a westernized version of this). Or else to use the profit to act like a king, and hope to convince people that you really are one. The alter ego of the shudra is the outcast or untouchable. Receiving but not giving, and especially receiving polluting and inauspicious substances, puts you at the bottom of the heap, and potentially outside the heap altogether.” ref

“In terms of status ordering – well, the king is at the top, but in an agrarian society there can’t be many kings and it’s a high risk business. You have to exact a lot of tribute, endow a lot of benefices and fight off a lot of bandit would-be kings. The priest and the renouncer may also enjoy high status of a non-material kind if they can convince other people of their spiritual virtues. The vaishya-merchant is in a risky status position – nobody likes a usurer – but they may have ways of pulling the wool over people’s eyes and adopting a different status. The vaishya-farmer can’t claim much highfalutin status, but can effect a certain haughty independence and homespun honor. But in practice this status is often beyond the ordinary farmer’s means – a more likely result is that they’re a mere client or retainer of a higher ranking patron. Hence the relative lack of farmers in the vaishya category, and their strong showing among the shudras or, worse, in some unfree category – serf, debt-peon or slave. An awful lot of socio-historical drama in agrarian societies turns upon the way people try to augment social status – sometimes as a multi-generational strategy exceeding their own lifespan – according to their inherited potential in these various social roles.” ref

FEUDALISM AND CAPITALISM IN LATIN AMERICA

“Debate on the Left in the last decade over the origins and present nature of Latin American societies has focused on the problem of whether they should be seen as feudal or capitalist in character. A complex and lengthy discussion has taken place whose importance is not diminished by the conceptual confusion which has often accompanied it. Its significance, moreover, has not been confined to theory, since different theories have led to different political conclusions. Those who maintain that the Latin American societies were historically constituted as feudal in character and have remained so ever since, wish to emphasize that they are closed, traditional, resistant to change, and unintegrated into the market economy. If this is the case, then these societies have still not yet reached a capitalist stage and are, indeed, on the eve of a bourgeois-democratic revolution which will stimulate capitalist development and break with feudal stagnation. Socialists should therefore seek an alliance with the national bourgeoisie, and form a united front with it against the oligarchy and imperialism.” ref 

“The advocates of the opposite thesis claim that Latin America has been capitalist from its inception, since it was already fully incorporated into the world market in the colonial period. The present backwardness of Latin American societies is precisely the outcome of the dependent character of this incorporation and they are in consequence fully capitalist. It is therefore meaningless to postulate a future stage of capitalist development. It is, on the contrary, necessary to fight directly for socialism, in opposition to a bourgeoisie that is completely integrated with imperialism, forming a common front against the masses.” ref 

“A clarification of the basic terms of the polemic. For despite their contradictory appearance, both the positions first cited coincide in one fundamental respect: both designate by ‘capitalism’ or ‘feudalism’ phenomena in the sphere of commodity exchange and not in the sphere of production, thus transforming the presence or absence of a link with the market into the decisive criterion for distinguishing between the two forms of society. Such a conception is clearly alien to Marxist theory, which maintains that feudalism and capitalism are, above all, modes of production. Andrew Gunder Frank is one of the best-known defenders of the thesis that Latin America is and always has been capitalist.” ref 

“Frank’s theoretical perspective can be summed up in the following theses:

1. It is false to suppose that economic development occurs through the same succession of stages in each country or that the underdeveloped nations today are at a stage which has been long surpassed by the developed countries. On the contrary, today’s developed capitalist countries were never underdeveloped in this way, although there was a time when they were undeveloped.

2. It is incorrect to consider contemporary underdevelopment as a simple reflection of the economic, political, cultural, and social structures of the underdeveloped country itself. On the contrary, underdevelopment is in large part the historical product of relations between the underdeveloped satellite and the present developed countries. These relations were, moreover, an essential part of the structure and evolution of the capitalist system on a world scale. Thus Frank declares: ‘To extract the fruits of their labor through monopoly trade—no less than in the times of Cortez and Pizarro in Mexico and Peru, Clive in India, Rhodes in Africa, the ‘Open Door’ in China—the metropoli destroyed and/or totally transformed the earlier viable social and economic systems of these societies, incorporated them into the metropolitan dominated world-wide capitalist system, and converted them into sources for its own metropolitan capital accumulation and development. The resulting fate for these conquered, transformed or newly acquired established societies was and remains their decapitalization, structurally generated unproductiveness, ever-increasing misery for the masses—in a word, their underdevelopment’.

3. The conventional ‘dualist’ interpretation of Latin American societies must be rejected. The dualist analysis maintains that underdeveloped societies have a dual structure, each one of whose sectors has a dynamic of its own, largely independent of the other. It concludes that the sector which is under the sway of the capitalist world has become modern and relatively developed, while the other sector is confined to an isolated, feudal, or pre-capitalist, subsistence economy. According to Frank, this thesis is quite erroneous; the dual structure is wholly illusory, since the expansion of the capitalist system during the last centuries has effectively and completely penetrated even the most apparently isolated sectors of the underdeveloped world.

4. Metropolitan-satellite relations are not limited to the imperial or international level, since they penetrate and structure economic, social, and political life in the dependent Latin American countries, creating sub-metropoles within them to which the interior regions are satellites.” ref

The corporate power of the British monarchy: Capital(ism), wealth, and power in contemporary Britain

“Abstract: This article offers a critical analysis of the British monarchy within wider political economies of wealth and power. While sociology has renewed its interest in ‘the elites’, the British monarchy is often positioned as an archaic institution, an anachronism in relation to corporate forms of wealth and power, and therefore irrelevant. This article counters this framing by revealing the mechanics, technologies, and actors ‘behind the scenes’, in order to expose and demystify the relationship between the symbolic and political-economic functions of the monarchy. To do this, I (re)conceptualise the monarchy as a corporation, ‘The Firm’, oriented towards, and historically entrenched in, processes of capital accumulation, profit extraction, and other forms of exploitation. The article maps out The Firm’s labor relations, financial arrangements, inter/national relationships and networks, and the legal status of The Crown and its components in order to demonstrate how ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of wealth intersect and converge in contemporary Britain. This article is intended as a provocation to sociological studies of elites to suggest that, in overlooking monarchy, we are overlooking a key component of contemporary capitalism, and a key component in the reproduction of inequalities today.” ref 

The Bourgeois Crown: Capitalism and the Monarchy in Thailand, 1946–2016

“Abstract: In the age of capitalism, monarchy has been treated as if it were an irrelevant institution. Once capitalism becomes the dominant mode of production in a state, it is argued, monarchy must be either abolished or transformed into a constitutional monarchy, a ceremonial institution that plays no significant role in a capitalist state that is ruled by the bourgeoisie. The monarchy of Thailand, however, fits neither of those two narratives, as it enjoys hegemonic status in the capitalist state, preeminent status in the market, and popular support from the urban bourgeoisie. What explains the resilience of the Thai monarchy in the face of capitalism? This dissertation argues that the Thai monarchy has been transformed into a “bourgeois monarchy,” a novel form of monarchy that is deeply embedded in the capitalist state, the market economy, and bourgeois ideology. Examining the development of this new form of the monarchy during King Rama IX’s reign (1946-2016), this dissertation reveals that, during his seven-decade reign, Thailand was rapidly transformed into a newly industrialized country and that the monarchy adapted itself to this great transformation. The crown created a symbiotic relationship with the rising bourgeoisie, engaged in capitalist development, invested royal wealth in the expanding market, and promoted bourgeois ethics in popular culture. Showing how the bourgeois monarchy in Thailand not only survives but also thrives in the age of capitalism, this dissertation sets out to revive the debate about whether monarchy is still relevant to capitalism in the twenty-first century.” ref 

Chiefdom

“A chiefdom is a form of hierarchical political organization in non-industrial societies usually based on kinship, and in which formal leadership is monopolized by the legitimate senior members of select families or ‘houses’. These elites form a political-ideological aristocracy relative to the general group. In anthropological theory, one model of human social development rooted in ideas of cultural evolution describes a chiefdom as a form of social organization more complex than a tribe or a band society, and less complex than a state or a civilization. Within general theories of cultural evolution, chiefdoms are characterized by permanent and institutionalized forms of political leadership (the chief), centralized decision-making, economic interdependence, and social hierarchy.” ref

“Chiefdoms are described as intermediate between tribes and states in the progressive scheme of sociopolitical development formulated by Elman Service: band – tribe – chiefdom – state. A chief’s status is based on kinship, so it is inherited or ascribed, in contrast to the achieved status of Big Man leaders of tribes. Another feature of chiefdoms is therefore pervasive social inequality. They are ranked societies, according to the scheme of progressive sociopolitical development formulated by Morton Fried: egalitarian – ranked – stratified – state.” ref

“In archaeological theory, Service’s definition of chiefdoms as “redistribution societies with a permanent central agency of coordination” (Service 1962: 144) has been most influential. Many archaeologists, however, dispute Service’s reliance upon redistribution as central to chiefdom societies, and point to differences in the basis of finance (staple finance v. wealth finance). Service argued that chief rose to assume a managerial status to redistribute agricultural surplus to ecologically specialized communities within this territory (staple finance). Yet in re-studying the Hawaiian chiefdoms used as his case study, Timothy Earle observed that communities were rather self-sufficient. What the chief redistributed was not staple goods, but prestige goods to his followers that helped him to maintain his authority (wealth finance).” ref

“Some scholars contest the utility of the chiefdom model for archaeological inquiry. The most forceful critique comes from Timothy Pauketat, whose Chiefdom and Other Archaeological Delusions outlines how chiefdoms fail to account for the high variability of the archaeological evidence for middle-range societies. Pauketat argues that the evolutionary underpinnings of the chiefdom model are weighed down by racist and outdated theoretical baggage that can be traced back to Lewis Morgan‘s 19th-century cultural evolution. From this perspective, pre-state societies are treated as underdeveloped, the savage and barbaric phases that preceded civilization. Pauketat argues that the chiefdom type is a limiting category that should be abandoned, and takes as his main case study Cahokia, a central place for the Mississippian culture of North America.” ref

“Chiefdoms are characterized by the centralization of authority and pervasive inequality. At least two inherited social classes (elite and commoner) are present. (The ancient Hawaiian chiefdoms had as many as four social classes.) An individual might change social class during a lifetime by extraordinary behavior. A single lineage/family of the elite class becomes the ruling elite of the chiefdom, with the greatest influence, power, and prestige. Kinship is typically an organizing principle, while marriage, age, and sex can affect one’s social status and role.” ref

“A single simple chiefdom is generally composed of a central community surrounded by or near a number of smaller subsidiary communities. All of the communities recognize the authority of a single kin group or individual with hereditary centralized power, dwelling in the primary community. Each community will have its own leaders, which are usually in a tributary and/or subservient relationship to the ruling elite of the primary community. A complex chiefdom is a group of simple chiefdoms controlled by a single paramount center and ruled by a paramount chief. Complex chiefdoms have two or even three tiers of political hierarchy. Nobles are clearly distinct from commoners and do not usually engage in any form of agricultural production. The higher members of society consume most of the goods that are passed up the hierarchy as a tribute.” ref

“Reciprocal obligations are fulfilled by the nobles carrying out rituals that only they can perform. They may also make token, symbolic redistributions of food and other goods. In two or three-tiered chiefdoms, higher-ranking chiefs have control over a number of lesser ranking individuals, each of whom controls specific territory or social units. Political control rests on the chief’s ability to maintain access to a sufficiently large body of tribute, passed up the line by lesser chiefs. These lesser chiefs in turn collect from those below them, from communities close to their own center. At the apex of the status, hierarchy sits the paramount.” ref

“Anthropologists and archaeologists have demonstrated through research that chiefdoms are a relatively unstable form of social organization. They are prone to cycles of collapse and renewal, in which tribal units band together, expand in power, fragment through some form of social stress, and band together again. An example of this kind of social organization were the Germanic Peoples who conquered the western Roman Empire in the 5th century CE. Although commonly referred to as tribes, anthropologists classified their society as chiefdoms. They had a complex social hierarchy consisting of kings, a warrior aristocracy, common freemen, serfs, and slaves.” ref

“The American Indian tribes sometimes had ruling kings or satraps (governors) in some areas and regions. The Cherokee, for example, had an imperial-family ruling system over a long period of history. The early Spanish explorers in the Americas reported on the Indian kings and kept extensive notes during what is now called the conquest. Some of the native tribes in the Americas had princes, nobles, and various classes and castes. The “Great Sun” was somewhat like the Great Khans of Asia and eastern Europe. Much like an emperor, the Great Sun of North America is the best example of chiefdoms and imperial kings in North American Indian history. The Aztecs of Mexico had a similar culture.” ref

Archaeology of Chiefdoms

“Abstract: Developed as a cross-culturally comparative concept within early to mid-twentieth century cultural evolutionary anthropology and processual archaeology, chiefdoms are defined as smaller scale complex societies that are sometimes intermediate to state development, with centralized decision-making hierarchies, some degree of hereditary social ranking, and economic centralization. In historically and ethnographically known chiefdoms, chiefs generally construct and maintain political power bases through various economic means (tribute collection, control over production and exchange, foreign trade monopolies), ideological means (ritual, myth, sacred landscapes), and military coercion. Archaeologists have recognized that these power strategies are materialized archaeologically in a variety of highly visible ways (such as monumental construction, settlement hierarchies, specialized prestige goods production and exchange, differential household wealth, and indicators of large-scale militarism), and a significant amount of archaeological research has been carried out on the origins, evolution, and organization of chiefdoms in premodern societies of the Near East, Africa, East Asia, Europe, Mesoamerica, South America, North America, and Oceania. However, there is considerable recent debate about the utility of ‘chiefdoms’ as a cross-culturally applicable evolutionary concept, with challenges to this archetype ranging from decoupling elements of ‘chiefdom’ structure, examining these societies at more diverse scales of analysis, and rejecting the ‘chiefdom’ model in favor of a variety of postprocessual approaches in archaeology.” ref

“The evolution of the polity, particularly the transition of chiefdoms to states, has been the subject of considerable debate. In this article, the authors engage the discussion surrounding the meta-theoretical positions on the tempo of change, specifically whether states emerged gradually from quantitative changes in chiefdom societies—gradualism—or if their appearance was the result of punctuated and qualitative change—punctuated equilibrium. After revisiting the classic debate, the authors update it with new contributions drawn from the natural and social sciences. They contend that chiefdoms do not simply become states as a result of increases in the size of component parts; instead, punctuated equilibrium, stemming from responses to selection pressures from social forces, has more empirical support than gradualism in explaining state formation.” ref

Chiefdom or State?

“The debate of the evolution of the political institution undergirds the various models attempting to explain if, how, and why chiefdoms transitioned into large-scale agrarian states. By chiefdoms we mean any socio-political entity in which overall social control activities are vested in a subsystem which is externally specialized vis-à-vis other activities, but not in-ternally specialized in terms of different aspects of the control process (e.g., observing, deciding, coercing). Conversely,

states are political entities that are internally specialized with regard to function and have a monopoly over the legitimate means of violence. While internal specialization is an important defining characteristic, it is the state’s ability to legitimately monopolize force that most clearly separates it from chiefdoms and other political forms.” ref

“Thus, while chiefdoms can and have become internally differentiated at high levels, revealing hierarchical levels of jurisdiction and the creation of sub-elites whose kinship ties likely cross-cut local modes of integration, there are no known examples of chief-doms in which the chief and his lieutenants have a true monopoly over physical force (Earle 1989). In a state, the king and/or set of administrators can and do derive power from their ability, and legitimate right, to use force as a last resort. Chiefs are given legitimate authority typically through traditional means that can be withdrawn relatively easily by the tribe, whereas states rely on more complex systems of legitimacy such as theocracy or legal-rational.” ref

“The lack of monopolized means of violence and the emergence of differentiated nodes of power make chiefdoms unstable political forms, as the possibility of breakdown is salient where internal struggles cannot be met with force or the threat of force. The polity is then subject to problems caused by various internal and external factors leading chiefdoms to cycle between simple (two rank levels) and complex forms (three or more rank levels). To be sure, the state does have problems of stability of a greater magnitude, yet they are also more successful at facilitating peaceful exchanges for longer periods of time because of their ability to use force to coerce internally differentiated social units as well as their control over what has been referred to as symbolic power and violence.” ref

“It is worth pointing out that much of the literature we will rely on is anthropological or archaeological in nature. It will be apparent below that some sociologists, such as Karl Marx ([1845–46]) and his theory of primitive accumulation will provide some important mechanisms with which to explain punctuated evolutionary change. However, sociologists have been generally concerned with the formation of the nation-state in the seventeenth century in Europe, which is an entirely different organizational unit than the early city-states in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China,the Indus Valley, Mesoamerica, and Peru. Both types of political change are important, but we feel the transition from chiefdoms to states has been relatively (and recently) neglected in sociology as has a general interest in long-term social change, both problems with which the classical theorists were fascinated.” ref

“In a study of state formation in Mesopotamia, some take the long view of human sociocultural evolution—that is, ~80,000 years old or so—arguing state formation that took place from around ~6000 to 3000 BCE or 8,022-5,022 years ago and was a single punctuated event, “a dynamic interval of human cultural evolution.” What many would deem today a slow process, has been recognized as being quite rapid in the face of the entire course of human evolution. Taking a larger, though complementary view, it has been argued that between 7500 to 1500 BCE or 9,522 years ago or so the Near East went“ . . . from a disconnected region of simple and isolated societies (pre-pottery Neolithic period) to a network of chiefdoms, to a highly interconnected and interdependent network of politically complex polities at stately and imperial levels.” Another contends that this same punctuated evolutionary sequence—simple societies to chief-doms to local and regional world-system—occurred not only in the West Asian region but also in the Mesoamerican, Andean, and East Asian world-systems.” ref

“Taking a slightly different appraisal of the archaeological evidence analyzed has provided an argument that it is plausible to suggest that “pristine” chief-doms occur gradually, “as resource control, alliance, and exchange networks, and supporting ideologies” emerged slowly and sometimes risk-management strategies generated legitimate authority for the best practitioners. Secondary chiefdoms, whose size and scale were qualitatively different, formed rather quickly in reaction to real or perceived threats from neighboring chiefdoms or other societies; while the rate of evolution was aided by secondary chiefdoms borrowing a tremendous amount of cultural material from their neighbors, it would be incorrect to conflatethe quantitative growth of pristine polities with that of secondary ones. This evolutionary pattern appears to bear out, for example, in Mesoamerica. Archaeological evidence indicates that pristine chiefdoms evolved during the Middle Formative period (1500–600 BCE or 3,522-2,622 years ago) on the South Gulf Coast region and not in Central Mexico, despite similar material conditions. So a potential conclusion is put forth that the evolution of secondary chiefdoms in the Highlands was “in deed a rapid process” that was likely stimulated by “the development of other chiefdoms” on the Gulf Coast.” ref

ref 

King-Priest?

“Definition of priest-king: a sacerdotal ruler: one who rules as king by right of his priestly office functioning as vice-regent of a deity.” ref 

“The Uruk period (ca. 4000 to 3100 BCE or 6,022-5,122 years ago; also known as Protoliterate period) existed from the protohistoric Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age period in the history of Mesopotamia, after the Ubaid period and before the Jemdet Nasr period. Named after the Sumerian city of Uruk, this period saw the emergence of urban life in Mesopotamia and the Sumerian civilization. The late Uruk period (34th to 32nd centuries) saw the gradual emergence of the cuneiform script and corresponds to the Early Bronze Age; it has also been described as the “Protoliterate period”. It was during this period that pottery painting declined as copper started to become popular, along with cylinder seals.” ref

“The traditional chronology is very imprecise and is based on some key soundages in the Eanna quarter at Uruk. The most ancient levels of these soundages (XIX–XIII) belong to the end of the Ubaid period (Ubaid V, 4200–3900 or 3700 BC); pottery characteristic of the Uruk period begins to appear in levels XIV/XIII. The Uruk period is traditionally divided into many phases. The first two are “Old Uruk” (levels XII–IX), then “Middle Uruk” (VIII–VI). These first two phases are poorly known, and their chronological limits are poorly defined; many different chronological systems are found in scholarship.” ref

“From the middle of the 4th millennium, it transitions to the best-known period, “Late Uruk”, which continues until around 3200 or 3100 BCE or 5,222-5,122 years ago. It is in fact in this period that the features which are generally seen as most characteristics of the civilization of the Uruk period occur: high technological development, the development of important urban agglomerations with imposing monumental structures (the most characteristic of these is Level IV of Eanna), the appearance of state institutions, and the expansion of the Uruk civilization throughout the whole Near East.” ref

“The phase of “Late Uruk” is followed by another phase (level III of Eanna) in which the Uruk civilization declined and a number of distinct local cultures developed throughout the Near East. This is generally known as the Jemdet Nasr period, after the archaeological site of that name. Its exact nature is highly debated, and it is difficult to clearly distinguish its traits from those of the Uruk culture, so some scholars refer to it as the “Final Uruk” period instead. It lasted from around 3000 to 2900 BCE.” ref 

“Some researchers have attempted to explain this final stage as the arrival of new populations of Semitic origin (the future Akkadians), but there is no conclusive proof of this. In Lower Mesopotamia, the researchers identify this as the Jemdet Nasr period, which sees a shift to more concentrated habitation, undoubtedly accompanied by a reorganization of power; in southwestern Iran, it is the Proto-Elamite period; Niniveh V in Upper Mesopotamia (which follows the Gawra culture); the “Scarlet Ware” culture in Diyala. In Lower Mesopotamia, the Early Dynastic Period begins around the start of the 3rd millennium BCE, during which this region again exerts considerable influence over its neighbors.” ref

“There is no evidence of a professional priesthood among the Norse, and rather cultic activities were carried out by members of the community who also had other social functions and positions. In Old Norse society, religious authority was harnessed to secular authority; there was no separation between economic, political, and symbolic institutions. Both the Norwegian kings’ sagas and Adam of Bremen’s account claim that kings and chieftains played a prominent role in cultic sacrifices.” ref

“In medieval Iceland, the goði was a social role that combined religious, political, and judicial functions, responsible for serving as a chieftain in the district, negotiating legal disputes, and maintaining order among his þingmenn. Most evidence suggests that public cultic activity was largely the preserve of high-status males in Old Norse society. However, there are exceptions. The Landnámabók refers to two women holding the position of gyðja, both of whom were members of local chiefly families. In Ibn Fadlan’s account of the Rus, he describes an elder woman known as the “Angel of Death” who oversaw a funerary ritual.” ref

“Among scholars, there has been much debate as to whether sacral kingship was practiced among Old Norse communities, in which the monarch was endowed with a divine status and thus being responsible for ensuring that a community’s needs were met through supernatural means. Evidence for this has been cited from the Ynglingatal poem in which the Swedes kill their king, Domalde, following a famine. However, interpretations of this event other than sacral kingship are possible; for instance, Domalde may have been killed in a political coup.” ref

Law in Mesopotamia

“Mesopotamians had the first written codified laws which reveal the level of social, political, economical, and legal development of the Mesopotamian civilization. Law in Mesopotamia is frequently closely associated with Code of Hammurabi inscribed on seven-foot and four-inch (2,25 meter) tall stela discovered at Susa but the oldest law codes date from the Sumerian Period. The oldest example of a legal code is attributed to Urukagna who ruled the Sumerian city-state of Lagash in the 24th century BCE or 4,422 years ago, although the actual text has never been discovered.” ref

“The Code of Ur-Nammu created by Ur-Nammu of Ur (21s century BCE) is the oldest known code of law which is only partly preserved. The laws were inscribed on a clay tablet in Sumerian language and arranged in casuistic form, a pattern in which a crime is followed by the punishment which was also the basis of nearly all later codes of law including the Code of Hammurabi. Code of Ur-Nammu is also notable for instituting monetary compensations for inflicting bodily injuries which are considered the oldest known code of law.” ref

“In contrary to Code of Ur-Nammu, the Code of Hammurabi from the 18th century BCE was based on the principle “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” (lex talionis). One of the most famous ancient codes contains 282 judgments of civil and criminal law. The penalties vary from crime to crime as well as on the social status of the offender although even slaves had some rights.” ref

“Hittite cuneiform tablets from the 14th century BCE found at Hattusa also include a number of Hittite laws which foresee less severe penalties than the Babylonian code of laws. Penalties were in some cases were even reduced at least twice. Hittite laws also reveal a tension to more systematical arrangement from the most serious to minor violations. The Hittites did not follow lex talionis.” ref

With rise of Assyria also occurred changes in penal laws which were more severer and more brutal. The death penalty and corporal penalties such as flogging and cutting of ears and noses were very common, while forced labor was the most common punishment for less severe violations. Besides severer penalties, the Assyrian law also reflects the great change of the social position of women. Women in Babylon and Hittite Empire were practically equal to men and were even allowed to divorce, while a man in Assyria was allowed to kill his wife if she committed adultery and to send his wife away without divorce money.” ref

Code of Hammurabi

“The Code of Hammurabi is a Babylonian legal text composed c. 1755–1750 BCE or 3,777-3,772 years ago. It is the longest, best-organised, and best-preserved legal text from the ancient Near East. It is written in the Old Babylonian dialect of Akkadian, purportedly by Hammurabi, sixth king of the First Dynasty of Babylon. The primary copy of the text is inscribed on a basalt or diorite stele 2.25 m (7 ft 4+1⁄2 in) tall. The stele was rediscovered in 1901 at the site of Susa in present-day Iran, where it had been taken as plunder six hundred years after its creation. The text itself was copied and studied by Mesopotamian scribes for over a millennium.” ref

“The top of the stele features an image in relief of Hammurabi with Shamash, the Babylonian sun god, and god of justice. Below the relief are about 4,130 lines of cuneiform text: one fifth contains a prologue and epilogue in poetic style, while the remaining four fifths contain what are generally called the laws. In the prologue, Hammurabi claims to have been granted his rule by the gods “to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak”. The laws are casuistic, expressed as “if … then” conditional sentences. Their scope is broad, including, for example, criminal law, family law, property law, and commercial law.” ref

“Modern scholars responded to the Code with admiration at its perceived fairness and respect for the rule of law, and at the complexity of Old Babylonian society. There was also much discussion of its influence on the Mosaic Law. Scholars quickly identified lex talionis—the “eye for an eye” principle—underlying the two collections. Debate among Assyriologists has since centered around several aspects of the Code: its purpose, its underlying principles, its language, and its relation to earlier and later law collections.” ref

“Hammurabi (or Hammurapi), the sixth king of the Amorite First Dynasty of Babylon, ruled from 1792 to 1750 BCE (middle chronology). He secured Babylonian dominance over the Mesopotamian plain through military prowess, diplomacy, and treachery. When Hammurabi inherited his father Sin-Muballit‘s throne, Babylon held little local sway; the local hegemon was Rim-Sin of Larsa. Hammurabi waited until Rim-Sin grew old, then conquered his territory in one swift campaign, leaving his organization intact. Later, Hammurabi betrayed allies in Eshnunna, Elam, and Mari to gain their territories.” ref

“Hammurabi had an aggressive foreign policy, but his letters suggest he was concerned with the welfare of his many subjects and was interested in law and justice. He commissioned extensive construction works, and in his letters, he frequently presents himself as his people’s shepherd. Justice is also a theme of the prologue to the Code, and “the word translated ‘justice’ [ešērum]… is one whose root runs through both prologue and epilogue”. Although Hammurabi’s Code was the first Mesopotamian law collection to be discovered, it was not the first written; several earlier collections survive. These collections were written in Sumerian and Akkadian. They also purport to have been written by rulers. There were almost certainly more such collections, as statements of other rulers suggest the custom was widespread.” ref

“The similarities between these law collections make it tempting to assume a consistent underlying legal system. As with the Code of Hammurabi, however, it is difficult to interpret the purpose and underlying legal systems of these earlier collections, prompting numerous scholars to question whether this should be attempted. Extant collections include:

• The Code of Ur-Nammu of Ur.
• The Code of Lipit-Ishtar of Isin.
• The Laws of Eshnunna (written by Bilalama or by Dadusha).
• Another collection, which Martha Roth calls the “Laws of X”, but which may simply be the end of the Code of Ur-Nammu.” ref

“There are additionally thousands of documents from the practice of law, from before and during the Old Babylonian period. These documents include contracts, judicial rulings, letters on legal cases, and reform documents such as that of Urukagina, king of Lagash in the mid-3rd millennium BCE, whose reforms combatted corruption. Mesopotamia has the most comprehensive surviving legal corpus from before the Digest of Justinian, even compared to those from ancient Greece and Rome.” ref

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Property offenses: stealing and receiving stolen property, kidnapping, harboring fugitive slaves, breaking and entering, burglary, looting and burning houses. Such as, if a man breaks into a house, they shall kill him and hang him(?) in front of that very breach. ref

Land and houses: tenure of fiefs, duties of farmers, debts of farmers, irrigation offenses, cattle trespass, cutting down trees, care of date orchards, and offenses connected with houses. Such as, if a man has a debt lodged against him, and the storm-god Adad devastates his field or a flood sweeps away the crops, or there is no grain grown in the field due to insufficient water—in that year he will not repay grain to his creditor; he shall suspend performance of his contract [literally “wet his clay tablet”] and he will not give interest payments for that year. ref

Commerce: loans and trade, innkeeping, fraud by couriers, distraint and pledge of persons for debt, and safe custody or deposit. Such as, if a merchant should give silver to a trading agent for an investment venture, and he [the trading agent] incurs a loss on his journeys, he shall return the silver to the merchant in the amount of the capital sum. ref

Professional Men: surgeons, veterinary surgeons, barbers, builders, shipbuilders and boatmen. Such as, if a builder constructs a house for a man but does not make it conform to specifications so that a wall then buckles, that builder shall make that wall sound using his own silver. ref

Agriculture: oxen, theft of fodder by tenants, hire of agricultural laborers, theft of agricultural implements, hire of herdsmen, duties of shepherds, hire of beasts and wagons, and hire of seasonal laborers. ref

Rates of Hire: wages of craftsmen and hire of boats. If a man rents a boat of 60-[kur] capacity, he shall give one-sixth [of a shekel] of silver per day as its hire. ref

Slaves: warranties on the sale of slaves and purchase of slaves abroad. Such as, if a slave should declare to his master, “You are not my master”, he [the master] shall bring charge and proof against him that he is indeed his slave, and his master shall cut off his ear. ref

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“Ancient DNA reveals that wealthy families in prehistoric Germany once lived with poorer people they weren’t related to, suggesting that live-in slavery or servitude started about 1300 years earlier than once thought. Archaeologists believed that inequality in the Early Bronze Age, from around 2200 BCE or 4,222 years ago, usually took the form of a small number of powerful elites living in communities of mostly peasants. This upper class was possibly made up of wealthy farmers or princely leaders and their families, but it is difficult to understand their social structure through archaeological objects alone. That is why Alissa Mittnik at Harvard University and her colleagues analyzed ancient DNA from 104 ancient individuals. They also examined items collected from the cemeteries where these people were buried, which are in small farmsteads in what is now southern Germany’s Lech river valley.” ref

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“Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave, who is someone forbidden to quit their service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as their property. Slavery typically involves the enslaved person being made to perform some form of work while also having their location or residence dictated by the enslaver. Many historical cases of enslavement occurred when the enslaved broke the law, became indebted, or suffered a military defeat; other forms of slavery were instituted along demographic lines such as race. The duration of a person’s enslavement might be for life, or for a fixed period of time, after which freedom would be granted.” ref 

“Although most forms of slavery are explicitly involuntary and involve the coercion of the enslaved, there also exists voluntary slavery, entered into by the enslaved to pay a debt or obtain money. In the course of human history, slavery was a typical feature of civilization, legal in most societies, but it is now outlawed in most countries of the world, except as a punishment for a crime. In chattel slavery, the enslaved person is legally rendered the personal property (chattel) of the slave owner. In economics, the term de facto slavery describes the conditions of unfree labor and forced labor that most slaves endure.” ref 

“The word slave arrived in English via the Old French sclave. In Medieval Latin the word was sclavus and in Byzantine Greek σκλάβος. Use of the word arose during the Early Medieval Period, when Slavs from Central and Eastern Europe (Saqaliba) were frequently enslaved by Moors from the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa. There is a dispute among historians about whether terms such as “unfree laborer” or “enslaved person“, rather than “slave”, should be used when describing the victims of slavery. According to those proposing a change in terminology, slave perpetuates the crime of slavery in language by reducing its victims to a nonhuman noun instead of “carry[ing] them forward as people, not the property that they were”. Other historians prefer slave because the term is familiar and shorter, or because it accurately reflects the inhumanity of slavery, with person implying a degree of autonomy that slavery does not allow.” ref

“As a social institution, chattel slavery classes slaves as chattels (personal property) owned by the enslaver; like livestock, they can be bought and sold at will. While some form of slavery was common throughout human history, the specific notion of chattel slavery reached its modern extreme in the Americas during European colonization. Beginning in the 18th century, a series of abolitionist movements saw slavery as a violation of the slaves’ rights as people (“all men are created equal“), and sought to abolish it. Abolitionism encountered extreme resistance but was eventually successful; the last Western country to abolish slavery, Brazil, did so in 1888. The last third-world country to abolish slavery, Mauritania, did not do so until 1981.” ref

“Forced labor, or unfree labor, is sometimes used to describe an individual who is forced to work against their own will, under threat of violence or other punishment, but the generic term “unfree labor” is also used to describe chattel slavery, as well as any other situation in which a person is obliged to work against their own will, and a person’s ability to work productively is under the complete control of another person. This may also include institutions not commonly classified as slavery, such as serfdom, conscription, and penal labor. While some unfree laborers, such as serfs, have substantive, de jure legal or traditional rights, they also have no ability to terminate the arrangements under which they work and are frequently subject to forms of coercion, violence, and restrictions on their activities and movement outside their place of work.” ref 

“Human trafficking primarily involves women and children forced into prostitution and is the fastest growing form of forced labor, with Thailand, Cambodia, India, Brazil, and Mexico having been identified as leading hotspots of commercial sexual exploitation of children. Forced marriages or early marriages are often considered types of slavery. Forced marriage continues to be practiced in parts of the world including some parts of Asia and Africa and in immigrant communities in the West. Sacred prostitution is where girls and women are pledged to priests or those of higher castes, such as the practice of Devadasi in South Asia or fetish slaves in West Africa. Marriage by abduction occurs in many places in the world today, with a 2003 study finding a national average of 69% of marriages in Ethiopia being through abduction.” ref

“Slaves have been owned privately by individuals but have also been under state ownership. For example, the kisaeng were women from low castes in pre-modern Korea, who were owned by the state under government officials known as hojang and were required to provide entertainment to the aristocracy; in the 2020s some are denoted Kippumjo (the pleasure brigades of North Korea — serving as the concubines of the rulers of the state). “Tribute labor” is compulsory labor for the state and has been used in various iterations such as corvée, mit’a and repartimiento. The internment camps of totalitarian regimes such as the Nazis and the Soviet Union placed increasing importance on the labor provided in those camps, leading to a growing tendency among historians to designate such systems as slavery.” ref

“Slavery predates written records and has existed in many cultures. Slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer populations because it requires economic surpluses and a substantial population density. Thus, although it has existed among unusually resource-rich hunter-gatherers, such as the American Indian peoples of the salmon-rich rivers of the Pacific Northwest coast, slavery became widespread only with the invention of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution about 11,000 years ago.” ref 

“In the earliest known records, slavery is treated as an established institution. The Code of Hammurabi (c. 1760 BCE), for example, prescribed death for anyone who helped a slave escape or who sheltered a fugitive. The Bible mentions slavery as an established institution. Slavery was practiced in almost every ancient civilization. Such institutions included debt bondage, punishment for crime, the enslavement of prisoners of war, child abandonment, and the enslavement of slaves’ offspring.” ref

“Slavery existed in Pharaonic Egypt, but studying it is complicated by the terminology used by the Egyptians to refer to different classes of servitude over the course of history. Interpretation of the textual evidence of classes of slaves in ancient Egypt has been difficult to differentiate by word usage alone. The three apparent types of enslavement in Ancient Egypt: chattel slavery, bonded labor, and forced labor. Slavery existed in ancient China as early as the Shang dynasty. Slavery was employed largely by governments as a means of maintaining a public labor force.” ref

“Records of slavery in Ancient Greece date begin with Mycenaean Greece. Classical Athens had the largest slave population, with as many as 80,000 in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE. As the Roman Republic expanded outward, entire populations were enslaved, across Europe and the Mediterranean. Slaves were used for labor, as well as for amusement (e.g. gladiators and sex slaves). This oppression by an elite minority eventually led to slave revolts (see Roman Servile Wars); the Third Servile War was led by Spartacus.” ref

“Some scholars differentiate ancient forms of slavery from the largely race-based slavery. The first type of slavery, sometimes called “just title servitude”, was inflicted on prisoners of war, debtors, and other vulnerable people. Race-based slavery grew to immense proportions starting in the 14th century. It was argued even by some contemporary writers to be intrinsically immoral.” ref

“By the late Republican era, slavery had become an economic pillar of Roman wealth, as well as Roman society. It is estimated that 25% or more of the population of Ancient Rome was enslaved, although the actual percentage is debated by scholars and varied from region to region. Slaves represented 15–25% of Italy‘s population, mostly war captives, especially from Gaul and Epirus. Estimates of the number of slaves in the Roman Empire suggest that the majority were scattered throughout the provinces outside of Italy. Generally, slaves in Italy were indigenous Italians.” ref

“Foreigners (including both slaves and freedmen) born outside of Italy were estimated to have peaked at 5% of the total in the capital, where their number was largest. Those from outside of Europe were predominantly of Greek descent. Jewish slaves never fully assimilated into Roman society, remaining an identifiable minority. These slaves (especially the foreigners) had higher death rates and lower birth rates than natives and were sometimes subjected to mass expulsions. The average recorded age at death for the slaves in Rome was seventeen and a half years (17.2 for males; 17.9 for females).” ref

Slavery and Economics

“Economists have modeled the circumstances under which slavery (and variants such as serfdom) appear and disappear. One observation is that slavery becomes more desirable for landowners where land is abundant but labor is scarce, such that rent is depressed and paid workers can demand high wages. If the opposite holds true, then it is more costly for landowners to guard the slaves than to employ paid workers who can demand only low wages because of the degree of competition. Thus, first slavery and then serfdom gradually decreased in Europe as the population grew. They were reintroduced in the Americas and in Russia as large areas of land with few inhabitants became available.” ref

“Slavery is more common when the tasks are relatively simple and thus easy to supervise, such as large-scale monocrops such as sugarcane and cotton, in which output depended on economies of scale. This enables systems of labor, such as the gang system in the United States, to become prominent on large plantations where field hands toiled with factory-like precision. Then, each work gang was based on an internal division of labor that assigned every member of the gang to a task and made each worker’s performance dependent on the actions of the others. The enslaved chopped out the weeds that surrounded the cotton plants as well as excess sprouts. Plow gangs followed behind, stirring the soil near the plants and tossing it back around the plants. Thus, the gang system worked like an assembly line.” ref

“Since the 18th century, critics have argued that slavery retards technological advancement because the focus is on increasing the number of slaves doing simple tasks rather than upgrading their efficiency. For example, it is sometimes argued that, because of this narrow focus, technology in Greece – and later in Rome – was not applied to ease physical labor or improve manufacturing. Scottish economist Adam Smith stated that free labor was economically better than slave labor, and that it was nearly impossible to end slavery in a free, democratic, or republican form of government since many of its legislators or political figures were slave owners, and would not punish themselves. He further stated that slaves would be better able to gain their freedom under a centralized government, or a central authority like a king or church.” ref

“Similar arguments appeared later in the works of Auguste Comte, especially given Smith’s belief in the separation of powers, or what Comte called the “separation of the spiritual and the temporal” during the Middle Ages and the end of slavery, and Smith’s criticism of masters, past and present. As Smith stated in the Lectures on Jurisprudence, “The great power of the clergy thus concurring with that of the king set the slaves at liberty. But it was absolutely necessary both that the authority of the king and of the clergy should be great. Where ever any one of these was wanting, slavery still continues…” ref

“In 2019, approximately 40 million people, of whom 26 percent were children, were enslaved throughout the world despite it being illegal. In the modern world, more than 50 percent of enslaved people provide forced labor, usually in the factories and sweatshops of the private sector of a country’s economy. In industrialized countries, human trafficking is a modern variety of slavery; in non-industrialized countries, enslavement by debt bondage is a common form of enslaving a person, such as captive domestic servants, forced marriage, and child soldiers.” ref

The Clear Connection Between Slavery And American Capitalism

“The ties between slavery and capitalism in the United States weren’t always crystal clear in our history books. For a long time, historians mostly depicted slavery as a regional institution of cruelty in the South, and certainly not the driver of broader American economic prosperity. Now 16 scholars are helping to set the record straight by exploring the true ties between 19th-century economic development and a brutal system of human bondage in the 2016 book Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development.” ref 

“Contrary to popular belief, the small farmers of New England weren’t alone responsible for establishing America’s economic position as capitalism expanded. Rather, the hard labor of slaves in places like Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi needs to be kept in view as well. In fact, more than half of the nation’s exports in the first six decades of the 19th century consisted of raw cotton, almost all of it grown by slaves, according to the book, which was edited by Sven Beckert, the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University and visiting professor at HBS, as well as Seth Rockman, Associate Professor of History at Brown University.” ref

“The slave economy of the southern states had ripple effects throughout the entire U.S. economy, with plenty of merchants in New York City, Boston, and elsewhere helping to organize the trade of slave-grown agricultural commodities—and enjoying plenty of riches as a result.” ref

“In the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, slavery—as a source of the cotton that fed Rhode Island’s mills, as a source of the wealth that filled New York’s banks, as a source of the markets that inspired Massachusetts manufacturers—proved indispensable to national economic development,” Beckert and Rockman write in the introduction to the book. “… Cotton offered a reason for entrepreneurs and inventors to build manufactories in such places as Lowell, Pawtucket, and Paterson, thereby connecting New England’s Industrial Revolution to the advancing plantation frontier of the Deep South. And financing cotton growing, as well as marketing and transporting the crop, was a source of great wealth for the nation’s merchants and banks.” ref

“Beckert (was asked)—who researches and teaches the history of US capitalism in the 19th century—to discuss the book and to talk about what lessons today’s business leaders can learn from the past.” ref

“Dina Gerdeman: The book makes note of the fact that a myth existed for many years: that slavery was “merely a regional institution, surely indispensable for understanding the South, but a geographically confined system of negligible importance to the nation as a whole.” Why do you think for so many years historians made slavery out to be a “southern problem” and didn’t seem to make a strong connection between slavery and things like innovation, entrepreneurship, and finance, which are at the heart of American capitalism?” ref

“Sven Beckert: This is an excellent question, and indeed, as you note, quite puzzling. It is puzzling for three reasons: For one, into the early years of the 19th century, slavery was a national institution, and while slavery was never as predominate a system of labor in the North as it was in the South, it was still important.” ref

“Second, there were a vast number of very obvious economic links between the slave plantations of the southern states and enterprises as well as other institutions in the northern states: Just think of all these New York and Boston merchants who traded in slave-grown goods. Or the textile industrialists of New England who processed vast quantities of slave-grown cotton. Or the bankers who financed the expansion of the plantation complex.” ref

“And third, both the abolitionists, as well as pro-slavery advocates, talked over and over about the deep links between the southern slave economy and the national economy.” ref

“Why did these insights get lost? I think the main reason is ideological and political. For a long time after the Civil War, the nation really did not want to be reminded of either the war or the institution that lay at its root—slavery. A country that saw itself as uniquely invested in human freedom had a hard time coming to terms with the centuries’ long history of enslaving so many of its people.” ref

“When slavery became more important to our historical memory, especially in the wake of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the work of reconciling the history of freedom and the history of enslavement involved quarantining the history of slavery to one section of the nation only. That allowed for doing two things simultaneously: It allowed for the belated acknowledgment of the importance, barbarity, and longevity of slavery in the United States. But it also allowed for a continued telling of the story of freedom, since the national story could be told as one in which one section of the United States, the North, fought hard to overcome the retrograde, coercive, and inhumane system of slavery in the other section.” ref

“Of course, this story is not completely wrong. Yet what it effectively did was to insulate the national story from the problem of slavery. A focus on the economic links generated around slavery, the story that our book charts, brings the story of enslavement squarely back into the center of the national history as a whole. And this is where it belongs.” ref

“Gerdeman: The book says “the relationship of slavery to American capitalism rightfully begins on the plantation.” Can you explain how the North benefited from the slave-grown cotton in the South? And how did this “empire of cotton” help create modern capitalism?” ref

“Beckert: There are very many economic links between the southern plantation complex and the development of American and global capitalism, involving trade, industry, banking, insurance, shipping, and other industries. The most prominent link developed around cotton.” ref

“As you know, the cotton industry was crucial to the world-altering Industrial Revolution as it first unfolded in Great Britain and then spread from there to other parts of the world, including the northern states of the Union. Until 1861, until the American Civil War, almost all cotton used in industrial production was grown by enslaved workers in the southern parts of the United States. Slavery thus played a very important role in supplying an essential raw material for industrial production.” ref

“Yet there were further links: British and later U.S. capital financed the expansion of the slavery complex in the American South. Advancing credit was essential for southern planters to be able to purchase land and labor. Northern merchants, moreover, organized the shipment of cotton into global markets.” ref

“And of course, northern manufacturers, along with their European counterparts, supplied plantations in the South with tools, textiles, and other goods that were necessary to maintain the plantation regime. Plantation slavery, far from being a retrograde system on its way to being ousted by industrial capitalism, saw a second flourishing in the 19th century in the wake of the industrial revolution. And in the United States, cotton was central to that “second slavery.” ref

“Gerdeman: Some argued that with the abolition of slavery, the North was poised to “kill the goose that has laid their golden egg.” Can you explain why that wasn’t the case?” ref

“Beckert: Slavery was important to a particular moment in the history of capitalism. But there were also severe tensions between the deepening and spread of capitalism and slavery.” ref

“For one, slavery was quite unstable. Slaves resisted their enslavements, and slave owners needed to deploy a lot of violence, coercion, and oversight to ensure the stability of the plantation and slave society more broadly. Moreover, slavery did not satisfy the labor needs that emerged in modern industrial enterprises; very little slave labor was used there.” ref

“And last but not least, slave owners had a very definite idea about the political economy of the United States, which focused on the export of agricultural commodities to world markets, free trade, and the territorial expansion of the slave regime into the American West. That was quite distinct from the increasingly urgent and also powerful political needs of northern industrialists and bankers. They wanted tariff protection and the expansion of free labor into the American West. Both these political economies depended on the control of the federal government.” ref

“With the advent of the Republican Party and then especially with the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency, that control became uncertain. As a result, southerners struck out on their own, provoking a violent Civil War that was won by the forces opposed to slavery.” ref

“Gerdeman: Do you think today’s business executives could learn any important lessons from this new understanding of the connection between slavery and the American market?” ref

“Beckert: Yes, definitely. The most important lesson this history provides is that business leaders whose companies’ history goes back into the antebellum era need to be proactively researching this history and confronting it. No one alive today is responsible for slavery—a crime against humanity. But we all need to face our histories and then try to move forward from that acknowledgment of the past.” ref

“More generally, it is crucially important that companies have a full understanding of their supply chains and of the labor conditions that are to be found throughout these chains. If they violate fundamental human rights, companies have the responsibility and also the ability to act.” ref

“There were powerful business interests in the 19th century who worked diligently against slavery. Just think of the Tappan brothers of New York, merchants who combined their business with anti-slavery activism. And then there were also entrepreneurs who refused to process slave-grown cotton. These people can serve as examples of what is possible. They show that to have a full understanding of all aspects of one’s business and to aggressively enforce fundamental human norms and rights is possible and necessary.” ref

“When you read the letters of businessmen of the 1840s and 1850s, you see numerous efforts to separate business and morality into distinct realms. Merchants and manufacturers in the past did know that slavery was a moral problem, but then they tried to say that such moral considerations were extraneous to the concerns of business. In retrospect, we can all agree that these claims are preposterous. Such observations should make everyone today acutely conscious about making rationalizations that seek to insulate business from moral responsibility. History (and historians) don’t look kindly on this.” ref

In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.

“A couple of years before he was convicted of securities fraud, Martin Shkreli was the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that acquired the rights to Daraprim, a lifesaving antiparasitic drug. Previously the drug cost $13.50 a pill, but in Shkreli’s hands, the price quickly increased by a factor of 56, to $750 a pill. At a health care conference, Shkreli told the audience that he should have raised the price even higher. “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it,” he explained. “But this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system, and capitalist rules.” ref

“This is a capitalist society. It’s a fatalistic mantra that seems to get repeated to anyone who questions why America can’t be more fair or equal. But around the world, there are many types of capitalist societies, ranging from liberating to exploitative, protective to abusive, democratic to unregulated. When Americans declare that “we live in a capitalist society” — as a real estate mogul told The Miami Herald last year when explaining his feelings about small-business owners being evicted from their Little Haiti storefronts — what they’re often defending is our nation’s peculiarly brutal economy. “Low-road capitalism,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Joel Rogers has called it. In a capitalist society that goes low, wages are depressed as businesses compete over the price, not the quality, of goods; so-called unskilled workers are typically incentivized through punishments, not promotions; inequality reigns and poverty spreads. In the United States, the richest 1 percent of Americans own 40 percent of the country’s wealth, while a larger share of working-age people (18-65) live in poverty than in any other nation belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.).” ref

“Or consider worker rights in different capitalist nations. In Iceland, 90 percent of wage and salaried workers belong to trade unions authorized to fight for living wages and fair working conditions. Thirty-four percent of Italian workers are unionized, as are 26 percent of Canadian workers. Only 10 percent of American wage and salaried workers carry union cards. The O.E.C.D. scores nations along a number of indicators, such as how countries regulate temporary work arrangements. Scores run from 5 (“very strict”) to 1 (“very loose”). Brazil scores 4.1 and Thailand, 3.7, signaling toothy regulations on temp work. Further down the list are Norway (3.4), India (2.5), and Japan (1.3). The United States scored 0.3, tied for second to last place with Malaysia. How easy is it to fire workers? Countries like Indonesia (4.1) and Portugal (3) have strong rules about severance pay and reasons for dismissal. Those rules relax somewhat in places like Denmark (2.1) and Mexico (1.9). They virtually disappear in the United States, ranked dead last out of 71 nations with a score of 0.5.” ref

“Those searching for reasons the American economy is uniquely severe and unbridled have found answers in many places (religion, politics, culture). But recently, historians have pointed persuasively to the gnatty fields of Georgia and Alabama, to the cotton houses and slave auction blocks, as the birthplace of America’s low-road approach to capitalism.” ref

“Slavery was undeniably a font of phenomenal wealth. By the eve of the Civil War, the Mississippi Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States. Cotton grown and picked by enslaved workers was the nation’s most valuable export. The combined value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation. New Orleans boasted a denser concentration of banking capital than New York City. What made the cotton economy boom in the United States, and not in all the other far-flung parts of the world with climates and soil suitable to the crop, was our nation’s unflinching willingness to use violence on nonwhite people and to exert its will on seemingly endless supplies of land and labor. Given the choice between modernity and barbarism, prosperity and poverty, lawfulness and cruelty, democracy and totalitarianism, America chose all of the above.” ref

“Nearly two average American lifetimes (79 years) have passed since the end of slavery, only two. It is not surprising that we can still feel the looming presence of this institution, which helped turn a poor, fledgling nation into a financial colossus. The surprising bit has to do with the many eerily specific ways slavery can still be felt in our economic life. “American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American capitalism,” write the historians Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman. The task now, they argue, is “cataloging the dominant and recessive traits” that have been passed down to us, tracing the unsettling and often unrecognized lines of descent by which America’s national sin is now being visited upon the third and fourth generations.” ref

[Listen to an episode of the “1619” podcast with Matthew Desmond and Nikole Hannah-Jones about the economy that slavery built.]

“They picked in long rows, bent bodies shuffling through cotton fields white in bloom. Men, women and children picked, using both hands to hurry the work. Some picked in Negro cloth, their raw product returning to them by way of New England mills. Some picked completely naked. Young children ran water across the humped rows, while overseers peered down from horses. Enslaved workers placed each cotton boll into a sack slung around their necks. Their haul would be weighed after the sunlight stalked away from the fields and, as the freedman Charles Ball recalled, you couldn’t “distinguish the weeds from the cotton plants.” If the haul came up light, enslaved workers were often whipped. “A short day’s work was always punished,” Ball wrote.” ref

“Cotton was to the 19th century what oil was to the 20th: among the world’s most widely traded commodities. Cotton is everywhere, in our clothes, hospitals, soap. Before the industrialization of cotton, people wore expensive clothes made of wool or linen and dressed their beds in furs or straw. Whoever mastered cotton could make a killing. But cotton needed land. A field could only tolerate a few straight years of the crop before its soil became depleted. Planters watched as acres that had initially produced 1,000 pounds of cotton yielded only 400 a few seasons later. The thirst for new farmland grew even more intense after the invention of the cotton gin in the early 1790s. Before the gin, enslaved workers grew more cotton than they could clean. The gin broke the bottleneck, making it possible to clean as much cotton as you could grow.” ref

“The United States solved its land shortage by expropriating millions of acres from Native Americans, often with military force, acquiring Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Florida. It then sold that land on the cheap — just $1.25 an acre in the early 1830s ($38 in today’s dollars) — to white settlers. Naturally, the first to cash in were the land speculators. Companies operating in Mississippi flipped land, selling it soon after purchase, commonly for double the price.” ref

“Enslaved workers felled trees by ax, burned the underbrush, and leveled the earth for planting. “Whole forests were literally dragged out by the roots,” John Parker, an enslaved worker, remembered. A lush, twisted mass of vegetation was replaced by a single crop. An origin of American money exerting its will on the earth, spoiling the environment for profit, is found in the cotton plantation. Floods became bigger and more common. The lack of biodiversity exhausted the soil and, to quote the historian Walter Johnson, “rendered one of the richest agricultural regions of the earth dependent on upriver trade for food.” ref

“As slave labor camps spread throughout the South, production surged. By 1831, the country was delivering nearly half the world’s raw cotton crop, with 350 million pounds picked that year. Just four years later, it harvested 500 million pounds. Southern white elites grew rich, as did their counterparts in the North, who erected textile mills to form, in the words of the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, an “unhallowed alliance between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.” The large-scale cultivation of cotton hastened the invention of the factory, an institution that propelled the Industrial Revolution and changed the course of history. In 1810, there were 87,000 cotton spindles in America. Fifty years later, there were five million. Slavery, wrote one of its defenders in De Bow’s Review, a widely read agricultural magazine, was the “nursing mother of the prosperity of the North.” Cotton planters, millers, and consumers were fashioning a new economy, one that was global in scope and required the movement of capital, labor, and products across long distances. In other words, they were fashioning a capitalist economy. “The beating heart of this new system,” Beckert writes, “was slavery.” ref

“When an accountant depreciates an asset to save on taxes or when a midlevel manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns on an Excel spreadsheet, they are repeating business procedures whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps. And yet, despite this, “slavery plays almost no role in histories of management,” notes the historian Caitlin Rosenthal in her book “Accounting for Slavery.” Since the 1977 publication of Alfred Chandler’s classic study, “The Visible Hand,” historians have tended to connect the development of modern business practices to the 19th-century railroad industry, viewing plantation slavery as precapitalistic, even primitive. It’s a more comforting origin story, one that protects the idea that America’s economic ascendancy developed not because of, but in spite of, millions of black people toiling on plantations. But management techniques used by 19th-century corporations were implemented during the previous century by plantation owners.” ref

“Planters aggressively expanded their operations to capitalize on economies of scale inherent to cotton growing, buying more enslaved workers, investing in large gins and presses, and experimenting with different seed varieties. To do so, they developed complicated workplace hierarchies that combined a central office, made up of owners and lawyers in charge of capital allocation and long-term strategy, with several divisional units, responsible for different operations. Rosenthal writes of one plantation where the owner supervised a top lawyer, who supervised another lawyer, who supervised an overseer, who supervised three bookkeepers, who supervised 16 enslaved head drivers and specialists (like bricklayers), who supervised hundreds of enslaved workers. Everyone was accountable to someone else, and plantations pumped out not just cotton bales but volumes of data about how each bale was produced. This organizational form was very advanced for its time, displaying a level of hierarchal complexity equaled only by large government structures, like that of the British Royal Navy.” ref

“Like today’s titans of industry, planters understood that their profits climbed when they extracted maximum effort out of each worker. So they paid close attention to inputs and outputs by developing precise systems of record-keeping. Meticulous bookkeepers and overseers were just as important to the productivity of a slave-labor camp as field hands. Plantation entrepreneurs developed spreadsheets, like Thomas Affleck’s “Plantation Record and Account Book,” which ran into eight editions circulated until the Civil War. Affleck’s book was a one-stop-shop accounting manual, complete with rows and columns that tracked per-worker productivity. This book “was really at the cutting edge of the informational technologies available to businesses during this period,” Rosenthal told me. “I have never found anything remotely as complex as Affleck’s book for free labor.” Enslavers used the book to determine end-of-the-year balances, tallying expenses and revenues and noting the causes of their biggest gains and losses. They quantified capital costs on their land, tools, and enslaved workforces, applying Affleck’s recommended interest rate. Perhaps most remarkable, they also developed ways to calculate depreciation, a breakthrough in modern management procedures, by assessing the market value of enslaved workers over their life spans. Values generally peaked between the prime ages of 20 and 40 but were individually adjusted up or down based on sex, strength, and temperament: people were reduced to data points.” ref

“This level of data analysis also allowed planters to anticipate rebellion. Tools were accounted for on a regular basis to make sure a large number of axes or other potential weapons didn’t suddenly go missing. “Never allow any slave to lock or unlock any door,” advised a Virginia enslaver in 1847. In this way, new bookkeeping techniques developed to maximize returns also helped to ensure that violence flowed in one direction, allowing a minority of whites to control a much larger group of enslaved black people. American planters never forgot what happened in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in 1791, when enslaved workers took up arms and revolted. In fact, many white enslavers overthrown during the Haitian Revolution relocated to the United States and started over.” ref

“Overseers recorded each enslaved worker’s yield. Accountings took place not only after nightfall, when cotton baskets were weighed, but throughout the workday. In the words of a North Carolina planter, enslaved workers were to be “followed up from day break until dark.” Having hands line-pick in rows sometimes longer than five football fields allowed overseers to spot anyone lagging behind. The uniform layout of the land had a logic; a logic designed to dominate. Faster workers were placed at the head of the line, which encouraged those who followed to match the captain’s pace. When enslaved workers grew ill or old, or became pregnant, they were assigned to lighter tasks.” ref 

“One enslaver established a “sucklers gang” for nursing mothers, as well as a “measles gang,” which at once quarantined those struck by the virus and ensured that they did their part to contribute to the productivity machine. Bodies and tasks were aligned with rigorous exactitude. In trade magazines, owners swapped advice about the minutiae of planting, including slave diets and clothing as well as the kind of tone a master should use. In 1846, one Alabama planter advised his fellow enslavers to always give orders “in a mild tone, and try to leave the impression on the mind of the negro that what you say is the result of reflection.” The devil (and his profits) were in the details.” ref 

“The uncompromising pursuit of measurement and scientific accounting displayed in slave plantations predates industrialism. Northern factories would not begin adopting these techniques until decades after the Emancipation Proclamation. As the large slave-labor camps grew increasingly efficient, enslaved black people became America’s first modern workers, their productivity increasing at an astonishing pace. During the 60 years leading up to the Civil War, the daily amount of cotton picked per enslaved worker increased 2.3 percent a year. That means that in 1862, the average enslaved fieldworker picked not 25 percent or 50 percent as much but 400 percent as much cotton than his or her counterpart did in 1801.” ref

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Wage Slavery

“Wage slavery is a term used to describe a situation where a person’s livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the wages are low and the person has few realistic chances of upward mobility.” ref

“The term is sometimes used to criticize exploitation of labor and social stratification, with the former seen primarily as unequal bargaining power between labor and capital (particularly when workers are paid comparatively low wages, e.g. in sweatshops) and the latter as a lack of workers’ self-management, fulfilling job choices and leisure in an economy.” ref

“The criticism of social stratification covers a wider range of employment choices bound by the pressures of a hierarchical society to perform otherwise unfulfilling work that deprives humans of their “species character” not only under threat of starvation or poverty, but also of social stigma and status diminution. Historically, some socialist organizations and activists have espoused workers’ self-management or worker cooperatives as possible alternatives to wage labor.” ref

“Similarities between wage labor and slavery were noted as early as Cicero in Ancient Rome, such as in De Officiis. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx elaborated the comparison between wage labor and slavery, while Luddites emphasized the dehumanization brought about by machines. The introduction of wage labor in 18th-century Britain was met with resistance, giving rise to the principles of syndicalism and anarchism.” ref

“Before the American Civil War, Southern defenders of African American slavery invoked the concept of wage slavery to favorably compare the condition of their slaves to workers in the North. The United States abolished most forms of slavery after the Civil War, but labor union activists found the metaphor useful – according to historian Lawrence Glickman, in the Gilded Age “[r]eferences abounded in the labor press, and it is hard to find a speech by a labor leader without the phrase.” ref

“Aristotle stated that “the citizens must not live a mechanic or a mercantile life (for such a life is ignoble and inimical to virtue), nor yet must those who are to be citizens in the best state be tillers of the soil (for leisure is needed both for the development of virtue and for active participation in politics)”, often paraphrased as “all paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.” ref 

“Cicero wrote in 44 BCE that “vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labor, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery”. Somewhat similar criticisms have also been expressed by some proponents of liberalism, like Silvio Gesell and Thomas Paine; Henry George, who inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism; and the Distributist school of thought within the Catholic Church.” ref

“To Karl Marx and anarchist thinkers like Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, wage slavery was a class condition in place due to the existence of private property and the state. This class situation rested primarily on:

1. The existence of property not intended for active use;
2. The concentration of ownership in few hands;
3. The lack of direct access by workers to the means of production and consumption goods; and
4. The perpetuation of a reserve army of unemployed workers.” ref

“And secondarily on:

1. The waste of workers’ efforts and resources on producing useless luxuries;
2. The waste of goods so that their price may remain high; and
3. The waste of all those who sit between the producer and consumer, taking their own shares at each stage without actually contributing to the production of goods, i.e. the middle man.” ref

“Fascist economic policies were more hostile to independent trade unions than modern economies in Europe or the United States. Fascism was more widely accepted in the 1920s and 1930s, and foreign corporate investment (notably from the United States) in Germany increased after the fascists took power. Fascism has been perceived by some notable critics, like Buenaventura Durruti, to be a last resort weapon of the privileged to ensure the maintenance of wage slavery:

No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.” ref

The First Labor Strike in History?

“THE PROBLEM WAS THREE-FOLD: A LOSS OF LABOR FROM CASUALTIES IN WAR & THE EXPENSE IN REPELLING THE SEA PEOPLES, CORRUPT OFFICIALS, & POOR HARVESTS. OFFICIALS ORDERED PASTRIES DELIVERED TO THE STRIKING WORKERS & HOPED THEY WOULD BE SATISFIED & GO HOME.” ref

“For over 20 years Ramesses III had done his best for the people and, as he approached his 30th year, plans were set in motion for a grand jubilee festival to honor him. Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson notes:

The court now looked forward to the king’s thirty-year jubilee, determined to stage a celebration worthy of so glorious a monarch. There would be no stinting, no corners cut. Only the most lavish ceremonies would do. It was a fateful decision. Beneath the pomp and circumstance, the Egyptian state had been seriously weakened by its exertions. The military losses of 1178 were still keenly felt. Foreign trade with the Near East had never fully recovered from the Sea People‘s orgy of destruction. The temples’ coffers might be full of copper and myrrh, but their supplies of grain – the staple of the Egyptian economy – were gravely depleted. Against such a background, the jubilee preparations would prove a serious drain on resources.” ref

“The troubles began in 1159 BCE, three years before the festival, when the monthly wages of the tomb-builders and artisans at Set-Ma’at (“The Place of Truth”, better known as Deir el-Medina) arrived almost a month late. The scribe Amennakht, who also seems to have served as a kind of shop steward, negotiated with local officials for the distribution of grain to the workers but this was only a temporary solution to an immediate problem; the underlying cause of the failure in payment was never addressed.” ref

“Instead of looking into what had gone wrong and trying to prevent it from happening again, officials dedicated themselves to preparation for the grand festival. The payment to the workers at Deir el-Medina was again late and then again late until, as Wilkinson writes, “the system of paying the necropolis workers broke down altogether, prompting the earliest recorded strikes in history”. The workers had waited for 18 days beyond their payday and refused to wait any longer. They lay down their tools and marched toward the city shouting “We are hungry!” They first demonstrated at Ramesses III’s mortuary temple and then staged a sit-in near the temple of Thutmose III.” ref

“The local officials had no idea how to deal with the situation; nothing like this had ever happened in the history of the country. Ma’at applied to everyone, from the king to the peasant, and everyone was expected to recognize his or her place in the scheme of the universe and act accordingly. Workers rising up and demanding their pay was quite simply an impossibility because it violated the principle of ma’at. With no understanding of how to deal with the problem, officials ordered pastries delivered to the striking workers and hoped they would be satisfied and go home.” ref

“The pastries were not enough, however, and the next day the men took over the southern gate of the Ramesseum, the central storehouse of grain in Thebes. Some broke into the inner rooms demanding their pay and the temple officials called the chief of police, a man named Montumes. Montumes told the strikers to leave the temple and return to their work but they refused. Helpless, Montumes withdrew and left the problem for the officials to resolve. The back pay was finally handed over after negotiations between the priest-officials and the strikers but no sooner had the men returned to their village than they discovered their next payment would not be coming.” ref

“Again the workers went on strike, this time taking over and blocking all access to the Valley of the Kings. The significance of this act was that no priests or family members of the deceased were able to enter with food and drink offerings for the dead and this was considered a serious offense to the memory of those who had passed on to the afterlife. When officials appeared with armed guards and threatened to remove the men by force, a striker responded that he would damage the royal tombs before they could move against him and so the two sides were stalemated.” ref

“By this time the men were no longer simply striking over the late payments but what they saw as a serious breach of ma’at. The king was supposed to take care of his people and that meant making sure that officials who oversaw payments did so correctly and in a timely manner. It was now going on three years since the strikes first started and the situation had not changed: the workers would not receive their pay, they would then go on strike, the officials would find the means to pay them, and the same scenario would be repeated again the next month. The tomb-workers and artisans claimed that injustice of the highest order was being perpetrated and they wanted that situation addressed.” ref

“The local government, however, still had no understanding of how to handle the problem. It was their responsibility to maintain order and, especially with the jubilee coming up, keep the peace and uphold the dignity of pharaoh. They could not send official word to the capital that the workers of Thebes refused to do their jobs or they could possibly face execution for failing to do their duty; so they did nothing. In keeping with the traditions of the culture, they should have sent word to the vizier who would then have looked into and corrected the problem. The vizier did, in fact, come to Thebes at about this time in order to collect statues for the jubilee celebration but there is no indication he was told anything about the striking workers.” ref

“The jubilee in 1156 BCE or 3,177 years ago was a great success and, as at all festivals, the participants forgot about their daily troubles with dancing and drink. The problem did not go away, however, and the workers continued their strikes and their struggle for fair payment in the following months. At last some sort of resolution seems to have been reached whereby officials were able to make payments to the workers on time but the dynamic of the relationship between temple officials and workers had changed – as had the practical application of the concept of ma’at – and these would never really revert to their former understandings again. Ma’at was the responsibility of the pharaoh to oversee and maintain, not the workers; and yet the men of Deir el-Medina had taken it upon themselves to correct what they saw as a breach in the policies which helped to maintain essential harmony and balance. The common people had been forced to assume the responsibilities of the king.” ref

Significance

“The strikes of the tomb-workers and artisans were especially influential because these men were among the highest paid and most respected in the country. If they could be treated this poorly, the reasoning went, then others should expect even worse. The influence of the strikes was also so great because these workers had the most to lose, were all very aware of the principle of ma’at and their duty to it, and yet chose to stand up against a governmental practice which they felt was unjust. What began as a complaint over late wages turned into an action protesting corruption and injustice. Toward the end of their strikes the workers were no longer chanting about their hunger but about the larger issue:

We have gone on strike not from hunger but because we have a serious accusation to make: bad things have been done in this place of Pharaoh. (Wilkinson, 337)” ref

“The success of the tomb-worker/artisan strikes inspired others to do the same. Just as the official records of the battle with the Sea Peoples never recorded the Egyptian losses in the land battle, neither do they record any mention of the strikes. The record of the strike comes from a papyrus scroll discovered at Deir el-Medina and most probably written by the scribe Amennakht. The precedent of workers walking away from their jobs was set by these events and, although there are no extant official reports of other similar events, workers now understood they had more power than previously thought. Strikes are mentioned in the latter part of the New Kingdom and Late Period and there is no doubt the practice began with the workers at Deir el-Medina in the time of Ramesses III.” ref

Why are lies more appealing than the truth?

American Propaganda and the Myths of Freedom, Equality, Democracy, and Liberty!

SCOTUS and Roe v Wade: “Christian Nationalism”, “Blue Laws”, and “Christofascism”

State Capitalism: economies of the Soviet Union/Eastern Bloc, Maoist China/current China relate to state capitalism

Capitalism is an unethical economic system based on profit over people.

A Hierarchy (Greek: hierarkhia, ‘rule of a high priest’, from hierarkhes, ‘president of sacred rites’)

Elite Power Accumulation: Ancient Trade, Tokens, Writing, Wealth, Merchants, and Priest-Kings

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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7,000 years of Class Conflict, Class War Struggle Ain’t Nothing New!

Damien loves when people of Statism-worship persuasion, love saying, things are so bad and we need to lower the struggle, Damien thinks what the delusion are you talking about, it has always been class war, crazy fucker, you know, for about 7,000 years ago of oppressions forced on us at the end. In Damien’s thinking it seems possible between 7,000-5,000 Years ago, rise of unequal hierarchy elite, leading to a “birth of the State” or worship of power, strong new sexism, oppression of non-elites, and the fall of Women’s equal status.

5th millennium BC (around 7,000-6,000 years ago) Events 

This was a time of great development along with the spread of agriculture from Western Asia throughout Southern and Central Europe. Urban cultures in Mesopotamia and Anatolia/Turkey flourished, developing the wheel. Copper ornaments became more common, marking the beginning of the Chalcolithic or copper age. Animal husbandry spread throughout Eurasia, reaching China. World population grew slightly throughout the millennium, possibly from 5 to 7 million people.

Inventions, discoveries, introductions

• Farming reaches Atlantic coast of Europe from Ancient Near East (around 7,000 years ago)
• Maize is cultivated in Mexico (around 7,000 years ago)
• Proto-writing, such as ideographic Vinča symbols, Tartaria tablets (around 7,000 years ago)
• around 7,000 years ago, Metallurgy during the Copper Age in Europe
• around 7,000 years ago, agriculture starts in Ancient Japan; beans and gourds are cultivated
• Plough is introduced in Europe (around 6,500 years ago)
• Copper pins dating to around 6,000 years ago found in Egypt
• Water buffalo are domesticated in China
• Beer brewing is developed
• Wheel is developed in Mesopotamia and India.

Fertile Crescent

• Ubaid culture around 8,500 – 5,800 tears ago in Mesopotamia, derives from Tell al-`Ubaid
• Yumuktepe and Gözlükule cultures in south Anatolia/Turkey. (Yumuktepe had 23 archaeological levels of occupation dating from ca 6300 BCE or around 8,320 years ago. In his book, Prehistoric Mersin, Garstang lists the tools unearthed in the excavations. The earliest tools are made of either stone or ceramic. Both agriculture and animal husbandry (sheep, cattle, goats, and pigs) were among the economic activities in Yumuktepe. In the layer which corresponds to roughly 4500 BCE or around 6,520 years ago, one of the earliest fortifications in human history exists. According to Isabella Caneva, during the chalcolithic or copper age, an early copper blast furnace was in use in Yumuktepe.)

Egypt

• Badari culture on the Nile (around 6,400 – 6,000 years ago)
• Merimde culture on the Nile in Prehistoric Egypt (around 6,570 – 6,250 years ago).

China

• Yangshao culture around 7,000 – 5,000 years ago on the Yellow River
• Proto-Austronesian culture is based on the south coast of China; they combine extensive maritime technology, fishing with hooks and nets and gardening (7,000 years ago)

Europe

• Cycladic culture—a distinctive Neolithic culture amalgamating Anatolian and mainland Greek elements arose in the western Aegean before 6,000 years ago
• Varna culture in the Balkans possibly starting at 7,700 years ago, it is attested to around 6,400-6,100 years ago but seems to possibly endured until around 5,000 years ago)
• Comb Ceramic culture in northeast Europe 6,200 to 4,350 years ago
• Stentinello culture (Sicilian Neolithic Temple Builders around 6,000 years ago probably part of an influx of Neolithic farmers, identified genetically with Y Haplogroup J2 (M172), and some of their pottery has been dated to around 7,200 years ago and may relate to the earliest known inhabitants of Malta arrived from Sicily sometime before 7,200 years ago.)
• Samara culture around 7,200–6,200 years ago on the Volga river that flows through central Russia
• Sredny Stog culture on the Dnieper that flows through Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine to the Black Sea. The Sredny Stog culture is a pre-kurgan culture around 7,000 years ago, relating to Ukraine, where it was first located. (It is thought by some this Sredny Stog culture pre-kurgan archaeological culture could represent the Urheimat (homeland) of the Proto-Indo-European language. Moreover, it seems to have had contact with the agricultural Cucuteni-Trypillian culture in the west and was a contemporary of the Khvalynsk culture. In its three largest cemeteries, Alexandria (39 individuals), Igren (17), and Dereivka (14), evidence of inhumation in flat graves (ground level pits) has been found. This parallels the practice of the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture, and is in contrast with the later Yamna culture, which practiced tumuli burials, according to the Kurgan hypothesis. In Sredny Stog culture, the deceased was laid to rest on their backs with the legs flexed. The use of ochre in the burial was practiced, as with the Kurgan cultures.)
• Lengyel culture centered on the Middle Danube in Central Europe around 7,000-5,400 years ago (preceded by the Linear Pottery culture and succeeded by the Corded Ware culture. In its northern extent, overlapped the somewhat later but otherwise approximately contemporaneous Funnelbeaker culture. Also closely      related are the Stroke-ornamented ware and Rössen cultures, adjacent to the north and west, respectively.)

Events around 7,000-6,000 years ago

• 7,000–6,500 years ago: Għar Dalam phase of Neolithic farmers on Malta, possibly immigrant farmers from the Agrigento region of Sicily Cucuteni-Trypillian culture
• 7,000–6,000 years ago: Bowl, from Banpo, near Xi’an, Shaanxi, is made; Neolithic period; Yangshao culture; now kept at Banpo Museum
• 7,000–4,000 years ago: Neolithic period in China
• 6,900–6,600 years ago: Arrangements of circular ditches are built in Central Europe (the Goseck circle was constructed around 6,900 years ago)
• 6,800 years ago: Dimini culture replaces the Sesklo culture in Thessaly, Greece (4800–4000 BC)
• 6,500 years ago: Settlement of Chirokitia in Cyprus dates from this period
• 6,500 years ago: Ending of Neolithic IA (the Aceramic) in Cyprus
• 6,350 years ago: Kikai Caldera in Japan forms in a massive VEI7 eruption
• 6,300 years ago: First Funnelbeaker Culture in north and east Germany
• 6,300 years ago: Theta Boötis became the nearest visible star to the celestial north pole; it remained the closest until 5,942 years ago when it was replaced by Thuban
• 6,250–5,750 years ago: Menhir alignments at Menec, Carnac, France are made
• 6,200 years ago: Date of Mesolithic examples of Naalebinding found in Denmark, marking spread of technology to Northern Europe
• 6,100–5,500 years ago: New wave of immigration to Malta from Sicily leads to the Żebbuġ and Mġarr phases, and to the Ġgantija phase of temple builders.

Christopher Blessing– “The fundamental problems I have with capitalism is the under representation of the majority of people. Problem, the vast majority of the wealthy whom are a small minority hold most of the capital. That by default gives them the greatest influence over the economy. It is the majority of people that generate this capital for them, yet they do not own it. This is because the majority of means of production are privately held, in the hands of the minority. Now another problem, capital by extension in terms of education is almost a privilege. One needs to go into debt because basic jobs do not pay enough to cover such costs. In fact, it wouldn’t be considered a necessity and factored into inflation. I may be mistaken on this to my limited knowledge, but I have not seen it as related to the cost of living. So we have a society through both internalized and cultural classism views education as less than a human right. Who will pay for it? By virtue of it increasing capital, it would be a higher return of investment. Odd capitalism, thinks it shouldn’t be available to the majority for free and they would benefit more from it. We have it for lower education with little opposition. Problem, this is addressed by Marx where the worker has little to offer than to sell his labor, but the companies have many workers to choose from as everyone has the same basic education unless they are fortunate enough to get higher education. The many jobs companies are having trouble with are specialty positions and those that require higher education which is out of reach of the majority of people. This highlights a problem with our educational system on a social level and workers are at a huge disadvantage when seeking employment. Problem, the capitals can use capital to generate wage slavery, and become abusive to the point where we could see something like the peasant wars happen again. People site socialism as an economic failure, it was not, the problem was corruption and manipulating the majority of people, this same thing is currently happening in capitalism. Classism shouldn’t exist, not because everyone should have material things equally, but because the idea itself, the notion of dividing the worth of a human being based on material value is a bad and harmful idea that negatively impacts humanity.”

Christopher Blessing– “I appreciate the work you do, making higher educational content available for…free! You are an anarcho-socialist. The simple fact that interest can be earned on capital means that is labor exploitation in the sense that workers generate the original capital along with its interest(the additional capital) which the workers do not see any percentage of. The issue with capitalism is the belief that it works for the majority of people, particularly equally. This seemed true because there was a more even split originally as there was enough resources and capital for the majority. Thinking of it as a pie, we have many more people continuing to get smaller and fewer slices while a few people are getting more and bigger slices. The problem is that the vast majority are wage dependent and in wage slavery because there is no fair representation of the majority. Imagine starting a video game as a character with 10,000 gold as opposed to one starting with 100 gold, or even none. Yes, people can work to get there, but those that already have it possess an unfair advantage. I am not saying take from people, rather we should develop a human interest economy(pro social) that removes the barriers of classism and focuses on improving earning capital through improvement of labor potential, not the exploitation of it. “I wish everyone had lots of money.”-Damien Marie At Hope. I don’t want more than anyone, I want my basic human needs met and the elevation of potential suffering due to the absence of enough money. I don’t want to compete with anyone, we shouldn’t need to, the planet has finite resources and enough for all of us, we need to use our brains for the betterment of our species, not the few.”

We rise by helping each other. I am a socialist anarchist and I welcome all good humans.

Anarcho-socialism

“Anarcho-socialism, commonly known as social anarchism or other similar variations, is an extremely lose term that applies to at least two majors variations of Anarchism. One of these branches advocates a collectivist society combining the fundamental principles of Socialism and Anarchism, whilst the other advocates an individualist system with heavy emphasis on human liberty. It is largely regarded as referring to any anarchist system that places emphasis on community cooperation and mutual development, even if such a society still has individualist tenancies. The theory rejects private property, seeing it as a source of social inequality. Anarcho-socialism is used to specifically describe tendencies within anarchism that have an emphasis on the communitarian and cooperative aspects of anarchist theory and practice. Social anarchism includes (but is not limited to) anarcho-collectivism, anarcho-communism, and anarcho-syndicalism.” ref

Social anarchism

“Social anarchism, sometimes referred to as red anarchism, is the branch of anarchism that sees individual freedom as interrelated with mutual aid. Social anarchist thought emphasizes community and social equality as complementary to autonomy and personal freedom. It attempts to accomplish this balance through freedom of speech, which is maintained in a decentralized federalism, with freedom of interaction in thought and subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is best defined as “that one should not withdraw from individuals and commit to the community what they can accomplish by their own enterprise and industry” and that “[f]or every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them”, or the slogan “Do not take tools out of people’s hands.” ref

Social anarchism has been the dominant form of anarchism. As a label or term, social anarchism is used in contrast to individualist anarchism to describe the theory that places an emphasis on the communitarian and cooperative aspects in anarchist theory while also opposing authoritarian forms of communitarianism associated with groupthink and collective conformity, favoring a reconciliation between individuality and sociality. Self-determination, worker’s self-management, education, and empowerment are all emphasized in social anarchism, while illegitimate authority is removed through inspection and vigilance. A do-it-yourself mentality is combined with educational efforts within the social realm. Social anarchism advocates the conversion and use of a portion of present-day and future productive private property to be made into social property that can be used as an alternative to capitalist production and exploitative wage labor. Social anarchist thought advocates social property to offer individual empowerment through easier access to tools and a sharing of the commons while retaining respect for personal property.” ref

“Social anarchism is considered an umbrella term that mainly refers to the post-capitalist economic models of anarcho-communism, collectivist anarchism, and sometimes mutualism. It can also include non-state controlled federated guild socialist, dual power industrial democracy and economic democracy, or federated worker cooperatives and workers’ and consumers’ councils replacing much of the present state system whilst retaining basic rights. In addition, it includes the trade union approach of anarcho-syndicalism, the social struggle strategies of platformism and specifism, and the environmental philosophy of social ecology. As a term, social anarchism overlaps with libertarianism, libertarian socialism, and left-libertarianism, emerging in the late 19th century as a distinction from individualist anarchism after anarcho-communism replaced collectivist anarchism as the dominant tendency.” ref

“Social anarchism has been described as the collectivist or socialist wing of anarchism as well as representing socialist-aligned forms of anarchism, being contrasted with the liberal-socialist wing represented by individualist anarchism. Nonetheless, several of those collectivist or communist anarchists have supported their theories on radical individualist grounds, seeing collectivism or communism as the best social system for the realization of individual freedom. The very idea of an individualist–socialist divide is also contested as individualist anarchism is largely socialistic and influenced each other. Carl Landauer summarized the difference between individualist and social anarchists by stating that “the communist anarchists also do not acknowledge any right to society to force the individual. They differ from the anarchistic individualists in their belief that men, if freed from coercion, will enter into voluntary associations of a communistic type, while the other wing believes that the free person will prefer a high degree of isolation.” ref

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Animism: Respecting the Living World by Graham Harvey 

“How have human cultures engaged with and thought about animals, plants, rocks, clouds, and other elements in their natural surroundings? Do animals and other natural objects have a spirit or soul? What is their relationship to humans? In this new study, Graham Harvey explores current and past animistic beliefs and practices of Native Americans, Maori, Aboriginal Australians, and eco-pagans. He considers the varieties of animism found in these cultures as well as their shared desire to live respectfully within larger natural communities. Drawing on his extensive casework, Harvey also considers the linguistic, performative, ecological, and activist implications of these different animisms.” ref

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref 

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Low Gods “Earth” or Tutelary deity and High Gods “Sky” or Supreme deity

“An Earth goddess is a deification of the Earth. Earth goddesses are often associated with the “chthonic” deities of the underworld. Ki and Ninhursag are Mesopotamian earth goddesses. In Greek mythology, the Earth is personified as Gaia, corresponding to Roman Terra, Indic Prithvi/Bhūmi, etc. traced to an “Earth Mother” complementary to the “Sky Father” in Proto-Indo-European religion. Egyptian mythology exceptionally has a sky goddess and an Earth god.” ref

“A mother goddess is a goddess who represents or is a personification of nature, motherhood, fertility, creation, destruction or who embodies the bounty of the Earth. When equated with the Earth or the natural world, such goddesses are sometimes referred to as Mother Earth or as the Earth Mother. In some religious traditions or movements, Heavenly Mother (also referred to as Mother in Heaven or Sky Mother) is the wife or feminine counterpart of the Sky father or God the Father.” ref

“Any masculine sky god is often also king of the gods, taking the position of patriarch within a pantheon. Such king gods are collectively categorized as “sky father” deities, with a polarity between sky and earth often being expressed by pairing a “sky father” god with an “earth mother” goddess (pairings of a sky mother with an earth father are less frequent). A main sky goddess is often the queen of the gods and may be an air/sky goddess in her own right, though she usually has other functions as well with “sky” not being her main. In antiquity, several sky goddesses in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Near East were called Queen of Heaven. Neopagans often apply it with impunity to sky goddesses from other regions who were never associated with the term historically. The sky often has important religious significance. Many religions, both polytheistic and monotheistic, have deities associated with the sky.” ref

“In comparative mythology, sky father is a term for a recurring concept in polytheistic religions of a sky god who is addressed as a “father”, often the father of a pantheon and is often either a reigning or former King of the Gods. The concept of “sky father” may also be taken to include Sun gods with similar characteristics, such as Ra. The concept is complementary to an “earth mother“. “Sky Father” is a direct translation of the Vedic Dyaus Pita, etymologically descended from the same Proto-Indo-European deity name as the Greek Zeûs Pater and Roman Jupiter and Germanic Týr, Tir or Tiwaz, all of which are reflexes of the same Proto-Indo-European deity’s name, *Dyēus Ph₂tḗr. While there are numerous parallels adduced from outside of Indo-European mythology, there are exceptions (e.g. In Egyptian mythology, Nut is the sky mother and Geb is the earth father).” ref

Tutelary deity

“A tutelary (also tutelar) is a deity or spirit who is a guardian, patron, or protector of a particular place, geographic feature, person, lineage, nation, culture, or occupation. The etymology of “tutelary” expresses the concept of safety and thus of guardianship. In late Greek and Roman religion, one type of tutelary deity, the genius, functions as the personal deity or daimon of an individual from birth to death. Another form of personal tutelary spirit is the familiar spirit of European folklore.” ref

“A tutelary (also tutelar) in Korean shamanism, jangseung and sotdae were placed at the edge of villages to frighten off demons. They were also worshiped as deities. Seonangshin is the patron deity of the village in Korean tradition and was believed to embody the Seonangdang. In Philippine animism, Diwata or Lambana are deities or spirits that inhabit sacred places like mountains and mounds and serve as guardians. Such as: Maria Makiling is the deity who guards Mt. Makiling and Maria Cacao and Maria Sinukuan. In Shinto, the spirits, or kami, which give life to human bodies come from nature and return to it after death. Ancestors are therefore themselves tutelaries to be worshiped. And similarly, Native American beliefs such as Tonás, tutelary animal spirit among the Zapotec and Totems, familial or clan spirits among the Ojibwe, can be animals.” ref

“A tutelary (also tutelar) in Austronesian beliefs such as: Atua (gods and spirits of the Polynesian peoples such as the Māori or the Hawaiians), Hanitu (Bunun of Taiwan‘s term for spirit), Hyang (Kawi, Sundanese, Javanese, and Balinese Supreme Being, in ancient Java and Bali mythology and this spiritual entity, can be either divine or ancestral), Kaitiaki (New Zealand Māori term used for the concept of guardianship, for the sky, the sea, and the land), Kawas (mythology) (divided into 6 groups: gods, ancestors, souls of the living, spirits of living things, spirits of lifeless objects, and ghosts), Tiki (Māori mythology, Tiki is the first man created by either Tūmatauenga or Tāne and represents deified ancestors found in most Polynesian cultures). ” ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref

Mesopotamian Tutelary Deities can be seen as ones related to City-States 

“Historical city-states included Sumerian cities such as Uruk and Ur; Ancient Egyptian city-states, such as Thebes and Memphis; the Phoenician cities (such as Tyre and Sidon); the five Philistine city-states; the Berber city-states of the Garamantes; the city-states of ancient Greece (the poleis such as Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Corinth); the Roman Republic (which grew from a city-state into a vast empire); the Italian city-states from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, such as Florence, Siena, Ferrara, Milan (which as they grew in power began to dominate neighboring cities) and Genoa and Venice, which became powerful thalassocracies; the Mayan and other cultures of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica (including cities such as Chichen Itza, Tikal, Copán and Monte Albán); the central Asian cities along the Silk Road; the city-states of the Swahili coast; Ragusa; states of the medieval Russian lands such as Novgorod and Pskov; and many others.” ref

“The Uruk period (ca. 4000 to 3100 BCE; also known as Protoliterate period) of Mesopotamia, named after the Sumerian city of Uruk, this period saw the emergence of urban life in Mesopotamia and the Sumerian civilization. City-States like Uruk and others had a patron tutelary City Deity along with a Priest-King.” ref

“Chinese folk religion, both past, and present, includes myriad tutelary deities. Exceptional individuals, highly cultivated sages, and prominent ancestors can be deified and honored after death. Lord Guan is the patron of military personnel and police, while Mazu is the patron of fishermen and sailors. Such as Tu Di Gong (Earth Deity) is the tutelary deity of a locality, and each individual locality has its own Earth Deity and Cheng Huang Gong (City God) is the guardian deity of an individual city, worshipped by local officials and locals since imperial times.” ref

“A tutelary (also tutelar) in Hinduism, personal tutelary deities are known as ishta-devata, while family tutelary deities are known as Kuladevata. Gramadevata are guardian deities of villages. Devas can also be seen as tutelary. Shiva is the patron of yogis and renunciants. City goddesses include: Mumbadevi (Mumbai), Sachchika (Osian); Kuladevis include: Ambika (Porwad), and Mahalakshmi. In NorthEast India Meitei mythology and religion (Sanamahism) of Manipur, there are various types of tutelary deities, among which Lam Lais are the most predominant ones. Tibetan Buddhism has Yidam as a tutelary deity. Dakini is the patron of those who seek knowledge.” ref

“A tutelary (also tutelar) The Greeks also thought deities guarded specific places: for instance, Athena was the patron goddess of the city of Athens. Socrates spoke of hearing the voice of his personal spirit or daimonion:

You have often heard me speak of an oracle or sign which comes to me … . This sign I have had ever since I was a child. The sign is a voice which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything, and this is what stands in the way of my being a politician.” ref

“Tutelary deities who guard and preserve a place or a person are fundamental to ancient Roman religion. The tutelary deity of a man was his Genius, that of a woman her Juno. In the Imperial era, the Genius of the Emperor was a focus of Imperial cult. An emperor might also adopt a major deity as his personal patron or tutelary, as Augustus did Apollo. Precedents for claiming the personal protection of a deity were established in the Republican era, when for instance the Roman dictator Sulla advertised the goddess Victory as his tutelary by holding public games (ludi) in her honor.” ref

“Each town or city had one or more tutelary deities, whose protection was considered particularly vital in time of war and siege. Rome itself was protected by a goddess whose name was to be kept ritually secret on pain of death (for a supposed case, see Quintus Valerius Soranus). The Capitoline Triad of Juno, Jupiter, and Minerva were also tutelaries of Rome. The Italic towns had their own tutelary deities. Juno often had this function, as at the Latin town of Lanuvium and the Etruscan city of Veii, and was often housed in an especially grand temple on the arx (citadel) or other prominent or central location. The tutelary deity of Praeneste was Fortuna, whose oracle was renowned.” ref

“The Roman ritual of evocatio was premised on the belief that a town could be made vulnerable to military defeat if the power of its tutelary deity were diverted outside the city, perhaps by the offer of superior cult at Rome. The depiction of some goddesses such as the Magna Mater (Great Mother, or Cybele) as “tower-crowned” represents their capacity to preserve the city. A town in the provinces might adopt a deity from within the Roman religious sphere to serve as its guardian, or syncretize its own tutelary with such; for instance, a community within the civitas of the Remi in Gaul adopted Apollo as its tutelary, and at the capital of the Remi (present-day Rheims), the tutelary was Mars Camulus.” ref 

Household deity (a kind of or related to a Tutelary deity)

“A household deity is a deity or spirit that protects the home, looking after the entire household or certain key members. It has been a common belief in paganism as well as in folklore across many parts of the world. Household deities fit into two types; firstly, a specific deity – typically a goddess – often referred to as a hearth goddess or domestic goddess who is associated with the home and hearth, such as the ancient Greek Hestia.” ref

“The second type of household deities are those that are not one singular deity, but a type, or species of animistic deity, who usually have lesser powers than major deities. This type was common in the religions of antiquity, such as the Lares of ancient Roman religion, the Gashin of Korean shamanism, and Cofgodas of Anglo-Saxon paganism. These survived Christianisation as fairy-like creatures existing in folklore, such as the Anglo-Scottish Brownie and Slavic Domovoy.” ref

“Household deities were usually worshipped not in temples but in the home, where they would be represented by small idols (such as the teraphim of the Bible, often translated as “household gods” in Genesis 31:19 for example), amulets, paintings, or reliefs. They could also be found on domestic objects, such as cosmetic articles in the case of Tawaret. The more prosperous houses might have a small shrine to the household god(s); the lararium served this purpose in the case of the Romans. The gods would be treated as members of the family and invited to join in meals, or be given offerings of food and drink.” ref

“In many religions, both ancient and modern, a god would preside over the home. Certain species, or types, of household deities, existed. An example of this was the Roman Lares. Many European cultures retained house spirits into the modern period. Some examples of these include:

• Brownie (Scotland and England) or Hob (England) / Kobold (Germany) / Goblin / Hobgoblin
• Domovoy (Slavic)
• Nisse (Norwegian or Danish) / Tomte (Swedish) / Tonttu (Finnish)
• Húsvættir (Norse)” ref

“Although the cosmic status of household deities was not as lofty as that of the Twelve Olympians or the Aesir, they were also jealous of their dignity and also had to be appeased with shrines and offerings, however humble. Because of their immediacy they had arguably more influence on the day-to-day affairs of men than the remote gods did. Vestiges of their worship persisted long after Christianity and other major religions extirpated nearly every trace of the major pagan pantheons. Elements of the practice can be seen even today, with Christian accretions, where statues to various saints (such as St. Francis) protect gardens and grottos. Even the gargoyles found on older churches, could be viewed as guardians partitioning a sacred space.” ref

“For centuries, Christianity fought a mop-up war against these lingering minor pagan deities, but they proved tenacious. For example, Martin Luther‘s Tischreden have numerous – quite serious – references to dealing with kobolds. Eventually, rationalism and the Industrial Revolution threatened to erase most of these minor deities, until the advent of romantic nationalism rehabilitated them and embellished them into objects of literary curiosity in the 19th century. Since the 20th century this literature has been mined for characters for role-playing games, video games, and other fantasy personae, not infrequently invested with invented traits and hierarchies somewhat different from their mythological and folkloric roots.” ref

“In contradistinction to both Herbert Spencer and Edward Burnett Tylor, who defended theories of animistic origins of ancestor worship, Émile Durkheim saw its origin in totemism. In reality, this distinction is somewhat academic, since totemism may be regarded as a particularized manifestation of animism, and something of a synthesis of the two positions was attempted by Sigmund Freud. In Freud’s Totem and Taboo, both totem and taboo are outward expressions or manifestations of the same psychological tendency, a concept which is complementary to, or which rather reconciles, the apparent conflict. Freud preferred to emphasize the psychoanalytic implications of the reification of metaphysical forces, but with particular emphasis on its familial nature. This emphasis underscores, rather than weakens, the ancestral component.” ref

“William Edward Hearn, a noted classicist, and jurist, traced the origin of domestic deities from the earliest stages as an expression of animism, a belief system thought to have existed also in the neolithic, and the forerunner of Indo-European religion. In his analysis of the Indo-European household, in Chapter II “The House Spirit”, Section 1, he states:

The belief which guided the conduct of our forefathers was … the spirit rule of dead ancestors.” ref

“In Section 2 he proceeds to elaborate:

It is thus certain that the worship of deceased ancestors is a vera causa, and not a mere hypothesis. …

In the other European nations, the Slavs, the Teutons, and the Kelts, the House Spirit appears with no less distinctness. … [T]he existence of that worship does not admit of doubt. … The House Spirits had a multitude of other names which it is needless here to enumerate, but all of which are more or less expressive of their friendly relations with man. … In [England] … [h]e is the Brownie. … In Scotland this same Brownie is well known. He is usually described as attached to particular families, with whom he has been known to reside for centuries, threshing the corn, cleaning the house, and performing similar household tasks. His favorite gratification was milk and honey.” ref

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Hinduism around 3,700 to 3,500 years old. ref

 Judaism around 3,450 or 3,250 years old. (The first writing in the bible was “Paleo-Hebrew” dated to around 3,000 years ago Khirbet Qeiyafa is the site of an ancient fortress city overlooking the Elah Valley. And many believe the religious Jewish texts were completed around 2,500) ref, ref

Judaism is around 3,450 or 3,250 years old. (“Paleo-Hebrew” 3,000 years ago and Torah 2,500 years ago)

“Judaism is an Abrahamic, its roots as an organized religion in the Middle East during the Bronze Age. Some scholars argue that modern Judaism evolved from Yahwism, the religion of ancient Israel and Judah, by the late 6th century BCE, and is thus considered to be one of the oldest monotheistic religions.” ref

“Yahwism is the name given by modern scholars to the religion of ancient Israel, essentially polytheistic, with a plethora of gods and goddesses. Heading the pantheon was Yahweh, the national god of the Israelite kingdoms of Israel and Judah, with his consort, the goddess Asherah; below them were second-tier gods and goddesses such as Baal, Shamash, Yarikh, Mot, and Astarte, all of whom had their own priests and prophets and numbered royalty among their devotees, and a third and fourth tier of minor divine beings, including the mal’ak, the messengers of the higher gods, who in later times became the angels of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Yahweh, however, was not the ‘original’ god of Israel “Isra-El”; it is El, the head of the Canaanite pantheon, whose name forms the basis of the name “Israel”, and none of the Old Testament patriarchs, the tribes of Israel, the Judges, or the earliest monarchs, have a Yahwistic theophoric name (i.e., one incorporating the name of Yahweh).” ref

“El is a Northwest Semitic word meaning “god” or “deity“, or referring (as a proper name) to any one of multiple major ancient Near Eastern deities. A rarer form, ‘ila, represents the predicate form in Old Akkadian and in Amorite. The word is derived from the Proto-Semitic *ʔil-, meaning “god”. Specific deities known as ‘El or ‘Il include the supreme god of the ancient Canaanite religion and the supreme god of East Semitic speakers in Mesopotamia’s Early Dynastic Period. ʼĒl is listed at the head of many pantheons. In some Canaanite and Ugaritic sources, ʼĒl played a role as father of the gods, of creation, or both. For example, in the Ugaritic texts, ʾil mlk is understood to mean “ʼĒl the King” but ʾil hd as “the god Hadad“. The Semitic root ʾlh (Arabic ʾilāh, Aramaic ʾAlāh, ʾElāh, Hebrew ʾelōah) may be ʾl with a parasitic h, and ʾl may be an abbreviated form of ʾlh. In Ugaritic the plural form meaning “gods” is ʾilhm, equivalent to Hebrew ʾelōhîm “powers”. In the Hebrew texts this word is interpreted as being semantically singular for “god” by biblical commentators. However the documentary hypothesis for the Old Testament (corresponds to the Jewish Torah) developed originally in the 1870s, identifies these that different authors – the Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and the Priestly source – were responsible for editing stories from a polytheistic religion into those of a monotheistic religion. Inconsistencies that arise between monotheism and polytheism in the texts are reflective of this hypothesis.” ref

Jainism around 2,599 – 2,527 years old. ref

Confucianism around 2,600 – 2,551 years old. ref

Buddhism around 2,563/2,480 – 2,483/2,400 years old. ref

Christianity around 2,o00 years old. ref

Shinto around 1,305 years old. ref

Islam around 1407–1385 years old. ref

Sikhism around 548–478 years old. ref

Bahá’í around 200–125 years old. ref

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

ref, ref, ref

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

The “Atheist-Humanist-Leftist Revolutionaries”

Cory Johnston ☭ Ⓐ Atheist Leftist @Skepticallefty & I (Damien Marie AtHope) @AthopeMarie (my YouTube & related blog) are working jointly in atheist, antitheist, antireligionist, antifascist, anarchist, socialist, and humanist endeavors in our videos together, generally, every other Saturday.

Why Does Power Bring Responsibility?

Think, how often is it the powerless that start wars, oppress others, or commit genocide? So, I guess the question is to us all, to ask, how can power not carry responsibility in a humanity concept? I know I see the deep ethical responsibility that if there is power their must be a humanistic responsibility of ethical and empathic stewardship of that power. Will I be brave enough to be kind? Will I possess enough courage to be compassionate? Will my valor reach its height of empathy? I as everyone, earns our justified respect by our actions, that are good, ethical, just, protecting, and kind. Do I have enough self-respect to put my love for humanity’s flushing, over being brought down by some of its bad actors? May we all be the ones doing good actions in the world, to help human flourishing.

I create the world I want to live in, striving for flourishing. Which is not a place but a positive potential involvement and promotion; a life of humanist goal precision. To master oneself, also means mastering positive prosocial behaviors needed for human flourishing. I may have lost a god myth as an atheist, but I am happy to tell you, my friend, it is exactly because of that, leaving the mental terrorizer, god belief, that I truly regained my connected ethical as well as kind humanity.

Cory and I will talk about prehistory and theism, addressing the relevance to atheism, anarchism, and socialism.

At the same time as the rise of the male god, 7,000 years ago, there was also the very time there was the rise of violence, war, and clans to kingdoms, then empires, then states. It is all connected back to 7,000 years ago, and it moved across the world.

Cory Johnston: https://damienmarieathope.com/2021/04/cory-johnston-mind-of-a-skeptical-leftist/?v=32aec8db952d  

The Mind of a Skeptical Leftist (YouTube)

Cory Johnston: Mind of a Skeptical Leftist @Skepticallefty

The Mind of a Skeptical Leftist By Cory Johnston: “Promoting critical thinking, social justice, and left-wing politics by covering current events and talking to a variety of people. Cory Johnston has been thoughtfully talking to people and attempting to promote critical thinking, social justice, and left-wing politics.” http://anchor.fm/skepticalleft

Cory needs our support. We rise by helping each other.

Cory Johnston ☭ Ⓐ @Skepticallefty Evidence-based atheist leftist (he/him) Producer, host, and co-host of 4 podcasts @skeptarchy @skpoliticspod and @AthopeMarie

Damien Marie AtHope (“At Hope”) Axiological Atheist, Anti-theist, Anti-religionist, Secular Humanist. Rationalist, Writer, Artist, Poet, Philosopher, Advocate, Activist, Psychology, and Armchair Archaeology/Anthropology/Historian.

Damien is interested in: Freedom, Liberty, Justice, Equality, Ethics, Humanism, Science, Atheism, Antiteism, Antireligionism, Ignosticism, Left-Libertarianism, Anarchism, Socialism, Mutualism, Axiology, Metaphysics, LGBTQI, Philosophy, Advocacy, Activism, Mental Health, Psychology, Archaeology, Social Work, Sexual Rights, Marriage Rights, Woman’s Rights, Gender Rights, Child Rights, Secular Rights, Race Equality, Ageism/Disability Equality, Etc. And a far-leftist, “Anarcho-Humanist.”

I am not a good fit in the atheist movement that is mostly pro-capitalist, I am anti-capitalist. Mostly pro-skeptic, I am a rationalist not valuing skepticism. Mostly pro-agnostic, I am anti-agnostic. Mostly limited to anti-Abrahamic religions, I am an anti-religionist. 

To me, the “male god” seems to have either emerged or become prominent around 7,000 years ago, whereas the now favored monotheism “male god” is more like 4,000 years ago or so. To me, the “female goddess” seems to have either emerged or become prominent around 11,000-10,000 years ago or so, losing the majority of its once prominence around 2,000 years ago due largely to the now favored monotheism “male god” that grow in prominence after 4,000 years ago or so. 

My Thought on the Evolution of Gods?

Animal protector deities from old totems/spirit animal beliefs come first to me, 13,000/12,000 years ago, then women as deities 11,000/10,000 years ago, then male gods around 7,000/8,000 years ago. Moralistic gods around 5,000/4,000 years ago, and monotheistic gods around 4,000/3,000 years ago. 

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope (Said as “At” “Hope”)/(Autodidact Polymath but not good at math):

Axiological Atheist, Anti-theist, Anti-religionist, Secular Humanist, Rationalist, Writer, Artist, Jeweler, Poet, “autodidact” Philosopher, schooled in Psychology, and “autodidact” Armchair Archaeology/Anthropology/Pre-Historian (Knowledgeable in the range of: 1 million to 5,000/4,000 years ago). I am an anarchist socialist politically. Reasons for or Types of Atheism

My Website, My Blog, & Short-writing or Quotes, My YouTube, Twitter: @AthopeMarie, and My Email: damien.marie.athope@gmail.com