Gotta start them off young

Sure there were slaves but capitalism made more than ever in human history but capitalism made them bigger and further away from the rich nations committing them’s population

Wouldn't completely agree here. There has simply been a massive technological advancement if we compare, for example, the "norse raids" with "european raids". Europeans could transport more and travel further. Also, there have been way more people alive if we compare those timeframes. Global population has grown steadily.

Don't get me wrong, capitalism certainly had a certain impact, but pretending like capitalism is the sole source is dishonest at best and stupid at worst. There have always been powerhungry people. Capitalism just gave everyone a chance to be power hungry instead of just the select few that were born into places of power.

Something I'd also like you to keep in mind that every communist regime that wasn't 50 people on a deserted island has resulted in a disaster for the population and surrounding countries. The soviet union has waged more than 15 offensive wars, for example georgia, poland, finland, iran, czech etc., which is almost as much as the US which has existed for like 250 years at this point. So pretending that communism is completely free of the things you criticize capitalism for is pretty dumb tbh.

Scale. It's about scale and centralization. Sure there were slaves but capitalism made more than ever in human history.

Depends on who you ask, and when, I guess. For instance, if you asked one of the nations conquered by the Mongols, they would've said that empire was the largest enslaver in history.

The Mongol Empire established a massive international slave trade founded upon war captives enslaved during the Mongol conquests, which were distributed by market demand around the empire via a network of slave markets connected through the cities of the empire.

Considering this was the largest contiguous empire in human history, the exploitation and damage was pretty extensive.

scale

More people had access to more people. Not complicated.

Capitalism is broken. It kills and needs to be completely broken down.

Communism is also broken. It kills and should not be pursued again by a major power.

This post is fucking stupid.

Yes. Capitalism is a tool that allows us to scale industry up. Good or bad. Just like fire is indispensable for our society, but if you don't regulate it properly, it will burn things down.

Capitalism allowed for scaling things up. Assholes got a hold of it first and used it to scale up slavery and wars. Doesn't mean it is inherently evil.

Sure, it is an imperfect and dangerous tool, but by far the best we have.

So you know nothing about the extent of pre-industrial slavery? Because it dwarfs the tiny bit they bought over to the Americas.

Not exactly, but whatever.

Mao and Stalin are both often cited as killing more of their own citizens than Hitler managed to do.

For Stalin is was a result of the 1930-1933 changes in policy to heavily prioritize heavy industry over food. Honestly hard to blame him, going from a war to a bloody revolution then overthrown for militaristic autocracy probably complicated a lot of things with no time between to normalize.

For Mao is was the result of making all private agriculture a offense worthy of capital punishment and instead made a grain quota for peasants to fill and send to the central government for distribution, then heavily investing in steel production and urbanization. Peasants didn't fill the quotas because the surpluses just didn't exist, if the central government just took what they wanted then in those cases the farmers just starved reducing next year's yield. Mao's came much later so he had no excuse.

So, yeah, they didn't get to eat meat every day. Or bread. Or even cereals.

The WHAT?

Please explain to me how sending most of the Baltic intelligensia to die in Siberia and replacing them with Russian settlers who held most positions of power was better for my rights than what I have right now.

Please tell me how great my grandmother in law had it living in the outskirts of Archangelsk in a wooden barrack because she was sent there against her will, how much more rights and opportunities she had back then.

Please explain to me how great the industrial management in the USSR was, where they built a bunch of heavy industries in countries that had few mineral resources to support them locally, leading to plant closures in the 90s.

Before WWII, Estonia was a bit richer than Finland. Not it is lagging behind by decades.

but corporate firms, investment banks, stock markets, ownership and commodification of land, and other hallmarks of capitalism are more recent.

these are more recent, and the things they have done, are in fact, also more recent, HOWEVER. The point you entirely miss out on here, is that capitalism is ultimately just an extension of mankind. There is nothing inherently different from capitalism, to any prior system, in the context of abuse of human rights, or however you wish to frame that particular problem.

It's merely an extension of the problem that has plagued humanity throughout history. I don't think as the meme suggests, that this is a problem with capitalism, i think this is a problem with humanity, and capitalism just allows it to bleed through, as every other system throughout history has done, and every new system ever invented will continue to be vulnerable to. I do not think this is a problem that can be solved.

also to be fair, that meme is probably missing out on the hundreds of millions of human causalities that were had during the time period of the USSR. No system is immune to this problem.

yes, however. It only takes one to ruin them all.

It doesn't matter if only 0.00001% of the worlds population is inherently evil and strives to do the most evil deed possible, because that is still 80k people. If any one of those persons gets into a position of power anywhere all hell will break loose, if only for a fraction of a second in the grand scheme of total human history. These things tend to snowball.

The wars of Genghis Khan are said to have killed 10% of the population of the entire earth at the time. Is that enough scale?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_Empire

Yeah, the citations of factual events are in the links below the quote. Check out Willam Blum's "Killing Hope" (pdf link) for more citations than you can shake a stick at.

Around that period there was a huge leap forward in the quality of the boats. England and Portugal were maritime powers. They were limited by the distance they could sail, and suddenly could sail much farther. Enforcing control on the opposite side of the world would have previously been unthinkable. Capitalism isn't the reason they started conquering the globe. It's the improved boats that allowed them to travel the globe in the first place. The spirit of imperialism was already there before capitalism came around.

Civilization is a product of slavery and it started in mesopotamia

Seems like there's a lot of that going around here.

It's not specific to slavery, but the entire claim of "capitalism started in the UK" and that that's somehow the cause of all the world's problems.

However, the Kingdom of Mali profited greatly from slavery, with the trans-Atlantic slave trade simply being a later chapter in its long history of trading slaves.

As for capitalism; King Mansa Musa went on a pilgrimage to Mecca and deliberately crashed the value of gold in Cairo, the then trade capitol of the world during the middle ages. He did this as a move to bring, and steal, trade interests for Mali.

*looks at bigtech*

Same.

Depends, do you think they define systems of production and distribution or do you agree with OP about it being descriptors of western and eastern world powers?

If it's the first one, then no, aside from anarchy.

If it's this second one, a more fair, equal, and direct democracy would be cool.

Whichever one doesn’t include people

The Bible warns of greed, talks about how people with wealth will never go to heaven. Look at how much colonization/spread Abrahamic religions have and they still couldn’t solve this

The worst part is they could and did grow what they used to eat. It just was packed off to England while the Irish starved as their own potato crops (which they could afford to eat) failed.

There was no famine. It was a deliberate and political choice to let the people who grew the crops starve.

If you think of the first corporation as the start of capitalism the Dutch East India company started in 1602, so that would be 17th century Netherlands, not 16th century England. In any case, I think the obvious choice for a date is 18th century England (together with the Industrial Revolution). Of course, you can trace the origins back much earlier even to antiquity, but capitalism the idea to organise most economic activity around capital is in my understanding more recent.

"Magnates"

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/magnate-vs-magnet-usage-difference

There's actually a lot of interesting recent work that points to wage labor being very prevalent in the Roman economy! The idea of slavery as the main driver of the production of the Roman economy is not nearly as popular now even amongst academics who take a 'primitivist' view of the Roman economy (ie that it resembled the customary economies around it more than later, early modern economies). Though, obviously, either way it had significant social influence and implications, and was far from economically inconsequential.

I, eh, would think that Phoenician societies and a lot of Ancient Greece could be called that too.

In any case, if everything involving markets and mutually voluntary deals and trade is called capitalism, then everything is capitalism. But that doesn't make any sense.

Capitalism is specifically what Marx was talking about - where the economic system is kinda free and equal, but to be a subject in it you have to own some capital, allowing you to create enterprises. You can't do it with just your head and two hands, because it's very expensive. So you need to ally with some generational wealth. Quite often that of aristocrats.

So-o things like VC and more recently crowdfunding and what not, which everybody blames for enshittification and such, are what ended the original capitalism in some sense. People who have some kind of a business plan and skills, and small capital (something realistic to assemble), can try. Also the startup incubators and all that.

A lot of it is BS, but in general you don't have to make an appointment with some Victorian dude with a monocle, wait for him a few hours, then explain your whole idea to him a few more hours, and then - that dude will be very polite and knowledgeable and interested, by the way, - likely get a commendation letter to some acquaintances of the dude, his written commentary with advice on your ideas, and a polite refusal.

There was some private industry and profit, but at the end of the day, it was all about enriching the empire and giving the people bread and circuses to keep them quiet.

Less than you might think! The Imperial state apparatus was actually very skeletal compared to what we think of it, at least during the height of the Empire. We're talking entire provinces with only a few dozen actual imperial officials to manage it, most of whom brought their own private staffs. Senators were formally barred from large-scale commerce, but they got around this by investing their money with non-office-holding individuals to engage in business on an obscene scale. Most of the resources moving around were moved by private trade, and at immense profit. Only a few resources were subject to imperial monopolies or had widespread imperial control; everyone else was playing a more-or-less recognizable hustle of commerce - buy or lease cheap, produce at low cost, sell at high profit.

Every Roman citizen got fed. Which is pretty anti-capitalistic.

Not even close, I'm afraid! Even in the city of Rome itself, and it was only in the city itself where the grain dole was in effect, it was limited to a certain number of citizens, and most of it was sold subsidized by the state rather than free. Those citizens who received the grain dole, furthermore, were not selected out of the poorest of the poor - it was largely the established working families - semiskilled workers, artisans. small merchants and the like, who might be expected to have times of hardship but not be in constant danger of starvation - it was a political subsidy to these people, who still had some social pull and connections in the city but were not integrated enough into the power structures to have a firm interest in sustaining it, to keep them from calling for anything dangerous, like more democracy!

The ultra-impoverished largely were left to the issue of charity and political patronage (which was big in Rome), and starved about as much as any impoverished pre-modern group. Maybe a little less, considering votes were almost literally bought long after voting ceased to be meaningful. One supposes that's a bit more money than most would have.

Since @[email protected] seems to be the expert in all things Roman, I'd be interested in seeing their take. Seems to me from what I've read that Rome was capitalist as hell and that was a major reason for expansion.

The notion that they gave out "bread and circuses" somehow made them other than that seems pretty facile. The bread and circuses was usually a quid-pro-quo to the colleges for their votes. There were very, very rich civilians and dirt poor nobles, and that doesn't seem to happen in an inheritance feudalism very often. Funding an army as a general and taking the wealth it conquered seems about as capitalist as you can imagine. Yah, you had to wait for an appointment as a governor for the areas you conquered, but that was usually just a matter of form.

So capitalism isn't the problem, then.

and giving the people bread and circuses to keep them quiet. Every Roman citizen got fed.

Fed and entertained.

So like the east indian company alone killed twice as many people as Authoritarian communism... As has The Congo Freestate (King Leopalds rubber corporation in the Congo)....

....so basically Capitalism has killed WAY more people that Communism, and that's just two corporate endeavors.

Lol, yes, the famine in 1945 was all just because of Stalin's ambient evilness. There was nothing else going on at the time that might have affected the USSRs ability to produce food.

They were a crown chartered company in the 17th century. Not the 16th. And they were founded to make it easier for the crown to colonize and control those colonies.

That's not basic math, that's just wrong and is the inverse fallacy

Because telling people capitalism began in the 16th century creates a confused and misinformed understanding of history that makes it more difficult for people to reason about the world.

As in they use him to "debunk Socialism/communism"

That these things exist independently of capitalism, probably

Not the guy you responded too, but his point is obvious.

The assertion that capitalism is the root cause of the atrocities listed based purely on their existing at the same time is evidence of nothing.

People have always been like this, increases in technology have helped increase mans mistreatment of his fellow man. Economic system be damned, that's not the point.

Or do you think mercantilism or feudalism where actually any better?

Sounds like they're trying to say "blame the Jews."