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Why People Say Capitalism is Violent
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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I think that the main factor is that I am off opinion that capitalist structures are present before the industrial period. But that the exploitation mechanism is different. I thought too have read something of the kind in Marx, but I stand corrected.
However the hooks of the mechanism were always present. I think that to say that capitalism was absent in history, while capital (in form of possession of wealth, production or time) was present is a bit myopic.
Forced labor is not capitalism... Egyptian pharaohs did not practice capitalism. Feudal lords did not practice capitalism. Black Americans in the south did not participate in a capitalist economic system for themselves (the white slave owners may have practiced capitalism amongst each other, but the slaves did not). To suggest that they are equivalent systems of economic activity is insane.
Elements of capitalism certainly existed prior to the industrial revolution... but that is like saying that socialism is basically capitalism with regulations on ownership of corporations that employ more than a handful of employees. Or that communism is essentially capitalism except there is communal ownership of all property.
There are fundamental differences between them that is a strawman to say they are the same. It is incorrect to say that the Egyptian pyramids were built in a capitalist society because "the pharaoh owned the mines". I can't even express how inane that sounds.
We can certainly compare the difference in the lives of the common people in these societies and, like I said before, there are reasonable arguments that modern commoners have worse situations than some did in historical system... but we can do that without conflating nonsense.