> that it is the natural state of affairs and everything leading up to it was a proto-captialist society (see the myth of a barter society, which never existed).
Wasn't that one of Marx's ideas? Certainly the part about everything leading to capitalism (including the proto-capitalist part). We're stuck at this stage for longer than he might have expected but I don't see how that invalidates his core ideas...
> capitalism is an immortal and immovable default state of human being.
Depends on how you define "capitalism" but in many ways it (at least many aspects of/proto-capitalism as you said) just seems like the default equilibria state human societies converge to without someone using excessive force/violence to mould it into something else.
At the end of the day humans need/want food/stuff to survive. Them giving it away them altruistically wouldn't be the best from the evolutionary perspective (i.e. their descendants if they kept doing the same would soon be outcompeted by more selfish individuals). Mutually beneficial (on the individual level) exchange of goods services seems seems to lead to extremely high productivity and no other system/approach can really compete with it.
Yeah it is sort of a Marxist idea, that doesn't mean its correct nor does it mean that it's not co-opted and warped by capitalists to make their own points.
Some level of market seems sort of natural but I think I would say full blown capitalism was a temporary stepping stone that was necessary in order to bring us to modern industrial civilisation. And now there is really absolutely zero reason to have as high as possible productivity. Like most people are being forced to pretend to be super productive at totally bullshit jobs because we really do not need that much labour any more to get things done. As humans it would feel more natural and less miserable to not live under this system.
> And now there is really absolutely zero reason to have as high as possible productivity.
Why? Redistribution is a problem and of course there are negative externalities (environmental and other) associated with the high growth over the few hundred years. But it doesn't mean that productivity can't continue growing even if we find ways to handle those things.
> Like most people are being forced to pretend to be super productive at totally bullshit jobs because we really do not need that much labour any more to get things done
So they aren't super productive? Inefficiencies exist in every system. And people spending a lot of effort working without producing any real value is not particularly "capitalist" at all.
But I do think that "capitalism" (again, it's very hard to provide any meaningful arguments when it's not at all clear what you mean by that specifically) enables higher productivity but it doesn't necessarily force you to maximize your productivity (due to technological and institutional progress we should be able to have enough surplus, at least for a generation or so, unless people start having children again..)
Wasn't that one of Marx's ideas? Certainly the part about everything leading to capitalism (including the proto-capitalist part). We're stuck at this stage for longer than he might have expected but I don't see how that invalidates his core ideas...
> capitalism is an immortal and immovable default state of human being.
Depends on how you define "capitalism" but in many ways it (at least many aspects of/proto-capitalism as you said) just seems like the default equilibria state human societies converge to without someone using excessive force/violence to mould it into something else.
At the end of the day humans need/want food/stuff to survive. Them giving it away them altruistically wouldn't be the best from the evolutionary perspective (i.e. their descendants if they kept doing the same would soon be outcompeted by more selfish individuals). Mutually beneficial (on the individual level) exchange of goods services seems seems to lead to extremely high productivity and no other system/approach can really compete with it.