Oh yeah they were serious. They observed how economic relations influenced political structures and concluded that if the working class with their sheer numbers rose up and replaced the bourgeois governments with a government of their own, they as the workers while acting in their self interest would democratize the economy and the State would no longer be needed, and eventually whither away like a vestigial organ. They thought that because industrialization had so concentrated human life as well as the economy, it had also created a common self interest among the majority of the population that would prove stronger than individualistic greed. While this was ultimately proven false I personally don't think it was inevitable. Intense power struggles both within the Communist Party and between capitalist and socialist nations prompted a strategic battle which had huge implications for the results of the socialist experiment. Espionage, color revolutions, and the Cold War at large twisted the paths both East and West would take. I think theres much to learn, both from the texts on political economy from Marx and Engels as well as the theories on realpolitik by figures like Lenin and Mao, that could enrich our perspective in the world we find ourselves in. (And yes Marx and Engels were not themselves proletariat, as academics they lived in a tidepool downstream of the productive economy and this subclass they named petit-bourgeois.) And yeah I agree our progress of a species transcends the dichotomy of capitalism vs socialism. I view individualism and western capitalist democracy as the other side of the coin, molded into a dangerous and inhibiting dogma by the heightened anxieties of the 20th century much like socialism was.
Thoughts are with y'all out in Cali stay safe
Read "Our Band Could Be Your Life" by Michael Azzerad
You're right it's an emergent system, the seeds of it grew out of the systems before until it became the status quo. We didn't create or invent it deliberately, but it is comprised entirely of human behavior so in that sense we do actively recreate it. It's natural in the sense that literally everything is "natural", because it emerged organically. But to say it's " just the way things are" is a myopic and ahistorical viewpoint. Capitalism isn't trade itself, it's a protocol for conducting trade defined by how we as a species define and enforce property rights. Like all other systems there was a time before it and there will be a time after it.
Capitalism has only existed for 0.174℅ of Human history, and that's being generous
(Humanity = 300.000years and Capitalism 1500AD-present)
Coinos.io. Or minibits or enuts if you wanna mess around with ecash. From what I've used
Once a lame always a lame
Yeah I was trying to lost a photo this morning and it couldn't upload
I've sworn off the nostr and come back a couple times for similar reasons, it's too powerful a tool for me to ignore. Worth combing through to find the cool folks hanging around here, and in time more and more will pop out :handshake_sm:
Woof OK we got some typos. I misquoted the goat Lao Tzu??? Hope is as HOLLOW as fear. Why is hope as hollow as fear? Idfk ask nostr:nprofile1qqsyawyrzrttfmv4cmtx5w2m85702kdct7hv3amfrkhagpdf9cz46mgprpmhxue69uhkv6tvw3jhytnwdaehgu3wwa5kuef0qyghwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnhd9hx2tcpydmhxue69uhkv6tvw3jhytnwdaehgu3wwa5kuef08ankcmmzv9kr6ctvds20l3q3. I also probably attributed Marx talking legislation to the wrong section, went off memory because even the ai I used for citations can't get through his whole book.
nostr:naddr1qqxnzdenxcenqwf5xvenyvenqyt8wumn8ghj7mn0wd68yetvd96x2uewdaexwtczyz74p2zkgmka0zv4vnesknkjwrjmjeya25d46k75xfmel0gr3ay8cqcyqqq823c3v5248
nostr:naddr1qqxnzdenxcenqwf5xvenyvenqyt8wumn8ghj7mn0wd68yetvd96x2uewdaexwtczyz74p2zkgmka0zv4vnesknkjwrjmjeya25d46k75xfmel0gr3ay8cqcyqqq823c3v5248
You are under no contractual obligation to boost this
Marx did not think Capital was limited, he saw it as a dynamic process of value creation and accumulation. As a matter of fact he predicts in Kapital Vol2 the precarious everything bubble the traditional market is sitting on top of now thanks to the advent of the finance industry But I sense the similarities you're talking about, and was actually working on a long form post about it this morning before work! I would say that the biggest commonality is the idea of those with their hands on the levers of the economy use that power to ciphon surplus value from the working class, whether you view the main part of that theft to be through the purchasing of labor power or through inflation (or both).
Awr nawrr chawlie 