For much of history, progress was driven by exploitation. If you leave them be, farmers will produce what they need to survive and a little more for safety margin. There wouldn’t be much surplus to feed non-agrarian workers with, particularly those not immediately visible to the farmer. The smith forging their plows may be visible, but the lumberjacks, colliers, miners and such producing the metal for those plows aren’t.
To a farmer without modern education and understanding of logistics, the idea of working more just to support some nebulous group somewhere out there that does fuck-knows-what, on the promise that the results eventually circle back to them, that’s a little far-fetched. After all, what they’ve been doing has been working well enough, why change anything?
The driving factor for progress, cruel as it is, has been the military aristocracy doing things like demanding taxes* or guarding land with weapons so the farmers can’t feed their family with just their own land and are forced to work on that aristocrat’s land as sharecroppers, taking home one share of the crop while the other goes to the landlord. Thus, the aristocracy forces the farmers to work more than they personally need.
The extorted “extracted” surplus can then feed other professions, which can produce stuff that eventually improves life for the farmers (such as steel tools making work easier, improved weaving racks, figuring out how diseases work and can be prevented). Ideally, the extra work would eventually pay off, the farmers would recognise the value and no longer need forcing.
The problem is obviously that the landlord in question doesn’t do it for the good of society, but for their own enrichment; the crumbs that fall off the table for everyone else’s benefit are incidental. If they just took those taxes and supplies in order to distribute them as they are needed, we might be looking at some form of despotic communism (which is a separate debate), but it’s a bit hard to convince people “your extra work is totally worth it, dude” when they see their extra work building His Grace another pretty mansion to station his goons at.
I won’t spell out the parallel here, but the point is: our prosperity, technology, culture is built on exploitation forcing people to work beyond subsistence. With education, we could understand that value and make working some measure beyond bare necessities palatable and perhaps even rewarding.
But that kind of education would also point out the injustice and inefficiency in the system, so we get “guarding land with weapons” instead.
* As an interesting aside, pre-modern taxes often come in two forms: in currency and in kind, which means in food, fabric, goods in general. Taxes in currency are a great way to introduce money into a society: by demanding they give you money, you force the peasants to find a way to get money, like selling surplus. This also enables them to spend whatever is left over after taxes to buy goods and tools, and that’s how they actually get things in return for their surplus labour. In the absence of some other method of distribution, this is another case of the aristocrats’ greed accidently fostering a useful system. Of course, the flipside of that coin is – again – that the extorted taxes end up funding the luxury of few instead of the utility of many.
Nope, bullshit lies based on less than zero understanding oh history and some crazy racism against indigenous peoples of generally everywhere but the Americas in fucking particular.
Fuck you and fuck your made up racost bullshit please.
I read four paragraphs in and the only thing I can find that isn’t a blatant lie is that tools can be used to make work easier, and even that is deployed in a deceptive manner that elides other ways to save labor that real historical cultures have practiced.
Like there’s no part of this that is true. Read ‘the dawn of everything: a new history of humanity’ and ‘debt: the first five thousand years’ for a very bare bones but actually real scholarship account of how any of this shit happened by actual scholars who examined history and evidence and facts. As I recall at least one of those was a little bit of a doorstopper, as actual not just made the fuck up racism to justify your bullshit actual fucking history tends to be.
All of it except ‘tools can be helpful’, as I said.
And offered something that explains the real version of what they’re making shit up about-books written at least in part to address the fact people just make shit up about early humanity and the origins of things like social forms and hierarchy and money based on what they think makes sense from what they can see right now in the present day. And the fact its made up.
No I can’t explain in detail, like I said they told too many lies for that, and suggested two books that would do that.
Once you have read those, if you still need me to explain why I think that was racist, I’ll try in very small words.
Did you not read my comment? I feel like you just asked for things I said in my original comment.
The truth is big and complex and lies are simple and fit just-so. The truth is bigger and messier and always more complicated and almost always stranger. Hence entire volumes of work.
I even cited scholarly work, if not in strict academic format! so if you want to be a fucking debatelord about it, you are free to do so.
I’m not writing about modernity, let alone the Americas. You’ll find no disagreement from me that the way European Imperialists forced their culture on indigenous people was an atrocity.
The history I’m talking about is centered on Europe, because that’s what I know most about. Simplified, sure, but if you want the full version you might as well read these series on agricultural subsistence, textile production and the general outline of the lives of pre-modern peasants, with all the attendant insights into the social structures of those times. Which, by the way, were written by a real historian, thoroughly sourced with history and evidence and facts, and with all the appropriate caveats that I omitted because I’m not writing a fucking dissertation when I’m trying to show that education is a key ingredient to even properly understanding the shitshow we’re in.
I’m pretty sure we agree on the last part too, if you weren’t hung up on hostility about a topic I neither mentioned not disagree with you on.
So can we be civil and try to help me understand what part of this comes across as racist to you? Or at least some substantial criticism instead of “this is all wrong, but I’m not telling you how”? What part do these books explain that I got wrong?
For much of history, progress was driven by exploitation. If you leave them be, farmers will produce what they need to survive and a little more for safety margin. There wouldn’t be much surplus to feed non-agrarian workers with, particularly those not immediately visible to the farmer. The smith forging their plows may be visible, but the lumberjacks, colliers, miners and such producing the metal for those plows aren’t.
To a farmer without modern education and understanding of logistics, the idea of working more just to support some nebulous group somewhere out there that does fuck-knows-what, on the promise that the results eventually circle back to them, that’s a little far-fetched. After all, what they’ve been doing has been working well enough, why change anything?
The driving factor for progress, cruel as it is, has been the military aristocracy doing things like demanding taxes* or guarding land with weapons so the farmers can’t feed their family with just their own land and are forced to work on that aristocrat’s land as sharecroppers, taking home one share of the crop while the other goes to the landlord. Thus, the aristocracy forces the farmers to work more than they personally need.
The
extorted“extracted” surplus can then feed other professions, which can produce stuff that eventually improves life for the farmers (such as steel tools making work easier, improved weaving racks, figuring out how diseases work and can be prevented). Ideally, the extra work would eventually pay off, the farmers would recognise the value and no longer need forcing.The problem is obviously that the landlord in question doesn’t do it for the good of society, but for their own enrichment; the crumbs that fall off the table for everyone else’s benefit are incidental. If they just took those taxes and supplies in order to distribute them as they are needed, we might be looking at some form of despotic communism (which is a separate debate), but it’s a bit hard to convince people “your extra work is totally worth it, dude” when they see their extra work building His Grace another pretty mansion to station his goons at.
I won’t spell out the parallel here, but the point is: our prosperity, technology, culture is built on exploitation forcing people to work beyond subsistence. With education, we could understand that value and make working some measure beyond bare necessities palatable and perhaps even rewarding.
But that kind of education would also point out the injustice and inefficiency in the system, so we get “guarding land with weapons” instead.
* As an interesting aside, pre-modern taxes often come in two forms: in currency and in kind, which means in food, fabric, goods in general. Taxes in currency are a great way to introduce money into a society: by demanding they give you money, you force the peasants to find a way to get money, like selling surplus. This also enables them to spend whatever is left over after taxes to buy goods and tools, and that’s how they actually get things in return for their surplus labour. In the absence of some other method of distribution, this is another case of the aristocrats’ greed accidently fostering a useful system. Of course, the flipside of that coin is – again – that the extorted taxes end up funding the luxury of few instead of the utility of many.
Nope, bullshit lies based on less than zero understanding oh history and some crazy racism against indigenous peoples of generally everywhere but the Americas in fucking particular.
Fuck you and fuck your made up racost bullshit please.
I read four paragraphs in and the only thing I can find that isn’t a blatant lie is that tools can be used to make work easier, and even that is deployed in a deceptive manner that elides other ways to save labor that real historical cultures have practiced.
Like there’s no part of this that is true. Read ‘the dawn of everything: a new history of humanity’ and ‘debt: the first five thousand years’ for a very bare bones but actually real scholarship account of how any of this shit happened by actual scholars who examined history and evidence and facts. As I recall at least one of those was a little bit of a doorstopper, as actual not just made the fuck up racism to justify your bullshit actual fucking history tends to be.
Could you try explaining what the user said that was incorrect instead of calling them racist four times and citing some book?
All of it except ‘tools can be helpful’, as I said.
And offered something that explains the real version of what they’re making shit up about-books written at least in part to address the fact people just make shit up about early humanity and the origins of things like social forms and hierarchy and money based on what they think makes sense from what they can see right now in the present day. And the fact its made up.
No I can’t explain in detail, like I said they told too many lies for that, and suggested two books that would do that.
Once you have read those, if you still need me to explain why I think that was racist, I’ll try in very small words.
Did you not read my comment? I feel like you just asked for things I said in my original comment.
The truth is big and complex and lies are simple and fit just-so. The truth is bigger and messier and always more complicated and almost always stranger. Hence entire volumes of work.
I even cited scholarly work, if not in strict academic format! so if you want to be a fucking debatelord about it, you are free to do so.
I’m not writing about modernity, let alone the Americas. You’ll find no disagreement from me that the way European Imperialists forced their culture on indigenous people was an atrocity.
The history I’m talking about is centered on Europe, because that’s what I know most about. Simplified, sure, but if you want the full version you might as well read these series on agricultural subsistence, textile production and the general outline of the lives of pre-modern peasants, with all the attendant insights into the social structures of those times. Which, by the way, were written by a real historian, thoroughly sourced with history and evidence and facts, and with all the appropriate caveats that I omitted because I’m not writing a fucking dissertation when I’m trying to show that education is a key ingredient to even properly understanding the shitshow we’re in.
I’m pretty sure we agree on the last part too, if you weren’t hung up on hostility about a topic I neither mentioned not disagree with you on.
So can we be civil and try to help me understand what part of this comes across as racist to you? Or at least some substantial criticism instead of “this is all wrong, but I’m not telling you how”? What part do these books explain that I got wrong?