Flippanarchy

I mean, they built a... thing that benefited absolutely nobody, so it doesn't help the (still obviously true) point that you can do big and useful things without capitalism.

well ancient egypt did have payrolls and quarterly reports because that's kind of just a necessary function for a civilization of that scale. I know everybody hates payroll and doing quarterly reports but that isn't because sharing and / or having that type of information sucks, it's because it's all to do more nickel and dime shit

They used slaves, so not too far off from capitalism.

how did they build this without agentic ai workflows

Yeah, the famous neolithic serfs.

Jokes aside, coercion was always a thing, but naturalizing it as inevitable or even desirable stumps any kind of radical thought for a differenti way of things. The world is something we make, and we can make it differently

I mean, go back and read up on The Inclosure Acts and you're going to see the real bedrock of modern capitalism.

The relationship between aristocrats and serfs was materially different than capitalists and wage laborers. The former was more a method of formalized raiding and looting, while the later never lets labor have their hands on the goods to begin with.

In the same vein, Guilds were - at their heart - a system of professionalizing a craft and passing that knowledge on generation to generation. The modern academic institutions simply don't do that. Academic students have to demonstrate a broad competency in academic skills, but they have very little exposure to the commercial applications of their labor until the start their careers. A guild apprentice or journeyman is already building a client network as part of their training, while a college student only cultivates these relationships extra-curricularly (via internships or fellowships outside of the classroom).

These are radically different systems in practice, even if you can draw some vague parallels between instances of labor exploitation.

That very much depends on when and where you look in history. Many people didn't live that way at all and still lived in large communities and built things with the only coercion being the ties of community for hundreds to thousands of years.

Being a serf was apparently a lot less work and less miserable than you might think from pop culture. They worked for another, yes, but they also were looked after in return, and they didn't have to work the whole year. They also could just leave if they wanted to find a new place to live, which was a lot easier then than it is now. It wasn't the false choice of today where you work or starve.

Slavery, also, depended on the culture. In some cultures slaves were typically people who were captured or traded in compensation for a killing. But rather than be forced labor, they were treated as a sort of trial family member, and once the debt was seen as paid they would often be fully adopted as part of the community.

I recommend a book by David Graeber and David Wengrow called The Dawn of Everything, if you're interested in this sort of thing. It challenges the foundations of what we assume history was like using historical evidence, then reimagines foggy parts and builds an at least as probable image of the past in it's place.

we also created farms and art before feudalism. feudalism is also a capitalist structured society. capitalism did not come into existence when adam smith described it, he was just discussing how feudalism gates access to the commons through access to power. capitalism has existed for 12000 years, at least, we only started calling it capitalism in the 1700s. the key features of capitalism are owners of wealth generating resources, and workers who are paid to generate wealth using these wealth generating resources. in the age of feudalism, the wealth generating resource was the land itself, and how the ownership class acquired it was through their access to violence.

I don't think c/flippanarchy is advocating for feudalism in their critique of capitalism, but I could be wrong!

Feudalism isn't particularly far removed from capitalism. Even its natural shift to what is often called cronyism is a basically feudalism without the titles.

Nobody is pretending that. Get real.

Capitalism is getting plenty done! Just look at the climate!

Look at the global rise of fascism!

Do you think this shit just happens?

So your theory is that home builders are deliberately sitting on their hands? Are you mad?!

I've worked adjacent to their industry, known a great many one-man contractors and a couple of big home builders. Believe it, they will build as fast as they can get permits and capital.

The housing problem is mainly corporate ownership monopolizing homes. That can happen under any system. Look at China for the opposite extreme. They built too many homes! This requires legislation no matter the system.

Second, our populations have exploded. America's population has increased 59% since I was born and the world population has gone from 3.7B to 8.2B. That's a lot of bodies to house!

Imagine 5000 years in the future and archeologists state that workers today were paid in part by a stipend of pizza and coffee, based entirely off reports documenting the expenses of companies throwing pizza parties and having free coffee in break rooms.

No, thats what cops are for.

Wage dependence is there to gaslight and isolate (all of) us.

We have a real alternative. Check which comm yore in and the rules in the sidebar