I’m confused reading this here of all places. That’s a mythos pushed by capitalism as part of the portrayal of history as a linear progression of improvement with capitalism being justified as part of that improvement.
Life was nasty, brutish and short.
And this part sounds very much like the civil/savage colonial narrative that pretends societies were inherently more savage before and have now “evolved” (guess who takes on the label of having “evolved” most of all - colonizer systems).
Some conditions for some people were worse, sure. As a whole, saying it was overall worse is ahistorical nonsense. You could argue technological improvements that came with industrialization, advances in science, medicine, etc., lessened a lot of suffering for people who could actually access those improvements and benefit from them. But then we are talking about when they could benefit, not as a given. Which is very relevant to a discussion like this. Some people are suffering a lot more than others. I support you in saying in such a context that “plenty of happy moments” can be had within that regardless, but it is part of the reality we’re dealing with.
I would much rather live under modern capitalism than feudalism. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still awful, but a different kind of awful. I like not being the property of the local landowner, even if I do have to spend most of my money each week on rent. Capitalism is a “better” system than those it replaced, our job as socialists is to replace capitalism with a better system, but we don’t do that by pretending capitalism is just all pain and suffering all the time.
I don’t even know where to begin with how ignorant of a take this is. You think the worst of capitalism is paying for rent? How about the homeless people whose tents get bulldozed? You think this is all about how you personally experience capitalism, is that it? We don’t need to give capitalism credit in order to replace it with something better, that’s an asinine position to have. If you are a colonized person trying to liberate from a settler occupier would you say, “Well it’s better under the settler than it was before, but our job is to replace it by ousting them”???
I’m confused reading this here of all places. That’s a mythos pushed by capitalism as part of the portrayal of history as a linear progression of improvement with capitalism being justified as part of that improvement.
And this part sounds very much like the civil/savage colonial narrative that pretends societies were inherently more savage before and have now “evolved” (guess who takes on the label of having “evolved” most of all - colonizer systems).
Some conditions for some people were worse, sure. As a whole, saying it was overall worse is ahistorical nonsense. You could argue technological improvements that came with industrialization, advances in science, medicine, etc., lessened a lot of suffering for people who could actually access those improvements and benefit from them. But then we are talking about when they could benefit, not as a given. Which is very relevant to a discussion like this. Some people are suffering a lot more than others. I support you in saying in such a context that “plenty of happy moments” can be had within that regardless, but it is part of the reality we’re dealing with.
I would much rather live under modern capitalism than feudalism. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still awful, but a different kind of awful. I like not being the property of the local landowner, even if I do have to spend most of my money each week on rent. Capitalism is a “better” system than those it replaced, our job as socialists is to replace capitalism with a better system, but we don’t do that by pretending capitalism is just all pain and suffering all the time.
I don’t even know where to begin with how ignorant of a take this is. You think the worst of capitalism is paying for rent? How about the homeless people whose tents get bulldozed? You think this is all about how you personally experience capitalism, is that it? We don’t need to give capitalism credit in order to replace it with something better, that’s an asinine position to have. If you are a colonized person trying to liberate from a settler occupier would you say, “Well it’s better under the settler than it was before, but our job is to replace it by ousting them”???