My brother in Christ, check the context of the thread.

My guy, you commented on my thread. You’re the bother.

Learned a new thing men are insecure about.

I think you’ve missed that the assuming is kinda your whole problem here.

Yes, and it would be exhausting to entirely explain how flawed and ahistorical this is. For starters, you ignore social and property relations entirely when you imagine capitalism as “wealthy hoard money, empire make money.” Wealth disparity and imperialism are certainly elements in capitalism, but do you think all these scholars are just big dumdums who didn’t think of Rome?

I instead chose to encourage you to consider how you know what you know and that maybe you don’t actually know enough. You should consider now if that level of self-accountability is a waste of time.

Could you explain where you got your information on the historical conditions of capitalism? Is this just you interpreting what you’ve seen passively, or have you gone through the effort to find historians who have spent careers answering this question?

They said “tens of thousands of years” and you thought that meant two centuries before the Russian Revolution. I think you’ve mistaken dominant narratives of history as a European discipline with what has actually happened in the past. Yes, there are very many accounts of hierarchal violence, but that isn’t descriptive of how human beings behave. Most of what we’ve built has come from cooperation (think about how dependent the internet infrastructure is on free labour and cooperation) and the greatest obstacle we’ve faced as our communities grow is the exploitation that arises from patriarchal hierarchies. Exploitation is the site of those brutalities youre referring to.

Marx also wasn’t a historian, and wasn’t very knowledgeable about societies outside of Europe at all. That isn’t something we can fault him for as though it was his responsibility, but it is something you need to take into account if you’re going to engage with this progressive history model (Hegel didn’t know about’em either).

Kathleen Duval makes an interesting argument in Native Nations that we have evidence that indigenous Americans, in particular those who lived in relation to the Cahokia (Mississippian) civilisation, intentionally altered the trajectory of their social organization in response to this same exploitation. This isn’t to say hierarchy never existed again, though certainly in a less stratified way than the European settlers that arrived a couple centuries later, but it does teach us that humans do not want to live that way, which means they do not have to.

Yes. I am pointing that out. That is the imaginary thing.

“Somehow,” looks behind us at five centuries of European settler-colonialism.

“Everyone,” looks ahead at the millions of people who defy hegemonically enforced constructions of human nature despite the overwhelming power those systems possess.

Liberal doomerism based on imaginary restrictions, how new.