Capitalism was nice when it first popped up. Because it was an improvement over feudalism.
Actually, it wasn’t that nice when it first popped up, considering the first capitalist ventures were colonialism (including the conquest of the Aztec and Incan empires and the east Indian tea company that was worse for India than Hitler was for Europe).
But it was relatively nice because before capitalism, most development needed to be done by the king, who had limited funds. Bankers had been building wealth and capitalism allowed them to become new sub kings with their own empires. More empires meant more development, which also means a lot of employment, so it did increase the quality of life for many people as they got paid to improve things around them and new products popped up.
But we’ve since outgrown the whole kings thing for control of a geographic or political region while corporations are still run like dictatorships (with the executive team acting as sub kings for the board, which acts as sub kings for the shareholders, where institutional investors dominate, which just makes the whole thing less transparent because those institutions also have similar command structures).
So while there is some truth to capitalism having had a positive impact, the overall story is more complicated than that (the plunder from colonialism made it look a lot better at a high price in the colonies, and it was a relative improvement to “only the lord of the land can develop it and benefit from that improvement”) and society has generally since rejected that model for running political regions but the economic model has yet to catch up.
The capitalists are resisting that change similarly to how the kings resisted changing from monarchies to republics and have been since around WWI and the fascist regimes of the 20s and 30s were a result of capitalists siding with them to prevent various leftist movements from gaining power.
Colonialism was pursued under the economic theory of mercantilism and capitalist thinkers explicitly separated their ideas from it (among other things by emphasis on the idea that the best kind of wealth is tools instead of gold and as a result the pursuit of wealth can be cooperative instead of zero sum game), but otherwise sure it all looks the same in the end. It’s not like capitalists ever stopped and said “No, don’t invade that country for its natural resources, that goes against our principles of making more money.”
Capitalism was nice when it first popped up. Because it was an improvement over feudalism.
Actually, it wasn’t that nice when it first popped up, considering the first capitalist ventures were colonialism (including the conquest of the Aztec and Incan empires and the east Indian tea company that was worse for India than Hitler was for Europe).
But it was relatively nice because before capitalism, most development needed to be done by the king, who had limited funds. Bankers had been building wealth and capitalism allowed them to become new sub kings with their own empires. More empires meant more development, which also means a lot of employment, so it did increase the quality of life for many people as they got paid to improve things around them and new products popped up.
But we’ve since outgrown the whole kings thing for control of a geographic or political region while corporations are still run like dictatorships (with the executive team acting as sub kings for the board, which acts as sub kings for the shareholders, where institutional investors dominate, which just makes the whole thing less transparent because those institutions also have similar command structures).
So while there is some truth to capitalism having had a positive impact, the overall story is more complicated than that (the plunder from colonialism made it look a lot better at a high price in the colonies, and it was a relative improvement to “only the lord of the land can develop it and benefit from that improvement”) and society has generally since rejected that model for running political regions but the economic model has yet to catch up.
The capitalists are resisting that change similarly to how the kings resisted changing from monarchies to republics and have been since around WWI and the fascist regimes of the 20s and 30s were a result of capitalists siding with them to prevent various leftist movements from gaining power.
Fucking well put!
Colonialism was pursued under the economic theory of mercantilism and capitalist thinkers explicitly separated their ideas from it (among other things by emphasis on the idea that the best kind of wealth is tools instead of gold and as a result the pursuit of wealth can be cooperative instead of zero sum game), but otherwise sure it all looks the same in the end. It’s not like capitalists ever stopped and said “No, don’t invade that country for its natural resources, that goes against our principles of making more money.”