I love that the dragon isn’t even dead XD
Should marry the nerd dragon, make a kingdom of nerds. A great civilization shall outlive any amount of gold.
I enjoyed this very much, thank you.
Result: loads of labourers lose employment, the rich take land from the commoners.
That’s only in capitalism. If the labourers owned the thresher it would mean they would spend less time threshing and could choose what to do with the newly freed time.
A nice thought, but generally the answer to “what we do with the newly freed time” has been “expand production until we no longer have free time”.
If peasant farmers get a piece of technology that lets them thresh wheat twice as fast, they’ll plant twice as many acres in wheat - because being able to grow more wheat makes you more secure in times of famine, and gives you a surplus to sell or trade for nice stuff, and everybody likes nice stuff and nobody likes starving.
And the surplus production goes to feeding more children, selling to bring in more resources, and so on.
But then in a few generations you have the same standard of living as before the thresher - except with more people, because your village population has expanded to the limits of your food supply, and with more environmental destruction, because you clear-cut forests to expand your fields. And the advanced technology is no longer a convenience, but a necessity, because going back to the old less efficient technology means people starve.
And if your village is socially advanced, and commits to keeping your population low so that your surplus production can provide a higher standard of living for your people? Then in a few generations you get invaded and occupied by your neighbors, who did use that surplus production to double their population, and then gave all their young men swords.
I can’t blame capitalism for this. This is the original sin of the agricultural revolution.
But we do live under capitalism. Whether we like it or not.
While that is true, what if we took steps so future generations wouldn’t have to?
You guys realize this is Adam Smiths argument in his title, ‘the wealth of nations’? The father of capitalism?
You do realize that even Karl Marx himself agreed with Smith on a number of points, right (including this one)? I know this is Lemmy where uneducated socialism is the predominant ideology to the point of what often amounts to hostility to learning more about anything, but it would be a good idea to read an actual book every now and then and learn how to recognize nuance, especially in political and economic topics. It astounds me how few of the self-proclaimed socialists on Lemmy have read any of the actual views or History of Karl Marx.
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and Adam Smith was arguing through this reasoning that the people of the world would be better off, as well as their bosses, if businesses were in competition rather than having the state an immobile hierarchy based on hereditary inheritences. ultimately, this comic presents what BOTH Smith and Marx had to say about capital within a capitalist society: that ownership of the means of production is the ultimate source of power. what Marx struck on, though i would argue less well than his anarchist contemporaries, or his indigenous and Black contemporaries, is that the top class in a classist society does not hoard the means of production through greed, but through cruelty justified through greed. Adam Smith, ultimately, is an early reformer/incrementalist. there are a few things he got right, but a lot of stuff he got wrong. i don’t think just because Adam Smith said somthing is a reason to discredit that thing
edit: wrote cooperation where i meant competition
Yesm. I should have said the father of economics not capitalism. And I see now the whole dragon hoarding wealth part flew right over my head
Well, he’s seen as both.
Socialism however is a post-capitalist and post-industrialization ideology in general, and the comic depicts a medieval knight and presumably medieval economy.
There are primitivist socialists but they’re very much a minority. Marx specifically for example presumed that socialism would require a capitalist society that is overturned by the development of class consciousness.
You’re pointing at the comic and saying “but that’s capitalism” and, sure, but it’s also the foundational concepts of most socialism. Socialists just disagree on who should own the machines, everyone agrees that machines make work more productive.
TL;Dr socialism developed after Smith’s work and incorporates his insights even if disagrees on certain aspects
my undercooked take is that adam smith was pretty woke for his time and place and a lot of what we don’t like about him is:
- him not having enough to go on since we learned more as a species since him
- co-optation by authoritarians he would have hated
I think Smith and Marx would have liked to spend some time together at a coffee house, and exchange thoughts on things.
they’d need Douglass to speak some sense to them 🤣
That might be a little rare but so is a good steak
Das Kapital must’ve been about something else. Like a legally distinct ‘Kapitalism’.
expectations and perception… all that work for nothing. It seems like they are winning when in reality we are all losing. So no matter what happens dumb violent ideas will leave us all in a state of despair. good ol daze pffftttt I like nerd shit a lot.
