The question is not why would people choose to live under supposed egalitarianism, but why would that be the default system. It relies on non-betrayal behavior across multiple actors in whom power is vested, which depends on many non-intuitive cultural innovations in thinking about your peers and social responsibility. Feudalism is at least straightforwardly plausible as the point towards which high entropy systems descend. Conversely, it's very hard to see how democratic communalism would just spontaneously emerge and maintain itself without consistent effort and cooperation, both fragile dependencies.
Two reasons:
1 - More egalitarian societies are more efficiient - they produce more because exploited peasants are not peoductive 2 - Who wans to die to protect their tyrant?
As an example - historically agricultural productivity was not a question of labor organization, or labor efficiency. A farmer could only grow but so much food with the land aloted, available water, and crop/fertilizer technology of the time. This amount was relatively close to subsistence.
The sowing of crops could be made more efficient in terms of person hours. But, without a production surplus, and no additional land to cultivate - there wasn’t much else for the individuals to do with the surplus hours.
Similarly, in a modern society labor productivity can be decoupled with economic output. Google search will be the dominant search engine regardless if it’s engineering team is efficient or inefficient.
This is true of some key areas, such as farming. But industry and at least some service sectors tend to benefit a lot from scaling up. Walmart is incredibly efficient, and Amazon only more so.
Just because they are exploited profitably, does not mean thats their best contribution to the economy. Its just that their more efficiebt aopkication camkot be easilly privatised
How does that work? Did Walmart shut a medical school?
You may not like Amazon or Walmart, but people work at Walmart because it's better than their alternatives at the time.
Walmart/Amazon didn't make their alternatives bad.
The point was, these people COULD do more than move boxes from A to B, could have been more productive, and could contribute more to the economy, if they were provided training.
Why they didn't get training is irrelevant - you can debate all day if Wallmart or Obama is at fault. But you don't get any credit for making humans move boxes A to B like monkeys. If they took a bunch of homeless people and made them into engineers, then yes, that would be noteworthy.
As to your starman - you could find a homeless person and cruely exploit them, by offering them dangerous work or getting them into prostitution. It could make you a lot of money if done at scale, and most people would call you a terrible person.
You did not make them homeless to begin with, but I think most people would not buy that as something that vindicates you.
But suddenly if your name is Amazon then it has a veneer of a respectable business.
Yes, they could, but what does that have to do with Walmart or Amazon?
And, at least for now, boxes need moving.
You persist in your belief that offering someone an "opportunity" that you don't like is exploiting them. It isn't, no matter how bad that opportunity is.
As to people with no good alternatives, that's on you as much as it is Walmart and Amazon.
I trust my two-year old to carry his glass to the table because I've given him the opportunity to show me he can be trusted with that.
I don't trust my two-year old to not fall down stairs because I've given him the opportunity to show me he can be trusted with that and he has failed to show it.
That's how it works in an egalitarian society too. You give people a chance to show they can be trusted. If they fail to show that, you stop trusting them.
At least please provide some specific and tangible reasons why you believe this is so obviously true, instead of repeatedly alluding to these numerous, incontrovertible, imminently applicable examples. Your statements are, I imagine for most readers, directly opposed to what history has shown about human nature and the nature of power.
Yes, I do honestly believe the wealth- and power-preservation interests of the few are one of the reasons we live in such undemocratic forms today.
Yes, I have experienced various forms of organisation in both the big and the small, along the authoritarianism--democracy axis, and the more democratic have consistently been the better, in almost all respects except that they make it hard to amass wealth and transform it into power over others.
If you want, I can refer to many more well-reasoned criticisms of capitalism than I can author. But it sounds like you'd be familiar with those already, so I'm not sure it would help you change your mind.
Socialism is what bootstrapped many ancient human communities, even if they didn't know the name
It is known (and sustained by scholars) that many societies of the past were socalist in nature, hell, even Jesus teachings are considered socialist.
It is by far more popular and spontaneous than feudalism, because it worked.
Interesting thesis, now prove it!
First of all you're conflating two arguments, excessive governments and socialism.
Excessive government in the past was bad because bureaucracy was slow, meaning physically slow.
Proto-socialism or community driven government made it possible for people to form smaller communities inside larger settlements where they could offload some of the burden to others in a mutually supportive way.
People scared today of government intervention think they still live a thousand years ago. Like that country that wait 11 weeks between election and inauguration of a new president because the process was designed around stagecoaches that brought the votes to the capital.
Secondly: your question is frankly showing that you went straight to the comments without even reading what I wrote Socialism is what *bootstrapped* many ancient human communities, the answer is there.
We are talking about spontaneous and "default economic system" after all, not the best at something.
If you really think ranking historical civilizations means anything, well you'll agree that Egyptians were quite THE civilization, does that mean that the best way to run a country is having a semi-god Pharaoh that builds pyramids in the desert?
The US is a glitch in history compares to what ancient Egyptian or Romans or Chinese or Greek or Mongols have achieved, it's quite possible that how the US are run today is a glitch in history as well that do not depend by the way they are run but only by the position they found themselves in after WW2, inertia is a bitch, it took centuries for the roman empire to fall.
They are in fact challenged (and somewhat defeates) by China, which is [drum roll] a socialist country!
It's quite possible that if the US switched to the political system of France or Sweden they would be as rich as today.
Also, to counter your naive argument: the Minoans.
And do ancient Greek qualify?
scholars have extensively argued that Plato and Aristotle led the foundation of socialism in their philosophies (it is now accepts that Marx was influenced by his ancient Greek studies)
The argument challenges a widespread interpretation of the connection between antiquity and socialism in Marx's work-that his socialist vision takes its bearings from the Aristotelian understanding of the relationship between necessity and leisure. In Marx's view, the fundamental legacy of antiquity was the notion of freedom as masterlessness. The roots of this legacy are in the political experience of the democratic polis, not in Aristotle's reflections on the ideal household. The core of Marx's project, then, is not to open a realm of freedom beyond necessity, but rather to create spaces for democratic action within the realm of necessity itself, to ensure that work is free and compatible with leisured activities. [1]
All work and no play, which is much more common in the US that here in Europe, makes Jack a dull boy.
Socialism and proto socialism have and will keep having a much longer history and importance than feudalism will never have and occur much more spontaneously and "by default" than many other systems, especially today that we should be more aware of our limited time on Earth and much less addicted to sacrifice for the benefit of the few (AKA the masters).
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-politics/a...
they won't understand.
This seems like a pretty reasonable theory, but does indicate a little problem I think -- the people have experienced the feudal system will only be around for a couple generations after the change-over. So, at least to the extent that this is the cause, it would likely be a transitory configuration, right? (ignoring some unusual circumstances, like being neighbors to a particularly unpleasant feudal state and having them as a constant contrast). I wonder what that sort of configuration decays toward.
But yes, you're onto something with the neighbour hypothesis too -- egalitarian and hierarchical (or beaurocratic and violent) societies often come in pairs, right next to each other.
The people retelling the story don't understand it - we have stories and kings and feudalism, go on the street and ask a random person any question about how feudalism works:
What rights did peasants have? What right does the lord have over his peasants? could peasants be sold and how are they different from slaves? Which 'levels' of nobility does what? Who pays taxes to whom?
If put theae people into a feudal society tomorrow, and just renamed 'baron' and 'lord' to something else, they would not know it. We could call it 'landlord' and 'investor'
This is going to sound sarcastic or something, but I'm actually curious -- do they? I would tend to assume that they appear to come in pairs, but this is largely because we happened to find history books written by the self-professed egalitarian society, and not their rivals, to whom they allocate every vice.
Their egalitarian neighbours where only just starting to discover. In part because their traces are less obvious, and in part because we've had a mental confirmation bias against finding them. I refer back to The Dawn of Everything if you want more details!
Feudalism might not be as common as we think of it; it's simply very visible in the historic record.
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As for why people would choose to live in more egalitarian forms: because we care.
Many forms of organising humans in the past and present have had specific mechanisms installed to prevent single people from getting too much power. (Including preventing them from converting wealth into power -- something we take for granted that one can just do today.)
As a case in point: I live in a condo association. We and all our neighbours collectively own and maintain this building. We vote on big issues and elect representatives for everyday duties. It would be very hard to consistently appropriate large amounts of resources over a longer time period, compared to, say, a small business owner.
We can only guess, but sometimes (at least from native American verbal history) this can happen because the people have experienced feudalist systems and realised how bad that turned out.
I strongly recommend reading Graeber's The Dawn of Everything to start out.