this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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He spoke to the poor. There were no ultra impoverished. That category didn't exist based on historical evidence. He spoke to hunger, not starvation outside of famine.
We don't know if he had a home, he probably did, but just kinda abandoned it.
Try actually reading Adam Smith
People in the ancient world often sold themselves into slavery to stay alive.
People don't sell themselves into fucking slavery because they're only moderately impoverished and fear just being a little bit hungry.
The idea that there was no extreme poverty in the ancient world is utterly bizarre and against everything we know about ancient societies and economies.
"he probably did"
Jesus fucking Christ.
I have read Adam Smith, ffs. Have you?
Yes, I have. As well as Marx, and Trotsky. You seem to have missed the part where Smith would tell you to stop cockgobbling capitalism when it has served its intended purpose by the mid 1800s and move on.
You uh, miss the majority of the fucking comment which challenges your initial absurd claim that I objected to?
"Cockgobbling capitalism is when you point out that poverty, starvation, and homelessness predate capitalism, and that feudal and clientistic societies are the ones in the modern day which continue to experience mass starvation, not developed capitalist societies, whose cultivation of a proletariat creates an independent power base for organized workers to demand certain minimum protections and sets up the possibility of a socialist future"
I don't care about the rest of your fantasies. People sell themselves into wage slavery or indentured servitude now.
I also don't particularly care about what a work of mostly historical fiction from over 2000 to 5000 years ago says about how to live. They didn't know shit about our world.
Capitalism is causing death today. It needs to be destroyed entirely, and replaced with democratically elected councils, not presidents and supreme leaders.
Fucking what??
Listing the material conditions of historical societies, the historical societies we were discussing, the historical societies YOU brought up, is my 'fantasies'??
... which is a sign of extreme poverty, correct??
What the fuck even is your argument here??
You were the one who brought up the conditions of Jesus Christ as laid out in Biblical narrative in this conversation
Holy fucking shit.
... okay? What the fuck does that have to do with anything I've said?
You brought up Christ before I responded to that. I know you're off your meds but do try to keep track.
You started by asking when capitalism has cause death outside of war and have been going off on tangents ever since.
An expletive, not an argument. Jesus fucking Christ.
Cute. What does it say about you that you're unable to keep a coherent argument even in comparison to someone with ADHD off their meds?
Fucking what.
Go ahead. Quote me saying that.
(Protip: you can't, because you've done nothing but spew utter bullshit with no relation to reality from the start)
Your FIRST REPLY to me was a claim that extreme poverty, starvation, and homelessness did not predate capitalism, which I responded to by first claiming, and then demonstrating, that such a claim is utterly absurd and in complete contradiction to actual history facts.
What 'tangent' did I go off on in continuously disputing that despite your continued defense of that utter bullshit claim?
You were saying?
I asked when the last time was that capitalism led to mass starvation and death, and, in line with that, pointed out that no famines since at least 1950 have been caused by capitalism, pointing out the mechanisms that have caused every major famine since. Sorry that your literacy is as poor as your reasoning?
No, but your's sure seems to be. I gave you a study that shows that capitalism is leading to mass starvation every single year. I didn't even find the one that I like to use that shows that capitalism averaged 20 million deaths due to starvation alone every single year of the 20th century.
Claiming that 2 billion people died of capitalist-caused starvation in the 20th century when not even 200 million total actually died of starvation, including the famines in the PRC and USSR, in the 20th century?
Yeah, that's about the level of academic rigor I'd expect from your sources at this point.
Source? You have spouted all sorts of pro capitalist bullshit and sourced none of it.
https://www.ids.ac.uk/download.php?file=files%2Fdmfile%2Fwp105.pdf
But please tell me more about how capitalism killed an order of magnitude more people through starvation in the 20th century than died through starvation in total.
"Pro-capitalist bullshit is when you think starvation, homelessness, and extreme poverty predate capitalism just because societies that predate capitalism had starvation, homelessness, and extreme poverty; or when you think the 'cycle of capitalism' in the modern day has nothing to do with mass death through starvation just because capitalist countries in the modern day go through this dogshit cycle but still don't experience mass starvation"
Yes, what a radical pro-capitalist I am, you really caught me.
Your source is discussing famine specifically, not starvation overall. It even touches on this while talking about economic entitlements in one of the middle sections. It does seem to be true that many fewer people died of famine than starvation in general because of capitalist failures of distribution.
Try again.
Jesus fucking Christ, you didn't even read the section you claimed to. Did you just see 'economic entitlement' and decide to make up what you wanted it to say in your head?
I read the entire paper. Sorry I used the wording in the paper to make a point about what the paper doesn't talk about.
That section was discussing how the four economic factors are compounded by famine and can contribute to famine.
In five minutes, you read some 8,000 words.
lmao.
You're not even trying to be believable.
Yes, I'm also sorry that you're trying to use the wording in the paper to make implications that are not only not addressed by the paper, but directly contradicted in places.
Jesus Christ. You didn't even skim it.
Oh, and my first reply was a study that shows that capitalism directly starves 9 million people a year.
The study you cited is claiming capitalism directly starves 9 million people a year because starvation did not exist before capitalism - a claim which is demonstrably untrue.
Then you didn't read the full study, and don't understand the terms extreme poverty and extreme wealth.
Jesus Christ.
He would understand the terms
Curious, because according to you and that paper, he lived in a non-capitalist society which, therefore, should not have any concept of those terms.
According to popular culture he was a part of an all knowing being. I would hope an all knowing being would know more than the humans 2000 years ago did.
Wacky declarations are no replacement for actual historical context and facts.
I'm sorry, just to be clear - are you disputing that people in the ancient world often sold themselves into slavery to avoid starvation?
Do you want me to start citing legal codes and chroniclers? Because I can. But I want to make sure that when you start pissing about playing dumb that everyone sees you got what you fucking asked for.