this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2025
29 points (100.0% liked)
askchapo
23195 readers
181 users here now
Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.
Rules:
-
Posts must ask a question.
-
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
-
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
-
Try !feedback@hexbear.net if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I like the question, just a minor point: hidden in your question is the assumption, that those societies didn't produce socialist thought. That's not necessarily true. Remember, that we rely on the transmission of sources. The ruling classes mostly determine, which ideas are written down, published, distributed, translated(eg in the case of Aristoteles "Metaphysics" from Greek to Syriac), copied, translated again (eg from Syriac to Arabic), copied again and then copied a few more times while older copies decay and fall apart and finally translated some more (eg from Arabic to Latin and finally into English). At each of those moments, ideas got filtered and it always were the progressive ones, that were targeted and lost.
Slaves in ancient societies and peasants in medieval times might have had all kinds of brilliant dialectical insights, that just never reached us. We rely almost completely on the ideas of slave holders, oppressors, opportunists and exploiters to learn about the history of human thought.