Edit: /j
Liberal doomerism based on imaginary restrictions, how new.
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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it's not just imaginary, humans thrived of mutual cooperation for tens of thousands of years while capitalism has only existed for a few hundred, but somehow that it's became the default position of everyone.
Yes. I am pointing that out. That is the imaginary thing.
"Somehow," looks behind us at five centuries of European settler-colonialism.
"Everyone," looks ahead at the millions of people who defy hegemonically enforced constructions of human nature despite the overwhelming power those systems possess.
Welcome to todays episode of criticizing things you haven't read:
and won't read. lol
Capitalism doesn't work, and it's for the same reason.
It used to be human nature. Nowadays it's nothing more than social engineering that teaches us what is up is down and what isn't, is.
that's human nature
Marx didn't forgot such thing he refuted it. No such thing as " human nature "
Even if you assume human nature is greed, it's also human nature to have their babies eaten by wolves but I don't see anyone suggesting we should center our society on baby tossin' wolf pits.
Killing people who don't worship the same Gods as you, taking slaves from the neighboring city state, and having a harem of ~~sex slaves~~ "wives" are all "human nature" that have all been done since before we had the technology to record them all the way up to today. Should those be tolerated in modern society too? Hell no.
Well that's WHERE youre wrong buddy. Wolf pits are the Last GREAT thang ABOUT this cuntry and I won't HAVE no liburels Taking them!
Edit: capitalized more words.
Observing humans in capitalism and assuming greed is just human nature is like observing humans on the Titanic and assuming drowning is human nature.
One has to wonder how capitalism arose, if the traits which gave rise to it aren’t part of human nature.
Capitalism arose from European feudalism. Which in turn arose from Christianity. Which in turn became mandated by the Roman Empire right before it totally coincidentally collapsed. The decisions behind this progression were limited to a tiny subset of the local human population, the ruling class which back then was basically seen as a completely different (superior) race compared to the commoners and peasants, to the point they chose to breed with their own relatives instead of polluting their blood with that of the people below them. Therefore, they absolutely did not represent the wishes of most humans at the time and certainly did not represent the "nature" of most humans, just the ones most corrupted by power and exceptionalism in a system they created specifically to keep themselves in power and separate from the masses. They're not human nature, they're the societal cancer that actively rejected and suppressed real human nature.
So the ruling class, with all the wealth and power and ability to do whatever they wanted acted against their own natures to create a system which would create in humans the desire to hoard wealth and power?
Yes. When your rule is based on seizing wealth and power you'll keep doing that perpetually so you don't lose your place in the ruling class. The fact that they did that is more consistent with the Marxist notion that human "nature" is shaped by the material conditions they're born into.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of peasants of that time fully accepted and even embraced their position due to all the religious brainwashing. Most had no real aspirations of power (supposedly despite their nature to desire power) because they've been taught their whole life that it's better for that to be taken care of by someone else that "God" supposedly chose. If anything, our uncritical acceptance of our place within capitalism is closer to what the serfs thought.
So then it’s not capitalism which causes in humans the desire to hoard wealth and power?
Any system predicated on obtaining as much wealth or power as possible will see people fixating on that and eventually divorcing the wealth/power itself from the material conditions that they arose from. Why do you think so many corporations turn into death spirals where they try to increase profits at all costs, abandoning their actual products and customers, and then act all shocked when they inevetably go bankrupt due to no longer having a customer base because they alienated everyone with their shitty profit oriented practices? The only way to solve this is to change the system people live under.
If it’s not in human nature to hoard wealth and power, then how do systems arise which are predicated on obtaining as much wealth or power as possible?
Because humans experiment with societal rules as societies were developing and get into self reinforcing loops that go on long after everyone's forgotten why it happened in the first place.
Human nature is to form societies. What happens in those societies and how they are structured are the result of chaotic interactions and competing thought that, again, are the result of material conditions those humans find themselves in.
There are plenty of societies that don't strictly follow the Roman/European system of power. Japan for example had their emperor reduced to a symbolic position long before European contact, but even though the emperor had most of his real power taken away, everyone still called him emperor and worshipped him because he was so important to their culture, power or not. Meanwhile, in what would be modern day India, multiple different religions arose based on selfless sacrifice for others and rejection of indulgence and pleasure in favor of self reflection and simple living, with many people throughout history in the region (princes, heirs of family fortunes, etc) fully rejecting their very privileged lifestyles to embrace aestheticism. Same with ancient Greek stoic and cynic philosophers many of which came from rich and powerful families yet deliberately choose to reject all of it. That all seems pretty against "human nature" no? Then you had the Indigenous tribes of the world who practiced small egalitarian societal groups and did perfectly fine until Europeans intervened.
So the first person who acquired wealth and/or power got no pleasure from it, because that’s not in their nature, but nonetheless kept it and passed it down to their children, who also derived no pleasure from it but also kept it and passed it down, until it had become ingrained tradition, and then people started to acquire the desire for the wealth and power they had had for generations?
Yes. Because it benefited them over others. Humans are capable of choosing to do things that benefit them and it has nothing to do with their "nature". Human nature is to not die and in the ages when humans could barely produce enough food for their own survival, it was beneficial to be in a position of power because it let you control the resources, ensuring you had enough for yourself and maybe some of your subjects as an afterthought. Marxism does not reject the notion that power benefits the people who have then, in fact that's a core fact that Marxism is based on, and it calls out the fact that feudal/monarchist/capitalist power benefits the ruling class by subjugating and exploiting the working class, and proposes that fully collective control of resources will benefit everyone much more equally than the current system. I don't think you have to agree with Marxism's proposed solution to this to recognize the problem it points out. It asserts that because we have lived in such systems our whole lives, we think it's human nature when in reality a person born and living in some other system (Marxist or otherwise) will think their system is human nature, because in reality no system is and they're all abstract inventions with nothing to do with our neurobiology or evolution.
For a non political example, I write code all day because it benefits me and I think it's the most normal and intuitive thing ever, even though I doubt programming was something humans evolved to do, we figured it out ourselves and it had nothing to do with our nature. You literally have to learn and practice abstract computational thinking while learning to program because it's very unintuitive at times compared to how humans think by default, yet people learn it just fine and once you do, it becomes your nature.
The cool thing about humans is we're not bound to natural instincts and can choose to live however we want. I think we should leverage this ability instead of using it as a justification for maintaining the same broken systems that have let us down over and over again.
It’s human nature to survive, but doing things which enable you to survive is not part of human nature?
It's just rejecting your responsibility in the way you behave. "It's not me, it's the nature"
You know that humans lived in communal societies for a long fuckin time before all the bullshit we know today, right?
Human nature is not greed. That's capitalism.
But have humans have never had a non-hierarchical large scaled society?
This is kind of the elephant in the room that every large scale political/economic model like to ignore.
While I don't agree with a lot of what he writes about, Murray Bookchin makes some pretty persuasive arguments about how hierarchical structures themselves are an issue no matter what system theyre found.
Pretty sure humans have been bashing in each others heads over resources since the dawn of humanity.
Capitalism made it worse and more efficient tho.
Half the problem with capitalism is that we aren't allowed to bash in the heads of the people who took all the resources.
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Yeah of course, this meme is meant to be making fun of the idea that "human nature" (whatever that may be lol) in any way disproves communist or anticapitalist theory
You’re right that the best arguments against Marxism are the falsity and over-simplification of economic determinism, and the falsity and over-simplification of the labour theory of value.
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Human nature on its deathbed when it realizes it forgot to account for Karl Marx
It's in Human Nature to be violent, which I why I've made sure to arm my kindergarten class with knives. Because otherwise I would not be accounting for Human Nature.
(note: this is sarcastic, I did not arm a kindergarten class with knives)
In some ancient text I read it talks about how the ancient Greeks had stopped wearing swords all the time for protection, but there were still some primitive areas where they did. Civilization reduces the necessity and the rate of return on individual violence it would seem.
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