Comment by Gormo

6 days ago

You're looking at aggregate patterns of human behavior, which originate in the pre-existing inclinations and motivations of those humans, and then trying to attribute them to some externalized, reified abstraction.

"Capitalism" construed as some entity unto itself simply does not exist. There is no "end of capitalism" that isn't itself an element of a general collapse of social organization and economic exchange.

So feudalism was a general collapse of social organization and economic exchange? Your analysis of capitalism is blinded by your obvious ideological bias

  • No, that's another abstraction. "Feudalism" is a descriptive term for a particular pattern of reciprocal obligations that was common in Western societies (though not dominant in the particular society that our own evolved from) in the past. The emergent patterns shifted, but the underlying reality -- that it all is just patterns of behavior engaged in by human beings with the same fundamental motivations and intentions -- remains. There was never an separate entity called "feudalism" just as there is no entity called "capitalism" acting as a causal agent.

    And the problem here is that the things you're arguing against aren't particular to that emergent pattern -- they're the lower-order motivations that inform the underlying behavior itself.

    There is no "analysis of capitalism". Your either analyzing real-life human beings or you're analyzing imaginary phantoms in your own mind.