Welcome, comrade! @dessalines@lemmy.ml has a fantastic Crash Course Socialism you can check out, and if you want to get into theory but don’t find the Communist Manifesto to be approachable, I recommend my “Read Theory, Darn It!” introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list. It has audiobooks, and starts off simpler than the Communist Manifesto.

Most books by Ha-joon Chang, especially 23 things they don’t tell you about capitalism. Fun fact, Ha-joon Chang isn’t a Marxist, he’s a liberal, but his writing is still critical enough of capitalism that South Korea banned his books.

Anything on prolewiki’s library are good reads as well.

For a broad look at the evolution modes of productions and how capitalism came to be there is this 60s textbook from the soviet academy of science, there even are a series of videos following the textbook by the finish bolshevik that is pretty good.

It gets easier, actually! So I wouldn’t call it Sisyphean. Different parts of Lemmy have different levels of understanding, if I can get parts mostly aware to be more aware, then that helps trickle into other instances, and it’s easier than doing so in instances where Marxism is seen hostiley.

a general safety net for all

Why shouldn’t there be a safety net for all?

One day we’ll all be hardworking, smart, educated, and have our needs all met, and we won’t be trapped, either.

Capitalism is not about individuals being greedy. Calling capitalists greedy is like calling fish greedy for needing water. The capitalist system requires constant profit maximization to prevent firms from crumbling, the capitalists are tasked with ensuring this, generally by (at first) maximizing exchange value of their product and minimizing costs (usually labor), then later using monopoly position to charge economic rent. In the heart of empire, financialization has meant trying to skip the first step via large financial investment up front, like with tech monopolies. The system itself forces exploitation, dispossession, colonialism, and ultimately crisis and war.

Historical empires conquered for reasons we often don’t really know specifically, as the accounts we have are written by victors with limited access and understanding. But ancient peoples were just as sophisticated as us and subject to material forces as us, so it was certainly not just being greedy. The economic base can force hands, for example. The Roman slave and debt system was unsustainable and required debt jubilees and war and invasions to be maintained, for example. For the ruling class of Rome, was maintaining the empire only greed or was it what they were taught to do as the moral and right thing?

There exists a strong current within Liberal economics that asserts that the formation we have arrived at now is because over time, Humanity has assumed the system most fit for our nature. Some take the path you percieve it as, a focus on greed, rather than Capitalism specifically, but that’s not what the meme addresses.

The advancement Marx made is recognizing Capitalism as merely one stage in the progression of Modes of Production historically. His analysis of Socialism and Communism was rooted in how it naturally emerges from Capitalism, just as Capitalism had emerged from Feudalism. The Capitalist Realists, who see Capitalism as eternal, stand in contrast to that notion and assert Capitalism as the final default stage. “There is no alternative,” of Thatcher.

This comment is like telling Superman not to lift with his back.

I didn’t make the meme, so 🤷

Just wrote the description.

Classic vapid comment.

Sure?

It’s important to draw a line between Primitive Communism and Communism as a post-Socialist society. Primitive Communism is founded upon small, isolated communities, while Marx’s Communism is one of large industry run along a common plan, democratically, to suit the needs of all.

What’s more accurate is to say that what’s considered “Human Nature” changes alongside Mode of Production. It was indeed “Human Nature” to have cooperative, communal units, but it is also “Human Nature” to produce under Capitalism, and still further “Human Nature” to move beyond the discordant production of Capitalism to a cohesive Socialist, and eventually Communist, society.

The mode of production is never human nature. Human nature is a factor, but the mode of production is something that is socially constructed and subject to material constraints, like tools and the environment in which people live.

But socializing and sharing empathy is virtually universal, and the impetus to share food or shelter or community is something that capitalist society teaches us to avoid. So one of the things we strive for through the abolition of capitalism is the restoration of human connections and care that are currently robbed from us. So I can totally see where you are coming from re: the extent to which the communism we want to build constitutes a return. But it is even more a step forward, a transformation into the future constructed from the bones of the present.

Re: what Marx called “primitive communism”, which we might better call egalitarian societies based on hunting and gathering and sometimes agriculture, such societies have actually existed everywhere people have lived. You can find clear historical examples of such societies in the Americas and Australia, yes, but also in the Middle East, Ukraine, Great Britain, Ethiopia, Pakistan/India, China, etc. As you mention, any of these societies did not have written records or they were lost, but we can understand how they lived based on their homes, food, tools, dress, cohabitation, and spatial distribution of all these things.

I answered more in-depth in this comment, but trade is not Capitalism itself. Rather, Capitalism as a system is merely one of the many Modes of Production based on trade. Capitalism emerged specifically alongside the Industrial Revolution, the system of workers selling their labor-power to large Capital Owners competing in commodity production could only arise with advancements in productive technology such as the Steam Engine.

Prior to the rise of Capitalism, various pre-Capitalist forms of production existed, such as small manufacturing workers who used their tools to make a complete good to sell, or the guild system, but these were never capable of giving rise to the vast system of accumulation the Capitalist system created through the

M-C-M’ circuit

Where M is an initial sum of money, C a number of commoditied sold at value, and M’ the larger sum of money gained from selling the commodities.

Private property isn’t unique to capitalism, feudalism and antique slave society each had a form of private property even tough feudalism and antique slave society have little else in common with capitalism.

Trade has existed for as long as humanity has existed, correct, but trade isn’t Capitalism. Capitalism specifically emerged from Feudalism. The historic ability for a class of property owners to employ wage laborers was only made possible through advancements in production.

To give an example, the feudal peasant largely produced most things they used, from clothes to housing. They would produce excess for their feudal lord, and some small handicraftsmen and guilds formed specialized labor. These were not Capitalist formations, but pre-Capitalist.

Eventually, technological advancements like the steam engine appeared. This revolutionized production, and gave huge rise to a class of owners that could purchase this new machinery, and employ workers in wages to create commodities. The barrier to entry is progressively lowered skill-wise, while the barrier to entry in the market as a Capital Owner raised, as firms began to solidify into factories. This coalesced into a marketplace of wage laborers selling their labor power to various Capitalists, eventually becoming the Capitalism of the time of Marx.

Does this all make sense? Engels, in Principles of Communism, summarizes it as such:

The proletariat originated in the industrial revolution which took place in England in the second half of the last [eighteenth] century and which has since then been repeated in all the civilized countries of the world. This industrial revolution was brought about by the invention of the steam-engine, various spinning machines, the power loom, and a whole series of other mechanical devices. These machines which were very expensive and hence could be bought only by big capitalists, altered the whole previous mode of production and ousted the former workers because machines turned out cheaper and better commodities than could the workers with their inefficient spinning-wheels and hand-looms. These machines delivered industry wholly into the hands of the big capitalists and rendered the workers’ meagre property (tools, hand-looms, etc.) entirely worthless, so that the capitalists soon had everything in their hands and nothing remained to the workers. This marked the introduction of the factory system into the textile industry.

Once the impulse to the introduction of machinery and the factory system had been given, this system spread quickly to all other branches of industry, especially cloth- and book-printing, pottery, and the metalware industry. Labour was more and more divided among the individual workers, so that the worker who formerly had done a complete piece of work, now did only part of that piece. This division of labour made it possible to supply products faster and therefore more cheaply. It reduced the activity of the individual worker to a very simple, constantly repeated mechanical motion which could be performed not only as well but much better by a machine. In this way, all these industries fell one after another under the dominance of steam, machinery, and the factory system, just as spinning and weaving had already done. But at the same time they also fell into the hands of the big capitalists, and there too the workers were deprived of the last shred of independence. Gradually, not only did manufacture proper come increasingly under the dominance of the factory system, but the handicrafts, too, did so as big capitalists ousted the small masters more and more by setting up large workshops which saved many expenses and permitted an elaborate division of labour. This is how it has come about that in the civilized countries almost all kinds of labour are performed in factories, and that in almost all branches handicraft and manufacture have been superseded by large-scale industry. This process has to an ever greater degree ruined the old middle class, especially the small handicraftsmen; it has entirely transformed the condition of the workers; and two new classes have come into being which are gradually swallowing up all others, namely:

I. The class of big capitalists, who in all civilized countries are already in almost exclusive possession of all the means of subsistence and of the raw materials and instruments (machines, factories) necessary for the production of the means of subsistence. This is the bourgeois class, or the bourgeoisie.

II. The class of the wholly propertyless, who are obliged to sell their labour to the bourgeoisie in order to get in exchange the means of subsistence necessary for their support. This class is called the class of proletarians, or the proletariat.

Free market trade has existed and changed shape throughout most of human history. Advice with how to deal with it is in the Old Testament. how often or consistent it revolved around a common currency is/was constantly changing, though

Capitalism developed over hundreds of years and is inextricable from European colonialism. The shift to capitalist relations themselves being ubiquitous is just a couple hundred years old, but the conquest by the bourgeoisie goes back more like 500-700 years.

Capitalism existed when Karl Marx wrote about it.

It really arose during the Industrial Revolution, around 1760. Imperialism, the final stage of Capitalism, began towards the end of the 19th century.