It doesn't matter: our entire societal system is fundamentally unfair and built on deception.
True merit-based justice largely vanished with the end of the Paleolithic era. Hunter-gatherer societies maintained actual equality through mobility, immediate-return sharing, and active resistance to dominance—creating an immediate, authentic egalitarianism rooted in face-to-face relations.
Anthropological evidence from modern foragers and archaeological insights suggests low inequality, with mechanisms like ridicule or ostracism preventing hierarchy.
The Neolithic Revolution introduced agriculture, surpluses, and storable wealth around 10,000 years ago, enabling private property, land accumulation, and deepening stratification.
This trend intensified over millennia, entrenching systemic unfairness.
Marxist communism cannot replicate this authentic Paleolithic egalitarianism, as it advocates a large-scale, anonymous societal machine, ultimately producing new hierarchies, as historical implementations and critiques (e.g., anarchist views on state coercion) demonstrate.
This isn't a left-right issue: both sides accept the post-Paleolithic framework, debating adjustments rather than its core inequities.
>Hunter-gatherer societies maintained actual equality through mobility, immediate-return sharing, and active resistance to dominance—creating an immediate, authentic egalitarianism rooted in face-to-face relations.Nah, Hunter-gatherers love to kill each other for petty reasons. Most assasinations weren't due to resources but social tension. That's where ll the stories about drama between siblings, lovers and family comes from.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248406002193?via%3DihubIt's difficult to generalise tho.
>It doesn't matter: our entire societal system is fundamentally unfair and built on deception.Bad thesis tho. It isn't built on deception. It's still bad.
>>2614020In communism there will be organic stonings
>True merit-based justice largely vanished with the end of the Paleolithic era
CHYNAH
>>2614020>Nah, Hunter-gatherers love to kill each other for petty reasonsstill more equal and fair than the societal machine, where the state (doesn't matter if capitalist or socialist) will crush you for petty reasons.
>>2614090doesn't matter, he's still right.
>>2613992Let me add this: For this reason, there is no fundamental difference between socialist and capitalist societies. In the end, the masses have to toil for the elites. Both systems are essentially the same: anonymous machines of exploitation. In a Paleolithic society, I would have had the opportunity to punch anyone directly in the face who harms or oppresses me. Can you punch Elon Musk, Stalin, or Xi Jinping in the face? No.
merit is itself an illusion anyway. anyone with "merit" just got lucky. Oh you have a talent? Well you were lucky you were born with a brain capable of focusing, practicing, and cultivating that talent. Not everyone is born that way. Once you realize this, the entire bourgeois question of merit in "meritocracy" is entirely besides the point, in addition to being a flimsy lie. Let people be good at what they are good at, but understand that being unusually good at something is luck. This is why Marx works with averages: Socially necessary labor time in production, and value realized in exchange as the equilibrium money price, rather than the particular fluctuations of supply/demand.
>>2613992>Marxist communism cannot replicate this authentic Paleolithic egalitarianism,that was never the goal, nor should it be. for all the "authenticity" of paleolithic egalitarianism, it was much more impoverished, because productive forces were undeveloped, and man lived in nature only with small handmade tools, weapons, and his tribe to protect him.
>>2614427I largely agree with you, but the problem with communists is that they too are advocates of meritocracy. Whether in the Soviet Union or in China today, there were and are people there who are very rich, and this is justified with meritocratic arguments.
>>2614425>For this reason, there is no fundamental difference between socialist and capitalist societies. In the end, the masses have to toil for the elites.under socialism surplus is collectively owned rather than skimmed by capitalists. As for the obligation of all able bodied adults to perform labor, the moment there is no ruling class skimming surplus, and economic planning to prevent waste, the necessary working hours will drop dramatically. Even in a chaotic system without masters where you live by yourself in nature, you are still obligated to toil for your own subsistence, and survival.
>>2614431even if they weren't perfect, they still had less inequality than, for example, the USA. Soviet education was free, soviet healthcare was free. In China today, homeownership rate is higher and homelessness lower. You can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. That sounds liberal, but I'm using it to contrast proletarian dictatorships with bourgeois dictatorships, rather than contrasting two bourgeois parties.
>>2614429Life in the Paleolithic era was certainly harsh and short. But the people in Paleolithic society had real, organic solidarity. Modern Marxist solidarity, by contrast, is an artificial, anonymous product. Ironically, it is completely alienated because it is the product of anonymous power structures. What good is material prosperity to us if we lack true solidarity and have only a cheap, artificial imitation of it?
>>2614439mystical ouin ouin
>>2614425>Both systems are essentially the same: anonymous machines of exploitationMarx says:
<What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
>In a Paleolithic society, I would have had the opportunity to punch anyone directly in the face who harms or oppresses me.it would be laughably easy for you to die as an infant before having the "opportunity" to do anything since infant mortality was very high. You would also have the "opportunity" to be molested or maimed by your parents and tribe since there are no legal proceedings against such behaviors. You would also have the "opportunity" to get killed by a wild animal as a child, die of starvation when local forage is depleted, freeze to death due to inadequate clothing, or die of a simple rhinovirus.
>>2614439>What good is material prosperity to us if we lack true solidarity and have only a cheap, artificial imitation of it?I would much rather have clothes and shelter and be able to argue with you over the internet than have "paleolithic solidarity" whatever that means. See
>>2614442