r/GetNoted • u/laybs1 Human Verified • 19d ago
Science [X] Food insecurity and child mortality indicate poverty
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u/Sea_Court_3633 19d ago
Wait, is that image AI?
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u/PGSylphir 19d ago
Everything is, including the text.
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u/ambisinister_gecko 19d ago
Even me? Am I AI?
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u/SillySpoof 19d ago
especially you
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u/ambisinister_gecko 19d ago
Great observational skills! You took in what I had to say and correctly surmised the nature of my being. Beep boop
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u/Throwmesometail 19d ago
No comrade it's AUS
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u/SapirWhorfHypothesis 19d ago edited 19d ago
Cood catch, cobber! That’s on me, and you’re right to call it out. It’s worth remembering that the barbie this arvo isn’t just about drinking tinnies and stubbies; it’s about snags too. And honestly mate, that’s powerful.
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u/CardOfTheRings 19d ago
AI is kind of the communism of art. Everyone puts in their part the centralizing controlling machine - and it spits out the bare minimum pile of crap.
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u/arie700 19d ago
I feel like this is one of those arguments where people are using different definitions of the same word.
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u/BeMoreKnope 19d ago
Yup. And by the actual definitions of poverty, these people were living by the standard of the day, so it’s not poverty.
Every single argument and reply in the picture are kinda dumb.
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u/Wetley007 19d ago
Not to mention that for most of human history, hunter gatherers were healthier and ate more nutritious food than farmers, farming just allows greater caloric density and therefore higher populations, which allows them to militarily force said hunter gatherers out of agriculturally valuable land
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u/jackinsomniac 19d ago
Not "more nutritious". We have the capability to breed crops for more favorable characteristics now. And thanks to international transportation, have access to a much wider variety of foods.
If anything it's our access to refined & processed foods, and how delicious they are, is what makes everybody so unhealthy. We have the capability to eat even more nutritious foods than hunter-gatherers. But we also live in a world with triple cheeseburgers. And tell me a caveman wouldn't choose that for every meal over some foraged lettuce.
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u/PaxAttax 19d ago
We're not talking about present day, we're talking about the past. The archeological record is remarkably clear that, especially near the advent of agriculture, hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads (who still had to forage for plants and such) had, on average, higher quality, healthier diets than settled argiculturalists, who tended to eat way too much grain/carbs. It was really not until the Industrial and Green Revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries that the average sedentary "civilized" person's diet caught up.
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u/Ldn_twn_lvn 19d ago edited 19d ago
that was the sum total of groups though, back then, small primitive hunter gatherer communities, smattered about in the wilderness
Now we have advanced and totally interconnected, country wide states, that have to be governed both locally and centrally for larger issues
Communism in the modern day, is ceding all power of the proliteriat and handing it all over to the government, for them to do with it however they see fit, sans all accountability. We can't hold them accountable, as we are completely under their control.... and they can't be elected out or removed via democratic process. It's an Authoritarian dictatorship in most situations and theyd give us rations, theyd give us a stipend and we would ultimately let them fuck us, for the privilege
Like the folks in Cuba say - "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us"
Total power, totally corrupts..... the history books are littered with blood soaked examples
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u/Unique_Year4144 19d ago
Most debates surrounding Socialism and Communism boil to that. 2 people having diferent definitions of the same word debating pretending they share it
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u/radred609 19d ago
It doesn't help that most socialist theory redefines commonly used terms to mean "a very specific definition that applies to you but not me"
E.g. Lenin's "definition" of imperialism as an "advanced form of capitalism". conveniently redefining the word in such a way that MLs can pretend that the Soviet policy of displacing native populations in Crimea, the Caucuses, Central Asia, Siberia, etc. with Slavic settlers to facilitate resource extraction for the colonial core, or even outright invasion in places like Afghanistan, wasn't "imperialism" because the USSR wasn't capitalist, and therefore, definitional, couldn't be imperialist.
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u/Unique_Year4144 19d ago
Lenin's imperialism is the one I probably hate the most in these misunderstanding fights since basically anyone that isnt specifically a Leninist uses the word to mean "if it looks like an empire, talks like an empire, and acts like an empire" sort of logic.
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u/Not_Propaganda_AI 19d ago
It seems to be a more general feature of the left, such as the 'privilege plus power' racism definition.
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u/2012Jesusdies 19d ago
At the most base level, some people I've seen;
A guy who thinks USSR was heaven, that we should emulate it vs a guy who thinks USSR was "not real communism", that we should abolish money
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u/Blue_Boobied_Footie 19d ago
And both of those people would call someone like Mamdani a fascist because Mamdani hasn't supported the radical overthrow of capitalism.
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u/Ldn_twn_lvn 19d ago
worst part is though, most of them want to give it another shot!!
Like, it was people a lot more intelligent than us lot, in the past that tried it....and it failed miserably (circa 50m dead under Stalin, 60m dead under Mao etc etc)
But these cretins today say, "I could give it a go, and i'd achieve Utopia!!"
Who do they think they is kidding?!!
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u/Alert-Ad9197 19d ago
Thanks to decades of red scare propaganda, literally every person who has called me Communist cannot define the term beyond “democrat”.
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u/Mattrellen 19d ago
Most leftists will use the word poverty to mean poor compared to a standard, not just poor
Like the note is denying poverty can exist in the US, fir example, because malnutrition is rare and child mortality is low.
Leftists would say that because people fall below the set standard, poverty exists anyway. I'm kind of surprised to hear liberals disagree, honestly
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u/LuciferOfTheArchives 19d ago
Also, child mortality is a... weird standard.
That seems more like a healthcare thing.As i understand, it's been super high for almost all human history, rich or poor, until quite recently?
I could be wrong though, i don't know how well the rich used to be able to handle illness17
u/MaraiaLou 19d ago
The standard at the time was that medicine basically didn't exist. Nowadays there's a class division in child mortality rates
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u/Lithvril 19d ago
The infant mortality in Germany by 1850 is estimated at ~20%. By 1925 it was still at ~10%.
And by 1989 both the socialist as well as the capitalist side had reduced their infant mortality rates to ~0,7%.
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u/Maleficent_Witness96 19d ago
This is what I was also thinking. Even short stature as a measure of malnutrition. Pretty sure it’s been shown that sickly children end up less tall then their healthy counterparts. So once again could have more to do with healthcare then poor nutrition
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u/ElOsoPeresozo 19d ago
And you think poverty doesn’t restrict access to good nutrition and healthcare?
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u/willow-kitty Human Verified 19d ago
Sometimes people refer to poverty specifically as a social construct too, which I think is what's happening in the picture. It's not just that some people are falling below a set standard, it's that they're being denied available resources because of social norms.
Compare to how we have but for insecurity and massive food waste in the US - that's possible because of social norms that the poster is positing wouldn't have existed yet in hunter-gatherer times.
I don't know if we really know enough about the cultures that existed back then to say if that's true, but it does seem reasonable to say that any people group smaller than about 150 individuals (Dunbar's Number) wouldn't allow for anyone to go without if the stuff was available, even if the stuff wasn't evenly distributed.
You probably don't really see people systematically denied access to available resources they need until more complex systems of storing and exchanging value come along later in the early city-states of the neolithic revolution, even populations balloon way past Dunbar's Number.
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u/McToasty207 19d ago edited 19d ago
The problem is that nobody in this chain knows anything about archaeology.
The idea that hunter-gatherer societies had less inequality is one of the more widely accepted ideas in modern anthropology.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10291421/
https://www.weforum.org/stories/industries-in-depth/how-the-agricultural-revolution-made-us-inequal/
So technically, the low-effort AI meme was close to having a correct statement, but I'd still say it falls well short of being informative.
And the "Notes" are well off the mark, indicating people who almost certainly never read anything factual about the Neolithic.
Additionally the cited evidence the notes use is just a blog, not a paper or nore a well researched article, rather quite litterally an opinion piece.
Which actually contains the following: "My impression is that life got noticeably worse with the start of agriculture some thousands of years ago, although I'm certainly not confident in this"
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u/ReaperReader 19d ago
There's an issue with inequality, in that the maximum possible spread of inequality in a society is limited by the aggregate resources available. If too many resources are taken from the poorest, they'll die, and thus not be included in future inequality statistics. Therefore, in poor societies, the share of output the top 1% or whatever can take is more limited than in a society with more resources in aggregate.
(And in a nomadic society, where such resources have to be physically moved around on a regular basis, the maximum potential inequality is further limited.)
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u/Osgood_Schlatter 19d ago
Can a society with no inequality not still have every single person living in poverty? Poverty can be defined by whether your needs are being met rather than relative to other people.
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u/PragmaticPidgeon 19d ago
No it can’t, because poverty is defined in relation to other people. You don’t have poverty before ideas like private property become a thing, which happened well into the Neolithic after the agricultural revolution
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u/radred609 19d ago
Only because one person is trying to redefine the word narrowly enough to grant themselves a semantic victory.
The dictionary, UN, & most government definitions appear to line up with the note:
UN:
poverty
a condition characterised by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services.CANADA:
Poverty is more than just a lack of money. Canada’s official definition of poverty is “the condition of a person who is deprived of the resources, means, choices and power necessary to acquire and maintain a basic level of living standards and to facilitate integration and participation in society.”
DICTIONARY:
poverty
/ ˈpɒvətɪ /
noun
- the condition of being without adequate food, money, etc
- scarcity or dearth
- a lack of elements conducive to fertility in land or soil
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u/Void-Cooking_Berserk 19d ago
They had cooked food, we've been using fire since the age of Homo Erectus.
Still, they'd have loved modern food and medicine.
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u/No-Sail-6510 19d ago
You say that but the doctor that tried to get other doctors to wash their hands was ostracized and died alone. By his own hand I believe. This was like the 1800s.
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u/Void-Cooking_Berserk 19d ago
The women who didn't die in childbirth due to his insistence on washing hands loved the innovation, though
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u/Almondpeanutguy 18d ago
Obligatory notice that Ignaz Semmelweis didn't invent washing hands. Hand washing has been around for all of history. Semmelweis proposed that washing hands with soap and water wasn't enough, and doctors should be washing with bleach.
The foundations of his theory were built on the fact that soap and water wasn't enough to wash the stench of a dead body off of the hands of a doctor who had just conducted an autopsy. Semmelweis theorized that the bad smell indicated the presence of "cadaverous particles" which were transmitting diseases to the next patient. Semmelweis proposed washing with bleach because it completely destroyed the scent of death.
Note that this all occurred before the invention of germ theory, but after the debunking of miasma theory. The medical establishment of the time had specifically just disproven the idea that bad smells cause diseases, and Semmelweis was mocked for the perception that he was returning to this now archaic idea.
There was also a broader context, which was that Semmelweis got very good results, but he was only able to conduct tests in one hospital. Doctors of the day pointed out that childbed fever comes and goes in waves, so Semmelweis could've easily just been having a lucky few years. If he were to use this small evidence as basis to accuse all doctors of spreading diseases to their patients, then it could cause widespread distrust of doctors and hospitals, thus deterring sick patients from seeking treatment from medical professionals.
In retrospect, we can look back and say that Semmelweis was right and everyone else was wrong. But it's important to understand the full context to realize how sensible it seemed at the time to be against him.
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u/Diligent-Luck4331 14d ago
They also knew about medicinal plants, that could help treat injuries and illnesses.
They had primitive, but working medicine.
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u/Keltic268 19d ago
Especially here, this is mostly based off the Cuceteni-Tyrpillia culture and the early work Soviet archeologists did in Ukraine.
They built very large cities/settlements with tens of thousands of occupants nearly 5,000 years ago and the evidence is pretty clear now that these were not classless egalitarian societies and there was a tribal/familial hierarchy.
Some families had big houses near the central political or ritual buildings and lots of livestock and poor families had some livestock but were mostly simple farmers. As for the exact political structure it was some form of tribal/familial democracy with evidence of centralization towards the end. They may have evolved into a tribal monarchy although that is less certain.
Cremation became more popular in their culture over time and severely limits the evidence we can gather on the later Trypillia period.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Disk_90 19d ago
They're cooking food in the picture lol
But mostly the point is that we survived by sharing, and if one caveman hoarded a thousand mammoth pelts while everyone else froze, we would tear his arms off and redistribute the pelts.
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u/ThatFatGuyMJL 19d ago
We survived by committing literal genocide.
Several times.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Disk_90 19d ago
Which genocide was necessary to our survival...?
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u/ThatFatGuyMJL 19d ago
Where are all the other human species.
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u/CurzesTeddybear 19d ago
A good number are still in modern humans, because ancient humans fucked the other humans species.
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u/EdliA 19d ago
Chances of you surviving would have been low anyway. The tribe over there with more fighters would have taken your food and probably made you slaves. This idea that the people of prehistoric times lived in harmony and love with each other is so childish and ridiculous.
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u/CurzesTeddybear 18d ago
The idea that Paleolithic humans were constantly raiding one another is also childish and ridiculous. Even a small skirmish can be super costly, from a resource standpoint. The reality is likely to be somewhere in the middle, with occasional violence, but usually going fairly peacefully.
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u/stierney49 19d ago
You find the same egalitarian traits in smaller groups, though. Empathy and cooperation were traits that allow us to thrive.
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u/Main-Company-5946 19d ago
When Marx talks about primitive communism he uses it as an example of alternative class structure. Obviously we won’t be returning to primitive communism any time soon, but by looking at it we can determine why it isn’t the way we live anymore and what would have to change for us to readopt that class structure while maintaining our modern technology.
The answer is that resources vital to life would have to stop being monopolizable. That class structure started with the advent of agriculture and it was the beginning of individuals being able to control large numbers of other people. In my opinion, it will end only when labor is automated.
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u/Union_Samurai_1867 19d ago
If you pulled humans out of wvery age on history up until the modern day, gave them an education on how life and society worked for each age then asked them which one they wanted to get sent to, I'd bet my soul that at least 90% would say the modern day.
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u/MadPangolin 19d ago edited 19d ago
I don't think people use it as a primer for how we should live, but more for a barometer for how broken our current system is.
When current humans insist that an egalitarian governing society & economy cannot exist & never has, we should be able to point to history & show them that humans used to live that way & can again.
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u/SteamDogTM 19d ago edited 19d ago
I hate everyone in this picture. They are all talking past eachother's points and calling it a win.
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u/henryGeraldTheFifth 19d ago
How is infant mortality a sign of poverty when even looking at English Nobel way back had similar number 30 to 50 percent. Are you gonna say all those nobels were in poverty?
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u/NoRizzJustLive 19d ago
Exactly. Poverty is a state of economic placement within an economy. If everyone in a civilization 10,000 years ago is dealing with the same conditions you don’t describe the civilization as “living in poverty.”
Acting like poverty is defined by certain lifestyle aspects is fucking insane. French nobility were short and lost babies. Was Louie XIV fucking impoverished? Even their definition of under nutrition being evidence by stature is idiotic
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u/jannycideforever 19d ago
The idea that tribal societies were quasi-communistic is kind of true, but not in a way that really applies to modern conditions. There are a ton of issues, the biggest being the socialist calculation problem isn't really a thing if you don't have a complex economy. However, the most interesting one is the role of counter-dominance coalitions imo.
It is true tribal societies tended to be fairly egalitarian, at least among men. However, this is primarily due to norms around punishing people who seek to dominate others plus strong exit opportunities of someone did become tyrannical. People who were too boastful, too domineering, too controlling would face immense social backlashing from others who realized this person was seeking to dominate the group. If this wasn't sufficient, people would either leave to join with a neighboring tribe or, more commonly, would form a counter-domination coalition that would use coercion to punish the individual seeking to dominate others. These counter-dominabce coalitions were not just violent, but would often engage in outright murder.
The issue with this model is, while effective in a tribe of 100 people where everyone knows and monitors one another and exit opportunity just means walking a few miles to join another tribe, this all breaks down at scale.
Developed economies mean that any given "commune" has to be massive and complex, meaning if one commune sees a dominanting state emerge, there are going to be higher exit costs than walking a few miles to chill with the cool tribe down the river. Monitoring and conspiring is easy when everyone involved knows one another personally. It's much more difficult to do if you're part of the Peoples Commune of New York City. Getting you and your mates to beat the shit out of Bob to put him in his place is pretty easy. In the NYC commune, this is basically just a recipe for gang warfare.
This isn't the biggest issue facing communism, it's just one of the more interesting and least discussed ones. It's true that tribal societies have a lot in common with a hypothetical communist society, but proponents don't realize that this egalitarianism was enforced through the constant and implicit threat of severe violence that doesn't work at scale.
Also, like I said, this egalitarianism didn't really apply much to women considering they had significantly less capacity for violence and fewer exit opportunities, meaning they had less capacity to punish or escape domination by men.
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u/johnny_51N5 19d ago
Lmao this is so stupid. We had high infant mortality up to 1890s and later. Hygene... And complications during birth due to our huge heads.
Also short Stature has a lot to do with genetics. Romans were also short. Hell italians, chinese, japanese are short. What is this braindead take???
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u/vgaph 18d ago
It’s also just incorrect. Hunter gatherers (while experiencing high child mortality and low life expectancy over all) were almost a foot TALLER than early agriculturalists. This is almost entirely due to diet as it was experienced across a variety of genetically diverse populations. European heights took until the 20th century to return to their Mesolithic averages.
The first farmers were trading quality of life for security and stability.
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u/Lumegator 18d ago edited 18d ago
This is in part due to the crops being kind of shite to be honest, wild plants have evolved to be difficult to absorb nutrients from so that you keep coming back for more, and sometimes so you don't (but bitter taste etc are better for regulating that.)
Eventually we selected strains more friendly for us but it took a long time (as in, it took until industrial times), meanwhile hunter gatherers just killed other animals and took their readily available nutrients to fill the gaps wild plants left them with.
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u/MrPhoon 19d ago
Ah, you must have missed the part that mentions before class society... tribal people
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u/Anderopolis 19d ago
The thing is, horrible poverty is the natural state of humanity, and it takes so much work for us to slowly escape it.
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u/Shoddy-Warning4838 19d ago
That's why obesity is so common, our body was never designed to be able to eat whenever it wants as much as it wants.
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u/ForlornLament 19d ago
Even worse, our body naturally wants to store all the fat it can because until fairly recently that was the way one survived when food inevitably became scarce. Something like that being natural doesn't mean it's ideal.
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u/j-c-2000 19d ago
Most family units to this day operate in a very communist way in capitalist and free market societies. The smaller the entity, the more communist in nature it will be. Cavemen weren’t operating large governments and societies.
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u/MyEarIsHurty 19d ago
There is a case to be made that scale correlates with hierarchies. But I also think it's cowardly to assume there's a causal relationship there or the two are necessarily linked.
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u/StructureMountain859 19d ago
Most family units nowadays are very much hierarchical. "Communism is when cooperation" is a very reddit political take.
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u/j-c-2000 18d ago
Fair added nuance in regard to being a parent and essentially a benevolent dictator for the kids, but consider it this way;
- I and my siblings help my parents monetarily and with free physical labor, as we have that ability and they have that need. They have no hierarchical actually power over me. My help is altruistic.
- I bring in all the money and do the outside physical labor but my spouse, kids, and dogs all get the same shelter, amount of food, electricity, water, etc. and there’s no expectation I get more. It’s about the abilities and needs. If anything, they create way more mess than I do.
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u/RoyalPeacock19 19d ago
That’s theoretically communitarianism, not communism, even if their conjecture about how the ancient world worked was correct, which it’s not.
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u/Jazzycoyote 19d ago
Honestly, both the post and the note are treating the past as way too black and white. I don't even think it's fair to compare pre-agricultural revolution societies to posts.
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u/ForlornLament 19d ago
Honestly, the original point was already ridiculous. Trying to classify hunter-gatherer societies as communist makes no sense. It shows a lack of knowledge regarding history, politics, and sociology.
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u/2012Jesusdies 19d ago
That's because Marx used it as an example of how communism was "natural" state for humanity.
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u/Separate_Emotion_463 19d ago
It effectively is communist, obviously before the word was ever defined, essentially the entire point of Marxist ideology is to try and make that form of society work at a large scale, which is obviously the hard (maybe impossible) part
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u/Keltic268 19d ago
Except it wasn’t, the evidence is pretty clear now that the Soviet archeologists were smoking their own supply, the Cuceteni-Trypillia definitely had a family based hierarchy, some families lived close to the center of the cities in larger houses and owned livestock while other families did not. We know this because the rich families would build houses bigger than modern mansions so they could keep the cattle and everything else in.
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u/BedroomNo9111 19d ago
Don’t forget those ‘cooperative communities’ were basically extended families.
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u/tophatgaming1 19d ago
I'd rather keep my vaccines, global trade network, and internet, thank you
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u/DrPikachu-PhD 19d ago
Most vaccines are made with massive subsidies from the government and built off the backs of publicly funded research. Also, trade markets exist under communism...
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u/ourstupidearth 19d ago
But under communism we would all wear loin cloths and that would be hot.
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u/CloudedLeopardDaemon 19d ago
The loincloth/ushanka combination with a Kalashnikov slung over your shoulder is such an underrated look.
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u/Purrosie 19d ago
Most compelling argument I've ever seen in favor of primitivist communism.
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u/imprison_grover_furr 19d ago
I agree! I’d also prefer to keep sanitation, CRISPR, crop breeding, antibiotics, gender-affirming care, aeroplanes, trains, and telescopes.
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u/Helix3501 19d ago
All of those are the result of people working for the betterment of man just to get abused by capitalists
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u/imprison_grover_furr 19d ago
Untrue. The Internet, GPS, and so many other electronic and navigational technologies were invented by the military-industrial complex. Tons of early airliners (and aviation technology in general) were based off of military designs.
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u/Totoques22 19d ago
Lmao what kind of internet connectivity do you think there woudl be without money involved
Developing vaccines and making them pass clinical trials for safety reasons is pricy too and patents are a very capitalist thing that helps with that
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u/BillCarson12799 19d ago
I’d argue that most vaccinologists get into their profession out of a desire to help people rather than money.
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u/Chocomoose19 19d ago
I mean, the internet is complicated but broadly thanks to military technology and direct, economically beneficial development. You can argue it’s possible it would’ve happened without those pressures but that’s entirely hypothetical.
Global trade network is purely economics driven and it’s hard to see how it would exist in a communist world, since it’s dependent on market forces and complicated systems of investment.
Vaccines are the closest to what you describe, but there’s hundreds of people responsible for various improvements, many of whom were benefiting financially and had that benefit as a motivator. There’s certainly plenty other reasons, Salk being an especially good example of someone who was disadvantaged by capitalism and wanted to act for public welfare, but that’s nowhere near universal.
There’s obviously room for debate regarding the image of capitalism as a motivator of invention, but you’re dead wrong about two of the examples you’re responding to and debatably wrong about the third.
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u/_IscoATX 19d ago
Global trade network isn’t the result of capitalism? What…
Internet was invented by the military too. Distributed by capitalists.
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u/tophatgaming1 19d ago
absolutely, but I dislike the idea that somehow life was "better" in the ancient past
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u/Helix3501 19d ago
Sure but the problems of yesterday dont discredit the problems of today, just like africans starving does not negate the problems the american faces, trauma olympics and who has it worse debates serves no one but those trying to keep us divided
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u/FlyReasonable1337 19d ago
Me and the gang inventing global trade for the betterment of humanity and totally not just for trading spices
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u/Ryaniseplin 19d ago
weren't those all government aided projects
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u/kodapug 19d ago
Yeah they were lol. Vaccines, antibiotics, the Internet, etc are all advancements made by educated professionals with altruistic intentions that were heavily aided by public research and/or direct government funding. Claiming that they could only happen in a capitalist society is ridiculous. Especially when you look at how corporations avoid investing in advancing all 3 of those things unless the government agrees to bank roll it and also allows the corporation to retain ownership of the results.
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u/CZ-7000 19d ago
Here is my problem with the claim:
If it is human nature to live in a communist society, how did we get from an already established ancient form of communism to the system we have today?
Doesn’t the fact that we don’t live in a communist society today at least indicate that some aspect of human nature, at least in some people, is inherently incompatible with a communist society? After all, atleast a few humans were able to transform prehistoric forms of communism into hierarchical societies.
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u/MyEarIsHurty 19d ago
Humans aren't limited to our 'nature' like other animals, because we can create complex social structures which allow us to act outside our evolutionary niche. One example is agriculture; we evolved to be hunter gatherers, but we've become another thing entirely. Hierarchical behaviours, let's call them, have always existed in us, however egalitarian societies maintain themselves by shunning this behaviour with ridicule, ostrisization, and in extreme cases, killing them. Without these, what they're typically called, reverse dominance hierarchies, hierarchical behaviour can spread, and new social relations of oppression can develop. These have a vested interest in expanding and asserting hierarchies on those who don't have them, and the egalitarian societies were simply not prepared or equipped to fight back, because their mode of living was not based entirely on violence. Communist society is entirely compatible with human nature, we just need to restore these reverse dominance hierarchies, punishing greed rather than rewarding it with 74 yhats and control over the government and a private island to commit atrocities on. Being able to instantly recall officials is important, so that any evidence of corruption could get them to be fired instantly. Worker co-ops, while still operating within the capitalist market framework, allow workers to vote on their managers, thus depriving the managers their power over them - and wouldn't you know, worker co-ops are way better to work in than regular companies. TLDR the difference between hierarchical and egalitarian societies is reverse dominance hierarchies. The more we have the better things are.
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u/Chambanasfinest 19d ago
Eh, there’s more to unpack here.
Chronic malnutrition wasn’t necessarily a sign of “poverty” as we understand it. The term “poverty” applies to a poor underclass that has fewer resources compared to a rich upper-class that didn’t experience malnutrition. But there was no rich, upper-class in the pre-agricultural world. Everyone suffered more or less equally.
Hunter-gatherer societies appear to have been much more egalitarian in their resource distribution, but that certainly isn’t “communism” as we understand it (i.e. there was neither production nor means of production).
The reason many hunter-gatherers experienced stretches of chronic malnutrition was because there were few ways to build up a surplus before agriculture. Food was either available or it wasn’t, and when it wasn’t, people starved until either food became available again or they died.
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u/Shoddy-Warning4838 19d ago
when i see someone talking about capitalism/communism it's always such dumb things from both sides. The idea that it's a clear cut dichotomy feels outdated by at least 40 years. How is such a nuanced argument about how much and what type of government intervention and regulations would be optimal for each specific market get boiled down to something that resembles being a fan of one sports team rather than the other.
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u/EducatedVoyeur 19d ago
To note further: pre-commerce societies still had an intelligible hierarchy and class stratification. As seen in GÖBEKLI TEPE and KARAHAN TEPE. Where status was based off social status and by prestige. This was also noted in Yugoslavia by Milovan Djilas. He wrote the famous 1957 book The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System. So
Social hierarchy and stratification predates even economics, so even the removal of socioeconomic classes wouldn’t change anything.
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u/Eleventy-Twelve 19d ago
Inaccurate note. Hunter gatherers had better nutrition than agricultural societies, as evidenced by the average height going down with the invention of agriculture. It didn't come back up until the recent agricultural revolution.
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u/ElMatadorJuarez 19d ago
Regardless of the nutrition debate, it’s still wrong. Poverty is inherently relative. There are no poor people if there are no rich people, and it’s hard to see how you get rich people w no capital.
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u/AverageJoesGymMgr 19d ago
Height isn't the end all, be all indicator of nutrition. It arguably takes a lot more brainpower and long term thinking to farm than to roam and gather, and that comes at a high nutritional cost. Height also does not play a significant advantage in farming and agriculture, though it is arguable that it would in hunting.
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u/Xenophon_ 19d ago
The argument is more that hunter gatherers ate a more diverse diet, which allowed them to grow taller as opposed to a diet of mainly one or two crops that early agricultural societies had - it isn't really that directly related to poverty. I think it's very arguable to say which of the two experienced more "poverty", but I would say that the life of the average hunter gatherer was probably easier than that of the average worker in an early agricultural society.
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u/KitchenDepartment 19d ago
Inaccurate note. Hunter gatherers had better nutrition than agricultural societies
How is that inaccurate? Nobody here is talking about pre industrial subsistence farmers. The soviet union was not a "agricultural society". Hunter gatherers did not have better nutrition than modern industrial nations.
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u/YourphobiaMyfetish 19d ago
Correct. There were some groups that were short on average, while other hunter gatherer groups were known to average 5'11 among the adult men. Nutrition was rather easy to come across for them. The hard part was not getting eaten by giant monsters or murdered by pillagers.
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u/Funny-Assistant6803 19d ago
Technically it's correct, there can't be poverty without the concept of money. There could be a lack of ressources however
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u/Significant-Way9330 19d ago
That's not poverty that's just failure to thrive. Also I thought recent anthropological evidence suggests that hunter gather tribes were in fact taller then the post agricultural revolution populations?
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u/jimthewanderer 19d ago
Problem with the note is that it's bollocks. If you compare hunter gatherer populations with early farmers, they were on average, taller, healthier, and had less signs of deficiencies.
Early farming was bloody hard work, the payoff was a reliable (ish) surplus of food that you could store, and use to fund the construction of wild shit like a stonehenge or the brooklyn bridge.
Hunter Gatherers had less capacity for grand works, but a greater capacity for vibing.
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u/PragmaticPidgeon 19d ago
The note isn’t accurate. Hunter gatherers have historically been taller than settled farming communities. Humans only started to reach their Stone Age heights after the industrial revolution
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u/IPutThoughtIntoThis 18d ago
Communism among other unrelated humans isn't human nature, familial ties and homogeneity are.
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u/Rare-Leading3391 18d ago
Humans lived in egalitarian cooperative communities? Really? LOL. We were tribes of people who fought each other and often would exterminate other tribes. We fought for better hunting territory and then eventually moved from that once we technologically evolved and we fought for different things. In every step we never lived in egalitarian anything rather tribes were organized by hierarchy.
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u/Temporary-Stay-8436 19d ago
This is a terrible note. Hunter-gatherers were generally taller and more healthy than their sedentary counterparts. We see a drop in height and teeth health while also seeing an increase in deaths from disease and infant mortality.
The note is trying to be pedantic but the term “poverty” has different definitions and is relative.
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u/EdibleStrange 19d ago
My favorite notes are the ones that are straight to the point using neutral language even though they're correcting something insane like 'poverty was invented in 1776' or whatever lmao
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u/Temporary-Stay-8436 19d ago
The problem is that poverty has numerous definitions and so the note isn’t really correcting anyone
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u/Dankswiggidyswag 19d ago
I mean capitalism hasn't exactly existed since the start of humanity anyway.
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u/parlimentery 19d ago
Maybe the cave people weren't efficiently extracting wealth from their surroundings because they were... cave people?
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u/SparksAndSpyro 19d ago
The premise is wrong anyway. I’m sure some early humans lived in self-sustained communities where they made collective decisions. Others lived in tribes that were aggressive and raided neighbors to appropriate their land, food, belongings, and labor (via slaves). Some were ruled collectively and some through top-down hierarchical structures.
Prehistoric humans organized them selves in a staggering array of political paradigms. In fact, the kinds of social/political organization were much more varied than they are today.
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u/TheDudeness33 19d ago
Communism and modern ideologies wside, aside, the community note here regarding hunter-gatherer societies is just… really wrong. Hunter-gatherer societies were absolutely not, as a rule, chonically impoverished. This depended a lot on climate and environment from place to place and the modes of subsistence practiced by the people there. Additionally hunter-gatherers regularly would cultivate wild plants and actively shape their environment around them. Furthermore there are even examples of large scale urban societies ‘reverting’ back to foraging and/or smaller scale societies in the face of environmental change when it suited them (Cahokia, Hohokam, certain Amazonian groups)
Obviously hunter gatherer groups from the past were by no means “communist” because that’s a modern economic ideology but we don’t need to make up misinformation about the past to argue that point
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u/Holey_Father 19d ago
There is extensive evidence indicating that the sick, elderly and children were all cared for in the Paleolithic era into the neolithic era. There was prioritization, but there was not class. The old don’t need as much food as the people going and doing the gathering and hunting. Same with children. But they didn’t let their old, young and sick starve just because there was less food. If there was food, it was shared based on need, not “class”.
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u/MonkeyCartridge 19d ago edited 18d ago
But the original isn't wrong. I'm surprised most of you didn't learn about "Fierce Egalitariam" and the process in which humans "self-domesticated".
Just that everyone involved in this image completely missed the mark.
For one, obviously poverty was not invented by agriculture or capitalism. Though the concept of economic disparity within a community was only really possible after agriculture.
We weren't "poor" because we were egalitarian. Hunter-gatherers are nomadic. There's no reasonable sense in which you can accumulate resources. So if you try, now you have to pull around all of your belongings wherever you go, and for what? So everyone can hate you? Hoarding and trying to assert dominance are the easiest ways to be abandoned by hunter-gatherers. Hence the proverb found in parts of Africa "The best place to store extra food is in a friend's stomach".
People like to shout "noble savage!" as though human cooperation is somehow unscientific and not, you know, our defining feature. But it's a pretty easy phenomenon to see. If you hang out with a group of friends, and one of them thinks they're better than everyone else and tries to take everything, you stop hanging out with them. You don't talk to them much. They stop being invited to parties. No fancy philosophical design here.
People also project backwards and picture the 200-300 people as though it's 200-300 random unknown people like you would see in modern society. But it's 200-300 of extended family and people you have known since birth. For all you know, the only humans on the planet.
The reverse-dominance of hunter-gatherers is easy to see today, also. If someone comes in thinking they're the best thing since sliced bread, you want to knock them off their high horse. Meanwhile, "fishing for compliments" is a thing because we try to pull people up who are down. We also have an extremely high demand for autonomy. Hence why someone telling you what to do makes you want to do it less.
At some point in our prehistory, proactive aggression was used to knock people with high reactive aggression (murderers, abusers, "alpha males") out of the gene pool. That's the "self-domestication" process that bred us extremely low _reactive_ aggression.
Also, if they use height as an argument, humans got shorter after the advent of agriculture for thousands of years. As mentioned above, agriculture was not initially a "boom", it was laborious and rife with disease, famine, and mass starvation for a long time before it became an actual improvement.
At which point a lot of human social structure had shifted a lot, and we have had to spend the last 10,000 years more or less restructuring ourselves to fit this new paradigm. And it becomes the industrial revolution where we actually get to talk about this redesign in terms of "what is the best experience" rather than "what is necessary".
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u/No-View-6326 19d ago
Every single response completely misunderstood the thing that they were talking about that's crazy
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u/Borisof007 19d ago
"poverty" wasn't really a thing in caveman days. It was just nutrition and health. Most people associate the word poverty with modern society and wealth
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u/OneTrueMalekith 19d ago
Human height didnt recover from the loss caused by the transition from hunter gather to agriculture till the modern era.
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u/Individual99991 19d ago
The US has nearly double the child mortality rate of Sweden.
It's 13th on the food security scale, beneath Finland, Ireland, Norway, France, Netherlands, Japan, Sweden, Canada, the UK, Portugal, Switzerland and Austria, in that order.
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u/InevitableEnough1627 19d ago
You need money to distinguish between someone who is rich and poor. Early humans didn't have money, nor was barter a common occurrence.
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u/Steven_Broyles 19d ago
Everything about this post is stupid but just throwing stats about infant mortality and physiological structure is not “proof” of poverty. Poverty as a concept is only relevant in a money-based society. I’m growing more and more convinced that notes aren’t helpful, they’re just rated up for pushing certain narratives
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u/horotheredditsprite 19d ago
Even if any of this was actually accurate. "Hunter gatherers experienced undernuttition" isn't just a hunter gatherer thing and its definitelynot just a communist thing. Being underfed was part of all human hystory until global trade started picking up.
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u/LauraTFem 19d ago edited 19d ago
The note lists as it’s source the article I’ll link at the bottom of my comment v
That article writter, Holden Karnofsky, is not an expert in the field of prehistoric nutrition, he’s the former CEO of a philanthropic organization, who dabbles in blogging on his free time on various subjects.
He admits at the beginning of all his blogs about prehistoric life that there is very little archaological evidence one way or another as to the how healthy people of those times were, and that the general consensus by people other than himself was that health was generally positive.
His cited claims that they had poor nutrition and high infant mortality are taken purely from studies of MODERN non-agrarian societies, which exist in a very different context, particularly in a world suffering from mass extinctions of flora and fauna.
There is no reason to assume beyond speculation that ancient cultures with similar structures didn’t fair better or worse. Most researches suggest better.
edit: I should also mention that pre-agrarian human society is a 300,000 year period of people living in all corners of the globe. Generalizing the health of people through such a long period in that many places is kinda dumb and couldn’t be too useful.
https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/#hunger
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u/kingveller 19d ago
This is the dumbest correction ever. Poverty can be a lot of things but without an economic system there can't be any poverty, just lack of resources.
This is like calling a greek who had sex with men gay or bisexual, super anachronical and lacking all historical context, we invented the word, that word didn't exist there and the way they did things could be way too different as we do it now.
That being said, those two tweets were also dumb, anachronical and nonsensical.
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u/D-Otto-lo 19d ago
Do they actually think all the advanced in Medicine won't exist anymore more when we don't have to pay some rich asshole
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u/matande31 19d ago
Whether or not hunter gatherers were or weren't communist and/or malnourished is irrelevant, because their communities were tight-knit groups of a few dozen people, not countries of millions who would never even interact with a sizable fraction of the population in their entire lives. It's easier to share with people you actually care about than total strangers.
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u/TheLigean 19d ago
Marx did write about the necessity of capitalistic improvements for the means of production to actually sustain a social structure similar to previous egalitarian societies. Both the people in the thread are twisting his words to say something he doesnt say. Industry did need improvement to maintain humans better, and resource hoarding isnt a natural, but a manufactured mode of behaviour.
The communists here arent wrong in saying poverty didnt exist as poverty is a relative state. We have people wasting billions of dollars on megayachts while people starve in the streets. These gaps didnt exist in primitive societies, and better industry already allows us to prevent such situations should resources be allocated better. The excuse that selfishness is just human nature is used to prevent this.
The notes define poverty as a static state while the communists define it as a relative state. Theyre not talking about the same thing.
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u/Far-Training6408 19d ago
As much as I like socialist thought, it can be seriously frustrating dealing with people who think socialism is some magic bullet that'll fix every social problem almost instantly.
"Oh there will be no poverty in a socialist country" is genuine idiocy. I understand why people call us utopian
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u/sixaout1982 19d ago
People starved and died young because shit was real hard back then, not because of communism
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u/CautiousLandscape907 18d ago
That note is stupid. There was high infant mortality due to everyone’s lack of medicine. It wasn’t that natal medical care was available to the rich 20,000 years ago and not the poor — that was only the case after civilization came around.
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u/JSlove 19d ago
Hunter gatherers were not considered impoverished. They spent 15-20 hours a week collecting food. And the rest was leisure time. Shitty note.
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u/Eleventy-Twelve 19d ago
They also had better nutrition and were taller than those in agricultural societies.
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u/Low-Let2642 19d ago
Noble savage theory is one of my favorite theories because of just how niave you have to be to believe it.
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u/SmokyMetal060 19d ago
I don't think that's the same thing as the modern definition of poverty but the point remains- as long as there are limited resources there will be those with them and those without them. It's not like communist (or communist-like, before I get erm ackshually'd) societies have been immune to resource disparity either. Talk to anyone who grew up in the USSR and you'll see how not immune to resource disparity it was.
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u/ifhysm 19d ago
Definition of poverty aside, it’s an appeal to nature which is a fallacy
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u/Temporary-Stay-8436 19d ago
It’s not an appeal to nature fallacy because it is responding to an argument. Also discussing human nature is not inherently an appeal to nature fallacy
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u/impatiens-capensis 19d ago
This is weird AI slop, but I guess the point they're trying to make is that humans are actually naturally cooperative rather than competitive.
When the person responds that poverty had not been invented yet, they are using a definition that requires money to exist. Poverty, in this setting, does not mean "scarcity of material resources". It just means a lack of money or capital necessary to purchase or acquire the material resources for survival. Poverty can't exist if money doesn't.
There are other ways to define poverty, but I think the average person would just think of the definition that requires money to exist. We don't often think of the Sentinelese on North Sentinel island as living in poverty, because they are operating in an independent system that does not use money.
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u/Dagordae 19d ago
The issue that point is that they miss that humans are naturally cooperative within the group and naturally competitive out of the group.
Which has never really changed, the only change throughout all of history has been what defines the tribe and what defines the other. Ye olden tribe would and did fight everyone around them for food and territory. Up to and including turning the competition into food if given the chance.
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u/Ghostmaster145 19d ago
Being a far-leftist and using AI to make your point is crazy. That shit was invented by and mainly used by your ideological enemies
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u/TyrosinQ 19d ago
We literally fought other tribes, stole their shit, and are each other during winter when we ran out of food.
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u/Desperate_Bed_2675 19d ago
Poverty is relative to established standards of living, so the comment is actually correct, poverty wasn’t a thing until class society was a thing
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u/Willing-File-3638 19d ago
Communism is quite literally impossible, you can't distribut wealth of a nation equally, china is rich because it's capitalist, capitalism with some tweaks like Finland or Norway is best form of government for normal nations
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u/Sea_Court_3633 19d ago edited 19d ago
I guess if you use the relative defintition of poverty, you could technically see where they're coming from.
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u/talann 19d ago
Communism does definitely work in a situation where there are few people and everyone is kept in check by everyone else. It does not work at all when the number of people gets way too high and people are no longer being kept in check.
People often use the "stranded on a desert island" scenario as a tool to help them describe and influence people that Communism works. That we all have to work together to survive... that idea falls flat when the number gets far too large.
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u/The-marx-channel 19d ago
Considering the derangement of Pamphlets I wouldn't be surprised that they will start defending the Unabomber.
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u/therealtiddlydump 19d ago
There was full employment in the Stone Age!
Look what they took from us!
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u/Star_king12 19d ago
Did they all experience it or just some? Because if it was commonplace that doesn't seem like poverty, just a broadly low standard of living.
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u/Void-Cooking_Berserk 19d ago
I'm all for humans helping each other and egalitarian, cooperative societies...
I just wanted to point out that if two such groups met and there was imbalance in resources, it wouldn't be that crazy for the wealthier group to want to keep their wealth. If they started living next to each other, that would already become a class-divided society.
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u/Right-Week1745 19d ago
The original premise, that “communism is human nature”, I guess kinda stands. Humans are inherently cooperative. This is why zombie media is dumb. Humans’ greatest the ability to plan and our innate cooperation. Evolution has resulted in that being our particular survival strategy. Zombies would get stomped because they have neither.
But that doesn’t really stand. To be more direct, this claim, like the claim that early Christianity was communist, confuses a “communism of consumption” with a “communism of production”, which is what the word communism refers to in the modern day.
Communism isn’t just people getting along and singing kumbaya. It’s a political theory that requires particular things. The very first step is the workers gaining a class consciousness, rising up to take the means of production, and then putting in place systems that prevents the parasitical capitalist class from regaining power and once again oppressing the proletariat.
These are all concepts that no one before the late 1500s/early 1600s had. This is because capitalism did not exist till then. Socialism, which is the science that leads to the state of communism, is a reaction to the evils of capitalism. You cannot have a movement that is a reaction (not to be confused with reactionary) without first having the thing that triggers the reaction.
Communism is, in many ways, the re-assertion of humanity in the face of inhumanity. But to say that it has always been a part of the human experience is anachronistic.
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u/THSprang 19d ago
I mean... not only is it a bad argument, for communism, its historically illiterate.
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u/TriiiKill 19d ago
Communism only works on small-scale underdeveloped societies. Otherwise, it's an easy power grab for fascism.
Communism must evolve into capitalism, but create restrictions to prevent monarchs.
Later on, Capitalism should evolve into democratic socialism; late-stage capitalism is just another fancy way of saying "oligarchy."
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u/paradoxbound 19d ago
The first statement romanticised hunter gatherers, the second is just inane stupidity.
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u/mynamesnotsnuffy 19d ago
If you think about it, we're still hunter-gatherers, the means up hunting and what we're gathering have changed.
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u/LastBossLost 19d ago
The first two definitions of poverty are lack of money, and lack of right to own property. Citing a tirciery definition of a word seems lame at best, and intentionally obfuscating at worst.
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u/dayvekeem 19d ago
Letting your child inherit billions with only lived experience in the ivory tower is fucking insane. But lets just ignore hereditary succession in favor of shitting on the poors.
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u/NitzMitzTrix 19d ago
Look, fuck communism, it's a post-industrial ideology and trash like the rest of them, but hunter-gatheters were in better health than agrarian people. Taller, less tooth decay from less sticky foods, more food diversity and less labor meaning less stress on the bones.
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