Homo, Naturally Born Capitalist

And WARRIOR!… WAR & CAPITAL ARE THE FORCES THAT GAVE US LIFE!

Capitalism presided to the evolution of the genus Homo. First, apes are territorial. They have to be to survive: land and its resources do not reproduce at will, yet species do. But species can’t survive without land or resources. So, unfortunately, survivors exist, because they have defended successfully land and resources.

As a study by top experts put it in Nature: “Lethal aggression in Pan is better explained by adaptive strategies than human impacts.“

Chimps On War Patrol. The species can’t survive without war. Or then, in a zoo!

The apparition of tools and weapons extended the notion of property crucial to survival to other capital. That coincided with a bigger brain and the rise of the genus Homo.

During those millions of years of human evolution, some limits to inequality were intrinsic, because the group could only survive if all worked for it, and that could only be done willingly. Force was not an option to ensure collaboration, because force was needed against outside threats and enemies.

Civilization threw these evolutionary conditions off, as the increasing powers it yielded enabled the apparition of a superior class capable of fighting enemies, foreign and domestic.

The monopolization of the means of production by these superior types included intellectual capital, which, in turn, brought superior weapons. However, intellectual capital grew the more, the more intellectuals, scientists and engineers were at work. Thus oligarchic regimes, by monopolizing those mental powers found themselves less militarily inventive than democracies, which unleashed those mental creative powers (hence developed better weapons).

Therefrom, the old struggle between  oligarchies and democracies.

How to create democracies? By outlawing runaway oligarchies. Thus the Roman Republic put an absolute limit on wealth. Enforcing equality is the fundamental reason for taxation.

Continually, the naive arise, and ask for an end to war and capital. When they get better organized, those plaintiffs succeed to hold ultimate power for a while. Spartacus, the Paris Commune, and Lenino-Stalinism are examples. However, that very organization, which put them on top, is itself from superior capital and war capability (however ephemeral). For example the Kaiser, and later Trotsky (head of the Red Army) took the military actions necessary for success.

Capitalism, war, democracy, oligarchy and plutocracy all belong to the same space. One can’t leave it. It, and only it, provides the human experience. Thus simplistic slogans have to be put to rest. It’s the correct analysis of subtlety which should rule, not this, or that idea, let alone person…

Patrice Ayme

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From the Nature article about the killing of chimps by chimps in the wild:

“Observations of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) provide valuable comparative data for understanding the significance of conspecific killing… Lethal violence is sometimes concluded to be the result of adaptive strategies, such that killers ultimately gain fitness benefits by increasing their access to resources such as food or mates^1,2,3,4,5

…Several robust patterns emerge from these data. Killing was most common in eastern chimpanzees and least common among bonobos. Among chimpanzees, killings increased with more males and higher population density, whereas none of the three human impact variables had an obvious effect. Male chimpanzees killed more often than females, and killed mainly male victims; attackers most frequently killed unweaned infants; victims were mainly members of other communities (and thus unlikely to be close kin); and intercommunity killings typically occurred when attackers had an overwhelming numerical advantage. The most important predictors of violence were thus variables related to adaptive strategies: species; age–sex class of attackers and victims; community membership; numerical asymmetries; and demography. We conclude that patterns of lethal aggression in Pan show little correlation with human impacts, but are instead better explained by the adaptive hypothesis that killing is a means to eliminate rivals when the costs of killing are low.”

 

Tags: Capitalism, democracy, Homo, war