“people have been propagandized to conflate things like invention with capitalism, as if they are one and the same”

Yeah, they have. Trying to twist “historical materialism” as a buzzword to defend the lens that has been pushed on you by a predominantly capitalist world doesn’t change this fact.

The overlap of capitalism and the rise in living standards etc. are historically intertwined and you cant undo that.

K, tell that to someone who is being exploited for cheap prison labor in the US. Or any number of other examples of exploitation, especially in some of the more exploited (by imperialism/capitalism) countries in the world. It’s not idealism to push back on poor attempts to universalize concepts that do more harm in messaging than good.

If capitalism was fundamentally a rise in living standards, we would not be talking about it as so fundamentally exploitative! Many people don’t benefit from it, that’s like kind of one of the most important points of criticizing it in the first place. You know who is usually the one going to people and giving them some insistent spiel about how capitalism is actually an improvement somehow and ya know, it could be worse? Capitalists. So forgive me for wondering where your priorities are at here.

Capitalism was a step forward, in the right direction even. But we didn’t move on from it yet. We need to move forward and asking whether we are worse off now than before capitalism is not how to encourage people to move forward that encourages them to go back.

No, no, no. History is not linear and things are not automatically universal just cause some people with the predominant status quo lens say that they are. This is not how anything works. Aspects of things in the past can actually be better and be something to model after. The whole notion of communism itself is in part based on communal societal structures of the past. Marx, Lenin, and others like them did not pull the concept out of thin air and “invent” organizing communally. What they did was observe the systems they were dealing with in a scientific manner, as well as historically, and then try to work out through a mixture of theory and practice what would get the outcome they wanted to be. The modern notions of communism are meant to be a kind of merging of the benefits of industrialization and technology, and the political/social/economic structure of something communal. They just don’t idealize it as something you will achieve by being nice to the dominant power structure and hoping it allows you to do your thing. The notion that the past is inherently worse overall I’m certain has some ties not just to capitalism, but also to colonialism and its lens of civil and savage, its lens of “primitive” indigenous societies that were doing a lot better off than they were portrayed.

None of this is saying “return to the past, romanticize it, think only in binary terms!” It’s saying something is not inherently worse in all aspects because it came before. It’s saying if you find yourself using talking points that sound way too close to what the capitalists are using, maybe that should give you pause. I cannot with the audacity of telling me I’m being idealist in this situation, while talking about history like it’s an RPG skill progression ladder.

I don’t know what in the world is going on with the train of thought that thinks historical materialism means saying capitalism was good for the world. That is effectively what you are arguing when you say “the rise in living standards etc. are historically intertwined and you cant undo that”. Meanwhile, climate change is threatening to upend the entire species. But sure, let’s have the priority be that nobody dare ever think any pullback on industrial excess could ever be necessary. Who needs the Amazon rainforest, right, as long as we have Amazon the service. Everything is linear progress overall, even if it threatens to make the planet unlivable for humans. History is over, right. Never mind the ecosystem. We’ll push our way through it with sheer force of rugged individualist linear history will.

Utterly exhausting.

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