#Turmoil2020's

To go along with this:Humans are functionally a social species relying on the group, and this has been the human condition for thousands of years. Ever since our ancestors strolled out of Africa as Neanderthalls and early Cromagnon Man. Really: far before that too. Relying on each other in social groups and extended families and through extended relationships is functionally the deepest aspect of human nature as man's most ancient coded genes. It is after all why we settled in cities and not scattered hermitages like some weirdly advanced form cougar that came to settle the entire world.As extension to this humans only got to this point in advancement because we're social animals that happened to achieve a certain level of cognitive ability that allowed us to invent language and thereby necessitate the level of communication needed to teach and maintain technological progress and adaption to new environments.We might murder ourselves from time to time, but even chimpanzees and other social animals get into the occasional fight, sometime murderous. But what makes us better than those is that we recognize this as being morally bad and have fixed legal codes to met out punishment, to at the very least make us feel emotionally better that justice has been served and to not act arbitrarily over it in our society.What is expressed in today's society is, as KingKek put it, simply the impression of modern materialism on our mentality. I posted a meme pic involving Richard Dawkin's Selfish Gene, which is more relevant here than it may have seemed as a meme, since this is a book that directly touches on what a meme is. A meme being some cultural unit that passes on through writing or speech to be replicated and carried by a member of the culture or society. And these memes reflecting the cultural paradigm of the society, some value, or a joke.In the western modern world money is a meme, as much as is capitalism. Humanity didn't evolve with capitalism being its primary mode of survival as an individual. In fact if you hoarded any resource for your own benefit in early society you'd at the least be ostracized by the group or physically punished or killed in order to seize the excess you own in order to distribute it per the society's needs. It's only when the society advanced to take on much more sophisticated resources that could be stored did any notion of hoarding become important, and thus giving rise to bureaucrats (Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel discusses this, if I recall right). And these bureaucrats would become the kings and capitalists of later human society; but are very much an artificial construction of humanity, a meme.An advanced form of the early bureaucrat would today be something of the competitive capitalist or businessman trading for goods on the market he'll never see, touch, taste, or smell and never worked to get. And in today's society we consider this a good thing and we enforce the notion — the meme — that competitively buying and selling goods and services is the most necessary thing in the world. But it is still artificial.The writings of Marx came about in the early phases of industrialism in Europe where while craftsmen could produce a range of goods far beyond their ability to do so before in such numbers was still fairly gimped and society was in transition. I don't think many communists far in advance in their ideology are going to consider Marx as being the end-all-be-all in Communism or anything, but more an entry point; I know I've seen people discussing his quintessential faults for having written his thesises at a different economic time in the 19th century using a different pool of literature. To Marx, it was the goal of the workers to seize the means of production to prevent the solidification of the bourgeoisie class as a sort of second feudal class and then to see society advances to a point of absolute post-scarcity where in everyone effectively owns everything because all the parts of society take so little human labor. Or that's how I've heard it before.Where as in comparison Kropotkin's writings later — in particular Conquest of Bread — reexamines the communist goals through the lens of a European industrial environment far more in advance than Marx's proposals and calls into question the entire Vanguard system and proposes the workers can go to the end goal of communism immediately when they seize control of production.