Was capitalism a "long-dreaded nightmare" from which wise Chinese statesmen protected their people for thousands of years? When /r/neoliberal debates Chinese history, /u/Prince_Kropotkin shows up to demonstrate why capitalism is superior to anarchism.

65  2018-05-07 by Deity_Of_Death

17 comments

Have you posted bussy yet?

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Prince used to tell everyone he was on his way to a PhD. Now he doesn't talk about it when anyone brings it up.

https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/8h7371/discussion_thread/dyj3l9i/

He still talks about it some. For how long has he been "working on a PhD" anyway? I imagine he must be super behind on it since he spends an obscene amount of time posting on Reddit.

What if his PhD is on the nature of posting to reddit? šŸ¤”

Well it's supposedly in econ, which means it'll probably be just as useless.

Inst he a socialist?

5 years

5 years sounds about right, for humanities degree at least.

In Prince's world, feudalism is more equal and fair than capitalism.

Btw who has time to write those 800 word essays twice an hour on reddit for several consecutive years? I mean jesus.

Also in /u/prince_kropotkin ā€˜s world, ideology and government direct history, and capitalism is the result of whitey, not industrialization.

Anarchists are the reason why Leon Trotsky is the worlds greatest hero.

Everyone in this thread is fucking retarded, no one feared capitalism or free trade considering those concepts didnā€™t even exist yet

The raw number of people who unironically think that all economies throughout history were capitalist or communist makes me mad.

I'm going to have to stick my neck out for u/prince_kropotkin here a bit, he certainly showed awareness of as much as that:

>Capitalism was a "nightmare", i.e. the fear of things that could possibly come if merchants were allowed to take over society. Not a precise, defined definition or expectation of what capitalism would actually be.

Thatā€™s the crux of what Iā€™m talking about. Certain Chinese emperors and the noble class had a real disgust for merchants, seeing it as ignoble peasant labor that was unworthy of their kingdoms.

Krapotkin then takes this fact and injects his own Marxist feelings ā€œthey must have been afraid because or capitalismā€, disregarding the fact that-

Nobody had a Marxist point of view until the 1840s, at this point not even the Europeans had any idea of what a true market economy was or how itā€™s effects (bad or good) would play out even if they did.

There is a perfectly rational reason for the Chinese government of the time to feel this way about trade besides them being pro to communists- the nobles who though this why were Confucianists, who regarded labor that produced something (like farming or crafting) over that that produced nothing. (With the exception of scholars and priests, whose works they saw as the most important).

And abyway these people Krapotkin and I are talking about didnā€™t even end up stopping free trade like he said, that was the Qing dynasty almost 200 years later and they left no stated reasoning for doing so.

Anyway enough seriousposting on drama, Iā€™ve got bussy to look at.

Fucking dumbass Europeans creating a system that lifted 800 million Chinese out of poverty.

I thought PK was supposed to be one of the reasonable ones

He's gotten more unhinged, mostly because Chapo keeps accusing him of being an 'evil liberal'.