"“Conflict” (eris) appears at the start of Hesiod’s Works and Days, a didactic poem about rural life from the same era as The Iliad. Hesiod’s narrator declares that there are two types of conflict, one bad and one good. Bad conflict causes war and destroys communities, while good conflict motivates people to outdo their neighbors. When one potter competes with another, everyone wins. Even the less successful artisan ends up with a better piece of work.”>Good conflict is when capitalistic competition.
Thus much of the origin,—let us next consider the evils of oligarchy. Would a man who wanted to be safe on a voyage take a bad pilot because he was rich, or refuse a good one because he was poor? And does not the analogy apply still more to the State? And there are yet greater evils: two nations are struggling together in one—the rich and the poor; and the rich dare not put arms into the hands of the poor, and are unwilling to pay for defenders out of their own money. And have we not already condemned that State in which the same persons are warriors as well as shopkeepers? The greatest evil of all is that a man may sell his property and have no place in the State; while there is one class which has enormous wealth, the other is entirely destitute. But observe that these destitutes had not really any more of the governing nature in them when they were rich than now that they are poor; they were miserable spendthrifts always. They are the drones of the hive; only whereas the actual drone is unprovided by nature with a sting, the two-legged things whom we call drones are some of them without stings and some of them have dreadful stings; in other words, there are paupers and there are rogues. These are never far apart; and in oligarchical cities, where nearly everybody is a pauper who is not a ruler, you will find abundance of both. And this evil state of society originates in bad education and bad government.
>>24772453>rural life from the same era as The IliadHesiod calls his era the age of iron and calls the era immediately preceding his own the age of heroes, which is the era the Iliad is set in.
I like to think about how even the average soldier in the homeric age could crush people with boulders
Hesiod basically says competition is good when it motivates greater effort, that isn't capitalism.
The Greeks also said fucking lil boys was awesome
>>24772453>capitalism is when people compete with each other to outdo each other in productive artsThat's a pretty broad definition of capitalism
discord mods always say the same thing
The Spartans were against international trade and made iron their currency to make capitalism more difficult
>>24772645I recall Xenophon saying much the same thing
Aristotle thought wealth inequality and usury were bad
>>24772453capitalism is not a real thing. it's literally not real
>>24772674Is this what you're referencing?>In the first place the system of coinage that he established was of such a kind that even a sum of ten minae could not be brought into a house without the master and servants being aware of it: the money would fill a large space and need a wagon to draw it.>Indeed, how should wealth be a serious object there, when he insisted on equal contributions to the food supply and on the same standard of living for all, and thus cut off the attraction of money for indulgence sake?- Xenophon, Constitution of the Lacedaemonians Book VII, 3lol sounds a lot more like communism than capitalism if anything
>>24772702>that even a sum of ten minae could not be brought into a house without the master and servants being aware of it: the money would fill a large space and need a wagon to draw it.lmao
>>24772702That anon wasn't saying the Spartans were capitalists.
>>24772645That's exactly what libertarians say.
>>24772719I know, I didn't intend to suggest he was; OP on the other hand said "The Greeks loved capitalism", whereas this suggests otherwise
>>24772721Yeah and no one listens to them. We don't have free market capitalism. Only in small pocket economies.
>>24772631
>>24772453What is Capitalism, where did it arise, and when did it start? Capitalism is not merely societal ownership of private property, nor of profit, and neither is it markets.
>>24773958If you look throughout history, these conditions are met everywhere. I think Capitalism is just a label, referring to market economies, that is used as a negation of Socialism and Communism.
>>24773960socialism and communism have market economies. How else do you get goods from one owner to another?capitalism refers to archaic notion of production where workplace is set up in a similiar manner to feudal estate and refuses to forgo societal change even though it might be beneficial in the long run, because the organizers of labor are its benefactors, thus they have self interest in not changing the way things are.
>capitalism
>>24772453Damn, this post glows so fucking hard.
>>24772453>capitalismYou use Marxist terminology.
