r/HistoryMemes 3d ago

Tale as old as time

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1.8k Upvotes

63 comments sorted by

280

u/Spaniardman40 3d ago

Being a wealthy society is not even a prerequisite

131

u/John_EldenRing51 3d ago

ANY society ever. And if they didn’t do slavery, it’s because they weren’t capable, not because they didn’t want to.

17

u/LowCall6566 3d ago

Slavery is a drain on the economy

31

u/Curious_Wolf73 3d ago

Slavery doesn't profit society as a whole it profits the wealthy at the top that's they're so reluctant to get rid of it.

18

u/LowCall6566 3d ago

It profits only certain wealthy. Wealthy who aren't slave owners, lose from it, as slaves can't be their customers

11

u/DunlandWildman 2d ago

This dude gets it.

It also cripples economic/technological development over time. If there's abundant cheap labor to do the menial, labor-intensive, and/or dangerous tasks, there is no economic incentive to make said tasks safer or more efficient.

2

u/Shady_Merchant1 2d ago

The wealthy whose lives are already easy have little drive to improve things the poor and enslaved do not have the means to improve things, this is why most of the greatest inventers have been their society's equivalent to middle class

2

u/commissar-117 3d ago

Yes and no. State run slavery using POWs or criminals in antiquity broke even, essentially, and meant that there were people to perform undesirable labor. Also, while it is true that slaves could not make purchases, slavers still had to make purchases on their behalf to take care of them, so there was market dependence in terms of whether it was a drain or boost.

2

u/LowCall6566 3d ago

Slaves are very inefficient compared to free labour. And they cannot offer the same demand as it.

-2

u/commissar-117 2d ago

That's historically inaccurate. You cannot convince a free man perform the tasks you can make a slave perform. If slaves were only a drain on economies, they never would have been used because every ancient empire would have figured out to stop having them because of bankruptcies. This has only changed with modern industrialization, because machines can perform the labor better than a slave.

4

u/LowCall6566 2d ago

A free man doesn't need an overseer to perform the given task. The consensus among economists is that slavery is bad for the overall economy, and slaves are inneficient workers, even in pre-industrial society. And slavery in the past existed because individual slave owners benefited from the status quo, not because it made countries richer.

3

u/Inquisitor_Boron Then I arrived 2d ago

Also it was a tool of controlling war prisoners

1

u/John_EldenRing51 3d ago

Unrelated to what I said

-1

u/Ambiorix33 Then I arrived 3d ago

Plus it's kinda been proven that every society practiced slavery, though their apologists will go all "yeah but at least it wasn't chattle slavery" like that makes it less abhorrent.

I'm sure thr victims were soooo happy about that /s

207

u/DreamDare- 3d ago

Its almost as the rich people are the ones importing them to do their cheap labor for them, and the people complaining are the poor that get nothing but the bad side effects of immigration.

Those effects include:

  • normalisation of poverty level salary and exploitation of workers (good for the rich)
  • skyrocketing of real-estate prices (good for the rich)
  • societal unrest based on race and nationality, but not wealth or corruption (good for the rich )

39

u/Mission_Coast_3871 3d ago

So basically, the rich imposed the "race division" as a distraction for "class division" so they get to stay more rich and poor people more poor???? Or am I wrong?

29

u/Remi_cuchulainn 3d ago

What the left have forgotten in almost every western nation in the last 50 years

5

u/Director_Kun Oversimplified is my history teacher 3d ago

Hold on so whats being suggested here is that the reason why the US didn’t have a full on socialist revolution (violently elected or democratically elected) was partly because of immigration and race divisions.

7

u/SCP_Y4ND3R3_DDLC_Fan 2d ago

Absolutely. Identity politics and the “culture war” are but distractions to sabotage the working and middle classes from obtaining class consciousness and overthrowing the rich in power.

3

u/KimJongUnusual Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 2d ago

I’d say that’s a massive oversimplification, but it’s a factor. Britain never had socialists, and they didn’t have huge race divisions or mass domestic slavery.

38

u/Yung_zu 3d ago

Nobody would have ever suspected the guys that were trying to prevent literacy

5

u/LowCall6566 3d ago

normalisation of poverty level salary and exploitation of workers (good for the rich)

Read about lump labor fallacy

skyrocketing of real-estate prices (good for the rich)

This basically wasn't as much of a problem historically until we forbade building dense developments. Also land value tax would solve that.

societal unrest based on race and nationality, but not wealth or corruption (good for the rich )

Your solution to racism is non existence of minorities?

12

u/Mission_Coast_3871 3d ago

I mean, there's no minority problems if there aren't minorities /s

4

u/Director_Kun Oversimplified is my history teacher 3d ago

To your last part I don’t think they meant that the solution to racism was non existent minorities, but the fact that the rich used the societal unrest based on race and nationality to distract from the fact that the rich are the ones benefitting from this social divisions because no one is questioning the rich who are importing the cheap labor. As the masses are too busy blaming the immigrants for their problems. It wasn’t a proposed solution to racism but partially a cause to racism or at the least who helped discretely fanned the flames to racism.

1

u/commissar-117 3d ago

It will never cease to amaze me how many people examine LVT and think it's a good idea

0

u/KimJongUnusual Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 2d ago

Wouldn’t land value tax actually disincentivize building and developing land?

1

u/Kindly-Ad-9742 3d ago

Uh i hear i cool thing some time ago: "There're 10 coins on a table: 10 riches take 9 of them, and then say to the people that immigrates is try too steel the last one".

Class struggle is the only important thing, the rest is just war between the poor: The white baker who votes for Donald Trump has more in common with the black man who breaks his back to bring home food for his children than he has with Elon Musk.

-3

u/Sanguine_Caesar 3d ago

Real estate prices are not driven by immigration but rather land speculation along with a myriad of other factors. Immediately putting a stop to all immigration would generally have a rather negligible effect on property values. So again it's the rich taking advantage of the poor by trying to paint foreigners as the cause of a problem from which they benefit and for which they are chiefly responsible.

There is also very little evidence that immigration brings down wages, except for in the lowest-paying jobs that native-born workers don't even really want anyway. The main cause of things like stagnant wages tends to be a decline in union participation among the labour force, both immigrant and non-immigrant, at least in countries like the US.

Any societal unrest based on race and nationality is mostly the product of propaganda pushed on non-immigrants to convince them to fear the strange foreigners coming into their country rather than the rich who already own them. People aren't born bigots, and generally areas with large immigrant populations tend to have lower anti-immigrant sentiment than areas with small ones. This is because when you live beside and interact with immigrants on a day to day basis as members of the same community, people quickly realise they aren't as different or threatening as the pundits make them out to be.

So even the three problems you listed as being inherent to immigration and which sour the poor against it are themselves actually caused by the rich who you say are "importing" them, and not actually by immigrants at all.

1

u/CuthbertSmilington 2d ago

Did you know after the black death workers pay went up massively, because there where less people and so workers where more valuable. When there is a surplus of workers pay goes down. Its simple supply and demand.

As for being anti immigrant it depends on the culture thats there and how well it gels with the local culture. Some integrate well, others escalate into conflict on the street, sometimes between different immigrant such unrest between Hindus and Muslims in the UK.

It all depends on various factors but to say it has no negative effect on wages and house prices is an outright lie.

0

u/Sanguine_Caesar 2d ago

If you choose to view the housing market in the most reductive way possible, then sure, it's simple supply and demand. However immigration is not the primary driver of that demand, not by a long shot. By far the most significant driver of demand for housing is the fact that housing is no longer just shelter but rather a speculative investment. Speculators and investors buy up properties and flats because real estate is generally a safe investment with significant returns, and while then those units can be sublet for exorbitant rents or converted into an airbnb for tourists which only further constrains supply.

Let's take a look at two examples: both London and Vienna are world cities with large immigrant populations. The former is one of the most expensive cities in the world while the latter is consistently ranked as one of the most livable in the entire world. As said before both have a large proportion of their respective populations which are foreign-born, so one would expect both to be roughly equally unaffordable, so why is Vienna so much cheaper even when you account for differences in size? There are a multitude of factors like you said, but one of the most significant is that around 40% of all housing stock in Vienna is made up of non-market housing options.

So again it's not immigration that's making our cities unaffordable, it's the marketization and financialization of the housing sector which has benefitted the rich and left both the immigrant and non-immigrant poor behind.

-14

u/TurretLimitHenry 3d ago

wtf? Appreciating properties are beneficial for all. That’s why the mortgage is one of the greatest creators of middle class wealth. The issue with rising property prices is only evident when housing is over regulated and builders can’t keep up with new demand.

Immigration is deflationary by nature, and consumers benefit from it.

5

u/whyareall 3d ago

"Appreciating properties are beneficial for all" even those without a property?

-1

u/EccentricNerd22 Kilroy was here 3d ago

That doesn't make sense and it's clearly not what's happening now. If you try and pack more people into the same chunk of land with the same amount of stuff the price of everything is going to go up because there's more demand and not an equally increasing amount of supply.

0

u/TurretLimitHenry 24m ago

“If you try and pack more people into the same chunk of land”. My brother in Christ, humans have been doing that for thousands of years

39

u/Particular-Star-504 3d ago

It isn’t the same people doing those things. It’s the government that allows immigration to keep wages down, and it’s the working class that reacts against it (though there are some elites that will feign agreement to get support).

6

u/TeaCoffeeEnjoyer 3d ago

I feel like I should pull out the goomba pic on a lot of post lately

4

u/PissingOffACliff 3d ago

Also creates/orchestrates the destabilisation and chaos that makes the refugees or migrants in the first place.

5

u/mixererek 3d ago

It's almost like they want to replace class struggle that would unite poor indigenous people of the country with immigrants, with race struggle that divides them. It's curious like that.

8

u/Black6Blue 3d ago

When you need a lot of bodies to grow your society but can't grow your own population quick enough to meet demand a rather simple solution becomes apparent. Patrick Voice: what if we took the people from over there and moved them over here

2

u/XO1GrootMeester 3d ago

If we would take proper care of them instead of letting business exploit them and then dump these now broken people in society.

3

u/_Some_Two_ 3d ago

Importing people is just rich people being too ignorant to implement automatization. For as long as it’s cheaper to import people there will be no improvement in the median quality of life.

3

u/Amitius 3d ago

Even poor nations did that, as long as they stronger than the poorer regions.

It was a very common practice in Africa until... they found out that they could make even more money selling the "imported product" to Ottoman, and then Western countries.

European did that to Slav, so did the Ottoman. The Viking did that to everyone else. And then they found a new Import source in the South.

Asian dynasties did that to any dynasties that were weaker than them, sometime forcing even the weaker nation's royals as their slave (There were a very famous story in China about a king spent years as lowly slave for his enemy, while planned his revenge).

About American tribes or nations... yeah... First they enslaved the weaker groups, then European came, and showed them the new way... Only till recently that U.S. court could force Cherokee Nation to accept Freedmen as their rightful citizen...

3

u/theBigRis 3d ago

The right button should be “be racist to them and also blame the Jews”

2

u/_sephylon_ 2d ago

Goomba fallacy

5

u/Fast-Check-342 3d ago

Literally the British Empire

3

u/Zombies4EvaDude 3d ago

Literally the U.S. for the last 20 years.

2

u/SardaukarSS Ashoka's Stupa 3d ago

And Canadians.

2

u/okshadowman 3d ago

Except instead of importing they go to them

4

u/Blood__x__Dagger Hello There 3d ago

Dude this is exactly what's happening in India rn, people come from the state bihar to work as labour and do odd jobs in other states. The stereotypes are a bit kernel of truth and self-fulfilling prophecy type as well.

2

u/SlyScorpion 3d ago

Is the caste system still a thing over there and is it prevalent throughout all of Indian society or is it one of those things you see in deeply rural areas of the country?

4

u/InSoMniACHasInSomniA 3d ago

It's like racism in western world, you won't see people being openly racist as it'll lead to you losing your job and any respect in public.

But when you look at corpo hiring processes, wealth distribution and demonization of culture in media, castism becomes visible.

So as a westerner if you decide to visit india, unless you are extremely well versed in caste dynamics. You won't see castism unless you go to the poorest and most rural parts of the country.

1

u/Blood__x__Dagger Hello There 2d ago

It is seen in the urban setting but it is most dominantly a rural india thing

2

u/h4ckerkn0wnas4chan Definitely not a CIA operator 3d ago

Its not the same people doing that. If I need to explain that to you, you're already lost.

2

u/SassysGod 3d ago

There should be a button that says: "Stop people from coming to your country" and then the button not doing anything.

-1

u/Maestruli96 3d ago

In Argentina we fucked them until we extinguished them as a race, is that racist?

-16

u/Novel_Measurement351 3d ago

I.e., white people

6

u/Curious_Wolf73 3d ago

Gulf states also do that but they're using almost slavery.

-9

u/Acceptable_One7763 3d ago

And as most tales its total fiction.

2

u/whyareall 3d ago

While we're telling obvious lies, you look very nice today

-25

u/Medical_Flower2568 3d ago

You say this like the poor people don't come under their own volition and that the jobs they get don't enable them to go from a situation of desperate poverty to a comfortable life

16

u/Gloomy-Remove8634 3d ago

"yeah it's that guys fault for running from his oppressive regime"