Best Of

@person said:

@marcitko said:

@person said:
The question that occurred to me was which comes first? Do less organically religious people create better societies or do better societies create less religious people? Or is it some sort of self reinforcing spiral?

You might find interesting and illuminating the findings of the World Values Survey: https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp

To the best of my knowledge, this is some of the best stuff coming out of social science.

From what I remember, their findings are that while culture retains some significance, economic development is the predominant factor influencing values, including religious values.

When I studied political science, the main debate was as you framed it. Max Weber said that culture determines economics. Karl Marx said that economics determines culture. From my understanding of the World Values Survey, it turns out that Marx was much more right.

I'm hardly a Marx scholar, but my general impression is that he (or maybe its down to those implementing his ideas) misses the organic vs forced distinction in the video. The former being positive the latter a disaster. At any rate its a helpful place for me to try to sort the question out, thanks for the pointer.

I've found that most people who criticize Marx have often have not actually read Marx. Marx did a lot of research into what would become the fields of sociology and political-economics. In particular, he researched and detailed the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and in Capital, details the logic of capitalism and its contradictions. And it's often assumed that Marx advocated a forced vs. organic economic transition. But a more accurate understanding of Marx on future transformation is to have working people consciously create something new and not simply be slaves to the whims of unequal social relations and ruling political and economic elites. That in and of itself is a long discussion on its own. However, one thing I'd like to address is the narrative that capitalism is basically an organic creation that sprung from all things good and consensual and quite naturally. But the fact of the matter is, capitalism has its fair share of 'forced' aspects in its origins. 

Capitalism itself has its beginnings in violence, oppression, and theft as well as innovations and industriousness. Countries with emerging mercantile markets enclosed local common land; colonized other lands; stole land, wealth, and resources; and exploited slave labour in what Marx called the process of 'primitive accumulation.' Then after the industrial revolution, those in power further forced their own people off of communal land and into the cities to work in the factories under new social relations, one in which they were forced to sell their labour power to someone for a wage, not fully realizing that the person who now owns that labour power owns the products of that labour and all the extra value added by their labour, and in which they're pitted against one another for the jobs needed for their survival and comfort. And lets not forget the fact that it was also a system that was purposefully designed with and built specifically upon the oppression and subjugation of black people. Literal black bodies formed the basis of our national wealth at one point and fuelled burgeoning global, capitalists markets. 

Capitalism has undoubtedly helped us reach a point of technological advancement and innovation sufficient to achieve material abundance through the colossal increases in the productive forces of social labour and the extension of our subjugation of nature's forces. But it certainly didn't have a peacefull organic beginning, and a fair share of force has been used to maintain it and its global markets.