Unfortunately this is false. They've tested this and monkeys establish captilasm extremely fast when they come to understand currency as a concept.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/503550
They would exchange the currency, steal it, gamble with it, purchase with it, and even do some prostitution for it.
Edit: To people responding that this isnt capitalism, it actually is, in this case the privatized controller of wealth were the researchers distributing "payment" to the monkeys at a fixed rate, as well as having experiments where the monkeys had to pull levers before they would receive rewards either to themselves or later, altruistically to other monkeys.
You would know that if you took the time to read up on the study before responding...
122That's not capitalism, that's just a market.
It's only capitalism when one monkey owns the means of production and starts paying another money a wage while taking the wealth they produce.
It would be really interesting if the scientists gave all of the monkeys a huge supply of walnuts, and one of the monkeys a tool to open walnuts. Would the monkey share the tool when it was finished opening walnuts? Charge the other monkeys to use the tool? Would the other monkeys beat the shit out of them and share it?
60I vaguely remember reading about monkeys teaming up and beating others to death if they hoard too much 'wealth'. If that's actually true the meme is still kind of true.
44There's no real way to hoard "wealth" as a monkey. Fruit rots. There's no way to invest in such a society, since they don't understand the concept of growing food. That's why they live in family groups to control territory.
Humans lived similarly for hundreds of thousands of years. Calling the basic exchange of tokens "capitalism" isn't accurate. It's like calling a tribal society "communism" because people take care of their relatives for free. It's not accurate.
15Permanently Deleted
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Since the researchers owned and distributed the capital, this was not a capitalist market invented by the monkeys, but one enforced on them by the researchers.
So you can call it capitalism, but it doesn't disprove the OP tweet like you suggested.
32"capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit."
19These are certainly words...
This take is insultingly dumb. As others have pointed out, trading goods for anything doesn't equal capitalism.
18Having a common medium of exchange isn’t the same thing as “capitalism”
11That's not Capitalism, that's just exchange.
9I read the study (not everyone has academic access, FYI, so here's a link) and it's not capitalism. Even your edit, where you explain how "it's capitalism for real guys", is just an example of voluntary exchange, a feature that is neither exclusive to capitalism nor its defining feature.
Maybe before criticizing others, first take a few minutes to even just read the Wikipedia article on capitalism and make sure you know what you're talking about.
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When I woke up today I never would if guessed that today is the day I would wind up accidentally learning that monkey prostitutes are a thing.
38If it helps, that's not monkeys inventing capitalism, it's monkeys responding to a system of currency that was enforced on them by scientists. That's a very different thing.
Essentially what they've discovered is an example of the logic of capitalism reproducing itself within those it subjugates.
23I'm sorry for your loss.
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I love this but anyone got a link to a site that isn’t paywalled or doesn’t force me to disable my ad blocker?
4Weird. It didn't paywall me. You could try clearing your cookies or using 12ft.io. (12ft.io sometimes works for me.)
Honestly, I just vaguely remembered hearing about that experiment and when this post came up I googled (well, DuckDuckGo'd, but anyway) "monkey money experiment prostitution" and picked the first link that seemed to be about the experiment I'd remembered hearing about.
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In this thread: many apes who demonstrate they have no idea what capitalism is.
12I'm starting a new line of NFTs that will be Communist apes.
Anybody can make them and anybody that needs one can have one.
As it happens, no one needs that. So none exist.
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To be fair, every monkey would be clubbed to death by trying to explain something to other monkeys.
6It would have happened with people too.
We had to be broken into it and, by it, domesticated over hundreds of years. Now people can't even imagine any other system possibly "working" (the exacts nature of the not working-ness of other systems is hard to pin down when we're honest about those things also applying to capitalism).
The origins of the feudal system isn't up for debate and we know it down to very fine detail. Hell, we can even tell the origins of some wild and obscure economic systems, not just, say, the roman slave economy. However, for some reason, were all expected to beleive capitalism just happened, as if by magic, out of no where.
Well, thats because you can't teach the origins of capitalism, without it being a criticism of capitalism, and you can't teach any criticism of capitalism in school either in the UK or the US.
It must be such a good and fair system to have to have its origins hidden.
2Actually all higher primates do capitalism. Bonobos pay with food for sex, Chipanzees pay with support for a higher rank, Orangs pay with food for other orangs making them a bad out of leaves. I suggest to read Barterverse: Galactic Economics 1: Happy Existence
-3Capitalism isn’t just the trade of goods and services
22this here, original commenter's take is the typical dumb take you hear from students of economy.
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I think you're making the common mistake of mixing up voluntary exchange and capitalism. Voluntary exchange, the exchange of goods, money, or services for other goods or services, is a feature of capitalism but it's not exclusive to it by any stretch of the imagination.
The issue many have with capitalism is capital accumulation, which involves the investment of money or other financial instruments with the goal of receiving a financial return, leading to the increasing concentration and centralization of the means of production into the hands of a small number of rich capitalists.
Using your analogy, it wouldn't be orangutans paying another for a bed of leaves. It would be orangutan 1 paying orangutan 2 for a bed, who then kept 60% of the food and paid a third orangutan the remaining 40% to make a bed of leaves. Orangutan 2 then gradually uses its food to buy up all the leaves so other orangutans then have to do 100% of the bed making while orangutan 2 gets a cut of the food simply for owning the leaves. Since the other orangutans can no longer make their own beds, the orangutan capitalist increasingly reduces the amount of food it pays them. Eventually orangutan 2 has more food than it needs, but it uses this food to keep accumulating even more food at the expense of other orangutans having less food than they need.
6a bad out of leaves
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