Will competition always exist or is competition just a symptom of scarcity?
Sickos [they/them, it/its] - 1w
I have been thinking hard on this subject for the past several weeks. A train of thought in the shower led me to some self crit/analysis where I realized my personal competitive drive feels much more nurture than nature. I hope we can grow out of it, as a species/society.
9
freagle - 1w
Under communism we will still have sports.
9
Sickos [they/them, it/its] - 1w
Then I yearn for what comes after. Competitive team sports are generally used as an outlet for tribalism. "Us vs them" is a mentality that I hope we can evolve past. Cooperation over competition.
2
freagle - 7day
I see you've never played a competitive sport.
The tribalism you talk about is branding and fandoms. Competition will always exist. People will arm wrestle, people will have contests to see who can do something better than others.
3
amemorablename - 7day
I am curious now to what extent there is historical evidence of such things in earlier communal societies in history and what form it would take. Because it's one thing to think people will always test themselves and each other. It's another thing to think they will always cling to the value of winner/loser dynamics in make-believe.
In my experience with the modern day capitalist framework, it's very much based on individualist win/loss, in the sense that "my win is your loss" and this tends to pervade forms of play too (board games, video games, sports, etc.). The idea that we could both win or both lose is often not even allowed for. The closest equivalent is considered a "tie", which essentially means limbo, undefined, it was never resolved who is "better". But this way of thinking would be strange in a basic communal society and incompatible with its framework of viewing problems as a shared responsibility. I will caveat the following by saying I'm not the biggest fan of Kropotnik because he can sometimes get pointed to to prop up anarchist arguments about not needing a socialist transition state, but I recall him going into observations of nature (I think in Mutual Aid) and how much and often animals actually work together on things as opposed to the prevailing capitalist narrative that nature is a constant dynamic of predator and prey. I bring this up as a point against the implication that competition in the "win/loss" sense of things is some kind of inevitability of humanity or of nature.
Consider a thing like debate, for example. Here CriticalResist talks about the Aristotlean dialectic that precedes what we call dialectical materialism today: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9510488
in aristotle’s dialectic the synthesis is the third new thing, something new emerges which did not exist before. Therefore it cannot be the thesis because the thesis existed prior to the ‘debate’. it cannot be the antithesis for the same reason.
And you can perhaps see that the concept of debate as described in that cultural context is not one of "win/loss", but rather one of synthesizing to discover new. The process that both participate in yields something that neither had before, which can then be to the benefit of both.
In the modern capitalist context (in my experience anyway) debate tends to take a much more demeaning turn. The implication is that there is a winner and loser of a debate and the loser "sucks" somehow compared to the winner. So people tend to get very defensive in debates, fearing damage to reputation or more.
So there is the combining of "yours and mine" process, which can take on different kinds of character. It can be more friendly and calm, or more lively and intense, but either way, the broader societal context influences what the end goal is and how one should feel about it. In capitalist sports, for example, part of the goal is to nurture/discover the most skilled players, who can then be offered lucrative contracts to play for an audience for even more lucrative payouts for the capitalist; this aim is not intrinsically about "improving society" or some such, as is commonly thought of as the "value" of competition, but is more just about making money and further validating the concept of society being based on one group beating another down and then reaping the benefits.
4
freagle - 7day
Precolonial non-European societies had sports. The precolonial societies of what we call the Americas had sports. The precolonial societies of what we call Australia has sports.
It is useful to have the concept of a winner when you are trying to promote excellence of a capability that inheres in the individual. Running is a great example. There's a reason why running has individual competitions and group competitions. The sinple foot race promotes excellence of an individual capability in all that participate, raising the level of the capability for the whole group while having an individual winner in any given competition. But the relay race has teams that win, not individuals because the problem being solved is a combination of individual excellence and excellence in communion.
Problem solving competitions are far better as team competitions than group competitions. There is a winning team, but no individualism. But, for problem solving competitions, even the losers can produce novel solutions that benefit everyone after the competition.
There are plenty of "games" that are fully cooperative and simply have a shared objective. Hunting big game is a classic problem, but the stakes are high so high that you need similar games/play to build up the skills. For this games you create a single shared objective and everyone is on the same team attempting to achieve it. Sometimes the single team is opposed to a single person or small group who are tasked with making the objective harder, as in a "find the mcguffin" style game where the elders hide the mcguffin. But sometimes games like this can ALSO be broken into teams for competition - orienteering competitions come to mind. Which team can hit the objective fastest? Similar to a relay race, while there are teams competing, they are not competing like on a football pitch.
3
amemorablename - 7day
It is useful to have the concept of a winner when you are trying to promote excellence of a capability that inheres in the individual.
Yes and no. The problem is that what "winner" means in modern capitalist society is not proven to be anything at all universal and so we can't rely on it as a word that is accurate and consistent in describing "competition" throughout history ("competition" being another word that has the same problems).
In trying to come up with a more universalized way it can be described, I would say: it is useful to have the concept of success and fail states (partial or total), of quantifiably better and quantifiably worse, and these things showing up in outcomes, in behavior, in skill levels, which are relative to specific contexts and goals.
But I don't think this is intrinsically the same as the modern capitalist concept of winner and loser, which carries with it extra baggage of the valuation of a human life through the lens of capital.
A good example of the difference, even within capitalist society, is within the context of video games.
Some games are designed in a more "punishing" way; that is, failures come with overt penalties or require redoing a long stretch of the game just to get to the part you failed at. Instead of honing in on where and why you failed, with the focus being on fixing that problem, those games are more about proving some kind of mindless persistence in the face of adversity and can cause great frustration in players, some of whom will just quit and give up.
On the other hand, some games are designed to be more "forgiving"; they might have difficult challenges, but trying again at the part you failed at is easy. This makes it more feasible to hone in on where you are making mistakes and how to fix them.
The first one is closer to how capitalist society functions; you "lost" and it's not necessarily clear why and you might just be significantly worse off now and have to "grind" just to get back to where you were before.
The second is more like what I'd expect from a healthy use of challenge directed toward improvement (albeit without mentorship in the picture in the case of a video game); the purpose is to hone your skill for a specific use and so the framework of it is centered around that, not around anything else.
Play is even broader and doesn't necessarily need to be about success or fail states, or about challenge at all. It can simply be about engaging with the creative parts of the mind and entering a more open and relaxed state for a time, which can help with connection and rejuvenation and so on. Play can include friendly challenges, but doesn't have to.
So we can probably say that play and challenges with success and fail states (partial or total) are universal concepts, but "winner and loser" is much more shaky ground, as is "competition" alongside it. An example to try to get at why this is not just semantics: If I were to play you in chess and you checkmated me, it would have a different connotation if we said "due to the way our differing strategies and choices collided, your side of the board reached the agreed upon success state and mine the agreed upon fail state; let's examine why that happened and try different strategies this time" vs. "you won, I lost, which means you're a better player and I need to suck less." Setting aside how stiffly academic the first way sounds, the point is that it's more impersonal and focused on the mechanics of it in context, and actively trying to learn from the experience together. The second one is making a whole assumption from one game, that you're an overall better player and being so vague with its language that it could imply I suck as a person, not just as a chess player, and this has contributed to my "losing". The second also puts the focus on the individual and their responsibility to work through challenges on their own, in isolation, and receive credit (for "win or loss") in isolation.
Even in a team-based game, we could look at it similarly. The first version could be a statement that implies both teams contributed to the outcomes and can learn from each other. The second would more likely imply the "winning" team is superior, through almost metaphysical characteristics (such as the often lofty term that gets bandied about "talent").
4
Maeve - 6day
A work mate and I used to compete at work to see who could go faster. There was no additional pay for it, it just made the work less mind-numbing and soul crushing, plus kept the line moving. It got a little hostile occasionally, if one of us stayed up too late and/or drank too much during games of spades or dominoes, the night before.
2
Sickos [they/them, it/its] - 7day
Us: the superior wholesome team sports enjoyers
vs
Them: the lesser non-athletes
Ableist
"Generally used as an outlet" ≠ "there should be no contests"
CTE
Arm wrestling? Really?
"Competition will always exist" -> "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism"
Bruh. I remember being told during nursery footy that it was important to run far up the line for a throw-in
-1
freagle - 7day
It's ableism to believe that team sports are limited only to the temporarily abled. Team sports are enjoyed by people across a WIDE spectrum of ability and disability.
Your tribalism point literally has nothing to do with playing a sport and everything to do with fandoms. Most people who have played sports know this, hence my derisive comment.
CTE happens to people who play sports where heads get knocked. What does that have to do with anything we're talking about? What a ridiculous bullet point. At this point you're just spraying and praying that just saying stuff will give you a win. Competitive much?
Arm wrestling is literally a competitive sport. People have been doing it for centuries, it developed rules and techniques, people train for it so they can compete, and eventually leagues have formed to recognize excellence in the sport.
Competition always exists is nothing like it's easier to imagine the end of the world than of capitalism. In the latter, it's a problem to solve and people are so immersed in the problem they think it's impossible. In the former it's literally built into the hormonal reward circuits of humans and many other animals. Play is crucial and competitive play is a form of play. Foot races are competitive.
You remember being told during nursery how to excel at a given task? Do you remember being told it's important to wash your hands before eating, or that it's important to clear your work area before painting, or that it's important to hold the drum stick just so in order to bang on things to make noise?
Hell, throwing the ball in from the line isn't even much of a competitive action. I would have thought you would say "I remember in nursery they told me to keep track of the score and make sure my team was winning", but no, your example isn't even about competition it's about performance, excellence, etc.
At the moment of delivering the ball, the thrower must:
stand facing the field of play
have part of each foot on the touchline or on the ground outside the touchline
throw the ball with both hands from behind and over the head from the point where it left the field of play
The point I intended to make was that I was not being taught to cooperate with my team, I was being taught to cheat as a child.
I do not believe additional discussion on this matter between us will lead to mutual understanding. I am disinterested in competitive debate, and decline to participate further.
-1
queermunist she/her - 7day
I think there are antagonistic and non-antagonistic competitions.
Competition under capitalism becomes antagonistic because of the ideological superstructure, winning and losing are existential. Even when there aren't stakes, no money or fame on the line, the superstructure organizes all competition under capitalism along these antagonistic lines despite our best efforts. Fundamentally, winning under capitalism means survival and losing means death. I'd go as far as to say that having a competitive personality is actually a trauma response to living under capitalism.
Once capitalism no longer determines the ideological superstructure we could see non-antagonistic competition become the dominant form, where winning and losing no longer factor in any way into survival or comfort or happiness. Competition wouldn't necessarily whither away but it certainly would transform into a new form that we might struggle to even recognize as competition.
8
big_spoon - 1w
imo, there's the "competition" in capitalism referred to some kind of economic "battle royale" where is not relevant if your product already exists or is better than the others, the important thing is that more people pay for it (like the iphone: is not a very good OS or device, but many people buy that crap every year even when they bought it the year before)
and the usual competition: referred to being more efficient, more creative, more strong or more intelligent than other people based on merit and the benefits of using those advantages for the common good and your progress
7
GreatSquare - 1w
Competition Society: "I own a house. I knock down your house. Therefore I win!" 🤪
5
Sickos [they/them, it/its] - 1w
I think you just described war.
5
haui - 7day
I was born pretty much without a competitive drive and I am also autistic which lends itself to my thesis pretty well:
I think it is nurture as most autistic people dont have a strong competitive drive, neither is it known that prehistoric humans would have been very competitive, in Opposition, current humanity would not exist if humans were mostly competitive.
This leads to my thesis that the need for social acceptance which is more prevalent in neurotypical people leads to the development of competitive driver under artificial scarcity e.g. opportunism.
Confidant6198 in asklemmygrad
Will competition always exist or is competition just a symptom of scarcity?
I have been thinking hard on this subject for the past several weeks. A train of thought in the shower led me to some self crit/analysis where I realized my personal competitive drive feels much more nurture than nature. I hope we can grow out of it, as a species/society.
Under communism we will still have sports.
Then I yearn for what comes after. Competitive team sports are generally used as an outlet for tribalism. "Us vs them" is a mentality that I hope we can evolve past. Cooperation over competition.
I see you've never played a competitive sport.
The tribalism you talk about is branding and fandoms. Competition will always exist. People will arm wrestle, people will have contests to see who can do something better than others.
I am curious now to what extent there is historical evidence of such things in earlier communal societies in history and what form it would take. Because it's one thing to think people will always test themselves and each other. It's another thing to think they will always cling to the value of winner/loser dynamics in make-believe.
In my experience with the modern day capitalist framework, it's very much based on individualist win/loss, in the sense that "my win is your loss" and this tends to pervade forms of play too (board games, video games, sports, etc.). The idea that we could both win or both lose is often not even allowed for. The closest equivalent is considered a "tie", which essentially means limbo, undefined, it was never resolved who is "better". But this way of thinking would be strange in a basic communal society and incompatible with its framework of viewing problems as a shared responsibility. I will caveat the following by saying I'm not the biggest fan of Kropotnik because he can sometimes get pointed to to prop up anarchist arguments about not needing a socialist transition state, but I recall him going into observations of nature (I think in Mutual Aid) and how much and often animals actually work together on things as opposed to the prevailing capitalist narrative that nature is a constant dynamic of predator and prey. I bring this up as a point against the implication that competition in the "win/loss" sense of things is some kind of inevitability of humanity or of nature.
Consider a thing like debate, for example. Here CriticalResist talks about the Aristotlean dialectic that precedes what we call dialectical materialism today: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9510488
And you can perhaps see that the concept of debate as described in that cultural context is not one of "win/loss", but rather one of synthesizing to discover new. The process that both participate in yields something that neither had before, which can then be to the benefit of both.
In the modern capitalist context (in my experience anyway) debate tends to take a much more demeaning turn. The implication is that there is a winner and loser of a debate and the loser "sucks" somehow compared to the winner. So people tend to get very defensive in debates, fearing damage to reputation or more.
So there is the combining of "yours and mine" process, which can take on different kinds of character. It can be more friendly and calm, or more lively and intense, but either way, the broader societal context influences what the end goal is and how one should feel about it. In capitalist sports, for example, part of the goal is to nurture/discover the most skilled players, who can then be offered lucrative contracts to play for an audience for even more lucrative payouts for the capitalist; this aim is not intrinsically about "improving society" or some such, as is commonly thought of as the "value" of competition, but is more just about making money and further validating the concept of society being based on one group beating another down and then reaping the benefits.
Precolonial non-European societies had sports. The precolonial societies of what we call the Americas had sports. The precolonial societies of what we call Australia has sports.
It is useful to have the concept of a winner when you are trying to promote excellence of a capability that inheres in the individual. Running is a great example. There's a reason why running has individual competitions and group competitions. The sinple foot race promotes excellence of an individual capability in all that participate, raising the level of the capability for the whole group while having an individual winner in any given competition. But the relay race has teams that win, not individuals because the problem being solved is a combination of individual excellence and excellence in communion.
Problem solving competitions are far better as team competitions than group competitions. There is a winning team, but no individualism. But, for problem solving competitions, even the losers can produce novel solutions that benefit everyone after the competition.
There are plenty of "games" that are fully cooperative and simply have a shared objective. Hunting big game is a classic problem, but the stakes are high so high that you need similar games/play to build up the skills. For this games you create a single shared objective and everyone is on the same team attempting to achieve it. Sometimes the single team is opposed to a single person or small group who are tasked with making the objective harder, as in a "find the mcguffin" style game where the elders hide the mcguffin. But sometimes games like this can ALSO be broken into teams for competition - orienteering competitions come to mind. Which team can hit the objective fastest? Similar to a relay race, while there are teams competing, they are not competing like on a football pitch.
Yes and no. The problem is that what "winner" means in modern capitalist society is not proven to be anything at all universal and so we can't rely on it as a word that is accurate and consistent in describing "competition" throughout history ("competition" being another word that has the same problems).
In trying to come up with a more universalized way it can be described, I would say: it is useful to have the concept of success and fail states (partial or total), of quantifiably better and quantifiably worse, and these things showing up in outcomes, in behavior, in skill levels, which are relative to specific contexts and goals.
But I don't think this is intrinsically the same as the modern capitalist concept of winner and loser, which carries with it extra baggage of the valuation of a human life through the lens of capital.
A good example of the difference, even within capitalist society, is within the context of video games.
Some games are designed in a more "punishing" way; that is, failures come with overt penalties or require redoing a long stretch of the game just to get to the part you failed at. Instead of honing in on where and why you failed, with the focus being on fixing that problem, those games are more about proving some kind of mindless persistence in the face of adversity and can cause great frustration in players, some of whom will just quit and give up.
On the other hand, some games are designed to be more "forgiving"; they might have difficult challenges, but trying again at the part you failed at is easy. This makes it more feasible to hone in on where you are making mistakes and how to fix them.
The first one is closer to how capitalist society functions; you "lost" and it's not necessarily clear why and you might just be significantly worse off now and have to "grind" just to get back to where you were before.
The second is more like what I'd expect from a healthy use of challenge directed toward improvement (albeit without mentorship in the picture in the case of a video game); the purpose is to hone your skill for a specific use and so the framework of it is centered around that, not around anything else.
Play is even broader and doesn't necessarily need to be about success or fail states, or about challenge at all. It can simply be about engaging with the creative parts of the mind and entering a more open and relaxed state for a time, which can help with connection and rejuvenation and so on. Play can include friendly challenges, but doesn't have to.
So we can probably say that play and challenges with success and fail states (partial or total) are universal concepts, but "winner and loser" is much more shaky ground, as is "competition" alongside it. An example to try to get at why this is not just semantics: If I were to play you in chess and you checkmated me, it would have a different connotation if we said "due to the way our differing strategies and choices collided, your side of the board reached the agreed upon success state and mine the agreed upon fail state; let's examine why that happened and try different strategies this time" vs. "you won, I lost, which means you're a better player and I need to suck less." Setting aside how stiffly academic the first way sounds, the point is that it's more impersonal and focused on the mechanics of it in context, and actively trying to learn from the experience together. The second one is making a whole assumption from one game, that you're an overall better player and being so vague with its language that it could imply I suck as a person, not just as a chess player, and this has contributed to my "losing". The second also puts the focus on the individual and their responsibility to work through challenges on their own, in isolation, and receive credit (for "win or loss") in isolation.
Even in a team-based game, we could look at it similarly. The first version could be a statement that implies both teams contributed to the outcomes and can learn from each other. The second would more likely imply the "winning" team is superior, through almost metaphysical characteristics (such as the often lofty term that gets bandied about "talent").
A work mate and I used to compete at work to see who could go faster. There was no additional pay for it, it just made the work less mind-numbing and soul crushing, plus kept the line moving. It got a little hostile occasionally, if one of us stayed up too late and/or drank too much during games of spades or dominoes, the night before.
Us: the superior wholesome team sports enjoyers
vs
Them: the lesser non-athletes
It's ableism to believe that team sports are limited only to the temporarily abled. Team sports are enjoyed by people across a WIDE spectrum of ability and disability.
Your tribalism point literally has nothing to do with playing a sport and everything to do with fandoms. Most people who have played sports know this, hence my derisive comment.
CTE happens to people who play sports where heads get knocked. What does that have to do with anything we're talking about? What a ridiculous bullet point. At this point you're just spraying and praying that just saying stuff will give you a win. Competitive much?
Arm wrestling is literally a competitive sport. People have been doing it for centuries, it developed rules and techniques, people train for it so they can compete, and eventually leagues have formed to recognize excellence in the sport.
Competition always exists is nothing like it's easier to imagine the end of the world than of capitalism. In the latter, it's a problem to solve and people are so immersed in the problem they think it's impossible. In the former it's literally built into the hormonal reward circuits of humans and many other animals. Play is crucial and competitive play is a form of play. Foot races are competitive.
You remember being told during nursery how to excel at a given task? Do you remember being told it's important to wash your hands before eating, or that it's important to clear your work area before painting, or that it's important to hold the drum stick just so in order to bang on things to make noise?
Hell, throwing the ball in from the line isn't even much of a competitive action. I would have thought you would say "I remember in nursery they told me to keep track of the score and make sure my team was winning", but no, your example isn't even about competition it's about performance, excellence, etc.
Law 15 - The Throw-in
At the moment of delivering the ball, the thrower must:
The point I intended to make was that I was not being taught to cooperate with my team, I was being taught to cheat as a child.
I do not believe additional discussion on this matter between us will lead to mutual understanding. I am disinterested in competitive debate, and decline to participate further.
I think there are antagonistic and non-antagonistic competitions.
Competition under capitalism becomes antagonistic because of the ideological superstructure, winning and losing are existential. Even when there aren't stakes, no money or fame on the line, the superstructure organizes all competition under capitalism along these antagonistic lines despite our best efforts. Fundamentally, winning under capitalism means survival and losing means death. I'd go as far as to say that having a competitive personality is actually a trauma response to living under capitalism.
Once capitalism no longer determines the ideological superstructure we could see non-antagonistic competition become the dominant form, where winning and losing no longer factor in any way into survival or comfort or happiness. Competition wouldn't necessarily whither away but it certainly would transform into a new form that we might struggle to even recognize as competition.
imo, there's the "competition" in capitalism referred to some kind of economic "battle royale" where is not relevant if your product already exists or is better than the others, the important thing is that more people pay for it (like the iphone: is not a very good OS or device, but many people buy that crap every year even when they bought it the year before)
and the usual competition: referred to being more efficient, more creative, more strong or more intelligent than other people based on merit and the benefits of using those advantages for the common good and your progress
Competition Society: "I own a house. I knock down your house. Therefore I win!" 🤪
I think you just described war.
I was born pretty much without a competitive drive and I am also autistic which lends itself to my thesis pretty well:
I think it is nurture as most autistic people dont have a strong competitive drive, neither is it known that prehistoric humans would have been very competitive, in Opposition, current humanity would not exist if humans were mostly competitive.
This leads to my thesis that the need for social acceptance which is more prevalent in neurotypical people leads to the development of competitive driver under artificial scarcity e.g. opportunism.