Base and Superstructure

One thing on the state and culture here. Norway and Saudi Arabia both have the same economy: big oil, generous welfare state. How come such utterly different state types and utterly different cultures? Doesn't this just blatantly fly in the face of the economic base determining the Superstructure? Because even when you hold the economic base almost the same you get two opposite Superstructures.

Could you expand on this?

Hobbes was wrong about mankind's state of nature. The social contract (in the form of productive division of labor and relative harmony) predates the state. According to Hobbes, the state would have had to predate or have emerged in tandem with the social contract. Modern anthropology has found that this theory of state formation is incorrect.
People got along fine in relatively stable and productive societies perfectly fine without states when the material conditions allowed for it.

You should read the book in the PDF. It's about this subject precisely. It's also a quick read, just a few hours.

they are not different enough to transcend capitalism, and the nature of capitalism is such that both of those states have to bend to certain realities that they can't will away. an example: no parliament or king can just unilaterally abolish markets by dictate, however much they want to do so, and force socialism from above. if someone wanted to push through and implement socialism by dictate, it doesn't work that way.

the way we do things impacts what is possible for the superstructure to be. if someone started spouting free market rhetoric in the middle ages, it wouldn't have held - feudal lords wouldn't give up their noble privileges and title to land for some grubby merchants, and as it turned out liberalization was a drawn out process that didn't happen overnight. we didn't just decide "oh hai we're doing capitalism now". rather, economists in the 18th century noted the behavior of markets and capital that was inherent in the nature of exchange, and policy prescriptions were made around this observation of the market and political economy (or critiques were made against the whole system). whether or not this political economy was formalized by economists, capitalism would have developed along similar lines.

Where is the real human economical progress?

They’re the same thing m8. The ruling class has power because it controls the means of production. The state forms around the interest of the ruling class as a tool of preserving their property. You should read Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Discourse on Inequality.”

I don't doubt that the division of labour predates the state. I'm laying that economoc hierarchy between owner/worker come after the state. Since ownership can only be established through force (ownership of slaves, land, whatever) then a force using entity must already exist, e.g. the state.

All of the followings are maybes, I'm not sure:

Could be promoted, when instead of voting the components of a system, You're detached from the decision making process and have to eat wtv company owners want.
And you may say "well make your own company, get to compete with coca cola, i mean cmon". (just in case, it would be that coca cola has all the technology bought, even if I had the recipe I couldn't be as efficient doing it as them. And I don't have the recipe. Plus dumping and wtv other practices. So you eat what coca cola wants to do.)

And if you tried to compete and failed, get cucked faggot! hehe.

Also when they tell you "charge as much as you can for your work, not just a small enough ammount according to what would be… pbi per cápita or wtv, an appropiate distribution of goods". Idk if this thought is a feature of capitalism or not, just bad ideas.

Also when they tell you "well, 2 workers compete, and the worse of them ends jobless, too bad". Or like, "yes, this old man here has ahad a bakery for 40 years, but if another better bakery comes along, sure, they should take his job and let him learn another job or wtv".

Also when they tell you "yeah, go into learning a skill, and if there isn't a job for that skill at the end of the road, too bad, nothing is planned here, your risk, hehehe".

This would be an influence though, contracurrent thoughts can be maintained.

I think you're moving the goalposts though. I didn't say the economic base doesn't influence the boundaries of the state or culture. I said the economic base doesn't *determine* them as this theory of economic determinism suggests.
And the reverse is true. The Superstructure impacts what is possible for the way we do things. Hence why we get such variations among capitalist societies.

I think you're mixing up different power sources. You can have political/ideological power without owning the means of production (economic power). There's no way that Islamic Fundamentalists in Iran are forming the state around the owners of the means of production. This is really dogmatic economic determinism.