If it was a comedy I would give it a pass, but this episode wasn’t, or at least it was a bad one. The only sort of funny scene was the sermon. The rest was young boys slowly dying.

I get the focus is supposed to be on Elijah and how bad he is but the background is the lost cause myth and sympathizing with the common confederate troops. I guess you could say they didn’t want to make the confederates look bad so Elijah could look horrible in comparison, but you could’ve had Elijah just be even more racist then the troops.

Like the only sort of funny part where he gives the sermon, if it were realistic he would’ve gone full race baiting and go one about how the unions gonna come and free the n*****s and slavery is in the Bible etc. to rile up the troops. But in this mythical confederacy racism and slavery don’t exist which is ahistorical.

They gave it back after doing a war crime and executing prisoners of war. They also executed them with a fucking gattling gun which is just cruel. I think they were trying to get you to sympathize with the confederates about to die instead of the northerners who were killing an already defeated foe.

if it was a serious show I’d agree but it’s satire

I agree, righteous gemstones generally whitewashes the southern church and rarely shows the racism and homophobia that would be present. But I give it a pass because it’s funny, this episode wasn’t funny. The only joke of the show was him giving a bad sermon to those troops, the rest was just sad imagery of confederate boys dying. This episode was them trying to be serious and it didn’t work IMO.

Ape hierarchies, at least within the troops, are mostly about mating not resource distribution. It’s not like the alpha male gets first pick of the fruit and all the other chimps wait until he’s done and then go in hierarchical order, they just disperse and grab what they can.

If you want to go down an essentialist path most pre-agricultural societies were anarchic. There may be a chief but they “ruled” at the discretion of the tribe. The chief, or anyone really, couldn’t hoard resources because

1. they couldnt monopolize violence and coerce people since there’s no specialization in anything much less violence so violence becomes a numbers game.

2. There’s only so much you can carry. Pre agricultural tribes were nomadic mostly and when the tribe moves camps you have to carry everything with you. So even if you were able to hoard enough food that won’t rot you won’t be able to carry it to the next camp.

3. Because of the above, wealth isn’t really a thing. This forces cooperation because without wealth, the individual can’t protect themselves from hardship. Selfish individualism only works if you’re able to build up some wealth to act as a buffer for leaner times. If you don’t have that wealth then you’re reliant on your social connections so you tend to cooperate and redistribute because it’s in your best interest to stay in good standing with the group so they will help you in harsher times.

All this changes with agriculture and the invention of wealth, first in grain then in gold and then stocks etc. Now your dependence on society is directly porportional to how much wealth you have, to the point where really rich people can fuck off to a cabin or island and never work or contribute to society ever again.

Violence specialization also becomes more or less a thing, increasing up until the invention of firearms at which point it becomes more of a numbers game and the hierarchies lessen.

All of this is to say that hierarchy is not natural, but the result of the ability to accumulate wealth combined with violence specialization and monopolization. If we get rid of those two concepts then anarchy may take over, how we do that in the modern world is another question.

It is anticapitalist by nature in that capitalism is a system where a person can own the means of production and use that ownership to acquire profits. That ownership is a form of domination and creates an arbitrary hierarchy, who makes all the decisions: the owner, why do they make all the decisons: because they had the wealth to buy the company.

You can have organization and markets though without capitalism, such as with anarcho-syndaclism. Basically you have a bunch of coops that are run and controlled by elected workers councils that can trade with each other voluntarily.